Professor Robert MacCulloch: Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care

The World's Media Reports Horrific Headlines about NZ quoting numbers from the Royal Commission into Abuse that its own consultants told it "may never be known with any degree of precision".

A most awful, terrible report by a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in NZ from 1950 to 2019 has just been released. The PM & world's media reacted with horror. One case of child abuse is horrendous, but 200,000, which is the number featuring in national & global news headlines? Today one of the "Most Read" stories in the United Kingdom is that "Almost one in three people in NZ care was abused". CNN in the United States stated, "NZ enquiry finds 200,000 children and vulnerable adults abused in care". The Commission itself says “unimaginable” and widespread abuse in care between 1950 and 2019 is a “national disgrace”. It says Māori were disproportionately affected & subjected to overt & targeted racism & calls for apologies from the Government, Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury.

Given NZ's population was only 1.9 million in 1950, the report tells us a huge proportion of Kiwis were either abused or abusers and that we're pretty much a morally bankrupt society. Let's take a look at the Royal Commission report. It turns out that the Commission never estimated the number who've suffered abuse to be 200,000. That number was featured in Chapter 5 of its report, called "The Extent of Abuse and Neglect in State Care". It contains little original research & instead "largely relies on research by private Wellington consultants Martin Jenkins (MJ)" in 2020. The Commission states Martin Jenkins, who I've never heard of, "provided low & high estimates of 114,000 and 256,000, respectively, for how many people may have been abused or neglected". My reading of the MJ report is that 114,000 is certainly not their low estimate - Table 16 on pg 45 quotes 36,000 as being the "low estimate" (using a "bottom-up" approach).

But hang on. So world headlines that the Commission "found" that "200,000 were abused" in NZ was not found by the Commission, but private consultants. So let's now focus on that company, Martin Jenkins', report. My understanding of it is that working out how many people were abused in care in NZ is largely impossible, since there's a monumental problem that a high proportion don't want to come forward. No-one one knows what is that proportion. Instead it must be largely guessed. The 200,000 figure reported about NZ in the world headlines yesterday is not a known quantity. It could by way higher, or lower. How did Martin Jenkins arrive at its guess? The firm took the total number in care institutions and under its "top down" approach, creates a guesstimate of the percentage that were abused. What did it base its guesstimate on? Studies "in the Netherlands, US, UK, Germany and NZ". Hang on again. The BBC and CNN report there were horrific rates of abuse in NZ, but it turns out that our numbers are partly based on their numbers!? What's to say abuse in NZ has nothing in common with the UK and US? It gets worse. Martin Jenkins use another approach, called "bottom up", which takes the actual numbers of reports of abuse, which are quite low - averaging less than 1% over the 1950 to 2019 period - and multiplies by them by a factor of up to 10, again based on international crime surveys, as well as NZ ones, based on the view that the under-reporting of abuse was of this kind of magnitude. But who knows what the factor truly is? And why use overseas studies?

A review of the Martin Jenkins report by another Wellington private consulting firm (!?) called TDB Advisory, says, "Given these challenges there is inevitably a wide range of uncertainty around any estimates of the cohorts and of the numbers of survivors of abuse. Indeed the “true” number of people in care and the number of survivors of abuse over the last seven decades may never be known with any degree of precision". Hang on a third time. The true number may "never be known with any degree of precision"? But the Royal Commission told the world yesterday it did know the numbers with quite high precision, quoting a range of 114,000 to 256,000. TDB says, "The key limitations of the estimates in the Martin Jenkins (MJ) report include that international studies are not fully representative of NZ’s demographics" and that it found "errors in the spreadsheets & MJ has been advised". TDB says it was told by MJ the errors are not material to its conclusion. However, we'll never know if the errors are material or not, since Martin Jenkins has a vested interest in making that denial & its work was never independently audited.

My perusal of these reports has been quick & I maybe making mistakes - but my initial conclusion is that the figure of '200,000 being abused' featuring in the Royal Commission Report, which made world headlines yesterday, is little more than a guess. The Commission may end up doing an injustice to those who were abused since the awful truth behind abuse shouldn't be conflated with stating that we know a number whose truth still remains hidden.

Sources:
https://www.abuseincare.org.nz/reports/whanaketia
https://www.abuseincare.org.nz/assets/Uploads/Size-of-cohorts-and-levels-of-abuse-in-State-and-faith-based-care.pdf
https://www.abuseincare.org.nz/assets/Uploads/Peer-Review-of-Cohort-Report.pdf
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4ng6jjz6jpo
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/royal-commission-of-inquiry-into-abuse-in-care-what-the-find-report-says/6L4RA5OD2JBHVHDBWFYDYRMSXA/
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/24/australia/newzealand-abuse-care-inquriy-intl-hnk/index.html

Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.