Drive to tame the taniwha

Youth Mentor Sue Dickens working with "at risk" kids at James Cook High School in Manurewa. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Every Wednesday for six months, social worker John Ormsby visited the mother of a troubled 16-year-old boy.

At the appointed hour the mother would be waiting outside to unleash a torrent of abuse on him.

"It was like a performance," he says. "The neighbours would just about pull out chairs to watch the show.

"I called her the taniwha lady. The real nice side was when we started talking about her son. She would say, 'I don't want him doing that [bad behaviour].'

"But then quite often she would slip into her own life and this taniwha would come out. I could see it just grow in a second."

The mother's life had been hell.

"She was pregnant at 14, had her first child at 15, a second at 16, and then another five," says Ormsby.

"She had years of short-term relationships, years of Mongrel Mob relationships, she didn't know who the parents [of her children] were."

A taekwondo exponent, Ormsby tried to reach the teen by teaching him a martial art pattern with 15 movements, but they only got to movement eight before the family left town.

"I'm wondering where the family was for the mum," says Ormsby, who manages Waipareira Trust's South Auckland "wraparound service" which works with 100 families a year.

"Where is that [blood] line that should be there to provide that support for the family? Because it seems to be cut off at the knees for a lot of families."

This is the kind of family that Justice Minister Simon Power and Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples will be talking about next Friday at a meeting with about 100 social agencies to discuss what Power calls "drivers of crime".

"The priority of the new Government has been the immediate safety of the public," Power said when he announced the meeting. He has tightened controls on bail and parole.

"I want to add another dimension to the debate from how we respond to crime - to how we stop it happening in the first place."

The context is a long term rise in violent crime. Our murder rate trebled from around five per million people per year in the 1950s to a recent peak of 17 per million in 2001-02, although it is back around 12 per million.

Other countries show similar patterns. Francis Fukuyama, in his book The Great Disruption, showed that violent crime rose exponentially from the 1950s to the 1990s in 10 developed nations, including New Zealand, and fell only in Japan.

Fukuyama believes the driving force of the "disruption", affecting family breakdown as well as crime, is a shift from industry to the "information era".

Women have been freed from constant childbearing by birth control, and have taken up "information-based" jobs that don't require brute strength, while many male industrial workers have become redundant.

Both family breakdown and crime have increased particularly strongly in New Zealand, perhaps because both industrial and information revolutions have been going on here at once.

Maori and Pacific people have moved out of rural marae-based communities into urban industrial jobs, at the same time as the rest of us have shifted from factories into offices and services.

The challenge for Power's meeting is to find ways to build new social bonds in our transient urban society where both men and women work.



New social bonds are needed at three levels: in the family; at school and work; and finally in the whole community.

The familyOrmsby's "taniwha lady" is not alone in losing support from her extended family. Many extended families are now scattered around the globe.

Nor is the breakup of her nuclear family unusual. By the 1990s, Waikato University demographers found that 37 per cent of children lived with a solo mother before they turned 17. For Pacific children it was 49 per cent and for Maori children 56 per cent.

But this disruption is reversible. One-parent families increased at every census from 1976 to 2001- from 12 per cent to 31 per cent of all families with children - but fell back slightly in 2006 to 30.2 per cent.

Manurewa's II Much Trust (an acronym for "to make united choices happen"), based at the Clendon police station, says some families can be transformed by simple parenting courses.

"One father had said he couldn't communicate with his teenage son. He thought it was his son who was the problem, always getting into trouble," says manager Lana Anae Ostler.

"However, when Dad started to identify other ways of parenting, he started to communicate with his son. Culturally, it didn't seem appropriate for a parent to say 'please' or 'thank you'.

But when he asked his son to 'make a cup of coffee please', he noticed a distinct change in his son's behaviour. His son would eagerly greet him at the door and offer, 'Dad, can I make you a coffee?'

"That boy had been suicidal. But not only did the parents and the son get on better, there was even better communication between husband and wife."

School and workFor most of us, study and/or work provide a reason to get up every day and a sense of contributing to society.

For a growing minority, these bonds have been broken. Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft says up to 80 per cent of persistent young offenders have dropped out, or been kicked out, of school, and many will go on to lives of unemployment and crime.

"Increasingly they come from what might be called a third generational underclass," he says.

"If there was a magic bullet, it would be keeping all young people meaningfully involved in education at least to the age of 16."

Alison Sutherland, a former youth justice school principal who interviewed 25 young offenders for her book Classroom to Prison Cell, says they "found school meaningless".

Yet in the youth residence where she taught, where teachers focused solely on them rather than more successful students, "I saw how settled they became and I saw the learning and the achievement begin to happen".

She advocates making schools more attractive by including music, videos and courses to help students towards goals such as making money.

For students from the most traumatised backgrounds, she recommends specialised boarding schools in years 5 to 8, then subsidies to go on to secondary boarding schools.

For about 5 per cent of students who have no interest in academic learning, she proposes "mini-apprenticeships" in trades from age 13.

II Much Trust youth worker Petia Wilson is already working with a mentoring programme, The Bridge, to motivate a group of year 10 students at James Cook High School to stay at school.

Beyond school, criminologist Gabrielle Maxwell says a job is a key "protective factor" against criminality.

But low-paid jobs may not be much help. Dr Sandy Simpson, who heads Auckland's Mason Clinic for offenders with psychiatric problems, points to research by British academics Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett tracing crime, drugs, child deaths, low life expectancy, mental illness and even obesity in developed countries back to a single root cause - inequality.

"It's the distance between the most and the least successful in society that seems to be at the heart of the problem," he says.



The communityIn a preschool run by the Sathya Sai faith community at Otara's Rongomai School, every adult is greeted as an "aunty" or an "uncle" - an echo of the days when every adult in a tribe or village saw it as not just their social but their religious duty to look after children and others in need.

Today, for many youngsters, that common faith has been replaced by what Ostler sees as a culture of violence copied from American TV shows, computer games and music.

"They are desensitised to violence. Often they don't actually understand the real consequences," she says.

As well as its mentoring work in schools, the II Much Trust runs rugby, league and touch rugby teams to bring young people together.

Ormsby of the Waipareira Trust aims to "beat our kids up with love and attention".

He quotes a 15-year-old who came to him after a conviction for aggravated robbery. The boy's father had died two years before. His mother's brother had moved in and taken over the dad's role, the boy resented that and bucked the uncle's authority, and the uncle punished him with beatings.

Ormsby placed him with a marae, Kokiri Te Rahuitanga Ki Otara, where a kaumatua taught him to cut trees, drive a pickup truck and repair lawnmowers.

"It was that relationship that more or less made this kid," says Ormsby. "Good relationships are going to have good outcomes 99.9 per cent of the time.

"We don't stand on the young people's mana. We don't stand on the mana of the family.

"So when the taniwha lady would scream, I would say, 'This is not the mother, this is the taniwha, so I won't stand on the mum's mana but I will beat that taniwha with a stick if I have to."'

TAKING AIM ON CRIME

Justice Minister Simon Power and Maori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples have invited people from about 100 groups to their summit on the "drivers of crime" at Parliament on Friday.

Professor Richie Poulton, who leads a long-term study of about 1000 people born in Dunedin in 1972-1973, will give a keynote address. Power and Sharples will speak briefly.

The conference will then break up into 10 groups, all focused on the same two questions: What are the factors that lead to offending? And why are Maori over-represented in offending rates?

After lunch they will go back into groups to ask the follow-up questions: What are the one, two or three things we can do to reduce offending over the next two, five and 10 years?