Haunting memories: new doco explores horror of growing up in 'care' in NZ

1News

19-07-2025

Journalist Aaron Smale has been covering the issue of abuse in care in New Zealand for over a decade and has now been involved with the making of a powerful documentary featuring adult survivors of our children's homes and other institutions. He reflects on the process of sharing part of a story, the whole of which is too big and too ugly to ever truly be told.
Watch The Stolen Children of Aotearoa on TVNZ+.
How do you tell the story on film of how more than 200,000 children were abused when they were in the custody of the state and how that abuse is connected to colonisation, Māori urbanisation, incarceration, gangs and a decades-long policy by the government to cover it all up?
Short answer – you can't. The story is simply too big to be conveyed in any form.
But myself and the team at Awa Films made an attempt at it – the result is The Stolen Children of Aotearoa, a nearly two-hour documentary that speaks to more than 20 survivors and also a line-up of advocates and experts.
A new documentary tells of a shameful chapter in our history - one of systemic abuse in state care. (Source: Supplied)
While I am primarily a print journalist, both a writer and photographer, it was virtually impossible to convey not only the magnitude of the abuse but the damage it has done to so many individuals and generations of whānau. In the last ten years I've written tens of thousands of words and also collaborated on a podcast on the Lake Alice adolescent unit where children were tortured in the 1970s. But there was always so much I couldn't get across.
I've also worked intermittently in broadcasting and I knew that there would be something incredibly powerful about seeing and hearing survivors tell their story directly to viewers on a screen.
As I have found out, film-making is a long and arduous business that requires a lot of people collaborating to bring a vision to a screen. I know the director Julian Arahanga, an old school mate, would agree that this project was more difficult than others for a number of reasons. The biggest problem we had was there was so many strong stories and compelling moments in the interviews we did with survivors and others. It was agonising making decisions about what to put in which inevitably means a decision about what to leave out. Furthermore, the survivors were not only telling their own individual stories, they were telling the stories of thousands of others that went through similar experiences. Many of them were friends and whānau and many didn't make it. At least two of those on the screen have since passed away.
One of the most difficult decisions was around the descriptions of abuse and what to include in a limited timeframe. Although many of the survivors' accounts of abuse that are included in the documentary are horrific, they are by no stretch the worst incidents we heard. But there was a risk of turning the whole documentary into a trauma-porn, which obscures the human being experiencing that trauma. In the end there is enough there to give the viewer a sense of the seriousness of what thousands of children went through. And sometimes the most poignant moments are the silences as survivors struggle to find the words.
While most of the survivors are Māori and the historical background is focused on Māori experience, there are also Pacifika and Pākeha voices. Although Māori communities were targeted by police and welfare authorities, so were working class whānau, which included Pākeha and Pacifika.
If it was impossible to be comprehensive and answer every question in the documentary, at the very least I hope it raises not only understanding but also further questions for the audience. Why is it, for example, that New Zealand has removed more indigenous children from a smaller population in a shorter space of time than either Canada or Australia, but we are only now having a public reckoning with those events? Why are the stories of the Stolen Generations in Australia and the indigenous residential schools in North America globally known, but what happened in New Zealand is barely known even in New Zealand? Why is is that the connection between the violence inflicted on tens of thousands of children and the violence of prisons and gangs is repeatedly ignored in public discourse, particularly by the media and politicians? How is it that politicians prance around every election competing with each other about how tough they're going to be on crime, when no one was properly held responsible for this mass crime that has been going on for generations?
The documentary touches on all these subjects, but the answers have broader implications beyond this immediate issue. For example, part of the reason the New Zealand public is so ignorant of these events and a major reason the state has failed to provide justice to victims of its own abuse is due to what was, in my opinion, the silencing of those victims by the Crown, denying the victims justice because it posed a significant threat of legal and financial liability.
Perhaps the most troubling thing I have discovered in ten years of covering state abuse is not just the rape and torture of children, but the calculated ways lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians have gone about covering it up. The documentary implicitly speaks to this institutional willingness to not only abandon its victims but to inflict further harm by perverting and weakening the processes of accountability.
One of the very special moments during a screening of the documentary at the Māoriland Film Festival in Otāki was the first moment when the late Moana Jackson comes up on screen. There was a collective gasp and then what I would describe as murmurings of aroha as people heard him speak. It reinforced the decision that we'd made to dedicate the documentary to him.
In a conversation I had with Moana once, that didn't make it into the doco, he made the observation: 'Never mind tikanga. The Crown can't even obey its own laws.'
I would encourage viewers to consider Moana's observation when watching the documentary and also when they next hear a politician on a soapbox about crime and punishment.
I could repeat here some of the words of the victims from the documentary, but I think it best you see and hear them for yourself. There is also an accompanying podcast that is hosted on RNZ.
One of the guiding kaupapa for all my work on this subject, including this documentary, is that one of the main objectives of telling these stories is to give survivors the dignity of being heard. For so long they have been silenced, ignored and even told by the Crown that they were lying, despite the Crown having a mountain of evidence that what they were saying was true.
The survivors that participated in this documentary and the many other stories I have told are both dignified and heroic. Despite its limitations, I can only hope that it honours them and the many others that they represent.
Watch The Stolen Children of Aotearoa on TVNZ+.