Why do Maori go wrong?

By Jan Corbett

The group of Maori and Pacific Island teenagers swaggering into the classroom at Pikura Waipuna activity centre, in Otahuhu, is smaller than director Jim Stretton would like.

One boy starts back at his old college today, two others are wagging somewhere, leaving only five, reluctantly pulling off their baseball caps and beanies as Mr Stretton demands.

Most of the violent crime in this country (55 per cent) is committed by Pakeha men.

But these are the faces behind the statistics showing that young Maori and Pacific Island men have a high rate of violence relative to their numbers.

Last year, 35 per cent of those arrested for violent crime were Maori men. Although down from a peak of 45 per cent in 1995, it is still a huge over-representation from only 15 per cent of the population.

These boys have seen a lot of trouble, and they have been a lot of trouble, which is why they are at this Ministry of Education-funded centre, sent by their high schools to get straightened out.

Three refuse to speak at all, either from shyness or defiance, but bright-eyed, 15-year-old Adam [not his real name] is eager to talk.

"I'm the youngest of 14 of us. I beat my sisters up because I didn't get what I wanted. Fighting was always my reaction.

"I started using drugs when I was 8. I got it through mates and then I ripped the dealers off.

"I beat people up all through school, smashed one fella's face in, broke his nose. One fight was over my girlfriend. I beat the crap out of him, stuck him in hospital. I was 10."

Asked what is behind all this aggression, Adam makes a painful admission.

"I can't read. The teachers knew, and did nothing. By standard four I gave up trying and started beating everyone up and stealing."

Adam may be confident he knows what made him violent, but researchers have struggled with why Maori men loom so large in the violence statistics.

Some simply blame police bias.

The perception that the public face of violence is brown distorts reality, says Victoria University criminologist Professor Warren Young.

"If you look at sexual offences and family violence ... the picture of the offender is different."

As part of the Christchurch Health and Development Study of 1265 children born in 1977, Professor David Fergusson studied the relationship between ethnicity and violence.

To remove any suggestion of results being skewed by police bias, the study relied on the subjects' own accounts of their experience with violence.

He found that the Maori children in that group were indeed at a higher risk of being both perpetrators and victims.

But once he removed the social factors affecting those children, he found no difference between Maori and non-Maori.

But the discussion does not end there. He concluded that the high rate of violence among Maori reflected their greater exposure to social conditions encouraging development of violent behaviour.

That included more frequent physical punishment by parents, more conflict among parents, more frequent changes of parents, and either lower levels of parental care or higher levels of over-protection than among non-Maori.

The Maori parents also had higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse and criminal histories.

In an unpublished paper, "Ethnicity and interpersonal violence in New Zealand," he notes that the unanswered question is what has led to such a high level of dysfunction in Maori families.

He suggests that we are seeing what happens to a people who lose their land, their culture, their tribal bonds and, ultimately, their mana.

Wellington lawyer Moana Jackson reached the same conclusion when he studied the high rates of violence among his people back in 1988.

"A colonial society is a violent society," he says. "Teachers whacking my mother as a child because she spoke Maori. We should not be surprised if Maori people react with violence."

To Jim Stretton, the single biggest factor driving Maori violence is unemployment.

"Much of the violence I've witnessed," he says, "is from lack of money."

His young charge Adam agrees.

"Make everybody rich," he offers as a solution.

"It would cut a lot of stress, criminals wouldn't go ripping people off. There'd be no more rapes, no one getting stopped on the street. It would be a waste of time hitting someone if you had money."