***Distressing content warning***

Dr Sutherland was a founding member of the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination (ACORD) and spent years campaigning and advocating on behalf of many children who were in State care during the 1970s and 1980s. Dr Sutherland gave evidence about how he first met a 13-year-old boy who had been in the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit. Dr Sutherland and fellow ACORD member Dr Ross Galbreath called for a Ministerial Inquiry, which resulted in the 1977 Mitchell Inquiry. ACORD contacted Members of Parliament, psychologists, and investigative journalists to make sure the New Zealand public were made aware of what was happening. He sent a telegram to the Minister of Health describing the allegations he had received from other adolescents at the unit as torture. Dr Sutherland said the words and actions of ACORD, in drawing attention to the complaints of abuse, ensured that people in power in the 1970s could not say they did not know what was going on at the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit.