Aotearoa New Zealand’s Royal Commission on Abuse in State and Faith-based Care began in 2018 and presented its final report in July 2024. The Inquiry, which covered the years 1950-1999, found that hundreds of thousands of children and young people experienced all types of abuse in a large range of sites across the country. Many of those were disabled children (children with disabilities) who were removed from families and communities and placed in segregated institutions, ‘mental deficiency colonies’, residential schools and abusive foster care, sometimes for their whole lives. Many of those experiencing abuse were Māori. The legacies of eugenic policies from earlier in the 20th century intersected with the effects of 19th century colonisation and persisted as the ableism and racism which created and sustained the conditions for widespread abuse. This presentation will outline the legacy of the false science of eugenics on generations of disabled children, young people and adults.

How do we reckon with and repair the injustices of institutionalizing disabled people, and how does this connect to anti-eugenics justice? Haunted house attractions, exclusive housing estates, and abandoned buildings are some of the common afterlives of disability institutions … justice and reparations are not. However, there is increasing momentum at the international human rights and local community levels for truth-telling and reparations towards disabled people who experienced institutionalisation. This presentation introduces the human rights and philosophical reasons why truth-telling and reparations are necessary and discusses some ways in which governments and communities are already engaged in these practices. It then reflects on what lessons might be learned for anti-eugenics justice.

Just as the practice of eugenics applied supremacist ideas to a wide range of hard and social sciences and public policies, anti-eugenics embraces difference and diversity and commits to an equitable and just future

University College London’s Eugenics Legacy Education Project involves collaboration across UCL’s faculties with a wide range of colleagues in a diverse range of roles to think about how we teach this difficult knowledge of eugenics history, in which the University itself has had a long history.