Name Callum and Victoria Turnbull 
Child in care Their son Rovin is autistic 
Hometown Central Otago
Age when entered care 9 years old 
Year of birth 2001
Time in care Four years 
Type of care facility  School for pupils with intellectual impairments – Ruru Specialist School in Waihopai Invercargill
Ethnicity NZ European
Whānau background Rovin has a brother.  
Currently Callum and Victoria describe Rovin as happy, sensitive and quirky. He enjoys bush walks and is learning to operate a little digger.  

“A bad kids place, doom” 

Our son Rovin is profoundly affected by autism. He also has savant abilities – he’s highly intelligent and has an aptitude for learning. Rovin is self-taught and very clever. He communicates in a straightforward way but he’s not very talkative. He struggles with sensory issues, and in social situations.

When he was nine, he began attending Ruru School in Invercargill, where he experienced physical and psychological abuse, including restraint and seclusion. He began to regress. His language and connection with us, and the world, disappeared. Looking back, we can see that Rovin’s dramatic deterioration was connected with the restraint and seclusion of him that was happening at Ruru, unbeknown to us.

When you have difficulty talking, you say ‘no’ the best way you can, and Rovin was trying to tell us. It became clear to us that he was unhappy. Getting him to school was a battle – he tried to exit the moving vehicle on occasions, and he’d hide under his bed in the morning, and put up a fight not to go to school.

At the time, we attributed his deteriorating behaviour at school and home, and his apparent fear and anxiety about school, due to having to be at school for the whole day, and this was how hard being at the school was for him.

His whole person changed. He began self-harming and talking about ending his life, expressing morbid thoughts. He would display aggression, strip off his clothes, cut off his hair and hit himself. It was a distressing time for our whole family.

There was an incident where he was put in a cloakroom by a teacher aide and left unsupervised after becoming upset. We recall he was taken to hospital in an ambulance with a large hematoma on his forehead.

We began noticing red flags everywhere. We spoke to the principal two or three times about bruising on Rovin’s body and arms, which was put down to his interactions with other children. This included very dark bruises around his wrists.

One day, he got off the bus groaning in complete devastation. He had a hematoma on his head, his face was all puffy, and he had marks on his hands. That night, the bus driver called us to tell us a teacher aide had assaulted Rovin during the after-school pickup. The driver said kids told him the teachers would shut them in the broom cupboard.

When Rovin had started at Ruru School, he had yelled out about a ‘little room’. At a meeting with the school, we asked to be shown the little room. There was a door at the back of a classroom, which opened into a tiny internal space, 1.3m x 1.8m and 3.3 metres high. It had a dark raw concrete floor, with ragged, frayed carpet stuck on the walls. There was no electric light, just light from a window at the top facing south into a hallway, so it was dark.

We were in shock and we both felt panic set in. Suddenly, the reasons for Rovin’s behaviour became clear to us.

We complained to agencies – the police, the Ministry of Education, the Education Minister, the Office of the Ombudsman, and even the Children’s Commissioner. The Ministry appointed someone to investigate.

The investigator’s report described the room as “dark and grimy” and that children put in the room would feel that it was for punishment. She said the atmosphere of the room was not pleasant and recommended that the room be closed.

The Ministry had existing guidelines from 1998, stating that “Time-out rooms should not be used. They are not necessary and can result in teachers and schools being accused of using inhumane and cruel punishments.” However, these guidelines were not provided to police or Ministry investigators. Instead in 2015, off the back of our seclusion complaint, a Ministry working group was set up to develop draft ‘seclusion guidelines’. The draft guidelines allowed for seclusion. The draft was provided to and used by police investigating our seclusion complaint against Ruru in 2016‒17, even though the then-Minister of Education, Hekia Parata, directed the Ministry to end seclusion in schools in October 2016, calling seclusion “intolerable”.

In October 2016, new restraint guidance was issued by the Ministry, which stated, “Seclusion is an extremely serious intervention. It is potentially traumatic and can harm a student’s wellbeing. It is an inappropriate response to a child’s behaviour and must be eliminated.” It became law in 2017.

Our complaints went to the Ombudsman for review. In his report, the Ombudsman said, “For any child or young person, let alone someone with particular disability-related needs, sensitivities and vulnerabilities, I consider that it would have been an uninviting and unpleasant place in which to spend even a short amount of time involuntarily.”

As a result of this, Rovin has missed almost all of his schooling. He spent four years at Ruru School, but four years of abuse is hardly good schooling.

As soon as we pulled him out of school, we were able to take him off all his medication and he’s been off medication ever since. We can count on one hand the number of meltdowns he’s had since. Once the abuse stopped, his behaviour stopped.

We’ve removed our son, so he is safe. But what about all the other students still there? What about the other children that were forced into the dark and grimy storeroom? Nobody spoke to the students – no agency talked to them. We were disheartened to hear from the Chief Executive of the Ministry in 2022 that they cannot know for certain that seclusion is not being used in schools, despite it being unlawful. The law change didn’t prevent children from being put into seclusion or create a proper complaints and investigations process.

This entire experience has had a lifelong impact on our entire family. We are much less trusting, especially of agencies and authorities, and it will continue to have a major effect on our lives. It has been heart-breaking and stressful, and brought us overwhelming anxiety at times. Rovin’s experience is common, and as hard as it is to tell our story, people – and the system – can learn from our story. That is our hope.[120]