105. Part 5 of the Inquiry’s final report, Whanaketia – Through pain and trauma, from darkness to light, sets out the significant, pervasive and lifelong impacts that abuse and neglect in State and faith-based care had on survivors’ physical and mental health, emotional wellbeing and spirituality, identity and cultural identity, and education and employment opportunities. This chapter describes the impacts on women and girls of specific types of abuse and neglect – vaginal examinations and forced adoptions.

Impacts of forced vaginal examinations of women and girls

106. Women and girls in care who were subjected to vaginal examinations experienced shame, humiliation, physical pain and trauma. Some survivors were also sexually assaulted by doctors during these examinations. Many survivors told the Inquiry that these experiences had lifelong impacts.

107. Māori survivor Raewyn Davies (Ngāti Porou), who was placed at Bollard Girls’ Home in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland when she was aged 14 in 1976, was made to have a vaginal examination despite telling staff she had already been examined by a gynaecologist as part of her pregnancy checkup:

“I didn’t want to have one [an examination], and I protested about this ... the staff made me get examined by a visiting male doctor. He was very rough and used clamps. He said something like, ‘open up, sunshine’, before he did the examination. It was painful and humiliating”.[120]

108. For some women and girls who had previously been sexually abused, the vaginal examinations were particularly traumatising. Māori and Welsh survivor Gwyneth Beard (Ngāti Porou), who was 12 years old when she was placed in Strathmore Girls’ Home in Ōtautahi Christchurch, said of the examinations:

“I can remember the comment they made was ‘she’s sexually active’ or ‘she's not a virgin’. That really buggered with my mind that these adults were blaming me for sexual abuse I had experienced. They did not think to ask why and find out what had happened to me.”[121] 

109. The impact of these examinations on survivors was immediate and lifelong on their self-worth and personal autonomy, and in terms of managing their future physical wellbeing. Gwyneth Beard told the Inquiry:

“I have struggled to go for smear tests because of the medical examinations I experienced in care. I’ve had cancer scares. Those examinations told me that adults had rights to my body, no matter who they were. That is wrong. It is so wrong to get that idea in your head as a child because then, as a woman, your value for yourself is lost.”[122]

110. Shortly after arriving at Bollard Girls’ Home in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, survivor Tracy Peters received an internal examination while being held down and tied to the bed. She described that the impact of being abused was her lifelong inability to trust medical professionals:

“Because I can’t trust medical professionals, I struggle with several kinds of doctor’s appointments. I’ve never been able [to] get any kind of feminine check-up, and I can’t cope with getting mammograms. I had a hysterectomy at 33 and had to be sedated completely, even for the ultrasound. When I was having trouble with my appendix, I couldn’t handle a female doctor doing an external examination on my stomach, so my appendix eventually ruptured, and I almost died.”[123]

Impacts of forced adoptions

111. Many survivors of unmarried mothers’ homes told the Inquiry of their grief and regret at being separated from their babies through forced adoption. Survivor Maggie Wilkinson told the Inquiry that she was called to say goodbye to her baby but was not allowed to touch her, and that “no-one bothered to look back at the grief of the ‘sacrificing’ mother”.[124] She experienced grief and depression for years afterwards.

112. Māori women and girls who were involved in closed adoptions, either as mothers or adopted children, missed the opportunity for the baby to be raised by a relative as a whāngai and to grow their knowledge of their whakapapa and tikanga.[125] Māori survivor Ms AF, who was adopted into a Catholic family as a baby, told the Inquiry:

“There was a violent structure to my adoption. They were complicit in stripping me of my whakapapa, and this violence was felt throughout my life. When I was adopted, it severed my connection to my whānau and whenua.”[126]

113. When Ms AF became pregnant at 18 years old, she was sent to Rosanna Good Shepherd Hostels in Te Awa Kairangi ki Tai Lower Hutt and forced to adopt her son out, which damaged relationships within her biological and adoptive whānau.[127]

114. At the Inquiry’s State Institutional Response Hearing, Oranga Tamariki acknowledged the impacts of forced adoption on birth mothers and their whānau:

“I’d particularly like to acknowledge the experience of birth mothers who experienced their babies being forcibly removed or their being coerced into relinquishing them or those birth mothers who felt they had no choice in decisions being made about their babies ... And then the last group I just wanted to acknowledge is wider family, who, even these days, are searching for connections to put together the pieces of whakapapa for relatives who were adopted themselves and the limitations of the legislation in terms of enabling them access to critically important information.”[128]