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The timing of the Māori rights movement’s land marches in the 1970s and 1980s has become a major defence point in the historic child molestation trial of Taiawa Harawira, the brother of former MP Hone Harawira and son of late social justice icon Titewhai Harawira.
Testimony began last week in the Auckland District Court trial, involving 44 counts of indecency with a child, rape, threatening to kill and injuring with intent to injure. All of the accused sexual abuse is alleged to have taken place with a single child - now an adult in her 50s - who said Taiawa Harawira repeatedly singled her out for abuse over about four years.
Jurors spent a day and a half last week watching three video interviews between the accuser and a police detective. But she appeared in person today, sitting behind a mirrored screen so she couldn’t see the defendant while defence lawyer Ron Mansfield, KC, combed over and looked for inconsistencies in her voluminous prior statements.
“You thought they were arrogant, you thought they were self-important and you thought they got too much attention,” Mansfield suggested of her feelings towards his client’s well-known activist family - insisting repeatedly that she fabricated the allegations.
The woman acknowledged she “didn’t like them” but was adamant her recollections were correct.
The woman said in the 2019 police interview that the abuse started when people would gather at an Avondale, Auckland home where planning meetings were going on for a land march from Kaitāiato Wellington. It continued, she said, in Whangārei, Northland, then inside or near at least three marae where crowds were sleeping during hīkoi.
Mansfield noted that the main land march of the era, led by Dame Whina Cooper, took place in 1975 - years before the abuse is alleged to have started. The most significant land march after that, he suggested, was in 1984 - after the abuse is alleged to have ended.
“That’s outside the date range of any charge, isn’t it?” he asked, noting that his client was living in Wellington at the time of the 1975 march and didn’t participate at all until it reached his city. “There seems to be a significant facet of this memory that you are on this land march ...”
The woman said there were plenty of smaller hīkoi that occurred during the period in question, as well as protest planning meetings and the occupation of Bastion Point, which she was involved in with her mother. As a 7- or 8-year-old at the time, she might not have understood the finer details or context of the political actions occurring around her but she clearly remembered the sexual abuse and threats of violence by the defendant, she insisted.
Taiawa Harawira stands outside Whakapara Marae near Whangārei in January 2011. He is currently on trial in the Auckland District Court, accused of child sexual abuse more than 40 years ago. Photo / Malcolm Pullman
“I’m not going to forget it,” she said. “I wasn’t getting things wrong. I know what happened.
“... I remember the weight of him [on top of her], the smell of his breath - all of those things.”
She also recounted an alleged instance when Harawira arrived unannounced when she was 8 or 9 - at home with her younger siblings but no parents. On that occasion, she said, he dragged her into her mother’s room by her hair before raping her.
When she knew he was coming over, she said, she would protect her siblings by jamming a knife into their bedroom door to force it closed then jump out of the window and return to the main portion of the house, “because I knew what was coming”.
Mansfield also suggested on Friday, not too long after the woman’s testimony began, that she had first lied about the abuse during a heated argument with her mother as a teenager. The argument was about the complainant’s own risky teen behaviour and her false outcry, he suggested, was an attempt to change the subject.
“It didn’t matter who you named,” Mansfield suggested, explaining a theory that the outcry was intended only to make her mother “feel like s**t” in the heat of the argument. “You then can’t backtrack, can you? ... So what you’ve needed to do is over time continue to blame Taiawa.”
He also suggested she went to the police in 2019 hoping for a payday from ACC (the Accident Compensation Corporation).
She adamantly disagreed with both defence suggestions, adding that she knows nothing about financial compensation other than ACC funding for a specialised psychiatrist to help her with her ongoing trauma.
“It’s getting quite difficult for me to remember everything because I just feel like I’m a young girl being pinned down by him,” she said this afternoon after about four hours of cross-examination, accepting Judge Mary Beth Sharp’s offer to take another break. “I’m feeling quite anxious and pretty gross.”
Her testimony is expected to continue for a third day when the trial resumes on Wednesday.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
