Dialogue: Sexual abuse payouts naive, foolish

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Th Deciciosn to allow the ACC to pay lump sums in compensation to people whose lives have been blighted by what is loosely called sexual abuse is a folly that signposts trouble ahead for the organisation.

The level of naivety behind this move was demonstrated by a Cabinet minister and a counselling doctor (presumably a physician) who publicly said they couldn't imagine someone applying for compensation with spurious motives.

They must both have led very sheltered lives.

One problem is defining "sexual abuse". Another is the inference that in any form it must essentially be permanently more emotionally crippling than all other abuses that scar childhood, an inference possible only in a society with a deeply puritan tradition.

All our lives are blighted in some way by trauma in childhood - some, of course, much more than others - but the measure of our adulthood is how bravely and constructively we recover from it. The most common inhibition to recovery is a lingering, haunting sense of victimhood. Sexual abuse - depending on exactly what it is - may be one form of deep hurt from which we take time and perhaps help to recover; and anyone with an intuitive imagination will know that a father sexually using a daughter is the ultimate breach of human trust from which it would take a woman an extraordinary resilience to regain emotional equilibrium.

But if sexual assault of children is worth recompense, what about compensation for the long-term psychological damage wreaked by brutal parents inflicting pain and shame on their children with straps and sticks and persistent verbal abuse?

Year-in-year-out violence against a child may leave even deeper scars than sexual wounds, and probably does more lasting social damage from generation to generation.

I know it's unfashionable to suggest that poverty is of any concern to anyone but the impoverished, so it would be spitting into the wind for me, I suppose, to suggest that children permanently damaged by poverty and neglect should equally be entitled to compensation from the community that let it happen.

Interesting, though, that a society should put its hand up with collective guilt where sex is involved but accept none for any other form of damage inflicted on the lives of our children, not even when mindless violence is the besetting problem.

Common sense would suggest we spend our money not on an ever-expanding range of social woes but on bids to prevent abuse in its many forms, on campaigns to severely punish those guilty of wilfully harming the most vulnerable among us, and on urging the afflicted that nothing is insurmountable given the love and support of others, and nothing is gained by assuming the permanent role of victim.

* Touching as I have on the subject of poverty, I would like here to set the record straight for young journalists and others on the reality of being brought up in a state house in New Zealand, at least until the mid-1970s. It was not, repeat not, a symbol of poverty or even hardship.

Is our social history taught in schools these days, or has it been caught in the undertow of the knowledge wave?

Here beginneth the lesson. During the Depression and World War II, our national infrastructure was seriously neglected for want of capital investment. After the war, the baby boom began exacerbating a serious national housing shortage. In the late 1930s the Government got its programme under way to provide housing at reasonable rentals. This continued through the 40s and 50s after which the Governments of the time expanded home building schemes that encouraged private home ownership. I bought my first group house without any capital at all and with a 3 per cent, 32-year mortgage through the Government-owned State Advances Corporation.

The idea that state houses were in small pockets of poverty is a joke. Whole suburbs - Taita and Naenae in Wellington, for example - consisted entirely of state houses. Almost every returned serviceman who wanted one got one. When I was at Wellington College, a significant number of fellow students lived in state houses, and at Onslow College and others in the Hutt Valley you'd have been pushed to find someone who didn't. This was the situation in many schools in all the main and provincial centres.

In fact, you could make a case that those people were a very, very large elite. They had new, superbly built houses, well appointed by the standards of the time, at affordable rents.

My father and mother would have counted themselves exceedingly lucky to have gained a state house but my father was not a returned serviceman and their income was a sliver too high to qualify otherwise.

I have many friends from well off to wealthy who were brought up in state houses, as thousands upon thousands of today's middle-class were. So let's bury this nonsense about a state-house childhood, before the mid-1970s at least, signifying some kind of poverty. It simply isn't true.

The first essential of history is to put it in its context.