Lives that begin in hell

It’s a brave National Party that pokes its head out the door, loudly says it won’t tolerate gangs, then shuts the door quickly in case someone heard. I wish it well. I really do, because gangs are the rejects of the model world of order and decency National has in mind. If only they’re hassled enough by the proposed ‘‘Strike Force Raptor’’ police gang they’ll soon see the error of their ways and become accountants. Or something.

There’ll be a ‘‘war on gangs’’ when the Nats come back that will strike deep at their evil hearts, like revoking parole for gang members, and making violent gang crime a new, more punitive add-on to the law that applies to everyone else. That’s like depriving them of their rights, which they don’t even deserve, so it doesn’t matter.

But even more courageously and to the point, gangs will be monitored by the raptor police, who’ll take their drivers’ licences off them if they don’t pay their fines. Because they wouldn’t dare drive without licences. And they’d check their clubhouses for bad workmanship, and ban gang patches because Mark Mitchell, the ex-cop who’s National’s justice spokesman, says he ‘‘won’t stand for it’’.

You know what this sounds like? An animated TV series where raptors (more usually the name for bird predators, like hawks and vultures) fight nasty brown two-legged critters and win the battle every time. Like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Without the turtles.

I don’t like violent crime and peddling dangerous drugs either, and I wish gang life looked more like fun and less like desperation. Because while we point a righteously trembling finger at the bad boys and girls, and threaten to make their lives even more hellish, we forget that they came out of hell in the first place. Being part of a criminal gang seemed to offer some kind of relief.

Just now in Afghanistan they’ve discovered that hundreds of boys sent away from home to be educated have instead been sexually abused by the men who should have been caring for them. Some have been killed by their shamed parents when they spoke up.

That’s shocking and horrible, a bit like what used to happen here if you were an under-age person making a nuisance of yourself, sent to boys’ and girls’ laughingly misnamed ‘‘homes’’ to be taught how to live properly.

I need hardly list the ‘‘homes’’ run by the state, assorted religions and charities that have been exposed for sexual, physical and mental abuse of kids who were trapped there, out of sight and out of mind, for their own good. That’s not forgetting mental hospitals where they were given electric shock treatment.

They were deprived of any rights with a criminal lack of oversight, taken from families deemed dysfunctional, placed somewhere worse because it was hypocritical. I’d say they know a lot about rights by the time they’re older thugs out on the streets. There’s nothing the state can do to make them suffer more than they have already.

This week police shot a man dead in Tauranga. He’d threatened his partner, she escaped, then he held a machete to the throats of children in the house while police negotiated for a hoped peaceful outcome. Two young children saw his killing, a trauma that could set them up for a lifetime of problems that could equally well turn them into offenders.

That’s where the energy should go if we want gangs to become irrelevant. On kids that never asked to live in hell, find themselves in it, and grow up thinking it’s normal.