Abuse in state care: the rough road to financial redress

Monetary Redress for Abuse in State Care (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by political theorist  Stephen Winter is aimed at people involved in creating redress programmes and those who might have suffered abuse in care.

The first half of the book focuses on seven case studies which include a programme for survivors of the infamous Magdalene laundries in Ireland; schemes for the 'stolen generations' of Indigenous Australians and programmes for survivors of Canada’s residential school system, designed to eliminate Indigenous cultures.

The second half offers recommendations to policymakers.

Dr Winter, who is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts, says any programme of financial redress has to ask important questions:

“Most people only ask, ‘How much money are you going to pay?’, but it is equally important to consider, ‘How are you going to get the evidence to make the claims?’, ‘Who's going to be responsible for getting that evidence?’ and ‘How is the programme going to analyse that evidence?’ The answers to those questions, among others, shape how survivors experience redress.”

Reading through the small amount of pre-existing literature, he realised people had great hopes for these programmes but didn’t realise how harmful they were.

“Survivors often think that getting some money from the government will sort them out, and they can heal and move on. But when I looked at the way these programmes were unfolding, the continual refrain was they were actually harming survivors who were looking for healing; the focal point of my book is that paradox.”
 

And the experiences of the programmes across the world are remarkably similar, he discovered.

“You don't need to change the names. It could be Hamilton, Ontario or Hamilton, New Zealand, and the story would be the same.”

A typical story is in the book’s introduction, that of New Zealander Keith Wiffin, whose father’s death when he was eight led to him ending up in the notorious Epuni Boys Home in Lower Hutt where he was physically and sexually abused.

“Keith Wiffin is one of hundreds of thousands of people around the world who experienced
systemic cruelty, abuse, and neglect while in state care,” says Dr Winter.

He says redress programmes always involve trade-offs.

“There are certain penalties or ‘cost burdens’ that survivors are going to end up bearing.” For example, he found the more you tailor the redress to the individual, the harder it is for the individual to get redress.

“Because tailoring redress in terms of how much someone should be paid requires a lot of good quality information about what that person went through and might well be still going through; the post-injury effects and consequential damage.

“And that in itself costs money and time [in training and paying staff to do the work, in interviewing, researching, checking] and becomes more of a psychological burden as the payment is delayed.”

Then you have the issue of how to put a price on abuse and remain equitable.

“Imagine someone who might have been locked in a cupboard, malnourished, and came out the other end a nervous wreck. A redress programme needs to set a value on that injury. Often programmes set levels of abuse. So if it’s level three, you get this amount, level four you get that. But that’s very dehumanising and depersonalising for survivors; like being given a label and a grade.

“And that spurs invidious competition to ‘get up the ladder’. But if you're trying to tie monetary value to people’s experiences, rules are almost unavoidable.”

However the book is not saying money doesn’t matter for survivors, quite the opposite.

“Survivors in a Queensland survey were asked what was most helpful for them from redress; was it the counselling or the opportunity to meet those who had gone through similar experiences? The most cited thing (by 59%) was money.”
 

Dr Winter says many survivors are highly marginalised people, now in their sixties or seventies, and are often struggling.

“We're talking about people who didn't get an education, who were sometimes traumatised as children and who would end up in the ‘state care to prison’ pipeline, scrambling at the edges, so $20,000 is a lot of money. A washing machine, a couch, even a cheap car can make a real difference in someone’s life.”

So what’s the answer to creating better redress programmes?

“I argue for schemes that allow survivors to pursue different paths to redress, so they can opt in, or out, of pathways that will have different outcomes. And different costs are likely to be associated with obtaining those outcomes.”

He says schemes need to provide survivors with support, information and options so they can do what seems best to them in their circumstances, as opposed to just going down one prescribed path.

“In Aotearoa for example, the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care has advocated replacing the present systems. We need something run by and for Māori. We can look to a country like Canada to see how they might work. Change is necessary to meet different cultural contexts.”