Massacre of the innocents must stop say Maori leaders

Statistics show that Maori abuse children at three times the rate of Pakeha. MATHEW DEARNALEY and SIMON COLLINS find Maori leaders are searching for the answers.

Even the most fearsome Maori warrior impressed early explorers and missionaries by the tenderness he lavished on his children.

"They are kind and hospitable to strangers and excessively fond of children," wrote the artist Augustus Earle in 1827.

Anthropologist and Maori Language Commissioner Dr Patu Hohepa is lost to explain the rash of violent deaths inflicted by Maori on their most precious but vulnerable taonga - their children.

"We did not have a culture of being absolutely callous to our young people," he says, almost pleadingly.

"Missionaries like Samuel Marsden were quite astounded by the way chiefs like Hongi Hika and other supposedly blood-thirsty savages were absolutely affectionate to their children."

Auckland University Maori research fellow Dr Fiona Cram cites an 1862 report by a native schools inspector that Maori were shocked by beatings teachers meted out to their children and were withdrawing them from school.

Despite the exaction of utu (revenge) against adult miscreants to maintain balance in tribal and inter-tribal relations, she says, physical punishment of children was unheard of in traditional Maori society.

Rather than confusing discipline with punishment, the overriding priority was to nurture the heart of the harakeke (flax plant) to guarantee new life for the tribe.

Yet at the start of the 21st century, Maori are abusing their children at three times the rate for European New Zealanders, and almost twice that for Pacific Islanders.

Maori and part-Maori children, who are 24 per cent of the country's 1.04 million population aged 17 and under, accounted for 47 per cent of those assessed last year by Child, Youth and Family Services as abused.

And in 1997, according to Health Ministry figures, child abuse claimed the lives of five Maori aged under 15 compared with 12 children overall.

Last year, two children with whom Child, Youth and Family had contact died at the hands of abusers, and both were Maori.

The problem of Maori child abuse is nothing new, with Waikato child health researcher Professor James Ritchie noting that the rate was in fact seven times higher than for Europeans in the first comparative study, done in the 1960s.

But it took the shocking death of 23-month-old Hinewaoriki Karaitiana-Matiaha - who was scalded, bashed and sexually abused - and a Whangarei toddler's savage beating just days later to jolt Maori leaders into full outcry.

Hine's death follows the damning report of Children's Commissioner Roger McClay into the failure of a raft of agencies to prevent 4-year-old James Whakaruru being killed by his stepfather for not calling him daddy.

Police are appalled that none of 72 people known to have been in contact with little Hine in the days before her death was sufficiently concerned about her safety to go to her rescue.

Wellington Maori bishop Muru Walters, leading a challenge to his people to stop such outrages, fears that a cycle of violence has become so inbred "it is almost acceptable for men aged 14 to 70 to abuse and rape their own children."

There was a frightening disregard for whanau and a shameful reluctance by Maori to tell others about drug-taking, incest and violence within their own households, he said in a radio broadcast reprinted in the Herald.

Women's Refuge chief executive Merepeka Raukawa-Tait says her organisation has been waiting 27 years for Maori men to pledge protection to women and children by banishing violence from the home.

"We are talking about insipid, gutless leadership. This is not about Maori bashing, it is about Maori people bashing their people. We are prejudicing our own future.

"It is shameful brutalising women and children because, while they may have bad health and be living in poverty, nothing excuses beating people who love you, the most vulnerable."

One Maori man who has not hesitated to blow the whistle on violence is Poverty Bay GP and former regional health director Dr Paratene Ngata, recipient of the Public Health Association's latest annual award.

He is outspoken about having attacked his own son about 20 years ago, to the point of stopping him from breathing. He hopes his confession will spur other men to break the wall of silence and own up to domestic abuse. "I am a violent man - it is a chasm within me," confesses the Tolaga Bay doctor, whose affability and palpable sense of humanity belie frequent beatings he suffered as a child.

Now he constantly atones for his past by holding weekly sessions with men, many referred by the courts, "to help them to help themselves to stop the hurt and pain" inflicted on their families and thus themselves.

While painfully aware of how violence is rooted in the poverty afflicting many of his people, tempting them to trample on loved ones in response to being beaten down themselves, Dr Ngata says there can be no excuses.

"You always have a choice to walk away," he says, adding that the only chance his people have to regain self-respect, humanity and social cohesion is to renounce violence.

The poverty statistics are dismally well known.

Figures put to a Beehive conference last month show that 41 per cent of Maori children in 1996 did not have a parent in paid work, compared with 23 per cent of all children.

Similarly, 41 per cent of Maori children lived in one-parent families, against 24 per cent of all children.

And 41 per cent of Maori women aged 25-44 said their households sometimes or often ran out of food from lack of money, compared with 21 per cent of all women of that age.

These things add to the stress on people already coping with the always-stressful work of parenting, and stressed parents are liable to take out their frustration on those around them.

Victoria University criminologist Dr Gabrielle Maxwell says many growing up in communities with high joblessness, especially young Maori men, rationalise reality by saying they don't want to work anyway.

James Whakaruru's natural father, Kevin Campus, told the Weekend Herald last month: "Work sucks, I'd rather be a movie star."

Dr Maxwell says that when jobs were plentiful in the 1950s and 1960s, there were few who did not want to work. "But once the dole becomes an inevitability, there will be people who adjust to that."

They are also more likely to get involved in drugs and crime, she says, citing studies on criminal gangs in the 1930s Great Depression.

"So those patterns are almost inevitable - with a high unemployment rate there is a greater propensity for criminality, anger and bitterness, and you are going to find that produces ineffective parenting."

But Dr Maxwell says that, although no one has actually done the statistical analysis, the Maori child abuse rate is almost certainly higher than the Pakeha rate, even after adjusting for socioeconomic status.

A 1997 report by Te Puni Kokiri (the Ministry of Maori Development) suggested that this was because of a loss of identity and worth suffered through the English domination of language, land and culture.

"If you ... have disintegration of identity, then what you have are people who turn on each other."

Retired Auckland academic Dr Ranginui Walker laments the demise of specialist institutions such as the Maori Affairs Department, which eased the trauma for rural Maori caught in mass migration to cities.

He says responsibility for Maori housing and other social issues has been subsumed into mainstream agencies which lack sensitivity towards those most in need.

Whanau often exist in name only, as loose groupings without the moderating physical presence of older people, yet taking the blame for every social ill, he says.

All that aside, what parents have done in a small proportion of cases remains incomprehensible to most of us - sexually abusing a 23-month-old toddler, or stubbing out a cigarette on a child's skin. Dr Maxwell says virtually all adults who behave like this towards children have been seriously abused in childhood.

"That's not to say all children who are badly beaten or abused grow up to be abusers - the rate of intergenerational transmission is about 30 per cent."

On top of this, the support that society provides to parents has been reduced. Income-tested Family Support payments have fallen well behind inflation, and the universal family benefit has gone.

Parents now bear a much higher share of the costs of children's health and education.

The national coordinator of Child Abuse Prevention Services, Heather Henare, says it is now much harder for Maori parents to get help from services such as Plunket.

Until the 1980s, the Government provided "Well Child" services to rural Maori communities directly through public health nurses.

In the early 1990s, public health nurses were told to stop providing "personal health" care and to concentrate on "public health initiatives" such as immunisation.

Care for babies was contracted out to Plunket and other agencies, including iwi health trusts. But they are now restricted to eight "contacts" with each child.

Trish Grant, of the Children's Commissioner's office, contrasts this with Sweden, where babies are visited at home at least 16 times in their first year and where child abuse is low.

But amid the morass of problems, there are some glimmers of hope as more Maori work to "break the cycle" through changing attitudes while lobbying for more supportive social and economic policies.

General attitudes towards violence are already changing - in some respects dramatically.

A Herald-DigiPoll survey last year found that 75.2 per cent of New Zealanders still believe smacking children is justified in some circumstances, with 82.3 per cent of Maori in favour, compared with 76.1 per cent of European New Zealanders and 64.3 per cent of Pacific Islanders.

But Professor Ritchie says the proportion of New Zealand children hit regularly by adults has dropped from around 90 per cent to only one in three in the past 40 years.

At Mangere's Nga Whare Waatea Marae, 13 violent offenders are learning about their Maori culture and about how to relate to others non-violently in a programme the Probation Service started in June.

Papatoetoe housepainter Dean Peni, half-Maori and half-Niuean, says the course has taught him about his Maori side for the first time.

"We have lost our culture, we have lost our religion, we walk around with no mana, we just go through our daily chores with just no hope at all," he says.

"This has shown us how to relate to our feelings, how to relate to the younger generation, how to love ourselves. The best thing about it is that we are learning about our culture, we are getting it all back.

"This is an opportunity to find it, and to pass it on to our children, to teach our children smacking is not an option."

Six weeks ago, Mr Peni says, most of the guys on the course were afraid to speak on the marae. "The brims of the caps were down to the tops of our eyebrows."

This week, they were singing songs, performing haka and passing what they had learned to their children.

He says the tragedy is that all the men had to hurt someone before they got on the course.

Huntly's Waahi Whaanui Trust is one group already trying to reach people before they are driven to violence.

With funding from Child, Youth and Family, it runs courses on skills the mainstream education system has ignored, such as parenting, relationships and budgeting.

It offers an integrated service including doctors and a preschool, and sends tutors to teach parents activities to share with their children through the Home Instruction Programme for Preschool Youngsters.

Family support coordinator Judy Wharekura says many Maori relatives are too whakamaa (shy/ashamed) to intervene when they suspect family members are abusing children. Agencies such as Waahi Whaanui are available to help, she says, and relatives owe it to the children to get that help.

She is encouraged by a man who came to see her this week after reading about the latest child abuse cases.

"He was so upset about what he had read, he said he wanted to help his family and said, 'I want to come on a programme so that as a grandparent I can help my grandchildren ... So I can say to my son, you have to stop that'."

Similar programmes are run by Te Aupouri Trust in the Far North and the Waipareira Trust in Auckland, which has teamed up with an agency for Pacific Islanders to visit at-risk parents of infants at home.

Large numbers of Maori also attend church-sponsored parenting programmes, such as those of Presbyterian Support and the Salvation Army's residential Bethany Centre in Auckland for young mothers.

he Waipareira programme has, with others in Rotorua and Whangarei, led the way for 13 more to be funded nationwide from Government health, education and welfare budgets totalling $17.55 million.

Programme manager Marion Hakaraia says its social workers operate similarly to those of Child, Youth and Family, but with less stigma involved for the 230 families.

They are trained to tackle issues such as domestic violence and drug and alcohol abuse, but lack of adequate housing is still the biggest challenge.

An extreme case was of a family of six, including a 6-month-old baby, found living in a car.

Labour MP and former Waipareira chief executive John Tamihere has little time for post-colonial analysis of his people's woes, saying Maori have to be given the resources to deal with today's challenges themselves.

Maori trusts need budgetary control over benefit payments to ensure children's basic needs of food, warmth and shelter are provided before anything else, he says.

"We need the right to put our people under a cold shower with a cake of soap."

His plea for greater autonomy may sit uncomfortably with those questioning the failure of whanau members to stop Hine's death and the dreadful injuries inflicted on the Whangarei toddler after Child, Youth and Family placed her with a relative.

But he says such outrages point even more to the need for strong tribal trusts to be involved in vetting whanau members as suitable foster parents.

"Unlike some pure fundamentalists, I would rather take babies out of some Maori communities than put them at risk."

Mr Tamihere claims that Government social workers sometimes shame relatives at family group conferences to take a child they lack the resources to look after.

Child, Youth and Family chief social worker Mike Doolan doubts this, saying relatives can receive a subsidy of up to three times that paid to outside foster parents, depending on assessments.

Until the agency's governing legislation was changed in 1989, many Maori children were put at risk of cultural alienation by being placed with European foster parents.

The statutory priority since 1989 has been to keep children with family or whanau unless there is "a serious risk of harm" in doing so.

Even so, 67 per cent of children in his agency's care have been placed outside their family group, including 55 per cent of Maori youngsters.

Northland family lawyer Paul Treadwell is appalled by the lack of funding of child social workers, rendering them ineffective when they have to take on far too many cases, often becoming ill through overwork.

But while concerned about their consequent inability to detect child abuse when whanau members close ranks, he says he has absolute confidence in Te Aupouri Trust's vetting of its own people.

The Kaitaia-based authority, acting as an agent for Child, Youth and Family, supervises the care of about 12 children in tribal homes, after accepting referrals from families as far away as the South Island.

* This is a corrected version of this story. In the first version, the comments of Mr John Tamihere were incorrectly attributed to Ms Marion Hakaraia.