Boy thrown in with adults at Lake Alice sexually abused on first night

Tuesday, 15 June 2021

A boy taken to a psychiatric institution was sexually abused on his first night before being subjected to electric shocks when he was unconscious.

On two later stays he was subjected to more abuse, and electric shocks by staff members he says were playing with children’s lives and enjoying watching them suffer.

He also suggested he and others were sent to the institution in the hope electric shocks would erase memories of sexual abuse at welfare homes.

Eleven-year-old Tyrone Marks was sent to Lake Alice in Rangitīkei on June 15, 1972. He spent his first night there in an area with “pretty well mentally disturbed” older male patients.

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**

He was the only child and the experience was frightening.

“My first night there I was sexually abused by an adult patient. I tried to defend myself as best I could by smashing a chair on his head, which just aroused him even more.

“The next day I complained about what had happened. I was told to ‘f… up’ and not to complain and go and sit down.”

Forty-nine years to the day of his first admission to Lake Alice, Marks, 60, was giving evidence at the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in Auckland on Tuesday.

The inquiry is investigating the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit, which operated from 1972 until 1978, near Marton.

The unit wasn’t around during Marks’ first admission.

Marks took to the hearing a photo of his 10-year-old son.

“The reason I brought it today was just to give you some idea, when I’m 10 years old all those horrible things happened to me. If you look at my son he’s cuddling a teddy bear.”

In that first stay, he said, he was given anaesthetic for several days. During that time he remembers lying in a medical ward bed, surrounded by other patients. Staff were stopping at each patient, one by one.

“Whatever they had given me had made me kind of groggy… My last memory was someone shoving something down my mouth, then I was off to sleep.

“I had no idea what was happening.”

Marks only later, through medical notes, found out he’d received electro-convulsive therapy.

He was taken to Lake Alice from Holdsworth School in Whanganui, run by the Social Welfare Department. He’d only recently been released from hospital after he was seriously injured when knocked off his bike by a car when trying to escape the school.

Absconding and bad behaviour were given as reasons for his admission to the institution.

Marks’ injuries, including a dislocated spine, were so serious he wasn’t expected to survive.

Given he was still healing from the crash and had skin grafts over his body, the electro-convulsive therapy could have killed him, he said.

One of 13 children, he became a state ward in 1969 and was placed in several institutions where, he said, he was beaten, drugged and sexually abused.

Marks’ first stay at Lake Alice lasted six weeks.

“I was in fear for my life because of constantly battling other patients that were wanting to abuse me because I’m only 11 years old and, to them, pretty well fresh meat.

“The first one that sexually abused me, he actually never ever did that again. Then what he did was he kind of shielded me and protected me from everybody else.

“I kind of hung with him all the time and he made sure that no-one else tried anything with me.”

Electric torture

Marks had two further stays in Lake Alice, being sent there from Holdsworth.

At the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit he was sexually abused many times by someone who had since died. Marks declined to name them out of respect for their family.

“The person I’m talking about did get arrested and charged from Lake Alice from that unit some years later.”

The electro-convulsive therapy would happen in an upstairs room, administered by psychiatrist Dr Selwyn Leeks and other staff members.

Those staff members would often walk around the unit with the electric box, saying: “It’s your turn. This could be you.”

The children would be made to wet the machine’s steel headphones, which allowed electricity to flow through. The water was salty. Marks said this stopped the children catching fire.

They would put on the sopping headphones. “Then you’re plugged into the national grid.”

Children would be dragged up to the room, screaming and trying to fight off the inevitable.

Once the headphones were on, the children’s eyes would shut, while Leeks slowly turned up the dial on his machine. Through their shut eyes children would see two white lines slowly coming together, as their pain increased, causing them to convulse and scream.

“You can hear everything that’s going on. You can hear talking. You can hear laughing,” Marks said.

“[Leeks] was enjoying the pain that he was getting out of it, your reaction to it, and he would say things like, ‘You’re not going to get cheeky again. You’re not going to be disobedient’…

“What he was doing with us, he was playing with our lives. He was electrocuting us.”

Marks holds Leeks and his staff responsible for what happened, describing them as the “team of maggots”.

Each session would last 3-4 minutes, often with the electrical current being turned up and down. Marks said he was shocked many times. He was awake and not anaesthetised on occasions.

The pain was immense, like someone smashing a hammer on your head, he said. Electro-convulsive therapy was Marks’ biggest fear at Lake Alice, especially not knowing when he would be subjected to it.

Usually, but not always, the children would have rubber in their mouths so they didn’t smash their teeth as they convulsed.

Marks said he thought Holdsworth master John Drake and a colleague sent him and other children to Lake Alice in the hope electro-convulsive therapy would erase memories of sexual assaults.

Marks was administered drugs at Lake Alice, including Paraldehyde in his leg after he kicked someone during a fight.

He couldn’t remember receiving any schooling at the institution.

He said he still lived with the trauma of what happened to him decades ago.

He has two younger children and four from a previous relationship, who were watching his inquiry evidence and hearing for the first time about what he went through.

Marks is a qualified counsellor and social worker.

The inquiry hearing continues.