A sorry state of affairs

During the time I spent in New Zealand I was lucky enough to meet, live and work with some fabulous people from the Maori and Pasifika community, learning their stories and language and immersing myself in the vibrant culture that is so key to life in the beautiful Aotearoa.  But within this community there is a dark secret that every so often rears it's head.

I hadn't been in South Auckland long when I met Janina and within a few weeks we were extremely close friends and even now, after being back in the UK for over 2 years, she is still one of the best friends I have.  But her family has a really difficult past - her little brother, Harry, isn't actually her brother but her cousin.  His parents were sentenced to jail for beating to death his baby sister.  It's not a one off case either, the issue with domestic and child abuse in New Zealand is well documented.

"Between 1991 and 2000 there were 91 child homicides, all but two of which concerned excessive physical abuse. These cases, and others that occurred in the early 2000s, put New Zealand among the worst performing nations for child mortality due to mistreatment."

The reason I'm thinking about this now is that there has been an article going around Facebook recently about a horrific child abuse case in New Zealand, and the reading of it is harrowing.  How anyone could treat another human, let alone a defenceless child, like that is beyond belief!

It took a while for me to get used to the idea of swapping babies around in the Pasifika families I met in Auckland.  There was a habit of one woman having a baby, but if she had too many then she might give her sister one of her children, or let her mother raise them.  Part of me just had to take a step back and say 'if they're being looked after by a family member then I shouldn't interfere' but the whole practice went against everything I had been raised with.  I'm one of the minority in this world in that I was born to two people who have stayed married now for almost 34 years and were happily married throughout my childhood, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Perhaps because of this though I always put this idea of a family onto a pedestal and have had to, over the last 10 years or so, begin to adjust my way of thinking to take into account that this 'man, woman + kids' is not the only form of family you can get!  I've got plenty of friends who come from one parent families, some who have two mums or two dads, some who have step parents and parents, and all of them have a different idea on family.  But none of these have come close to the Maori (I'll use Maori as the basis, but it spills over into all the Pasifika groups too) concept of it.

To clarify a bit I will try to introduce the three key Maori words relating to family:


Iwi - Translated literally as bone, the iwi is the largest of the social units in the Maori culture.  It's sort of like the tribe or people who you come from and where your ancestors are from.  Historically most Maori people lived on the land of their iwi and would grow up there, but now less and less people do and a lot of the Maori's I worked with in South Auckland didn't know or associate very much with their iwi, and so had no real bond to it.

Hapū - A hapū is a group within an iwi that is linked by a genealogical connection.  So usually within a hapū you have lots of interrelated families.  This is a smaller group than an iwi and there are usually about 400 people in each hapū.  You are born into your hapū but then if you marry would be married into another one, or maybe more than one - so many people are members of numerous hapū but maybe only one iwi.  It's a closer connection and people will tend to see their hapū family more often, particularly for funerals, weddings, celebrations etc.

Whānau - The whānau is the smallest division of Māori society and is generally 3 or 4 generations of one family. Most people will live with their whānau and generally the whole family will either live in one house or in a few houses within close range of eachother.  The word has been slightly changed in meaning in recent years due to it's popularity amongst not only Māori people but also the Pākehā.

The reason I think an understanding of these words is important, is because it sort of explains why the idea of letting your sister raise your children isn't as unusual as it maybe would be in suburban England.  In fact, many of the kids that I worked with in New Zealand were living with aunts, uncles, brothers or sisters and some were living with even more distant relatives!

Three of the kids that I worked with most closely: Phantaesha, Santos and Ennex, were brother and sisters, and also had 7 other siblings, but none of them lived together.  Santos was living with Janina after having been deserted by her Mum who ran off with a boyfriend and left Santos in a house with no food or electricity for over 2 weeks.  Phantaesha lived with me while I was in New Zealand and then when I left she moved in with Jono and Anna and has been living with them for the last 2 years.  And Ennex spent some time drifting around but eventually moved in with his Dad, who last I saw was in the back of an ambulance being rushed to hospital after overdosing.  Their family was chaotic, and some of the things that they had been through when they were younger was distressing to hear about.  But it wasn't unusual.  I had the same story when I spoke to most of the kids, and the more I heard about the things that they put up with at home the more I sort of became used to it, in a way that worries me, because it stopped being a massive shock every time they told me about a new cruelty that was bestowed upon them.  And that just isn't okay.

I feel like I've been getting to this point for ages - but basically I am right back where I was almost 3 years ago, thinking that something has to be done about this problem in New Zealand, and I just don't know how you go about doing it. In a way to stop the practice of child swapping and fluid families is to interfere in a long held culture; to ignore it all and not say anything so as to avoid hurting anyone's feelings and causing any more strife between Maori and Pakeha, is to say that it is okay that these children are being hurt, abused and killed.

Janina and I spoke when I was leaving New Zealand about one day going back and starting up a House of Hope where abused women and children could come and stay and have somewhere safe and warm to be while they got their lives back in order, and I really do hope that one day this will happen.  I know the difference it would make, even just in Takanini, and hopefully things like this would go some way to making sure that soemthing is being done to ensure that cases like Baby C and Delcelia Witika never happen again!