Family’s ordeal due to lack of sense
IT must have been frightening for them. An Invercargill family, who migrated from the US three and ahalf years ago, flew to Auckland and back one day early this month, to renew the US passports for their children, aged 11 and 8.
When they arrived back at Invercargill airport, late at night, they were met on the tarmac by police, and, without explanation, taken by them to a room in the terminal.
They wondered if a relative had died, or had their house burnt down? But no — the police said that a concern had been raised about their children.
What? Were they being accused of child abuse? Would their children be taken away from them?
Again, no. The parents and the 11yearold boy are of vaguely pinkish ‘‘European’’ ethnicity, but their 8yearold adopted daughter is ethnically Chinese.
It seems that, because the child looked different from her parents and older brother, another passenger on the return flight had raised concerns with Air NZ staff at Auckland Airport that she might not be part of the family, and perhaps was being trafficked.
Air NZ made no attempt to check the family’s identity documents, but the ‘‘trafficking’’ suggestion was apparently passed on to the plane’s captain, who notified the police, presumably by radio, en route.
After being questioned for 10 minutes the family were allowed to go home.
The experience was deeply disturbing for children and parents — as the mother asked, is this liable to happen again whenever they fly? What about other mixed race families (a question which resonates with Civis, a mongrel English/ Scottish/Irish/goodnessknowswhatelse, vaguely pinkish parent of a partMaori adopted daughter)?
The question having been raised, the police can’t be blamed for interviewing the family.
But the complainant, especially in these days of many reconstituted families, needs to reflect on the distress caused by the racist mindset that considers a family relationship suspicious if it crosses ethnicities.
And Air NZ needs to get its act together.
It tried to excuse itself by saying it’s ‘‘not the appropriate authority to make determinations on matters such as this and we refer these via the appropriate avenues to look into concerns’’.
But the mother tells us that at one stage during the flight a flight attendant stopped by their row and stared at them for a while.
Surely, if a child is relaxed, chatting happily to another child in the seat behind, as her mother reports, it’s not likely that she’s being trafficked.
And surely the airline’s own computer system could have told Air NZ that the whole family had flown up from Invercargill earlier that day, which would have ruled out trafficking pretty definitively.
Why didn’t Air NZ check the family’s immediate flight history before calling the police?
In its 2017 Sustainability Report Air NZ said, ‘‘While we do not currently provide specialised training to cabin crew and checkin staff in this [human trafficking] area, we plan to introduce a training programme next year.’’
Only, it didn’t.
On December 19, 2018, it reported, ‘‘We are investigating training programmes on human trafficking that we can introduce into our training modules for cabin crew and checkin staff.’’
It seems that training about human trafficking isn’t a priority for the airline — it’s fair to conclude, from its panicked response to the other passenger’s assumptions, that Air NZ hasn’t yet implemented a training programme about trafficking.
It’s to be hoped that this cruel, incompetent botchup will trigger the introduction of a training programme as soon as possible.
And that the training will ensure staff are aware that not all members of a family can be expected to look alike, that parents can be of different ethnicities, that a child may look quite different from its parents, and that adoption may be across a rainbow of different ethnicities.
In the meantime, how about airline staff using some common sense?