Dunedin historical sex crime left victim drained from fighting for justice, claims it was never about money

Warning: Some content may be upsetting.

A historical sexual abuse case that took nearly five years to resolve left a Dunedin survivor heartbroken and drained of her drive for justice.

She tells Tim Scott how she feels her childhood abuse was made all about money, and that the system failed her again nearly 50 years later.

It took a lot of faith for Sarah* to break the silence about her abuse.

When the first two people she ever told heard her story, this faith seemed well-placed.

They were two smartly dressed women from the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) sitting across a desk.

By the time 13 others had heard the same story, years later, faith was something Sarah was all but devoid of.

The abuse, at the hands of a father figure, left her with little self-worth, difficulty trusting people and strained mental health — for which she wanted compensation.

When she left that very first meeting with the pair, Sarah said it felt like they had actually listened to her.

She even gave them a hug on the way out the door.

“I thought they were on my side,” she told the Otago Daily Times.

Nearly five years later, having corresponded with more than a dozen different people and spent thousands on legal fees, Sarah says the ministry resorted to offering her more money as “damage control” rather than rigorously investigating her abuse.

She also said she was told by a staff member her abuse, the catalyst for life-long trust issues, was considered “low-level”.

Sarah accepted the higher offer but says the ministry needed to front up and address the process’ failure, instead of making it all about money.

She labelled the whole process “soul-destroying, unprofessional and a complete mess”.

“I wish I didn’t hug them or have faith in them — total waste of my energy and faith.”

The MSD has since apologised for how it treated Sarah’s claim, admitting it complicated what should have been a smooth process.

It says it had no intention of minimising her abuse and understood how defining it as “low-level” would have been upsetting.

Sarah was sexually abused by her foster father, whose care she was placed under by the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) in 1977.

The man would masturbate in front of her at the breakfast table before he left for work.

Sitting in his pyjamas while listening to the news, the man repeated this up to six times.

He explained he was sexually frustrated with his wife and would daydream of sexual fantasies while Sarah sat next to him.

The man claimed he told his wife about his breakfast-time proclivities, who told him, “I hope it’s not in front of Sarah.”

Sarah knows this because he told her himself at breakfast one morning.

At times, Sarah would rush through breakfast and leave the room, contemplate running away from home and cry at night wondering what to do.

In a meeting with Sarah, a senior social worker noticed she looked “pale and unwell”, which was noted in the DSW report at the time.

The man was confronted about his behaviour and the DSW report stated it was never reported to the police. Sarah says the same social worker told her to never speak of the abuse again.

After identifying further inconsistencies in the DSW report, Sarah now worries the MSD has also failed to address her abuse, nearly 50 years later.

“Once again, MSD have done no better by me than what they did all of those years ago.

“This time, they nearly destroyed my mental health.”

The process began back in November 2018, when Sarah first lodged a historical abuse claim with the MSD.

Her first face-to-face meeting — the one with the two MSD employees — happened in 2020, and she received a redress offer in March 2022.

The offer was $6000 and Sarah was told her abuse had been classified as “low-level”.

Her abuse was assessed at the very bottom of “Category 2″ which, when it was explained to her, was lumped together with “being smacked on the bottom and threatened” and “made to watch or view genitals”.

Sarah said there was a big difference between physical abuse and sexual abuse, and compared this classification system to being asked to rate her pain on a scale from one to 10.

When she asked the MSD to review her claim, it referred her to its handbook on processes and guidelines, which Sarah said was vague and contained unclear information about how to initiate a review.

As a government department, the MSD should have conducted itself professionally and provided her with a legal review document to sign, she said.

Her $6000 offer letter also said the ministry’s process had “not involved testing the evidence or reaching a conclusion on whether the allegations are proven”.

Both the handbook and offer dumbfounded Sarah, and caused her to be concerned the claim had not been assessed rigorously or based on any documented evidence.

From there, Sarah embarked on an 18-month campaign to get her claim reviewed.

She said the ministry took months at a time to respond to her request and she was referred back to the handbook every step of the way — more than six times.

In one case, it took six weeks for her to receive a reply from a MSD worker, only for them to refer her back to the handbook again.

Another time, she had to inform an employee their own handbook had been updated.

In total, Sarah was referred to three claimant support workers, a senior case worker, six further MSD employees, the general manager of the historic claims unit and a Royal Commission representative.

She even emailed then-Social Development and Employment Minister Carmel Sepuloni, who she was told was not responsible for daily matters.

In April of 2023, to her complete surprise, she received a second offer — a higher “rapid payment offer”.

Rapid payment offers were a scheme introduced by the previous government in December 2022, as a response to claimants whose abuse had not been resolved for several years.

Sarah did not want to say how much the offer was for, but government documents say rapid payments for a period of abuse matching hers could range up to $25,000.

Sarah was confused about why she was suddenly offered more money after the “slap in the face” of having her abuse labelled low-level.

It also felt like she was being offered the chance by the MSD to “take the money and run” and get her off its back.

The review process concluded in August 2023, to no avail, and Sarah said she accepted the higher offer because the process had taken a toll on her mental health and she had little hope of getting proper closure.

In response to questions from the Otago Daily Times, MSD historic claims general manager Linda Hrstich-Meyer acknowledged the redress process could be very difficult for claimants.

The handbook was a tool to help claimants understand their options and how the process worked.

She said MSD had tried to make the claim process as smooth as possible and apologised for Sarah’s experience.

“We acknowledge Sarah was unhappy with aspects of how her claim was assessed, such as the number of different MSD staff she had to speak to.

“We’re sorry this made the process more confusing for her.”

Claimants could choose between two types of assessment: an individualised or rapid payment, Hrstich-Meyer said.

Individualised assessments considered claimants’ specific concerns and reviewed their state care files, while rapid payments involved less detail and took less time to resolve.

Both options were dispute-resolution processes, so did not test evidence or establish fact “to the same degree a court would”, she said.

MSD was processing a “very large backlog” of claims, which left some people waiting years to have their claim assessed — which was one reason why rapid payments were introduced.

After listening to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care and survivors, the ministry had learned that closure meant something different to everyone, she said.

The claims process was designed to give them choice, and payments were only one aspect.

However, she understood that sorting abuse into a hierarchy could be upsetting for survivors, but this ensured the MSD’s assessment model was applied consistently across claims, she said.

“The categorisation is not intended to diminish Sarah’s lived experience, or the lived experience of anyone else.

“We do not dispute and did not seek to minimise any of what Sarah told us about her experiences.”

Academic and advocate for survivors of historical sexual abuse Dr Christopher Longhurst said rapid payment offers must only be used in urgent circumstances, such as ill health, and could not provide the full scope of justice if used alone .

The process was too simplistic to warrant Sarah’s nearly five-year wait — a reasonable time frame would have been three to six months, he said.

“Such a slow and drawn-out response only aggravates the survivor’s trauma and calls into question the competence of the people involved in processing complaints.”

Historical abuse claims required the “most rigorous” investigative methods and called for a more detailed process than just consulting survivors’ personal files, Longhurst said.

The duty of assessing historical claims needed to be turned over to an independent redress body, as the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care had recommended, he said.

After years of back-and-forth and deliberations of taking the ministry to court, her battle had become too much of a burden to continue and she wanted it all to be over, Sarah said.

She had accumulated nearly $7000 in legal fees, more than the worth of her original claim.

When her lawyer approached the MSD for payment, they were told it usually paid fees once a claim was settled as “part of the settlement offer”.

In October last year, she reluctantly accepted the offer, but was concerned the system was setting future survivors up for failure.

Upon reading her review letter, she realised her closure had been twisted by the MSD to be all about money — something it was never supposed to be, Sarah said.

“I was suddenly that little 12-year-old girl again - skinny, freckles, bucked teeth, pigeon-toed - and I cried.

“My heart breaks for all of the children who have been sexually abused, beaten and neglected, left alone in their own misery with no way out.

“This was supposed to be my way out.”

Tim.scott@odt.co.nz , PIJF cadet reporter.

* Names have been changed to protect anonymity.