The survivors of state abuse have not been heard

Legislation stripping Treaty provisions from the Oranga Tamariki Act — the repeal of Section 7AA — passed its final reading in parliament earlier this month, to the disbelief of those familiar with the evidence of abuse in state care.

The law change ignores the kōrero of survivors of state abuse and the findings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. Here’s lawyer Harry Clatworthy, who spoke to dozens of survivors, on the history that the government insists on ignoring.

 

Visiting someone on the inside is different in every prison in Aotearoa.

At Rimutaka and Paremoremo, it’s just how you’d imagine from the movies. A small visitor cell made of pale-yellow brick. A hard plastic sheet separating the prisoner and the visitor. Holes to let the sound through. A guard standing outside the door. Tagging scratched on the brick.

At Wiri, the room looks more like a kitset school classroom than a prison. Modern, but bare. There’s carpet, shaded one-way glass, and a large table, with a button under the table to call the guards. The tall chain-link fence is only centimetres behind the shaded window.

At Waikeria, in the segregation unit, you meet the prisoner in the guardhouse, a long, single-storey building. There are small and comfortable meeting rooms with pamphlets on the wall, like an office in a local library.

Sometimes, you can’t visit in person. You have to call over AVL, a precursor to Zoom, which has a set time limit. Or you speak on the phone.

All these prisons are different, but the stories of the prisoners inside are painfully similar.

When I visited these places, I was working as part of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care.

My job was to take witness statements from those who’d survived abuse in state care as children and rangatahi — ngā mōrehu ō te whare herehere tamariki.

The inquiry investigated the abuse of children and rangatahi in state and faith-based care between 1950–1999. It was the largest, longest and most complex public inquiry ever held in Aotearoa. It sat for over five years and released a detailed report in 2024.

The witness statements I collected from prisoners encompassed their entire life stories. The inquiry wanted not only the details of their abuse, but to hear about their lives before and after it happened: the effects of the abuse on them, their whānau, and the rest of their lives. In particular, we wanted to know about the intergenerational effects on their tamariki and mokopuna.

In total, the inquiry heard from 2,329 survivors.

Before this inquiry, most New Zealanders were unaware that we had our own version of the Stolen Generation. The 2,329 who came forward represent only a tiny fraction of the estimated 510,000 children and vulnerable adults in care during that time. It’s estimated that up to one in three were abused.

The abuse still affects them, their whānau and many parts of their life today. Sometimes decades later. Like a stone dropped into a calm pond, the ripples of abuse keep forming long after the stone hits the surface. They surge out in every direction.

Those ripples of abuse are still surging today: through whānau, prisons, hospitals, courts, and urupā. Many New Zealanders know that Māori show up in negative statistics, but they still don’t know the cause.

*

Of those men I met in prison, nearly all had three things in common.

1. They had been abused in state care.
2. They had gone on to lead traumatised lives of substance abuse and crime.
3. They were Māori.

During the inquiry, patterns of discrimination against Māori, and the disproportionate impact of state care on tamariki and rangatahi became starkly clear.

Māori who were part of that generation already know this. For us in the younger generation — well, we’d heard the stories.

Statistician Len Cook has meticulously mapped the path of Māori in the 20th century. His research traces a largely rural people through urbanisation to the high rates of incarceration that we see today. His work shows the devastating effects of state care on Māori.

Until the early 1950s, next to no Māori children were in state care. As we passed through that decade, two things happened: Māori began to rapidly urbanise, and the population of young Māori shot up. In 1966, for every Māori aged 65 and over, there were 25 Māori children aged under 15.

These young whānau were moving from their ancestral kāinga into cities and becoming increasingly visible to an urban Pākehā New Zealand.

The 1960s and ‘70s saw a shocking rise in state care statistics for young Māori — the result of discriminatory practices in employment, policing, courts and youth justice systems, coupled with the struggle to adapt to urban living.

From 1965 to 1977, the number of young Māori (aged 10–16) appearing before official bodies for juvenile offending more than tripled. For Māori boys, the rate increased from 600 to around 1900 per 10,000. Meanwhile, Pākehā boys’ rates remained between 200 and 300 per 10,000.

In 1971, 10 percent of non-Māori boys appearing in court received a custodial sentence. For Māori boys, the percentage receiving a custodial sentence was 20 percent.

The total number of state wards more than doubled — from around 3,500 in 1965 to more than 7,000 by 1975 — with the increase largely driven by Māori.

Perhaps the most damning statistic is this: Len Cook estimated that by the late 1970s, 7 percent of all Māori boys and 2 percent of all Māori girls were living in state institutions. This was up to seven times that of non-Māori.

For every classroom of 30 Māori children, two would be living under state care.

The men I talked to told me why they were taken into state care. For some, it was minor, delinquent stuff. Haututū stuff. Getting into a fight at school. Throwing rocks through a window. Stealing lollies from the dairy. Not stuff that deserved a prison sentence.

Some did nothing wrong. They were orphans. Children of parents who couldn’t afford to feed them. Sometimes, they were children who were deemed mentally ill.

Others committed more serious crimes — stealing cars, breaking into houses. They needed help to guide them away from that life, but instead, they were treated like hardened criminals and thrown into violent state institutions.

The system didn’t care how they got in. Once they were in, they were all the same. Dropped into the dark waters of abuse.

*

The stories of abuse are horrible. I’ll spare the details here. They include rape, solitary confinement, vicious beatings, mental abuse, torture, drugging, and electroshock therapy. Overall, the inquiry found that Māori suffered more and worse abuse than non-Māōri.

I encourage you to go to the Royal Commission’s website and read some of the witness statements. Just be prepared — it’s difficult reading.

The stories follow a pattern. Many tamariki, especially young ones, were first sent to foster homes. This was where the abuse started.

They told me how some foster parents saw children as free labour and a cheque from the government. There were long hours of work and vicious beatings. Their social workers weren’t interested in moving them, no matter what they said.

Many children escaped from these foster homes. This is where their run-ins with the police began, followed by appearances in children’s court.

The next step after a court appearance was often the infamous boys’ homes: Hokio, Epuni, Kohitere. These places, many would later tell me, were worse than New Zealand’s most hardcore jails.

The guards would viciously beat and abuse the boys. A culture of violence, created by the guards, encouraged the oldest, strongest boys to beat up the younger ones and keep them in line, in exchange for favourable treatment — the kingpin system.

Many escaped from the boys’ homes and went on the run. Security was lax, and they usually weren’t chased.

Escaping — and living on the run — is how many first got a criminal record. They stole to get by. They had no money and nowhere else to go. Those records would follow them for life.

During this period, discrimination led many Māori to state care. Abuse in state care led to a life on the streets. Street life that became criminal by necessity. Street life that was never easy to leave.

It’s not hard to understand the growth of gangs in New Zealand throughout this period. To survive, joining a gang was often the only choice. You went with the boys from the same area as you, who you met inside the boys’ homes and other state care institutions. Hawke’s Bay went with Hawke’s Bay — that was Mongrel Mob. Wellington went with Wellington — that was Black Power.

The other boys would have your back. You needed people to have your back. Gangs would go on to shape many of their lives.

Not all the men I met were still in prison. I met many at other places. A cafe in Te Puke. A park bench in Gisborne. A marae in Ngongotaha. A bakery in Naenae. A car shop in Manurewa.

Even though they were now out, nearly all had been in prison at some point. Many still wore their colours and tattoos proudly. The old Mob member in Naenae cracked up as he told me he liked my blue shirt. Bloody hell, man! I told myself. Dress neutral.

Some had straightened their lives out, got jobs and dedicated themselves to taking care of their tamariki and mokopuna. Got sober. Some hadn’t.

Some had been able to get back in touch with their culture, their reo, their marae. That, they told me, had been their salvation.

They told me of the pain they’d endured throughout their lives. How dysfunctional most of their lives had been. Violence, crime, drugs, gangs and prison.

In most cases, they had become institutionalised before the age of 15. They didn’t know how to live on the outside. They found it hard to adjust to the normal world. Using an Eftpos card, having a bank account, getting a licence — they found these things hard.

The trauma of the abuse they suffered followed them. They still feel it today, even 30 or 40 years on. They believed they had passed that trauma on to the next generation.

Several men told me how they had been the only sibling from their family taken into state care. The rest had gone on to live normal lives, while they hadn’t. When they saw their brothers and sisters, they couldn’t see themselves. The state had changed them.

Still, they all told me they felt lucky to be alive. Most of their mates who’d been with them in state care were dead. Kua mate.

It was clear where many of those who suffered abuse washed up, after being dropped into those waters of abuse. Dead or in prison.

*

When Māori were taken into state care, they were ripped away from any connection to their kāinga, tūrangawaewae, reo, tikanga and culture.

If they made it home, they didn’t understand their own culture. They didn’t fit. There was deep pain and mamae from that dislocation.

The Pākehā world didn’t want them. It had thrown them in facilities and abused them.

Then, because they had lost connection to their culture, they didn’t feel there was a place for them in the Māori world either.

They didn’t fit anywhere. They had nowhere to land, like driftwood tossed around in the tide.

What they could latch on to, they told me, was anger. Anger at the system that abused them. Resentment for the loss of their culture. Anger at mainstream New Zealand society. The anger unified them. They said it became their purpose to buck the “acceptable” society that had left them behind.

The Mob said: “Sieg Hiel.” The Tribesman said: “Fuck the World.” The Black Power raised their fists. They told me they wanted to live as far outside of normal society as they could. Many said they just wanted to burn it all down. The only thing they felt that was left for them was life outside the margins.

Len Cook’s analysis of available statistics shows how the generation of Māori kids who grew up in the period of extreme rates of state care became the generation of Māori men in prison.

Māori incarceration rates exploded in the second half of the 20th century, from the 1950s through to the ‘80s. That increase was driven by the imprisonment of Māori males under 21 years old.

Between 1955 to 1981, the average age of a Māori male prisoner fell from 28 to 23 years. This reflected how much the growth in the Māori male prison population had been dominated by young men aged up to 25, and the very high imprisonment rates of those aged 17–19 during the 1970s.

Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, the rate of imprisonment of adult Māori males aged 30 and over was fairly constant.

Then the Māori children who had grown up in state care came of age. Tamariki of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. As this birth cohort became adults, the number of Māori men aged 25 and over in prison shot up.

The aging of this birth cohort became a significant trigger for rises in the age-specific rates of imprisonment of Māori men and women.

After 1996, the number of Māori men in prison aged above 39 quadrupled.

The children who’d been taken into state care had been put on a lifelong pathway to crime and prison. Those ripples of abuse are still flowing through prisons 30 years after these men had left state care.

The men told me about the impact on the next generation, too. How they saw many of their own children taken into state care, gangs and prison.

As time has passed, we’ve seen Māori whānau begin to recover from the discriminatory policies of the 1970s.The imprisonment rates of the generation born since the mid-1990s, for ages 17–19, have fallen and are now similar to those experienced by their great-grandparents’ generation.

By the age of 25, 14.3 percent (one in seven) Māori males born during 1981–86 had been in prison. For those born in 1992, this had fallen to just over 10 percent.

However, we still see a disproportionate number of Māori represented in the statistics today. As of June 30, 2020, Māori made up 68 percent of children and young people in care and protection custody and 74 percent of those in youth justice custody.

 *

Some men I talked to had turned their lives around. Those who had told me about their reconnection to ahurea, their culture.

They talked about the profound effect that the reclamation of their reo me ōna tikanga, and connection to their whānau, marae and iwi, had on them.

For many, the first time they came back in contact with their culture was in prison. Programmes introduced throughout the ’80s and ’90s, such as Mahi Tahi led by rangatira like Herewini Jones, took a new approach to rehabilitation by incorporating te ao Māori.

Some told me it was like flipping a light switch. They were no longer floating lost in that tide. They knew who they were. They had mana. They had a place in the world.

Some were able to find a new purpose, dedicating their lives to reform the next generation and their own whānau and iwi.

Some were still in prison, but they told me how their culture inspired them to leave that life behind and push for parole. Before that, they didn’t care if they got out or not. They were happy to die in prison. It’s tough to hear someone say they’ve lost hope and would be better off to die in prison.

All of them told me that, to improve outcomes for the next generation, Māori needed to be connected to their ahurea.

This kōrero was reflected by many of the Māori survivors throughout the inquiry.

The Royal Commission recognised this kōrero.

In the official recommendations, the Commission stated that:

• The government needs to give effect to Te Tiriti.
• The government needs to allow for tamariki and rangatahi Māori who are in care to live as Māori and retain connection to their whānau, hapū, iwi, whakapapa, whenua, reo and tikanga.
• The government must allow whānau, hapū, iwi and Māori exercise the right to tino rangatiratanga over kāinga and empower them to care for their tamariki, rangatahi, pakeke Māori and whānau according to their tikanga and mātauranga
• The government needs to recognise the rights of iwi, whānau and hapū Māori to retain shared responsibility for the wellbeing of tamariki and rangatahi Māori.

This month, on April 3, less than a year after the release of the Royal Commission’s final report, parliament passed legislation removing section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act.

Section 7AA required Oranga Tamariki to commit to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, reduce the huge disparities suffered by Māori, and have regard to the mana and whakapapa of tamariki Māori in care.

The purpose of section 7AA was to recognise the right of Māori children to stay connected to their whakapapa, hāpori, iwi and culture.

The horrible disparities suffered by Māori in state care remain today. Māori make up more than 65 percent of those in state care, and cases of tamariki being abused while in Oranga Tamariki care are still common.

Section 7AA was added to the Oranga Tamariki Act in 2019 to address this harm and recognise the importance of cultural connection to the wellbeing of tamariki and rangatahi.

Survivors told us of the damage caused by severing tamariki and rangatahi from their connection to their culture. Survivors told us of the healing powers and positive outcomes that connection to culture can bring. It was a wind that, once they felt it blow, helped them navigate their life.

The Royal Commission reflected this in their recommendations. Yet still, the government has done away with section 7AA.

Cultural connection is not something that can be quantified. The ihi and wehi that you feel as you hear a karanga, sit under the whakairo of a wharenui, or perform a haka. That sense of place and belonging can’t be captured by statistics.

For those who don’t know it, and haven’t felt it, this kōrero is easily ignored and cast aside. It is deemed worthless.

The removal of section 7AA goes against the kōrero of survivors and the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, the largest, longest and most complex public inquiry ever held in New Zealand. Yet this government pushes on, seemingly determined to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Chris Luxon said in an apology to survivors of abuse in state care in November 2024: “You have been heard. And you are believed.”

Yet with the removal of section 7AA, the kōrero of survivors has been ignored. Cast aside.

They have not been heard.

 

Harry Clatworthy (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Uenuku-kopako) is an Auckland-based lawyer who is an urī of Tauranga Moana. His work covers issues related to Māori, including claims to the Waitangi Tribunal, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, Marine and Coastal Area applications, and the kaupapa to return the medals of soldiers of the 28^th Māori Battalion to their whānau.

E-Tangata, 2025