New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon publicly apologized this month for five decades of horrific abuse of New Zealand children and others in the country’s state run and faith based institutions.

     He announced that a National Remembrance Day would be held on 12 November 2025 to mark the first anniversary of the national apology, and he confirmed that the government would invest NZ$32 million into the current redress system. The New Zealand government will also establish a NZ$2 million fund to support those organizations working with abuse survivors.

     A Royal Commission of Inquiry released a report this July that revealed that between one hundred thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand children, young people and adults had been abused and neglected between 1950 and 1999 in the country’s institutions. New Zealand Schools, foster care  facilities, state agencies, and mental health facilities were named as liable for abuse or for failure to protect these victims from abuse.

     One institution, in particular, Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital, was noted to be an example of some of the worst atrocities committed against New Zealand’s children.

     Despite it being a psychiatric facility, most of the children admitted to Lake Alice did not have a mental illness. The Department of Social Welfare records show that 60% of admissions were for “behavioral” problems, and many of the children simply came from disadvantaged communities, including many from the island’s indigenous Maori people. The mean age was thirteen years old.

     Former patients of the hospital’s child and adolescent units revealed to the commission that the abuse they endured during the 1970s included being punished by  electroconvulsive therapy without anesthetics and being injected with paralyzing drugs such as paraldehyde (a central nervous system depressant). These young patients were also frequently victims of sexual assault on their wards.

     All of the children who were shocked, drugged or sexually abused named the same perpetrator, Dr. Selwyn Leeks, the lead psychiatrist of the Lake Alice child and adolescent unit. 

     Leeks administered electric shocks to them for such minor infractions as passing wind, being anti-social, being picky about food, showing off in front of the girls in class, and being argumentative, the Lake Alice medical records show.

     Leeks would use electroconvulsive shock treatments as punishment in what he called “aversion therapy,” and he applied the electrodes not just to the temples, but also to the children’s breasts, groins and genitals. He also required some young residents to administer shocks to their peers, and he forced others to watch while their mates were being shocked.

     When the first of these children’s allegation about him became public in the 1970s, he dismissed them as coming from “bottom-of-the-barrel kids” who had been lying.

     Leeks’ unit at Lake Alice opened in 1972 and over the next six years admitted between 400 and 450 children and adolescents. The unit permanently closed in 1980, but Leeks had already moved to Australia and continued practicing. In August 2006 Leeks was ordered to pay $55,000 in damages for sexually assaulting a former patient. The victim said that Leeks had told her that complaining would be futile.

     “You’re a long-term psychiatric patient and no one will believe you,” he had said.

     In 2023 more evidence of his abuse was uncovered, but he was by then 92 and was deemed medically unfit for trial.

     In 2020 a United Nations committee labeled Leeks’ acts at Lake Alice “torture.”

     This sad story is not unique of an institution originally created to help the unfit and the disadvantaged being turned into a psychiatric torture chamber.

     Lake Alice had opened in August, 1950, and its therapeutic rural setting included its own farm, workshop, bakery, laundry, swimming pools, glasshouses, and vegetable gardens.

     These facilities could be used for the nineteenth century “moral therapy” concept of physical work and worthy endeavor being used as part of the therapy for resident patients.

     Like many similar, charitable institutions around the world which had evolved from the community almshouses of the previous centuries, the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit in New Zealand was intended to be a sanctuary for care and healing. However, like many other once benign institutions for the public good – the word “asylum” means sanctuary, in fact – these facilities became mental hospitals.

     Psychiatrists gained control of populations of vulnerable, unprotected people, and without oversight these sadistic “doctors” were now free to unleash the brutality of their insulin shock therapies, lobotomies, and electroconvulsive shocks on innocent victims.

     The New Zealand government is now trying to make amends for the brutality of some of these incarcerations.