Latest news with #TheStolenChildrenofAotearoa
1News
19-07-2025
- 1News
Haunting memories: new doco explores horror of growing up in 'care' in NZ
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+.
The Spinoff
12-05-2025
- Politics
- The Spinoff
‘Soul-destroying': A survivor's response to the latest in abuse in care redress
The lack of a new redress system for survivors proves the royal commission of inquiry's recommendations were pointless, argues Steve Goodlass. It is a cruel irony that on the very day a US cardinal – implicated in covering up abuse – was elevated to Pope, the New Zealand state chose to entrench the status quo for children abused in its own care, while casting faith-abused survivors aside. In appeals to the New Zealand Catholic clerics, I've often used the parable of the Good Samaritan to appeal to their supposed Christianity. It will not be lost on anyone that Jesus used it to illustrate an issue of his time where the religious (the priest), the Levite (in our case, the state) ignored the robbed and beaten traveller lying in the ditch by walking on by. The good Samaritan comes and assists the traveller. In the New Zealand context the Samaritan is whānau, other survivors, and the gangs that formed directly out of the abuse rendered by the state and faith-based institutions. The message of a 2,000-year-old parable plays out again today. I've been critical of the Abuse in Care Inquiry in the past and still am as we experience the fallout of its failings. Last week, the government's lead minister Erica Stanford announced that there would be no new compensation scheme for survivors, despite it being a recommendation from the inquiry and the prime minister hinting at it in his national apology in November. In a wider context, this is just another example of how inquiries roll in New Zealand. A symbolic action for public appeasement, set up to fail by virtue of scope, commissioner selection, budget and in-process meddling because our inquiries are not independent at all. If you haven't watched the 'The Stolen Children of Aotearoa' then you need to. Yes, it deals with the concept of colonisation for Māori, and in doing so it draws out the manipulation of the New Zealand public by our leaders. Stanford continues to roll out her 'no amount of redress could make up for what people experienced' talking point. It's just a way of saying 'we'll give you the minimum we think we can get away with, we hold all the power, and we know that most of you are desperate for any assistance you can get'. Her talking point really is the most disgusting attempt at a justification for not doing the right thing. Earlier in the week, Malcom Richards, a Lake Alice torture survivor, took another brave stand against the state by seeking a judicial review of the redress offered by the state. The United Nations is crystal clear on what redress for torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment is. What the state is offering is in absolute breach of its obligations to the convention. Similarly, the state continues to pigeonhole its torture redress to cover only survivors of the Lake Alice Child and Adolescent Unit. Ask a member of the public if $30k, $50k, $75k, or $150k is sufficient to put someone's life back on track from the sexual abuse and beatings they suffered as a child. They'll say no. Stanford says the government doesn't have a model to follow so they're making it up as they go and leading the world, apparently. That's nothing but a diversionary statement. The state could go to an actuary like the inquiry did, but they choose not to. They could apply the wrongful imprisonment model because at the end of the day, many survivors were taken from their family and 'imprisoned'. This then firmly set them on the path to spend a lifetime in and out of the justice system. The justice statistics clearly illustrate this. The state chooses not to, but why? Do they think they're protecting the public by denying abused children the right to fair redress while peppering cabinet papers with statements of 'fiscal risk'? Can we not draw a direct line from our broad social problems back to the abuse of our children? It comes down to reputations and reputation protection. How weak to risk a nation based on someone's reputation. It's again, ironic that in a the recent podcast ' Keeping politicians honest ' by Alexia Russell we hear that Helen Clarke, Anne Tolley and Chris Finlayson are all raising questions about state corruption. Yet their actions from 1999 to present day were conveniently 'scoped out' of the inquiry and left to journalists like Aaron Smale to expose their part in this abuse crisis. We could pull apart the redress package and the many ways in which it misses the intent of the inquiry's recommendations and fails to deliver on Luxon's promise at the public apology. However, the most deeply concerning actions are buried in some work recently completed by the Public Service Commission. Laura Walters wrote an important piece on it recently for Newsroom titled ' State lets itself off the hook over public servants implicated in cover-up '. The Public Service Commission was tasked with delivering its verdict on the question of 'personal accountability for public and state servants'. In the final, redacted report the Public Service Commission says the state is currently squeaky clean and has done all it can do regarding historical abuse in case. It's a perfect example of the state's use of 'sleight of hand'. Using the same old playbook, the report restricts the scope to the period of the inquiry (1950 to 1999) and excludes any ministers of the crown. It's full of statements like 'Where it has been possible to identify individuals whose adverse conduct is described in the report, most are either deceased or no longer working as public or state servants. These individuals are outside of the scope of this work.' The Commission used the inquiries lack of detail (failing to name officials in their sparse final report despite having the source documents in front of them) to justify the impossibility of their task to uncover who was involved in cover up x, y, z. I guess they didn't want to read Joel McManus ' A long list of ministers and leaders found at fault for allowing abuse in care ' where he meticulously teases out the names that the inquiry decided not to publish. Instead, the report limply concludes: 'We committed to report back to you on the feasibility of identifying any current public or state servants for accountability purposes from allegations of cover-ups referenced in the final RCOI report. Our view is that proactive work in this space is not feasible.' Criminal actions that would fall into the realms of 'accessory after the fact' and 'perverting the course of justice' are referred to as if they would be employment matters. The report notes that the abuse in care inquiry made 110 referrals to the police, 86 of which have been closed due to insufficient evidence. Three resulted in prosecutions and none of those were state employees. The police 'cannot advise how many referrals they have received from other agencies or how those issues were resolved as this is not recorded centrally'. This illustrates a common theme of the document which is 'we don't have the information to hand', 'we don't have the systems to collect that, see that, do that etc'. Yet they were provided the mountains of documentation upon which the inquiry made its findings. The conclusion is peppered with assurances that all systems, going forward, are fit for purpose and monitoring is in place etc, etc, etc. As a survivor, this report and the actions of the government around redress are soul destroying. There has been no accountability, there is not a system for accountability and all the work and trauma we've experienced over the last many years seems to count for nought.
