New Zealand. Committee of Inquiry into Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders

This work was not written by a single author, but by a committee appointed by New Zealand’s Minister of Health, Sir Maui Pomare. The Project Gutenberg edition credits the report to W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Paterson, C. E. Matthews, and J. Beck, with Triggs serving as chairman.

Published in 1925 as Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders, the report was laid before the New Zealand House of Representatives. It reflects the official thinking of its time on mental health, disability, institutional care, and sexual offending—subjects discussed in ways that are now historically important but often deeply outdated and disturbing.

Among the better-known committee members was Ada G. Paterson, a New Zealand school medical doctor and child-health administrator. Read today, the report is best approached as a primary historical document: useful for understanding the ideas, anxieties, and policy debates of early twentieth-century New Zealand, rather than as a guide to modern medicine, psychology, or justice.