The World's Media Reports Horrific Headlines about NZ quoting numbers from the Royal Commission into Abuse that its own consultants told it "may never be known with any degree of precision".
A most awful, terrible report by a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care in NZ from 1950 to 2019 has just been released. The PM & world's media reacted with horror. One case of child abuse is horrendous, but 200,000, which is the number featuring in national & global news headlines?
Today one of the "Most Read" stories in the United Kingdom is that "Almost one in three people in NZ care was abused". CNN in the United States stated, "NZ enquiry finds 200,000 children and vulnerable adults abused in care". The Commission itself says “unimaginable” and widespread abuse in care between 1950 and 2019 is a “national disgrace”. It says Māori were disproportionately affected & subjected to overt & targeted racism & calls for apologies from the Government, Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury.
Given NZ's population was only 1.9 million in 1950, the report tells us a huge proportion of Kiwis were either abused or abusers and that we're pretty much a morally bankrupt society.
Let's take a look at the Royal Commission report. It turns out that the Commission never estimated the number who've suffered abuse to be 200,000. That number was featured in Chapter 5 of its report, called "The Extent of Abuse and Neglect in State Care". It contains little original research & instead "largely relies on research by private Wellington consultants Martin Jenkins (MJ)" in 2020. The Commission states Martin Jenkins "provided low & high estimates of 114,000 and 256,000, respectively, for how many people may have been abused or neglected". However, the MJ report does not state that 114,000 is their low estimate.
But hang on. So world headlines that the Commission "found" that "200,000 were abused" in NZ was not found by the Commission, but private consultants.
So let's now focus on that company, Martin Jenkins', report. It turns out that estimating how many people in NZ were abused in care is largely impossible, since there's a monumental problem that a high proportion don't want to come forward. No-one one knows what that proportion is. Instead it must be largely guessed.
The 200,000 figure reported about NZ in the world headlines yesterday is not a known quantity. It could be higher or lower. How did Martin Jenkins arrive at its guess? It took the total number in care institutions and under its 'top down' approach created a guesstimate of the percentage abused. What did it base the guess on? Studies "in the Netherlands, US, UK, Germany & NZ".
Hang on again. The BBC & CNN report there were horrific rates of abuse in NZ, but our numbers were partly based on their numbers (!) What's to say abuse in NZ has nothing in common with the UK & US? Using 'top down', the number of abused ranges from a low of 114,000 to a high of 256,000. As these numbers are so abjectly unreliable, MJ use another approach, called 'bottom up', that takes actual reports of abuse (which are low, averaging less than 1% from 1950 to 2019) and multiplies them by a factor of up to 10 based on international crime surveys, as well as NZ surveys (taking a view that under-reporting is of this magnitude). Who knows what is the true factor? Why use overseas studies?
Using 'bottom up', the new estimate ranges from a low of 36,000 to a high of 65,000. (See Figure 15 on page 46 for a summary). The numbers calculated using these two different approaches are wildly different. So MJ did not report a "low estimate" of 114,000, as claimed yesterday by the Commission. It was 36,000.
A review of the Martin Jenkins report by another Wellington private consulting firm (!?) called TDB Advisory, says, "Given these challenges there is inevitably a wide range of uncertainty around any estimates of the cohorts and of the numbers of survivors of abuse. Indeed the “true” number of people in care and the number of survivors of abuse over the last seven decades may never be known with any degree of precision".
Hang on a third time.
The true number may "never be known with any degree of precision"? But the Royal Commission told the world yesterday it did know the numbers with quite high precision, quoting a range of 114,000 to 256,000. TDB says, "The key limitations of the estimates in the Martin Jenkins (MJ) report include that international studies are not fully representative of NZ’s demographics" and that it found "errors in the spreadsheets & MJ has been advised". TDB says it was told by MJ the errors are not material to its conclusion. However, we'll never know if the errors are material or not, since Martin Jenkins has a vested interest in making that denial & its work was never independently audited.
My perusal of these reports has been quick & I may be making mistakes. But my initial conclusion is that the figure of '200,000 being abused' featuring in the Royal Commission Report, which made world headlines yesterday, is little more than a guess. The Commission may end up doing an injustice to those who were abused since the awful truth behind abuse shouldn't be conflated with stating that we know a number whose truth still remains hidden.
Sources:
This piece was first published at Down to Earth Kiwi. Robert MacCulloch worked at the Reserve Bank of NZ, before he travelled to the UK to complete a PhD in Economics at Oxford University. He pursued research interests at London School of Economics and Princeton University, before joining Imperial College London Business School. Robert subsequently returned to his alma mater in NZ.