More damage is done to children by these families than by the state. Regarding the killing of children – and there is one every five weeks in New Zealand – the vast majority occur in the home and the perpetrators are family members. And when these murders occur, too often there are examples of the family protecting the offender from prosecution, leaving justice for our most vulnerable horribly wanting.
And, of course, for each of the young kids brutalised to death in the home, there are scores who survive the horror of their environments and subsequently go on to endure highly dysfunctional and criminal lives.
Indeed, one of the great tragedies of state care is that it was very often protecting children who had already endured an abusive start to life, but on too many occasions the state just heaped more misery upon them. The cruelty of that is unforgivable.
Understanding, though, the role of highly dysfunctional families is consequential.
If, for example, we were to fix all the problems with, say, Oranga Tamariki uplifts and they were made to be the highest functioning organisation possible, we would still be left with horrors occurring to children in family homes. Yet if we were to fix families and rid them of abuse, we would have no need for Oranga Tamariki uplifts.
Given that, fixing the actions and activities of the state are tremendously important, but the saviour of the country’s vulnerable children is more fundamentally situated in private homes. Solve that and we solve the lot.
Much has been said about the impact of state care in the creation of New Zealand’s gangs. Indeed, many of the largest gangs were formed by young people in state care.
I have interviewed numerous gang members who talked about the horrors of state care in the likes of Epuni Boys’ Home and Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre. They said that the extreme anti-social stance they adopted was in direct response to these institutions.
Some years ago, one gang member said to me, “Those places destroyed our f***in’ heads, man. [So we said] f*** the system. If that was the way they were going to treat us, then we will treat them the same way. We were going to give them what they gave us – and [via the Mongrel Mob] they got it, all right.”
But equally, these gang members relayed horrors in their homes, too, around drugs, drinking, neglect, and physical and sexual violence. State care brought many young people to congregate together and to learn to fight, but so did the underneath of bridges where street kids congregated to escape from their nightmare homes. Just recently I listened to a gang member tell a tale of sexual abuse perpetrated by his father. His story was all too familiar, and all too affecting.
Yip, there are direct links between state care and gangs, but the gangs would have formed anyway. State care made an important contribution to gangs but it’s an impossible stretch to say it was responsible.
None of these arguments, of course, ought to diminish in any way the work of the Royal Commission and the importance of its findings. As a country we must learn from the serious issues raised and respond accordingly.
Holding the state to account is fundamentally important. Equally, though, we can’t forget that if we put a similar microscope over dysfunctional families in this country as we did with state care, we would find horror aplenty. And we owe it to the kids experiencing horrific abuse right now to help them.
When faced with highly complex issues, we often create a shorthand to help us make sense of things, and the one that’s forming right now is that the ills of the state monopolise the problems faced by at-risk young people. In reality, the truth is far sadder.
It is those related to them, the families, the very people who are meant to love them the most, who do the most damage.
