Victoria University criminologist Elizabeth Stanley. Photo: RNZ / Aaron Smale
Between the 1950s and 1980s, more than 100,000 children were taken from their parents and put into state institutions, and in recent months RNZ has extensively covered revelations of historical abuse and neglect in these welfare homes. The Human Rights Commission has sent an open letter to the Prime Minister calling on the Government to hold an inquiry and apologise for what happened. Elizabeth Stanley is the director of the Institute of Criminology at Victoria University. She researched 105 cases of individuals sent to institutions as children and interviewed 40 of them for her book, The Road to Hell: State Violence Against Children in Postwar New Zealand.
