KEY POINTS:
A teenage anti-violence educator who is younger than some of his students says aggressive children are often just copying behaviour they have learned from their parents.
Wiremu Te Mapihi-Livingstone, a 15-year-old whanau support worker for the Wellsford-based Te Korowai Aroha O Ngati Whatua, will be a lead speaker at New Zealand's first national hui of child advocates in Hamilton tomorrow.
His grandmother, Adell Dick, is one of the country's first child advocates and enlisted the help of her grandson.
When he was still a preschooler, Wiremu saw his own father hitting his mother.
"I didn't like it one bit, and I don't want people to go through it as well," he said.
Mrs Dick said Wiremu's father had been taken away from his own mother because social workers thought she was too old to care for him. He was passed from home to home. However, she says that should not be used to excuse his violence.
Mrs Dick said the children told her about it, she stepped in and it stopped.
From the age of about 10, Wiremu started looking after the children of neighbouring families in the rural area where he grew up, when they, too, were affected by violence.
"He arrived home with three or four kids on the quad bike because he saw the family drunk," Mrs Dick said.
Wiremu said his family always had piles of clothes for them.
The parents came over to fetch their children a day or two later.
The grandmother and grandson now run a Saturday programme for children affected by violence.
Both are also involved at a kura kaupapa Maori school which started this year at Oruawharo, just north of Wellsford.
One of the students at the kura, an 11-year-old boy, had been expelled from his mainstream school at the age of 8 because of bullying and other behavioural problems, and spent three years out of school.
His elder brother, now at boarding school in Auckland, was so aggressive that Wiremu said, "When he came here I thought, 'Oh my God, I've never seen such a child."
Now the 11-year-old has "gone from strength to strength" at the new kura and his brother is also doing well.
"They were just picking it up off the adults," Wiremu said.
In another case, Mrs Dick was called in to see a 6-year-old who was "really up the wall" at his school.
"I took him aside," she said.
"His parents had had a hell of an argument that morning and Mum had threatened to leave and go to Wellington.
"This little fellow was beside himself, so yes, he was very disruptive - all he wanted was someone to listen.
"So that gave me the opening at 5pm, when I knew the dad was home from work, to go into their home and give it to them!
"There has been nothing since - they have not been arguing and doing those kinds of things in front of the children."
Mrs Dick said some men were violent when they took 'P' or other drugs.
Others became aggressive because they had prostate problems, diabetes or in one case tuberculosis, but refused to go to a doctor.
"They were too scared or too shy or something."
The Atawhaingia Te Pa Harakeke (Nurture the Family of Flax) programme, which Mrs Dick and Wiremu run, teaches traditional Maori values such as seeing women as sacred and children as treasured gifts.
"All the parents are coming to learn where they come from. It's a real eye-opener to them," said Wiremu.
His grandmother said: "When you teach them their identity and they realise that women are very sacred because they are the basis of future generations, they start to think twice about it.
"That's why it's important for us to bring back our identities and how we used to be before colonisation."
