Nearly two years after the release of Whanaketia, the landmark Royal Commission into Abuse in Care report, survivor Frances Ruwhiu says the promises made to thousands of survivors have yet to translate into meaningful change.
Ruwhiu, now 72, spent decades in state care after being taken from her whānau when she was just three weeks old.
Across a childhood and early adulthood spent moving between foster homes and psychiatric institutions, she says she endured abuse, neglect, repeated institutionalisation and decades of disconnection from the people and culture that should have surrounded her.
Today, she has become one of many survivors continuing to speak publicly, not only about what happened to her, but about the lasting impact state care has had on generations of whānau.
As the second anniversary of Whanaketia – Through pain and trauma, from darkness to light, approaches, Ruwhiu says survivors are still waiting to see many of the changes they were promised.
Released on 24 July 2024, the Royal Commission’s final report described abuse in state and faith-based care as a “national disgrace”, concluding that hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders had suffered abuse and neglect while in care over more than five decades.
The six-year inquiry heard almost 3,000 survivor accounts, made 138 recommendations for reform and redress, and led to the Crown formally acknowledging that children at Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital had been subjected to torture.
For Ruwhiu, however, the report confirmed what she had spent a lifetime trying to tell people.
“I was just nine years old.”
“I thought I was getting a family”
Before Ngāwhatu, there were foster homes; Ruwhiu estimates she lived in five of them. Some carers were kind. Others were not.
She recalls being beaten, moved repeatedly and never knowing how long she would stay before another placement ended.
Looking back now, she says none of what happened was because she was a “naughty” child.
“It was beyond my control,” she says.
She compares it to peeling wallpaper from a wall.
“You pull a little bit... and it gets bigger and bigger.”
Eventually, she says, adults stopped seeing a frightened child and instead saw behaviour they believed needed correcting.
At nine years old she was told she was finally leaving to live with a proper family.
“I was told I was going to have brothers and sisters... a mum and dad.”
Instead, she arrived at Ngāwhatu Psychiatric Hospital in Nelson.
“But really what it was, was a mental institution for adults.”
Opened in 1922, Ngāwhatu became one of New Zealand’s major psychiatric hospitals, housing adults and children with mental illness, intellectual disabilities and behavioural problems.
Decades later, survivors would tell the Abuse in Care Royal Commission about physical abuse, neglect, forced medication and institutional practices that left lasting trauma.
Ruwhiu says she was admitted because adults misunderstood the impact repeated separation had on children.
“They put me there for behaviour problems because of disconnection.”
Now, more than 50 years later, she believes what staff labelled “behavioural problems” were simply the actions of a child repeatedly losing the people she should have been able to depend on.
“Children look up to those people who are their role models,” she says.
“But when those role models just disappear and they never say goodbye... they have tantrums and they get escalated.”
She remained at Ngāwhatu for nine years.
“I was at Ngāwhatu for nine years. 1963... and I left there in 1971.”
Despite everything she experienced there, Ruwhiu’s memories are more complicated than simple condemnation.
She recalls one of the first “treatments” she received was government-issued rolled tobacco. Her doctor would roll her five cigarettes a week and tell her she had to smoke them.
“Child Welfare gave me a home,” she says quietly.
“That was a home,” she says, reflecting on Ngāwhatu.
Then she pauses.
“But they still haven’t given me... a home.”
“Five of them held you down”
Although Ngāwhatu became the only home she knew, the abuse she describes when asked what happened if she misbehaved has never left her.
One of those moments came when she was still a child, and refused to use bath water that others had already used.
“I didn’t want the bath water that five other people had before me.”
She rushed back into her room and huddled into the corner. She says, as soon as she heard the key turn in the lock, she knew what was coming.
“They’d hold you down.”
“Five of them gave you a needle.”
Asked what they injected her with, her answer is short.
“Oh... that was pain.”
Ruwhiu says those experiences remain with her more than half a century later.
“I’ve got a phobia of needles to this day because of them.”
Ruwhiu’s account echoes evidence heard by the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care about the use of paraldehyde injections in psychiatric institutions.
In 2024, the Government formally acknowledged that children at the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit were subjected to torture, following the Royal Commission’s finding that painful paraldehyde injections and electric shocks were administered for punishment and behavioural control rather than medical treatment.
However, that formal acknowledgement has not been extended to survivors from other psychiatric hospitals, including Ngāwhatu.
Survivors from several former psychiatric hospitals, including Ngāwhatu, Porirua, Tokanui, Kingseat and Cherry Farm, have since come forward alleging they experienced similar practices.
Morehu, advocates and lawyers are now calling for the Crown to investigate and formally recognise the treatment survivors experienced in those institutions also amounted to torture under international law.
Learning to live outside the institution
At 18, Ruwhiu finally left Ngāwhatu.
But rather than beginning an independent life, she was taken to meet her birth mother for the first time since she had been removed as a three-week-old baby.
She remembers the journey vividly.
Social Welfare collected her just before Christmas, flew her from Nelson to Wellington, then drove her to Porirua.
She had imagined this meeting for years. She wanted to see her mother with her own eyes.
“I felt nothing.”
She says years of institutionalisation had disconnected her from the outside world.
“It was a lot of shame...I didn’t know how to live out here...I was institutionalised for nine years.”
“I had no understanding how to live out here.”
Her birth mother, too, was carrying trauma.
Ruwhiu says she struggled to cope.
One Friday, she remembers being called into a room by her mother’s husband. She says she was assaulted while her mother watched.
Her mother admitted Frances into hospital; her mother died soon after, and she never saw her alive again.
“I’ve never cried for her,” she says.
Not because she didn’t care, but because, after a lifetime of separation, there was little relationship left to grieve.
“I wasn’t mentally ill”
After her mother’s death, Ruwhiu says she was sent to another institution.
This time it was Porirua Hospital.
For decades, Porirua was New Zealand’s largest psychiatric hospital, housing thousands of patients across a sprawling campus.
Like Ngāwhatu, its history has since been examined through the Abuse in Care Inquiry, with survivors describing institutional neglect, isolation and lifelong harm.
Ruwhiu spent another ten years there.
“And not because I had a mental illness...I was there because of circumstances.”
“My mother died and left me with nowhere to go.”
The institution had become the closest thing she recognised as home, since Ngāwhatu.
Life inside those hospitals also shaped habits that followed her into adulthood.
While in Porirua, Frances says she received electroconvulsive therapy, more commonly known as ECT.
Asked why she may have received it, she says it was often after she “played up”, including by stealing cigarettes or other small items.
Smoking, she says, was an addiction that was imposed on her by the state after she was introduced to tobacco as a child and told it was a form of treatment.
She remembers staff rolling cigarettes for her.
“She used to come and roll me five government-issued tobacco... once a week.”
ECT is a psychiatric treatment in which controlled electrical currents are passed through the brain under general anaesthetic to trigger a brief seizure.
While it remains an approved treatment for some severe mental illnesses today, its historical use in psychiatric institutions has been the subject of scrutiny through the Abuse in Care Royal Commission.
Trying to explain what it felt like, she struggles for words.
“It was like...”
“...a bang sort of in your head.”
History repeating itself
Nearly two decades after leaving Porirua Hospital, Frances found herself confronting another chapter she never imagined.
This time, it wasn’t her own life that had brought her back into contact with the state.
It was her daughter’s.
When Child, Youth and Family (Oranga Tamariki) removed her daughter from her care, she says decades of unresolved trauma resurfaced.
The system she had spent her childhood inside had returned, this time for the next generation.
Looking back, she says it reopened wounds she had carried since childhood.
“It was really because of two generations,” she says.
“Myself and my daughter.”
She pauses.
“They made the same decision twice... and it was the wrong decision.”
In 2003, aged 50, Ruwhiu set fire to toilets and part of the foyer at a Child, Youth and Family office.
She has never denied what she did.
“I burnt the toilets and part of the foyer at Child, Youth and Family.”
“I have no regrets.”
She says she was careful to ensure no one would be hurt, choosing a time when no one would be there.
“I knew their lives weren’t endangered.”
The fire led to another institution.
This time it was Arohata Prison.
For many, prison might have been expected to become another place of anger.
Instead, Ruwhiu remembers something else entirely: the women in the prison saved her life.
“It was a sad place.”
She describes meeting women carrying trauma remarkably similar to her own. Many were Māori, and many had experienced similar abuse.
She became a Nan figure; it was clear to her, like what she needed, many simply needed someone to listen.
“I was their nan, I was their whaea.”
“You know... the hugs. I was someone they could talk to.”
Rather than remembering their offending, Ruwhiu remembers their humanity.
“You see the whole of them, not just what they’ve done.”
She believes her own experiences allowed her to recognise pain in others.
Some of the women she met there, she says, remain in prison today.
She says the consequences of state intervention lingered for decades.
“I carried that for a very, very long time.”
Now, more than 40 years later, she says mother and daughter are still rebuilding what was fractured.
“We’re starting to put it together again. But it’s not easy.”
“It’s abuse done in a different way”
Frances does not believe the harm experienced by children in state care belongs only to history.
Asked about Oranga Tamariki today, she says the system still causes trauma, even if it looks different from the institutions she grew up in.
“We are talking about young people who are in this system who have been abused.”
“It’s abuse done in a different way.”
Then she pauses.
“But it can actually be worse than the old days.”
She says today’s children often leave care carrying invisible trauma that can shape the rest of their lives.
New Zealand, she believes, still lacks the workforce needed to properly support survivors.
“New Zealand hasn’t got enough professional people to help these people and survivors.”
“Young or old.”
Sharing her story is one way she hopes she can help survivors understand that the abuse itself is only part of the story.
The decades that follow can be just as difficult.
“I wasn’t alone”
When the Royal Commission of Inquiry began hearing survivor evidence, Ruwhiu says she wasn’t sure what it would achieve.
Watching thousands of stories emerge from across the country changed something.
“I never knew how many children went through state care.”
For perhaps the first time, she realised her experiences were shared by thousands of others.
“But I also felt I wasn’t alone.”
Whanaketia documented abuse across generations of New Zealanders who had spent time in state and faith-based care.
It concluded that abuse was not the result of isolated failures, but systemic failings that stretched across decades.
Following the report, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon issued a formal apology on behalf of the Crown, acknowledging the suffering of survivors and committing to reforming the redress system.
Ruwhiu says she welcomed the apology.
But apologies alone are not enough. She says it felt as though he was reading words from a piece of paper and that she could not feel them.
“He didn’t follow through what he promised...What they promised.”
Asked what she meant, she doesn’t hesitate.
“A lot of things didn’t happen for survivors following that apology.”
When asked whether the inquiry had changed anything, her answer is more complicated.
“It changed a lot.”
But not for the reasons you would expect.
“People became ill. Their illnesses came out.”
She believes many survivors spent decades suppressing what had happened to them, and although the Royal Commission encouraged them to speak, speaking also reopened wounds.
“It exposed people and exposed their illnesses.”
“It’s not about the money”
The conversation eventually turns to redress.
Was it fair, I ask?
Ruwhiu shrugs.
“For me, it’s not about money.”
She says people often assume compensation is what survivors are seeking.
For her, it never has been.
“It’s not about material things.”
Instead, she mourns the life she believes might have been possible had she not spent most of her childhood and early adulthood inside institutions.
“Life could have been different. I could have been a Doctor of Psychology. I could have been high up in the corporate world.”
“My passion was always working for Child, Youth and Family.”
She smiles faintly.
“Instead, I worked as a cleaner.”
The greatest loss, she says, cannot be measured in dollars.
It is measured in opportunities and the freedom to choose a different path.
No amount of compensation can return those things, she says.
“To forgive”
As the interview draws to a close, I wanted to know what she would have told her child self.
Knowing everything she knows now, after the foster homes, Ngāwhatu, Porirua Hospital, prison, advocacy and hardship, what would she say to the frightened nine-year-old girl who thought she was finally getting a family?
Ruwhiu doesn’t need time to think.
“To forgive.”
She repeats it.
“To forgive.”
“To forgive all the people that have hurt you.”
She says forgiveness isn’t about excusing what happened but about refusing to let it define the rest of your life.
“If we don’t forgive in this life,” she says quietly.
“We’re going to take it with us.”
It has always been about those whose stories remain untold.
“My story is only one among thousands. If you put all those stories together... they’re very powerful.”
She hopes they will continue changing New Zealand.
Not simply through apologies, but through understanding.
“I want to leave a legacy behind, to help other survivors.”
