KEY POINTS:
A flaxroots initiative to provide collective Maori leadership on child abuse is under way in Rotorua, two weeks after local 3-year-old Nia Glassie was severely injured by being hung on a clothes line and spun in a tumble dryer. She died yesterday.
Grace Dorset, manager of a social service agency at Ohinemutu on the Rotorua lakefront, said child abuse and domestic violence was "far, far worse than people actually realise".
"They hung her on the clothes line," she said. "Guess how many times I have had adults come to me and tell me that was what was done to them as children. It's a common situation, tying kids on to clothes lines and spinning them around."
Mrs Dorset, who grew up in the Ohinemutu pa, has started talking to kaumatua of her Ngati Whakaue people about a hui to provide leadership on alternatives to violence.
At the same time, Maori Party MP Hone Harawira yesterday suggested locking all of Parliament's 21 Maori MPs together in a Waiouru Army barracks and not letting them out "till we come up with a solution" to abuse.
National Party Maori affairs spokeswoman Georgina te Heuheu supported the idea but Labour MP Dover Samuels said "more korero" (talk) was not the answer.
Mrs Dorset said the problem stemmed from the disruption of traditional Maori society, where children used to be taught by their grandparents, aunts and uncles. At Ohinemutu, the elders did not thrash the children but let them know firmly when they did something wrong.
"The parents' role was to observe and to learn," she said.
"What happened when Maori society began to break down and young people started to move away from their tribal areas in search of work, they were on their own. They lost that support. They had no idea how to manage in the cities and the towns."
Mrs Dorset's work in Te Akatea Iwi Tauawhi Trust, based under St Faith's Church hall at Ohinemutu, has uncovered two urban generations of people, now grandparents and parents, who were often "horrendously abused" by their own parents in the name of discipline.
"Hundreds of people I have spoken to will identify the weapons - the four by four [timber] or the branch of the tree," she said.
"A lot of parents I have seen hate the vacuum cleaner hose and the electric jug cord because they were the weapons that were used.
"Those are the things I want to talk to our kaumatua about as to why we need to get on top of the behaviours that are going on in the homes that people have accepted as 'normal'."
