The truth about Lake Alice: New Zealand's great shame
Friday, 17 December 2021
This week an 89-year-old man stood in the dock accused of crimes committed against children at the Lake Alice adolescent unit in the 1970s. But those in authority have known of those crimes for nearly 50 years. In part one of a two-part series, AARON SMALE relays the experiences of Lake Alice survivors and asks why has it taken so long for accountability.
Graphic content warning: The terrors started with physical, sexual and psychological abuse in foster homes when he was 6. It continued to escalate as he ran away, and was put in a string of welfare homes that were also steeped in violence and rife with paedophiles.
But the worst place and the worst abuse was at the adolescent unit at Lake Alice, where children were regularly given electric shocks on the head and other parts of the body – including the genitals – as punishment.
Those present at the Royal Commission hearing listened in stunned silence as Rangi Wickliffe gave a devastating account of his time in state custody as a child, particularly his time at Lake Alice in the 1970s.
Wickliffe was 10 when he arrived at Lake Alice psychiatric hospital from Holdsworth boys home in Whanganui. The hospital, near Marton in Rangitīkei, was set up to house the country’s criminally insane and the children were subjected to their predations day and night.
**READ MORE:
* Criminal charges filed against former Lake Alice staff member
* Call for psychiatry profession to be held to account over Lake Alice abuse
* The Lake: What happened to the children of Lake Alice was the beginning of a shameful story
**
At the height of his Royal Commission testimony stood an account of a time he ran away with a friend when they were on a trip to the movies. They stole a van and made their escape but, after running out of petrol, they were caught by police and returned to Lake Alice.
“We told the police we ran away because we were getting electrocuted. We didn’t say the word ECT, we didn’t say the word torture. We certainly didn’t say the word ‘sex abuse’. As a 10-year-old child, how do you know those words? ‘They’re hurting us,’ is all we could say. And ‘They’re electrocuting us.’ The police: ‘We don’t care.’
“We were taken back to Lake Alice, shaking, crying, in my case, urinating, defecating, knowing what was coming. I knew I was going to get punished with unmodified ECT. I was terrified. I was given ECT by Dr Selwyn Leeks.
“He got the staff member to hold my head to the side, or push it to the side, and said to me, ‘I’m going to knock you out, and this is how I’m going to do it, Rangi. See this little silver knob? Well that’s going to clean you out. You won’t feel a thing. Watch this.’ He banged a button and I was out.
“I don’t know how long I was out for. I do know when I woke up I was lying face down on a hospital bed. I had leather straps on both arms to the side of the bed. Two leather straps, one on each leg which was strapped down to the bed. I regained consciousness and looked over and a patient was standing there and I asked him what happened, ‘Why am I tied up?’ He untied me. While he was untying me I felt a burning, itching sensation in my rectum area. After being unstrapped … like little boys do, I investigated the problem. I felt something there so I pulled it. I just about blacked out from the pain. I was told by other patients that I had been gang-raped by up to eight adults who were criminally insane.”
Wickliffe had only just turned 11.
Wickliffe’s account might have been horrendous but it was by no means unique. A number of survivors have memories of being put in Villa 8 as a punishment.
The kid that Wickliffe had run away with, Vernon Sorenson, has a file that mentions that after they were caught and brought back, he received ECT and was put in Villa 8.
Kevin Banks also spent time in Villa 8.
Sharyn Collis witnessed children being put in the exercise cage attached to Villa 8 where they were exposed to the adult patients.
And several others made complaints to the police that they were put in Villa 8 and sexually abused and raped. In one case the rapist was a staff member who was later convicted for offending against boys.
But a document that has surfaced proves that this wasn’t just some random practice carried out by rogue staff. It was also known about at the highest levels.
In 1981, psychologist David Page, who worked for the Department of Education, wrote a letter to his boss Don Brown, the department’s head psychologist.
“I came across this old Lake Alice Adolescent note from Iain Tennent and remembered our discussions at the time and also that we had discussed these with [the director of the mental health division] Dr [Stanley] Mirams on an informal basis.
“It reflected the deep concern we had held about children being placed at Lake Alice for some time. It is a great sense of relief to know that the Unit has been virtually closed.”
Tennent’s report was written in 1978 and outlines a number of incidents involving children. One is of a 9-year-old girl who was sexually abused by an adult female patient. Another was of a boy who was later given heroin by a former adult patient he’d met at Lake Alice. Then Tennent mentions a common occurrence at Lake Alice:
“In addition to the above incidents, as you are well aware, the boys who have been placed in Villa 8 are almost automatically faced with homosexual advances from the adult male patients. Because of [their] age and inexperience, few of the boys are able to resist these.
“This poses to us as psychologists in the Department of Education acute ethical problems. Are we by our continued involvement in the hospital conniving at what is potentially most anti-therapeutic and perhaps criminally negligent?”
Lake Alice was a psychiatric hospital for criminally insane adults and Villa 8 was where some of the most dangerous were held.
‘All these high-ranking people knew’
Wickliffe is subdued and reflective as he reads the document for the first time. But one of his first reactions is to state that the document exonerates him, as if he were the one guilty of the crime that happened to him.
“I’ve always been shot down over it, no one has believed me at all, all my life.
“When you tell your story all these years and you finally get to see the proof like this, it’s like you’ve been exonerated. Because everyone has called you a f….. liar all your life. Even now they call me a sociopath. That started when I was very young, they called me a compulsive liar. That’s what they used to abuse me.
“I finally have the proof to be believed. Fifty years later. That’s what I mean by exonerated, it’s like a whole weight has been lifted off me. Finally, I have proof that people can believe. Because that’s the closest I’ve ever come to the truth. Ever. In writing.
“It’s just hitting me now. All these high-ranking people knew. They knew all right. They knew children were being sexually abused.”
Not only does this document independently corroborate Wickliffe’s evidence. The report also implicates several high-level bureaucrats who were aware this was going on.
The letter the report is attached to was addressed to Don Brown, the head psychologist at the then Department of Education. The certainty that Tennent expresses – “as you well know” – indicates this was no mere rumour among educational psychologists. It was established knowledge among the highest echelons of the departments directly responsible for what was happening to children at Lake Alice.
Tennent was not the only psychologist in the Department of Education who had raised the alarm about what was happening at Lake Alice. Lyn Fry and Craig Jackson risked their careers by repeatedly raising matters with their superiors.
Jackson wrote a series of letters to those higher up in the Department of Education, raising questions about how children were being treated at Lake Alice. When an inquiry was held in 1977 he was instructed by his superiors not to take part.
Jackson’s correspondence was so significant that it was compiled and presented at the Royal Commission during the opening day of the hearing into Lake Alice. The superintendent of Lake Alice, Dr Syd Pugmire was also mentioned in the reference to children being abused in Villa 8: “Dr Pugmire has recognised this problem.”
Pugmire was one of the people Wickliffe went to for help.
Mirams is also mentioned in the letter written by Page to Brown, but during a magisterial inquiry into Lake Alice in 1977, Mirams did not provide any information regarding the ill-treatment of children, such as being put in Villa 8 and sexually assaulted.
Mirams had spoken to Lake Alice survivor Kevin Banks the same year, who says he told him of an incident in which Leeks made five children give electric shocks to an older boy who had raped them.
The incident was referred to the police and the Medical Council but nothing came of it.
The police file from 1977 shows a deferential attitude from police towards Leeks and a negative attitude towards the children. This was a pattern that would continue for years, with Leeks always given the benefit of the doubt while the testimony of the children who went through unit was regularly treated as unreliable.
In the police interview with Leeks:
Police: “It is possible a lot of these boys are only telling half-truths about why they received the aversion therapy.”
Leeks: “I would think so. Knowing them, they are really the bottom of the barrel kids from Hokio, Kohitere and Holdsworth who could not manage them. They were anti-social and destructive kids.”
Police were aware of serious allegations of sexual abuse against staff in several state-run welfare homes, including Campbell Park, Epuni, Hokio Beach and Holdsworth. And yet children’s deteriorating behaviour was always attributed to some character or psychological flaw, particularly if they were repeatedly running away or showing aggressive behaviour.
In 1977 police commissioned an expert witness, Dr David McLachlan, to write a report on what was happening at Lake Alice. Again, the report was based on Leeks’ testimony and not much else.
The Medical Council was reluctant to investigate Leeks and did not follow through on Banks’ complaint when Leeks resigned from his position at Lake Alice. Instead the council gave him a certificate of good standing when he left New Zealand to continue his practice in Australia. Leeks was later the subject of a civil claim by a female patient that he had sexually assaulted her. He was found liable by the court, a decision that was upheld on appeal.
Representatives for the Medical Council appeared at the Royal Commission’s hearing into Lake Alice in June this year and apologised for their failures to investigate Leeks.
‘I told them exactly what had gone on’
Those who criticised government agencies and staff based on solid evidence were often maligned or attacked in the press by government ministers.
Dr Oliver Sutherland, the public face of ACORD (Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination), had waged a public campaign against the violence and abuse in welfare homes. The minister of social welfare at the time, Bert Walker, had repeatedly denied such abuse was happening.
Sutherland eventually found out about Lake Alice and caused a media ruckus when he revealed the abuse suffered by Niuean boy Hake Halo. That led to a magisterial inquiry that would function as a whitewash. Social Welfare withheld evidence, the terms of reference were limited to the one individual case, and those within the system who knew about the abuse and had raised their concerns were not permitted to participate or weren’t approached.
Seeing the Tennent report now confirms what Sutherland has always known – that there was evidence of gross negligence and abuse of children at Lake Alice. “Right now I don’t think anything surprises me. It was known at the time, and Pugmire obviously knew. The adult part [Villa 8] where children were put, that was Pugmire’s part, that wasn’t Leeks’ empire.
“Any number of people could have stood up and done something.”
Shortly after laying a police complaint, Sutherland says he spoke at a meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1977 and explained what was happening at Lake Alice.
“I told them exactly what had gone on. They all knew because I stood up and I told them. It doesn’t matter which way you look at it, the psychiatrists knew and so did the psychologists.”
Scathing report
In 1977, the Ombudsman, Sir Guy Powles, received a complaint from parents of a boy who was at Lake Alice around the same time as Hake Halo’s case came to light. Powles sent staff to interview the boy at Lake Alice, but when they arrived he’d been given ECT that morning and was incapable of answering their questions.
Powles was furious and wrote to the director-general of health, saying: “It appears to me that the administration of the electro-convulsive treatment to the boy on that day may have been a deliberate attempt to prevent the performance of enquiries made by my office into the matter.”
Leeks was dismissive in his response. But Powles had already had to reprimand Social Welfare for removing papers from the complainant’s file.
Powles’ report was scathing. He found that the child’s detention in Lake Alice had at times been contrary to law and found the consent to treatment was “less than satisfactory”.
“The cumulative effect of a number of the actions and decisions of officers of the Departments of Health and Social Welfare has been, in my opinion, to cause K a grave injustice.”
But Social Welfare Minister Walker was unrepentant and told the media that Powles had “gone off half-cocked”.
Eventually Lake Alice faded from the headlines and Leeks started a new life in Australia, free of any consequences. However, the children he terrorised in New Zealand struggled into adulthood, carrying trauma that was never resolved and continued to impact their lives.
In the 1990s, many of them started to try to resolve what they went through. For some, that was going to counselling to unravel the damage. In a number of cases this led on to legal action against the Crown.
If the Crown had been negligent in its response to Lake Alice in the 1970s, it became aggressively defensive in the 1990s and 2000s.
Part 2 on Sunday focuses on those in power who failed to protect children in state care. Aaron Smale’s analysis is the result of years of interviews with survivors and their whānau, careful scrutiny of government files, correspondence with survivors and their lawyers, court judgments and evidence from the Royal Commission into Abuse in State Care.