KEY POINTS:
It started just like any other day in a small rural District Court.
"They talked about some guy whose dog was not registered, then some guy caught driving for the 28th time without a licence," says a "tracker" who was in court that day with a teenager who was charged with having oral sex with a boy five years younger.
"Then the judge read out [the youth's] supposed offending ... and the court filled up to overflowing. It was unreal," the tracker recalls.
"There was one man, a Pakeha, about 45, well-dressed, suit and tie, who was literally writing notes and handing them out and people were running off. It was almost like he was some sort of king of the vigilantes.
"There was a glass window between the registrar's office and the court. I was with [the youth] inside, and they were coming up to the glass and thumping it: 'If we see you on the streets we'll f***ing get you!"'
The incident dramatises the risks in New Zealand's current policy of treating almost all adolescent sex offenders in the community, rather than following the American example of jailing them.
Parliament's social services select committee launched an inquiry into how we handle youth sex offenders a year ago this month. But it has found no easy answers for its report, which is due before the election.
"It's a real conundrum," says National's spokeswoman on Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS) and education, Anne Tolley, who pushed for the inquiry.
"We have some severely troubled kids out there who need total one-on-one care, but they also need to be brought into society. That can only be done with the knowledge of the community."
Everyone hates child molesters. Ironically, they bring out the worst in us because they strike at our noblest instinct, our love for our children.
Adults who commit sex crimes are almost invariably jailed. But children under 14 cannot be charged with any criminal offence except murder or manslaughter, and the law provides that young people aged 14 to 16 who commit offences "should be kept in the community so far as that is practicable and consonant with the need to ensure the safety of the public".
Garth McVicar of the Sensible Sentencing Trust says the policy is wrong. He wants the worst young sex offenders locked in preventive detention in their teens - before they get a chance to commit a crime as an adult.
"It seems to be dumb that we have to wait until there's another victim before that can be done," he says.
National MP Chris Tremain said last year that sometimes serious young sex offenders "need to be institutionalised".
But a few days later, after his office was "besieged" by callers with rumours of an offender's whereabouts, Tremain had to urge people not to take the law into their own hands.
The number of young sexual offenders is tiny - only 78 aged 14 to 16 were caught for violent sexual offences last year; one in every 2500 teenagers in that age group. This rate has fluctuated over the past decade with no clear trend up or down.
CYFS told the select committee that police referred 98 young people to it for sexual offending in the two years to June 2007, of whom only 13 were placed in the 10-bed national secure unit for adolescent sexual offenders near Christchurch. The rest were dealt with in the community.
But this small group of 100 or so youngsters include some of our most seriously disturbed young people who may go on to a life of crime unless we do something.
Robert Ford of the Auckland-based Safe Network says about half the teenagers referred to his programme have already committed other offences as well as sexual ones. "They are usually from problematic family circumstances," he says. "There will be other problematic behaviours, a number of different ways of acting out - maybe difficulties at school or overly aggressive. It's unusual to see someone who's perfect in every other way but screwed up about sex.
Hamish Dixon of Wellington's WellStop says only half of his adolescent clients are still living with a parent or parents. The other half are in CYFS care.
The 17 submissions to the select committee raise three broad concerns about how we handle these teenagers:
* Constant changes of caregiver which mean many youngsters in CYFS care never "attach" to anyone.
* Treating one problem, such as sex offending, without tackling all the other things a youth needs to find the right path in life.
* Reconciling public safety with the young people's needs for education, sport and normal socialisation.
STABLE
ATTACHMENT In theory, CYFS has a policy of "permanency". When a child comes into care, the first priority is to work with his or her family so they can take the child back. As soon as it becomes clear that that is not possible, the priority is supposed to be a "permanent" foster care placement.
But in practice, both family and non-family placements often break down, either because of family problems such as deaths or marriage breakdowns, or because of the child's own "acting out".
In an extreme case, Tolley quotes a 15-year-old boy she met at the Christchurch secure unit who had had an average of one move in every month of his life since the age of 3.
"This boy said himself: 'CYFS kept experimenting with me. They kept placing me back with my family and I kept getting into trouble with my sister'," Tolley says.
"He kept saying to them: 'Don't put me back, I can't handle it'."
A former manager of the sex offender unit at Christchurch Prison, psychologist Tony Ward, says anyone shifted around so many times would have a problem with "attachment" - the relationship of trust with a long-term caregiver that most infants take for granted.
"He would find it difficult to bond with people, so one of the critical things would be to work on establishing effective relationships," he says.
Auckland University psychologist Ian Lambie, who co-founded the Safe Network, says foster parents of children with attachment problems need good training, back-up and pay so they can stick with youngsters for the long term.
"Therapeutic foster-care is the use of behavioural programmes to change the young person's behaviour - not babysitting," he says.
"We don't have it anywhere near enough in New Zealand. It needs to be set up far more extensively for a whole range of different kids."
Christchurch-based Stop Trust put up a proposal last year to recruit and train such specialist foster parents on the basis that CYFS would pay them $350 a week, about double the normal foster care allowance of $179 a week for youngsters aged 14-plus.
But Stop manager Don Mortensen says: "This project did not proceed due to funding pressures at the time, and has now been shelved."
THE RIGHT PATH The sex offender programmes worry that they can't solve all of a young person's problems in the limited time they have - typically a two-hour group session and an hour of one-to-one counselling, plus up to two hours a week of therapy with the youngster's family.
A tracker who took a youth to the Safe programme two years ago says the teenager thought his therapist was "dumb".
"He said, 'I can trick him every time'."
Ward decries the Corrections Department policy of targeting only "criminogenic needs" - factors that can be directly linked to criminal behaviour, which are tackled by specific interventions imposed on offenders such as a sex treatment programme or drug addiction therapy.
He believes therapists should help all offenders to develop holistic plans for a "good life" which gives them a sense of purpose, so that they choose freely to make the changes needed to achieve their plan.
SOCIALISATION Ward says such plans must involve keeping young offenders in the community where they can go to school or trade training, play sport, socialise and eventually find the job, partner and other relationships that make a fulfilling life.
"If someone doesn't have a chance of developing a decent relationship or engaging with people who will point out that they're thinking in a disturbed way, that will actually elevate the risk. It's madness," he says.
Yet that is what sometimes happens in the drive to "safeguard" the public. In one case, a young offender did not attend school or play sport because he could not have contact with anyone under 16 unless supervised by an "informed adult".
Either his caregiver or two trackers had to go with him every time he left his house.
The caregiver says he battled for 18 months to get a CYFS social worker to enrol the youth in the Correspondence School, but this never happened.
He tried to get two younger people to enrol with the youth in a catering course at a polytechnic, because having two older people with him would have been too conspicuous.
The youth spent much of his time playing board games with his caregivers and trackers. The adults did their best to make this a learning experience.
"He'd throw a 6 and a 3 and we'd let him have another move if he could say, '6 + 3 = 9'," the caregiver says.
Mortensen believes the answer is a British system which requires agencies to share information on former sex offenders and work together to minimise the risks, rather than totally isolating anyone.
"We don't have an effective system for managing sex offenders," he says. "The agencies who are responsible for community safety should know where they live.
"It does make sense to inform the immediate neighbours, but not the whole community. Often we have found with the immediate neighbours that they want to try to help."
Tolley believes the whole local community needs to be involved so that parents can protect their children and know who to go to if problems arise.
"Notification isn't enough. I think CYFS has to start working with communities," she says.
"Communities can be very helpful when they are involved in the process. It's all about building relationships and trusting that you are going to be told the truth."
STATE CARE 'DEAD END'
Mane and Denise Whiu took in some of the country's most difficult children until they concluded the state care system was "a dead end for them".
"I saw it," says Mane Whiu, 54. "I saw the beginning, the middle and the end. That's what I was amazed at - they had nothing for them."
He saw kids come into state care, get bumped around a succession of caregivers, then simply left to their own devices as soon as they passed out of the care of Child, Youth and Family Services at age 17.
"This young boy we had - when he turned 17 he was just put out to pasture," Whiu says.
"He was ... a sexual offender. He was just dumped - no money, no nothing, no future."
Whiu grew up in Auckland as the middle child in a family of 12 and for some reason was "the one on the outside all the time, getting blamed for everything".
As a teenager he was easy prey for a gang. "I was all anti-[white] supremacy," he says. "When I think back about my girlfriends, it was the violence. Violent relationships. It was in the hotel where I met them, always the booze."
But it was a girlfriend who turned him around. In his mid-20s, she told him: "You've got no real friends."
He decided to make a complete break from everyone he knew in Auckland and got a job on the railways in tiny Raetihi, in the shadow of Mt Ruapehu. There he met Denise, studied the Bible with a Jehovah's Witness family and learnt what "love" meant.
He and Denise have never had children, but they began taking in stray kids. They signed up as CYFS specialist caregivers when they moved to Whiu's ancestral home area of Kaikohe in 1998, through Ngapuhi Iwi Social Services. Whiu did a two-week training course in Wellington.
They took in a series of boys and a few girls. Whiu took them fishing, tinkered around on cars with them, and gave them love.
Most responded well for a while. But eventually all but one of the boys complained about them to CYFS. "As you got closer to them they started making accusations."
One boy attacked Whiu verbally with nasty sexual comments and Whiu had to get his social worker to take him away.
Months later, now working for a mental health agency, Whiu ran into the youth again. The boy told him he had made similar attacks on all his caregivers and Whiu was the only one who had not physically hit back.
"From then on the ice was broken," Whiu says. "I asked him, 'Why do you always do this? Why do you go so far with a caregiver and then make accusations?'
"He said it was to break off the closeness, because when they get something nice it's taken away from them. They abuse them to break that bond that's forming, because if they don't break it off, then later on down the track, when they're really settled in, the system will break it."
