Abuse in care: Medical Council to apologise to Lake Alice survivor Steve Watt

Warning: This story contains details of unacceptable treatment of young people, including children.

The Medical Council is poised to deliver a personal apology to a survivor of the notorious Lake Alice child and adolescent unit whose complaint about horrors there was ignored.

Twenty years after he was sent to the institution, where children were tortured with electric shocks and paralysing injections, Steve Watt asked the council to investigate the unit's lead psychiatrist, Dr Selwyn Leeks.

His plea fell on deaf ears, partly due to concerns about harassing Leeks, who died two years ago.

Watt laid his complaint with the council in 1999, but never heard back.

In July, the council apologised to Lake Alice survivors for failing them, and Watt told Checkpoint he had since requested a personal apology.

"I'd like them to realise that they've hidden behind a whole lot of lies and they've stolen a whole lot of time from all of the survivors from Lake Alice.

"This isn't just for me. This is going to be an apology for all of us."

The 63-year-old wants his apology recorded and made public, including his questions about why the Hippocratic Oath was ignored.

"The whole world needs to know the abuse that has gone on. I know what went on because I lived through it.

"[The council's] left a lot of stains that need to be healed and they can't do that unless they come forward and be apologetic through the media."

The council had told him it would not do this, and was proposing to meet Watt in late November at the Brain Injury Association's Wellington office. Watt suffered a severe brain injury in a car crash on New Year's Eve 2002.

As a teen in the 1970s, despite having no psychiatric illness, he was twice sent to Lake Alice.

There, he witnessed Leeks give electric shocks to another boy. Watt was injected with the paralysing drug paraldehyde and locked in an isolation pen.

Leeks never faced prosecution, although shortly before his death police, at the conclusion of their latest investigation, said there was enough evidence to lay charges against him. By then he was too ill to face trial.

Leeks held a New Zealand licence to practise when Watt laid his complaint, although he had worked in Australia since leaving Lake Alice.

"Apparently they sent the response back to an address that I wasn't in and it got sent back to them, and they decided it was too difficult to get hold of me," Watt said.

"I was running a couple of businesses in Wellington at the time. I was pretty easy to find."

Watt this year requested the file of his complaint and for the first time read the letter that never reached him from early 2000, saying the council's complaints assessment committee would not take the matter further.

It describes Watt's complaint, in which he sent a video of a TV documentary about Lake Alice, difficult to understand and cites 12 reasons behind its decision.

They include the historical nature of the complaint; previous investigations - now known to be lacking; a class action then in progress, which it said provided an "alternative avenue of redress for the disgruntled"; and a lack of information pertinent to Watt.

The cumulative effect of all that and potential harassment of Leeks were among the reasons behind the committee's decision not to act, it wrote.

"They've created a whole lot of wounds in a whole lot of people and they need to realise they need to heal all of those. A weak sorry is not going to do anything for us. They've got to really be careful," Watt said of the council.

Citizens Commission on Human Rights spokesperson Mike Ferriss helped Watt request his file.

Its content showed the council was keen to dismiss the complaint, he said.

"It's completely bizarre that they would think like that - that they would impart that information that they felt that Dr Leeks might be being harassed," he said.

"Yet the evidence that Steve presented to the Medical Council was a full-blown television documentary that discussed many of the things, [such as] electric shocks to the genitals and bodies of children as punishment."

The council's apology to Watt must include accountability for its failings, he said.

Ferriss was aware of two other survivors who had personal meetings with the council.

In a statement, Medical Council chairwoman Dr Rachelle Love said personal apologies were private meetings and it was not its place to discuss them outside of that.

"However, the council fully respects the right of a survivor to release the content of the personal apology to external parties."

Survivors had, in general, asked the council to keep the nature of face-to-face discussions private, Love said.