A New Zealand Royal Commission of Inquiry released a report Wednesday detailing abuse in state and faith-based care institutions from the 1960s to the 2000s. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ordered the royal commission in 2018 after Australia concluded a similar six-year inquiry. The five-person commission, made up of lawyers, judges, and minority advocates, set out to uncover patterns of abuse in state and faith-based care and plan a proper government response.

The commission conducted hundreds of one-on-one survivor interviews and collected more than 370,000 documents to date. The nearly three hundred page report estimates that 250,000 of the 655,000 people in care settings were abused during the specified period. The commission found that most survivors experienced abused between the ages of five and seventeen, and abuse peaked nationally in the 1970s and 1980s.

The report includes the accounts of 50 abuse survivors. Of the fifty survivors included, “forty survivors described physical abuse, forty described sexual abuse including contact, and thirty-three described both.” When survivors of sexual abuse reached out for help, they were ignored or accused of lying, and “some carers or guardians would take the opportunity to [further] sexually abuse them.”

The commission also concluded that Maori were particularly vulnerable to abuse. Maori account for “sixty-nine percent of children in care and eighty-one percent of the children abused in care.” In addition to physical and sexual abuse, Maori survivors reported being isolated from their family, culture, and language. One survivor reported that nuns in her faith-based care institution “laid hands on [her] to get rid of Maori spirits.”

The commission seeks to rectify the reverberating impact of abuse, saying “the impact of abuse in care is felt far beyond survivors themselves. It also harms their families, their immediate community and society as a whole.” The commission will continue to collect data and survivor stories in order to formulate practical recommendations for lasting change.