Name Renée Habluetzel
Hometown Ōtautahi Christchurch
Age when entered care 6 months old
Year of birth 1961
Type of care facility Foster care; adopted into a family that ran a children’s home
Ethnicity Pākehā
Whānau background Renée went into care at six months old and was adopted just before she turned 5 years old. She reconnected with her birth mother when she was 17 and describes the relationship as difficult. Her mother has passed away. Renée also discovered the identity of her father as an adult.
Current Renée has two children, a son and a daughter. She is still close with her foster brother Paul, after reconnecting about 12 years ago.

I was adopted before I turned 5 years old by a woman who ran Little Acres Children’s Home for disabled children in Christchurch, Mrs Miles. She was probably the most evil person I have ever met, and will ever meet in my whole life. She was so cruel to the most vulnerable people – not just me but hundreds of children.

Mrs Miles told me she adopted me because my birth mother was crazy and didn’t want me. She said all our mothers were prostitutes and bad people. I believed her at first – then I realised, how can they all be prostitutes? I think my mother was probably mentally unwell – she’d had a rough life herself and no family support. From what I’ve pieced together, Mrs Miles manipulated my birth mother into signing the adoption papers. Although I didn’t have the best relationship with my birth mother, I never doubted that she tried to do her best for me.

I used to joke that Mrs Miles didn’t need to go to the gym because she got a full body workout beating the crap out of us. I remember regular beatings for being ‘naughty’, although in retrospect, nobody really was. She would punch us, thump us, kick us to the ground and hit us in the head. She would make me put my hand out and smack me over the back of the hand with a wooden hearth broom and then send me to school. I couldn’t write for hours. Once I got away with putting my left hand out so I could still write, but she figured that out and she was furious.

It always amazed me that we didn’t have bruises. I think she was tactful about where she hit us so that it didn’t show. She would whack all the kids across the head. Once, when I was 12, I got such a severe beating that I was off school for a whole week – I had bruises all up my legs and my back.

She had a particular dislike for anybody who wet the bed. She would pull me out of bed at 10pm to check if I’d done it yet. If I had, then she’d beat the crap out of me. Then I’d have to get back into my wet bed – she wouldn’t change the sheets. The nature of beatings was such that I was absolutely terrorised. I think she enjoyed it. When she started on us, her husband would just take off and do something else – get out of the house. A few times she tried to get him to hit us and he would just walk away.

She would make me wear the singlet I had worn to bed to school the next day so that I would stink. I’d try to get the singlet off and stick it in my bag so no one could tell, but I’d still smell, and I got a really hard time from other kids.

When I was about nine or 10, she broke my tooth by smacking me against the bar frame of the bath. I still hate looking at that now. She was washing my hair and said I was wriggling too much, so she got me by my hair and just smashed me against the bath. After that my tooth was really sharp and I kept getting a cut lip and cut tongue because of it. If I complained about it, she would just hit me around the head.

After she beat us up, she would make us all hug and kiss her. I wouldn’t do it, I didn’t want to hug someone after they’d thumped me.

From a young age I didn’t think I was a person, and I didn’t think the rest of us were, either. We weren’t treated like people – we were just things. She used to tell me that she saved me from the gutter, and that I was there because no one loved me, so I owed her.

One of my early memories is scrubbing a floor with about five of us in a line. The girls just worked all the time. My job was to do the dishes at night. I’d help all the kids go to bed, then Mrs Miles would have us knitting clothes for everybody before bed.

It was also my job to get Mrs Miles up in the mornings. I would bring her some toast with jam on it and a cup of tea. Then I would get her a hot cloth to wipe under her armpits, help her put her bra on, get her clothes out and help dress her. Then I’d have to empty her urine potty from under the bed.

Another child sexually abused me. He was about 10 years older than me. I know he started abusing me before I was five, when I got adopted, because I remember being in court for my adoption and knowing that I was already being regularly abused by him. I think Mrs Miles knew what was going on because she caught him red-handed touching other children at least twice, but she didn’t care. At night he would go along and tap us in bed with a hockey stick, which was a signal to get out of bed and go into the bathroom, where he’d abuse us.

Social workers used to come at least once a month and Mrs Miles hated it. They were becoming younger and more educated, and she did what she could to keep them away – they were onto her and she knew it. She became more in favour of non-verbal kids.

Most parents wanted to visit their children at the home and Mrs Miles would tell them awful lies. She did a good job of convincing them never to visit, saying things like, “They get upset when you come to see them. That one, your son, screamed and screamed for days after you came to see him. It’s best you don’t come back.”

I remember six instances of children dying in care – four who died at the home and two who were dropped off to die. I remember thinking I could die, because it was kind of normal for kids to die, and there were a lot of very sick kids.

When I met my birth mother she told me Mrs Miles promised when she adopted me that I would get an education, have music lessons and do ballet, and I’d have my teeth straightened. My mother gave Mrs Miles a lot of money to do all of those things – my grandmother remembers it too. Mrs Miles’s children mocked me for not doing ballet and I never understood it. Her grandchildren would say “we’re off to do ballet” and laugh at me. If I got presents from my biological family they’d be taken off me and given to her grandchildren. I’d go to visit their house and see all my presents there.

When I met my birth mother it destroyed her to learn what had happened to me – she thought she’d done the right thing by leaving me there.

I escaped at 17 years old. I’d been told I was going to be put into psychiatric care, she was going to organise that next, and I got out before she could do that.

She shut down Little Acres within six months of me leaving. I saw a newspaper article and I rang Social Welfare to raise my concerns. They just ignored me. I feel so angry at the State.

A documentary about the children’s home and Mrs Miles’ “selfless” work was made in about 1973. It was filmed when I was about 13 years old. Mrs Miles named it Four in the Morning, because that was the time she was supposedly up looking after the kids. She wasn’t. I know she’s dead now, but I still worry.

Mrs Miles was also given a British Empire Medal for her services to the intellectually disabled in Christchurch, in 1969. She is forever held up as this beacon of compassion, and I would like to see that medal taken off her. What I want more than anything now is for the people who adopted me to acknowledge that they let me and my future descendants down. I’d like them to offer me and my kids some redress for what they did. I’d also like to be un-adopted. I would like no one on my birth certificate, except for perhaps my birth mother.

Disabled children are so vulnerable, and the fact I’m the only person to come forward from the place I grew up isn’t surprising, because Mrs Miles got people she could shut up.[238]

The Inquiry notes that Presbyterian Support South Island commissioned an independent investigation into the allegations made between 2005 and 2007 but they were unable to be corroborated. The matter was also referred to the NZ Police and no charges were laid.