The Lake: What happened to the children of Lake Alice was the beginning of a shameful story

Friday, 22 October 2021

Some of the children who suffered horrific abuse at the hands of the state in the Lake Alice psychiatric hospital tell their stories – decades later – in a podcast released on Stuff today. The journalist behind the series, Aaron Smale, explains why their stories are just one grim chapter of a shameful story.

“Shock” is a threadbare, hackneyed journalism term that is overused. In the case of Lake Alice psychiatric hospital it is also a hard-to-avoid pun.

But five years after starting to investigate the state’s appalling abuse of children in its custody, there is one institution that continues to shock me. Quite literally. That institution is Lake Alice psychiatric hospital and the adolescent unit that operated there between 1972 and 1977.

Just when you think you’ve heard it all about Lake Alice, there’s always some new horror or outrage that you encounter. Example. I was recently introduced to someone who had been through the adolescent unit run by Dr Selwyn Leeks and I spoke to this person over the phone. I’d heard a number of stories about children being electrocuted on the genitals to the point that it no longer surprised me, even though it is the kind of thing that was practised by the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Nazi regime in Germany. But this particular individual had not only been electrocuted on the genitals. One of his testicles had been destroyed.

Whether through the politeness of a first conversation or maybe because I was reeling with incomprehension (and wincing at the thought of it), I failed to ask for details. But what in any other world would seem implausible, was entirely possible in the world of Lake Alice. What would be dismissed as too bizarre to be believed in any other context was par for the course in this story.

There are many such horrendous details of abuse, which are best told by the victims themselves. Many will be in this podcast series. But there is another whole layer to the story of Lake Alice that is perhaps more outrageous – the institutional failure that not only allowed the abuse but actually fostered it. Then there’s the subsequent failure over nearly five decades to investigate and hold people accountable. This was not a passive failure but an active one.

It’s easy to think of Lake Alice as ancient news, a blot on our history, but essentially something that happened “back there”. Janet Frame’s literary and autobiographical accounts of the horrors of mental health institutions in 20th century New Zealand have almost romanticised our collective sins and barbarity and turned them into the beauty of art. Frame’s fiction allowed us the escape of viewing the past as a strange country of lurid weirdness.

But Lake Alice is not the past. As that other great literary master William Faulkner observed, the past is not dead. It’s not even past.

Firstly, Lake Alice is not in the past because those who entered its gates will carry the trauma they experienced there until their dying day. It is ever present with no end in sight. Not only that, their children and even grandchildren also live with the damage caused to their parents and grandparents, whether it is spoken of or not.

Part of that curse is that what happened at Lake Alice has never been fully acknowledged by the entity that caused the harm in the first place – the state. The state was the parent and the doctor who inflicted the abuse. It was also the lawyer that defended them both and the policeman who dawdled and dallied.

I initially thought of Lake Alice as some outlier, an anomaly. The narrative of a rogue doctor running his own little fiefdom where he could inflict unimaginable cruelties is in one sense a comforting myth that has grown up around Lake Alice. It contains the evil within one individual, Dr Selwyn Leeks. By personalising it, the evil becomes somewhat comprehensible.

But as I have gone deeper into my research I’ve come to the view that Lake Alice is actually something far worse. It was completely enmeshed in a system of punishment that regarded children – particularly Māori children – as a certain kind of problem. And wherever there is a perceived problem, there are going to be those who claim to have the answers.

The so-called problem of youth delinquency that was a national obsession in the post-war period also coincided with the increased presence of Māori in urban centres. This provided the psychiatry profession with its chance to flex its credentials in not just fixing criminal behaviour but attempting to prevent it.

There is, in my view, a deeply entrenched attitude amongst the psychiatry profession that they know best. This belief is on full display in the way wards of the state in the welfare system – children it must be remembered – were a convenient pool of guinea pigs for psychiatry to trial its “treatments.” One of psychiatry’s problems is that it has constantly been trying to prove its legitimacy as a medical, scientific profession. And if mental illness was really an illness then its symptoms – ie behaviour – must have some medical explanation and cure. The only hitch is that these children were never actually diagnosed with mental illness.

Before Dr Selwyn Leeks set up shop at Lake Alice, he was a roving consultant who would advise staff at welfare homes like Hokio Beach School on drug regimes for children. These drugs were potent anti-psychotics that were being given to psychiatric patients in adult hospitals. Their use on children was a form of chemical control. This was not unusual. In the mid-1960s a doctor at Porirua hospital was conducting experiments on girls at Fareham House in Featherston using drugs like Nydrane and Valium. Campbell Park in the South Island was also giving children drugs with the express purpose of controlling behaviour, including amphetamines. One of those children was Tyrone Marks, who we talk to in this podcast.

Most of the children that ended up at Lake Alice were victims of some kind of trauma before they arrived there. Some of this was inflicted by employees at other institutions. Some of those employees were paedophiles and were the perpetrators of chronic sexual abuse of hundreds of children in the state’s custody. This abuse led to these children displaying behaviour – aggression, absconding – that was quite clearly related to the abuse they were experiencing.

But there were also realities that were so mundane that survivors often don’t even think to mention them, not least of which is solitary confinement in what were effectively prison cells 23 hours a day. I’ve seen the file of one individual where he was put in solitary confinement at Kohitere for close to five months when he was 14. This followed hard on the heels of shorter stints, one of three months. There is a mountain of evidence that solitary confinement destroys people both physically and mentally, but those studies are based on adults. The damage to a developing child that has already suffered multiple incidents of serious trauma is incalculable. I’ve witnessed first-hand some of the damage that has done.

The so-called experts of psychiatry were so blinded by professional arrogance that they couldn’t see what was right in front of them – children who were traumatised by the very institutions and people that were supposed to be protecting and caring for them. Instead, the children were portrayed as the problem and were blamed for the multiple failures of adults who called themselves professionals.

There were children who reacted so badly to these regimes of abuse that they were escalated up through the ranks and ended up in Lake Alice. They were put under the authority of Dr Selwyn Leeks who believed his use of electrocution under the guise of treatment would deter whatever behaviour was considered undesirable.

Whatever justification was used to inflict this kind of torture then became a legal and political problem when these children became adults.

The Lake Alice story is far bigger than Lake Alice, although that’s big enough. Lake Alice is about how the state should be held responsible for crimes it commits against its own citizens. Who or what holds the state accountable when it inflicts torture and abuse against its own? In the case of Lake Alice we’re talking about its own children, who were wards of the state. There is a direct conflict of interest when the criminal is also supposed to be the cop. It’s akin to putting Al Capone in charge of the FBI’s investigation of the Mob.

The counter-argument is that there is a separation of the state’s various powers into institutions with different roles. But in my view the balance of power between those institutions is completely tilted towards those who are inclined to protect the Crown’s interests over the rights of those who have been abused. I have come to the conclusion that, aside from Dr Leeks himself, the worst culprit in the failure of accountability is Crown Law. It has been Crown Law that has gone out of its way to get the Crown off the hook. But on the available evidence the politicians played along and took Crown Law’s advice.

Which is why questions about Lake Alice go all the way up to the ninth floor of the Beehive. The 2001 out of court settlement with Lake Alice victims, engineered by Helen Clark, was supposed to look magnanimous at the time. But on closer examination it looks like a way of avoiding the glaring scrutiny of the courts or an independent inquiry.

Individual perpetrators of child abuse have a consistent habit of silencing their victims. That might be direct threats of violence, but that is not the only method. Casting the victims as liars, minimising the abuse, even reassuring the victims that it won’t happen again or that there is genuine remorse on the part of the perpetrator – abusers use all these tactics and more to silence their victims and avoid facing justice.

At every stage of the 50-year saga that is Lake Alice, the state has chosen to silence its victims. Or at least quieten them down. This started from day one. I have seen files written by staff who were actually paedophiles, branding the children they were abusing as liars. It’s like it was a preemptive attack on that child’s credibility should they speak up. Then when that child tells the police, they are ignored and returned to the hands of the perpetrators.

When one of the Lake Alice children, Leoni McInroe, became an adult and took legal action against the state, they put her through a nine-year ordeal of obfuscation, delays, bullying and intimidation by Crown Law. The police received 35 complaints but lost 15 of them. They took eight years to investigate the remaining complaints, only interviewing one victim, then declaring there wasn’t enough evidence to charge. They didn’t even bother investigating the allegations of sexual abuse against children.

The state is not the only entity silencing victims. When I first started investigating state abuse I interviewed Elizabeth Stanley, author of the book The Road to Hell. Her publicist had tried to get interest from different media and was met with complete indifference. I was working at Radio NZ at the time. I was new at the company and tried to shop the story around to various producers. One was dismissive and told me the story had already been done. Even those who expressed interest I had to ignore, because they were reducing it to the same cookie cutter package of daily news.

There have been journalists over the last five decades who have done great work on the subject – work by Peter Trickett at the NZ Herald in the 1970s and Simon Collins, also of the Herald, in the 2000s are worth noting. But the problem is not individual journalists but their bosses who don’t see the value in getting to the bottom of what happened. The only reason I’ve been following this story for five years now is because I’m a freelancer and don’t have an editor telling me to move on to something else.

The coverage is still uneven. During the Lake Alice hearing there was evidence given that a child had died while being electrocuted by Dr Leeks. I was travelling at the time but in the following 24 hours I kept looking for stories about it on the media and I couldn’t find any. Not prominently anyway. I would have thought a child being killed by a doctor using a practice that had no legitimacy as a medical treatment would have led every front page and bulletin. Apparently not.

So when does the Lake Alice story end? At what point can there be some kind of closure for victims?

In a sense there isn’t any end point. As survivor Tyrone Marks puts it, the trauma of Lake Alice is tattooed through his body and mind. He can’t get over it, he’s just had to learn to live with it. Another survivor we talk to in this podcast is Rangi Wickliffe. He goes so far as to say that he doesn’t like the word survivor. The trauma is so ongoing that he is still a victim.

Even in a best case scenario this doesn’t change. With Lake Alice the possibility of some last minute victory of justice has faded long ago. Any small victory will come with caveats. If the police charge Dr Leeks and/or others, that will be a hollow victory given Leeks is 93 and has failing health and mental capacity. Charging him now would also raise questions – so why didn’t the previous two investigations in the 1970s and 2000s find the same evidence when it was even more available?

If the government decides to acknowledge the facts, apologise, take responsibility and pay out proper compensation, for many survivors it will simply mean something to pass on to their children. Many haven’t got a lot of time on the clock themselves. Far too many are already gone.

And if they are offered some kind of support for the trauma they have suffered, who is going to deliver it? The psychiatry/psychology professions that not only put them in Lake Alice but failed to hold one of their own accountable?

This podcast can’t rectify the wrongs of the past 50 years either. But it is a small attempt to break the silence and give survivors the dignity of being heard.

Please listen.