ROB MacCULLOCH: World's Media Report Horrific Headlines about NZ
- Administrator
- Jul 25, 2024
- 4 min read
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.
I have not read the report but…
If the Commission is confident of having discovered cases of abuse, has it named names, and initiated a process of hearings to bring the perpetrators to account? I suspect not, because there have been no headlines to say, for example, “the Commission has identified 54,321 abusers who committed heinous acts in New Zealand over a period of 60 years”. In my experience, abused individuals have a concern for identification, apologies, and accountability of abusers. Why are we not hearing of accountability being sheeted home to the perpetrators, rather than general responsibility (which means no responsibility) given to “the State”, “the schools”, or “the churches”? Institutions do not abuse people, individual people do. Those pe…
NZ voters deserve to be made aware of the following reality that Rob MacCulloch's article referred to as 'Martin Jenkins private consultancy' - a consultancy which it appears has "captured" this Government and previous ones (including Luxon, depts and local councils)
Introduction
The article he refers: 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".
The reference to MJ is material, and more than significant for all NZers to understand.
This post is just a small sample for those interested to hopefully understand the depth of influence of MJ in government…
Andy Espersen writes :
Rest assured that New Zealand’s past government funded mental care institutions are no worse than those in any other Western democracy – irrespective of absurd overseas headlines today. Rob MacCulloch’s eminently sensible and quite gentle scepticism over certain aspects of this Royal Commission’s report is fully justified.
I get the awful feeling that we measure this inquiry’s importance and truth-finding by how many kilos the concluding report weighs, by the length of time the inquiry has taken and by it’s sensational, headline-grabbing conclusions – ill-founded though some of them are (as MacCulloch so clearly and authoritatively shows in his article).
State institutions in New Zealand have always been open to the public – and…
I have not read the report. Reading the ROB MacCULLOCH article it appears that the abuse number was based on modelling. If you just read the headlines in the media you get the impression that there were 200,000 actual reported cases of abuse. A more accurate headline: "Royal Commission speculates that there could have been 36,000 to 256,000 cases of abuse from 1950 to 2019"
The fact that no-one in the New Zealand media has noticed this inconsistency is a further indictment of our smug, hapless media.