The enormity of the number of vulnerable children abused by the State in NZ must force reflection…
Royal Commission into Abuse in Care: Estimated 250,000 victims
The numbers are astounding – figures out this morning from the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care estimate there are up to 250,000 victims over 70 years.
They are children, young people and vulnerable adults who suffered beatings, sexual assault and other cruelty while in state or religious care between 1950 and 2019.
The cost to society of the physical and mental injuries, criminal behaviour, homelessness, lack of education and unemployment is calculated at $217 billion.
…at least quarter of a million NZ children abused, costing over $200billion and causing immeasurable social carnage.
THAT is the legacy of NZ welfare.
An underfunded punitive stick with which to beat the Christ out of the weakest members of society.
We must all hang out heads in collective shame.
This is what happens when a punitive culture of mini tyrants are left in charge of an underfunded process designed to punish the poor.
Once upon a time in New Zealand, the agencies of state welfare were constructed as an instrumental and direct means to ensure our egalitarian values.
Social welfare was seen as a way to redistribute back to the most vulnerable amongst us and these agencies were critical in carrying out that redistribution.
There was a pride involved in this public service, our compassion made us unique and it built the values from which we as New Zealanders have benefitted from.
That simply is no longer the case.
Between the 1950s-1980s, a perverse mix of ignorance, zero oversight and the darker side of our nature dominated large insinuations that acted more like an abusers paradise than a socially progressive democratic welfare system.
For the last 30+ years, the neoliberal experiment has turned our once egalitarian welfare state into a neoliberal welfare state. The branches of social welfare, the MoD, CYFS, Corrections, Parole Services, Housing NZ, WINZ and Mental health have all been warped and mutated into weapons to punish the poor for being vulnerable.
In a culture of me first and gimme, gimmies where success is private and failure is personal , we see the poor as victims of their own circumstance rather than as a result of the hegemonic structures of power.
The poor, the vulnerable, the weak, the sick and the disabled do everything in their power not to be needing assistance from these Government agencies, because these Government agencies don’t help, they only punish.
We have a MoD who put homeless people into illegal housing.
We have a WINZ service who break people each day and force them to grovel on their belly to make ends meet. Who perform mass surveillance spying on beneficiaries to catch them out in ‘relationships’ despite WINZ not telling anyone what the actual relationship equation is and we have 60% of beneficiaries oweing WINZ money because WINZ claims they’ve defrauded the system by having a ‘relationship’.
We have a Corrections department that is more interested in hiding prisoner suicide stats than actually looking after their prisoners , more interested in locking 10 000 NZers up for profit than rehabilitating them.
We have a Paroles Service that almost every NGO despises having to work with because it’s staffed by people who enjoy the power they have over prisoners lives and are concerned with only throwing them back into prison.
We have an agency that sexually molests, abuses and assaults the children they are supposed to look after while continuing to remove children from families.
We have a mental health system that still sees skyrocketing suicide rates.
We have a Housing NZ more focused on throwing people out of their homes based on flawed meth testing than providing shelter to the poorest amongst us.
22000 are on social housing waiting lists, 1 in 5 children live in poverty and speculators are pricing home ownership to of reach for every generation who isn’t a boomer.
For me, nothing sums up the horror of our neoliberal welfare state more than what happened in 2016 with the Auckland Action Against Poverty beneficiary clinic they held for 3 days outside a South Auckland WINZ office. Over a 1000 people lined up to beg for help from activists to gain some type of assistance from WINZ.
Just comprehend that.
WINZ are so evil to these people that a 1000 of them lined up to gain assistance from AAAP. Some had walked since before dawn to arrive in time to get help. Many were in tears and emotionally distraught by the way WINZ had treated them.
What kind of an indictment is that?
Right now we have Oranga Tamariki, a neoliberal welfare experiment that argues early intervention will save the State downstream costs and we are seeing the exact same types of State abuses occur again!
Which demands questions of us on the Left.
Is this abuse because of grotesque underfunding of a welfare system that is about punishing the vulnerable or is there something innate about the State that means its lack of oversight and accountability will always be reduced to an abusers paradise?
The older I get, the more convinced I am that the biggest abuser of rights in NZ is the State.
Every passing year I become more of an anarchist at a time when the State will be essential for surviving the climate crisis.
Elections change Governments.
Revolutions change the State.
We need a revolution at the ballot box to seriously reform the State or we are simply enabling it to continue to damage our fellow citizens.
Our forefathers died and bled on foreign shores to prevent Governments from damaging their own people like this, perhaps the real fight was always here.
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‘Every passing year I become more of an anarchist at a time when the State will be essential for surviving the climate crisis.’
By the time your reach my age you’ll be awesome. That’s if the state hasn’t killed you.
You really are supposed to be a compliant nobody who consumes mindlessly, like the other ‘good’ citizens.
‘Our forefathers died and bled on foreign shores to prevent Governments from damaging their own people like this,’
I believe they died and bled on foreign shores to protect the vested interests and privileges of the scum at the top, especially British scum at the top.
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Agree 100%.
“An underfunded punitive stick with which to beat the Christ out of the weakest members of society.”
God Bless Martyn. It takes an atheists like Martyn to point this out. Where are my fallow Christians on this? Where are you, letting the state beat up and destroy the poor, as Martyn so succinctly put in this one simple sentence?
Where are you in your obligation to up life the poor? Where are you to protect the weak? I know where you were and what you were doing – and you not going to like my criticism. You were all suckered in by a corrupted, twisted and down right evil theology – Prosperity theology.
Ask yourself where were you, and why were you not doing Gods work in relation to the poor?
One of the things I took early on board from Evangelist Billy Graham was never, ever ,… defend the church. Whether catholic or protestant, never defend it. Why?, – because there always will be those among its leadership who have their eyes firmly trained on this world and not the other. Every institution is the same. Chris Trotter wrote an excellent article on just that.
Never defend the church. Ever. It stands or falls on its deeds and is no way the exception. From time long ago, evil manipulators have crept into the ‘church’ to make it less than what it should have been. Caught up in politics and the economy , it was more often a servant of mammon than of faith. More often an instrument of oppression than of freedom. More often a tool of empire than of community.
The only one to judge the church is the Lord Jesus Christ, – and mark my words,… He will. The Bride of Christ and its infidelity. Or its faithfulness. So yes, the ‘church’ has a lot to answer for over the many century’s. From genocide to marginalization. Its all there. But I wonder how much is purely and simply godless, faithless , and murderous secular human beings who used the ‘church’ as a tool for their own ends… and who enjoyed wearing the flowing robes and the holding staffs of authority in the process and eating the finest of foods while their ‘subjects’ starved and died….
The Pogues – Turkish Song Of The Damned
https://youtu.be/b6fFJX4OkDw?t=8
That quarter of a million may also be only counting about half of the state&faith abuse victims.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/432999/as-many-as-400-000-abused-in-state-faith-care-
250,000 vulnerable and neglected children abused in so-called care causing them unbearable suffering and trauma they will experience for the rest of their lives and it has taken this long to get to this point. Really? Like, where was the rightful outrage back then? This brutal abuse was condoned because these children were marginalised and the abuse was carried out by horrible people, in the main older males. It makes me sick to the stomach that no-one protected these children and no-one stood up for them. The attitude of the establishment at the time is reflected by the Crown’s attitude today, i.e. they wanted to minimise the dreadful harm done and avoid responsibility. In doing so it has continued the abuse and re-traumatised the victims.
Imagine the outrage if a child of someone in the establishment was abused physically and sexually.
You can be assured youngsuffrajet, that there were people who tried to stand up for the children that were marginalised by the state. Sadly, trying to turn a liner with a rowboat was a thankless task with too few wins.
Thanks aom – that gives me some comfort. Your last sentence says it all.
It is easy to condemn the state, even though it is manifestly right to do so. But this is a country in which private persons abuse, kill, and batter their children in horrific numbers, and where over 80% of referendum respondents wanted the right to inflict violence upon children, in the run up to Sue Bradford’s “ anti-smacking” bill, and where Dr Bradford is still vilified by persons like that dreadful woman from Nelson, for trying to place a shawl of protection over our most precious taonga. That’s us.
“ What you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me,” said that hippie from Galilee who would lose his job if he repeated it in a government department, and barely tolerated if he said it in Parliament. Thing is, the state is a reflection of who we as a people are, and at the best we are ignorami, and at the worst, callous heartless barbarians, and exceedingly stupid.
One day, anthropologists may look back bemused at a populace which idolised human hunks of beef kicking an ovum shaped ball as a spiritual pinnacle, and themselves kicked whoever they thought they could get away with kicking, and not be surprised that we got taken over by a more thinking sort of culture. It happens.
“ What you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me,” said that hippie from Galilee who would lose his job if he repeated it in a government department, and barely tolerated if he said it in Parliament. Thing is, the state is a reflection of who we as a people are, and at the best we are ignorami, and at the worst, callous heartless barbarians, and exceedingly stupid.”…
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Excellent.
I love this, I call the game Thugby.
One day, anthropologists may look back bemused at a populace which idolised human hunks of beef kicking an ovum shaped ball as a spiritual pinnacle, and themselves kicked whoever they thought they could get away with kicking, and not be surprised that we got taken over by a more thinking sort of culture. It happens.
This all seems to have started with the moral panic whipped up by the National Party in the 1950s about alleged juvenile delinquency in state housing areas built by Labour, and its self-presentation to the Kiwi public as a guardian of what Tim Shadbolt used to call lawn order. Come the 1980s, neoliberalism continued the pattern of state-backed child abuse, but by other means such as the combination of mass unemployment and benefit cuts.
You forgot abusing those who have disabled children to care for. In some fucked up Rogernomics thinking apparently the disabled children are now employers to their caregivers and have to handle extensive paperwork….
While the legacy of state abuse is damning, people should not give up.
If there was more practicality for children and at risk people, and a higher standard of thinking about the complex situations that abuse often thrives in, then that would be a decent start.
Stop those Rogernom businesses and quasi charities making money out of more abuse could also be a start and spending the money on much better state systems.
In housing, Housing NZ apparently built more state houses than the much publicised Kiwibuild – maybe time a more back to the state with people running the organisations actually qualified in the area they are running and the employees also being qualified as of right, aka Oranga Tamariki needs more ‘social’ people in their board by the sound of it as well as more qualified people. Not full of business and woke and poorly paid, poorly qualified and under resourced staff in the organisation.
Abused kids need practical and long term solutions – not some paper pusher and lawyers working for their own ease.
In the 1970s when I was 14 years old I was rebelling against a world that didn’t make a lot of sense to me. My father represented NZ in his chosen sport and was ranked as one of NZ’s finest ever players at that time. I worshipped him but he was a hard man who struggled with open displays of love. He was away most weekends with his sport. I played high-level rep sport myself and was top of my class at school in most subjects but as I entered my teenage years I felt like a round peg looking for a square hole. One weekend myself and three friends decided it would be fun to throw rocks at a Warehouse and try and break as many windows as possible. We broke a shitload. Mr Plod caught up with us and three of us were sent to different boy’s homes / Borstals by the Courts. I was sent to the infamous Epuni Boys home in Lower Hutt. That facility is referred to many times during the Royal Commission into abuse while in State Care(less). I needed to stand up very quickly when I arrived there or be eaten alive. I stood up and survived the facility with only a few internal scars. The shit really hit the fan for me after I left Epuni. Part of the process with the then Social Welfare was to reintegrate you back into society via a Social Welfare “Family home”. Sounds good but it was a fucking nightmare. I knew things were bad when another teenage boy got seriously toweled up by the “father” in the home two days after I arrived. He was a big guy who worked as a slaughterman at the local works. The same shit happened again to another boy a few days later. These were brutal sadistic beatings and from what I could tell the boys had done nothing wrong. I knew my turn was coming so stayed well off his radar. Then as I was walking down the hallway to bed, the father appeared. He dragged me into the bathroom, threw me into the bath and beat seven bells out of me. Blood everywhere which I later had to clean up. Two black eyes. Swollen face. Blood nose. Top and bottom lips both cut and swollen. Ears felt like they had been bashed with a hammer and my scalp hurt from him holding me by the hair while he unloaded on me. Bruised all over my body and was sore for several weeks. A month later he did pretty much the same thing again but this time avoided leaving evidence all over my face.
My comfort there came from one of his pig dogs I befriended (Ben). He noticed the relationship was important to me. He took me hunting with him. I’d been hunting before so knew what was normal and what wasn’t. He took obvious pleasure in the slow manner he killed animals and would send them packing via repeated blows to the head with his fist. I’d always been fond of animals so found his conduct difficult to handle. Truth be known I was too frightened to say fuck all about it. At the end of the hunt, he started yelling at the dog who had been sitting quietly. This appeared a contrived move to upset me. The dog was bricking and tried to hide behind me while I was also sitting on the ground. He pointed his 303 rifle at the dog but couldn’t get a clear shot at him. He kicked me out of the way and then shot the dog in the head. Ben’s blood and other matter was splatted all over my face and chest etc. I will remember for life what he said as he walked away. “That will make a man out of you”. It changed me for sure but not in the way he intended. Any fear I had in me was knocked out that day. It was replaced with rage.
I spent the next few years fighting and looked for more of the same. Later I hooked up with the local motorcycle club. They used my services to collect debts, settle scores and work the door at clubs etc. A few years later I met up with the “father” from the “Social Welfare family home”. He’d been visiting me in my sleep for ten years so seeing him again had become my fantasy.
I moved to Auckland and hooked up with the biggest motorcycle club of all. I was only used to collect debts that other collectors had failed with or got toweled up during the process. I was seen as a tough guy covered in ink who caved in skulls but disliked what I’d become. I met the right lady and we started a family. I restarted my education and later completed multiple post-graduate degrees. I despised seeing myself as a one-dimensional tough guy. I had a family but the rage still simmered just under the surface where it still resides over 4 decades after I went into State Care. I run a modest business with a dozen staff and mix with all types. I’m probably the last person you’d expect to be a Jacinda Fan.
I’m not seeking any compensation from the State. I don’t see myself as a victim. That aside, I received my compensation many years ago when I as an adult man met up with my abuser.
@Jacindafan – you should submit to the enquiry and still tell your story – it’s even better if a range of survival stories are told to bring abusers to justice. The abusers looking after the abused kids and in a position of power are the most reprehensible. Kia Kaha.
Agreed SaveNZ. Jacindafan may not need compensation for themself, but their testimony might help prevent further abuse to others. However, I do get that the circumstances of later utu may not make coming forward without risk.
Everyone is both victim and perpetrator in various circumstances. Understanding that at least helps make new and different mistakes in the future.
Forget now,
You’re absolutely correct.
The exacted Utu that unfolded a decade later was comprehensive and prevents me from taking any further action.
I have however assisted several others to stand tall since about the abuse they suffered at the hands of the State.
Cheers bro.
saveNZ,
Chur brother.
Jacindafan. How very well you have done after such a very tough start – I salute you. You are on my list of inspiring people. Your story is your story, and do with it what you will, but some things stay with us forever, so put yourself and your wife, and the children who you’ve been blessed with first – that’s your place. Kia kaha.
Snow White,
Thank you for your kind and generous words.
x
Dear Jacindafan,
You have moved me to tears.
Thank you for sharing your story. I’ve often thought, when reading your comments on TDB: who is this loving person?
Now I know a little bit more.
I think I understand you choosing to be a Jacinda Fan.
Thanks again!
Immigrant,
Thank you for your very kind and lovely words.
x
Those in poverty are being abused by the state as a blind eye is turned to any increase in benefits and no party seems to have the guts to suggest to only have children you can afford th look after.
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