Chapter 3: Purpose and process
15. The Terms of Reference directed the Inquiry to recognise and focus on the experiences of groups who have been disproportionately represented in care and disproportionately suffered abuse and neglect in care, including disabled people.[2]
Disabled survivors who registered with the Inquiry
16. Disabled survivors made up just over a quarter (27 percent) of the 2,329 survivors who registered with the Inquiry. This does not include Deaf survivors or survivors who experienced mental distress. Part 1, Chapter 4 of the Final Report includes information about the disabled survivors who registered with the Inquiry, including gender, age, ethnicity, where they were in care and self-identified impairments.
17. Part 1, Chapter 5 of the Final Report describes how the Inquiry engaged with disabled survivors, their whānau and wider communities.
18. Part 1, Chapter 6 of the Final Report sets out the framework the Inquiry used to guide its analysis and understanding of disabled survivors who suffered abuse and neglect in State and faith-based care. The framework was also used to understand the experiences of Deaf survivors and survivors who experienced mental distress.
19. Part 1, Chapter 6 of the Final Report also describes the principles from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Enabling Good Lives, which the Inquiry considered appropriate to help frame its understanding and analysis of the abuse and neglect suffered by disabled survivors.
Context relevant to disability in Aotearoa New Zealand
20. Part 2 of the Final Report includes more detailed contextual information:
- Chapter 2 describes traditional Māori, Pacific and settler societal attitudes to disability
- Chapter 4 explains ableism, disablism and the eugenics movement
- Chapters 5 and 6 describe the development and implementation of the State’s policy segregating disabled people in large-scale institutions in the 1950s–1970s
- Chapter 7 describes the closure of institutions in the 1970s–1990s, and the disability rights movement
- Chapter 8 discusses demographic data about disabled people during the Inquiry period
- Chapter 10 describes the State-run disability care settings during the Inquiry period, including psychopaedic institutions, sheltered workshops and special schools
- Chapter 11 describes the faith-run disability care settings during the Inquiry period.
21. Chapter 2 of the Kimberley Centre case study sets out the history of the Kimberley Centre, a psychopaedic hospital in Taitoko Levin that operated for 61 years from 1945 to 2006
Footnotes
[2]Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State Care and in the Care of Faith-Based Institutions, Terms of Reference, clause 8