Tapu Misa: It’s the little things that help

Last weekend we were "in the hood", as my wannabe gangsta son likes to call it. He has a certain romantic attachment to South Auckland, made all the rosier by not having to live there. But then he's only 12, so we indulge him.

The occasion was a Polynesian operatic night in the heart of industrial Otahuhu, at which The Community - or at least those of us who could afford the $100 "donation" - was treated to an evening of Tongan and European classical music: Vivaldi, Mozart, Bizet, Schumann and Queen Salote, among others.

My sons slouched in their seats and bore it all with as much grace as is possible for pre-teens who like hip-hop, which is not much. But they cheered up when I told them that the proceeds would help a relative, 'Atolomake Helu, pay for her studies - a bachelor of music degree in performance, voice at the University of Auckland - and that she'd be world famous some day.

It seemed surreal after a week of angst-ridden headlines about South Auckland's gang problems.

I see the usual suspects have been trotted out for blame: the parents, the family, the schools, The Community. And, as is usual, a guilt-ridden Community has taken it upon itself to come up with the solutions to problems not entirely of its own making.

If you ask a long-time Otara resident like Su'a William Sio what's happening in his neighbourhood, he'll tell you that times have changed since his family first arrived there in 1969.

There were gang problems then, too, but they didn't see the kind of violence and coldness they see in the troubled youth who've been making the headlines in the last fortnight.

Back in Su'a's day, everyone had a job that paid a living wage and overtime, and mothers didn't have to work. Now, the low minimum wage (which is being raised to $12 an hour from 2008, after pressure from the NZ First and the Greens and loud protest from employers) means mum, dad and even the older kids have to work to pay the bills.

This means there's no one home to keep the home fires burning and fewer people available for the kind of voluntary work that keeps a community ticking over.

Su'a, a Manukau City councillor, says the strong sense of egalitarianism and social cohesion of the 1960s and 1970s has gone. The sense that "you took everyone along with you" disappeared after the economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s. "The weak were left behind, and there was a period where we forgot about the young people."

The former children's commissioner Ian Hassall would agree. He posited in a 1997 paper that many young people who engaged "in acts of self-destruction and social disruption" and who contributed to our high rate of youth suicide - which leapt between 1985 and 1988 from 17 to 35 per 100,000 population, and continued to rise until the mid 1990s - were the casualties of the 1980s and 90s market reforms; that "children and young people who are by their nature dependent are particularly vulnerable in a society which prizes individual self-reliance and despises dependency".

Today, South Auckland kids know what they're missing; they know how the other half lives, and they also know that their chances of getting a slice of the good life are diminishing. The idea that education and hard work buy you a better life doesn't carry the same weight if you've been kicked out of school and you see your standard of living dropping, despite everyone in your household being employed.

Add drugs and alcohol into that mix and you have big problems.

And yet, it has to be said, that growing up poor, and going to an under-resourced school in a tough neighbourhood, is not an automatic sentence to a life of crime.

It just makes it harder to avoid.

In his best-selling book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses what he calls the Power of Context and the influence of environment in determining how individuals act. Given the right circumstances, most of us are quite capable of turning nasty and uncaring.

Gladwell echoes psychologist Judith Harris' argument in The Nurture Assumption that peer influence and community influence are more important than family in determining how children turn out.

"Studies of juvenile delinquency and high school drop-out rates, for example, demonstrate that a child is better off in a good neighbourhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighbourhood in a good family."

According to one study, which looked at the effect that the number of role models in a community has on the lives of the teenagers in the same neighbourhood, when the number of professionals dips below 5 per cent drop-out rates and teenage pregnancy rates double.

Last week, on Auckland's Radio 531pi, a mother from Otara told just how hard it had been to keep a teenaged son out of trouble.

She couldn't have been more vigilant, or a tougher disciplinarian, but she was a working mother, and her son's friends exerted a stronger hold on him than she did.

After he was caught driving a stolen car, she decided that drastic action was needed.

She took him out of school and sent him to Tonga, where he worked on the family's plantation.

After a year of hard labour, he begged to be sent back to school. He recently graduated with a BA from Auckland University.

But you can't take every boy out of Otara, and this is where the police come in - or don't, as is more often the case these days.

If you subscribe to the Broken-Windows theory of crime prevention - which was credited (with other initiatives, including an increase in police numbers) with the dramatic drop in crime figures in New York City from the 1990s - you'd have to conclude that policing troubles have played a part in the latest escalation in South Auckland, especially given the admission in a top-level police report last week that one in five crimes are never investigated.

Broken Windows works on the assumption that little things make a big difference. Letting nuisance crimes go unchecked contributes to a sense of insecurity among the law-abiding, and encourages the lawless to move on to bigger crimes.

Clearly, and despite the promises of a "zero-tolerance" approach from now on, that's what's been happening.