Heather Henare
Refuge in a storm
Where most see misery, Heather Henare sees opportunity.
The inquiry into abuse in state care excites the hell out of her. The mental health inquiry, too. Sure, they will be grim affairs, but people will get to tell their stories. And being heard is a few steps towards healing.
That’s one of the many things the 59-year-old has learnt in a lifetime of dealing with child abuse, domestic violence and now childhood trauma and loss, as chief executive of Skylight Trust.
She’s seen things no-one should ever have to – children limp and near lifeless after being held under in the bath; kids from Bert Potter’s Centrepoint commune presenting with sexually transmitted diseases; broken babies; broken women; broken lives. You’d think it would destroy anyone’s belief in humanity. Not so, she says. Throughout 20 years as a social worker and 10 as boss of Women’s Refuge, she has kept faith – in people, in parenting, and in recovery. But the misery has left its mark.
Henare wasn’t ready to leave Women’s Refuge. Her heart took a different view. After her second heart attack in 2014, her cardiologist warned she needed to get out of that 24/7 stress factory. She would lie in bed while wife Helena Henare Coolen read out job ads. ‘‘No, no, no.’’ That job was her world and she couldn’t imagine anything more fulfilling.
Then Helena got to the Skylight job. It’s everything the Women’s Refuge job wasn’t – long-term healing in place of crisis intervention; a chance at prevention – dealing with the kinds of childhood trauma that can turn kids into victims or perpetrators, the sparks that inflame the fires of domestic abuse.
Three years in she’s already shaking the place up, building an online resilience hub for young people and their families to get information about suicide, bullying, grief. She’s supposed to be working four days, but can’t help herself. She still has heart problems and is tired, though that might have more to do with the battle to keep bounding black pug Sumo from sleeping on the bed. But for once she’s trying to look after herself instead of just focusing on everyone else.
Hot pink lippy, hot pink glasses and a funky urban apartment filled with Helena’s steampunk treasures – Henare looks more Wellington arts patron than defender of the downtrodden. But she understands those she helps because she has lived their life.
The daughter of Morrinsville sharemilkers, Henare’s childhood pulsed to the constant rhythm of daily milking. Not so constant was her mother’s mental health. She fluctuated between being well enough to foster other children, losing control, and being sent on ‘‘holidays’’ to mental institutions where she endured shock therapy. The youngest of five girls, Henare copped less of the violence. But she saw. She watched. And she didn’t always speak up.
When she was bored and wanting more from life – having left home at 15, married George Henare, moved to Auckland and had baby Shilo just before her 18th birthday – she thought about that. About learning to speak up. ‘‘Resistance is fertile’’ proclaims a cushion in her apartment.
After her fourth time attending the same assertiveness course, her tutor suggested there might be other ways to improve herself. She pointed out the women’s centre on Ponsonby Rd. ‘‘It was like a whole world opened up for me.’’
Henare divorced her husband and got involved with women’s line, the women’s health centre and Rape Crisis. She did a job swap with a lady at Women’s Refuge and started a social work diploma.
At the same time as discovering help and resistance, she began a 19-year abusive relationship. Which raises the eternal question levelled at women who stay in abusive relationships – why didn’t you leave? They had two beautiful children and he was a good father.
‘‘I always intended to leave, but I needed to believe in myself. I concentrated on getting me right. So that’s what I did. I got myself educated, I furthered my career. I was hellbent on being a survivor, not a victim, and I was.’’
Henare believes reducing New Zealand’s awful domestic violence rates requires multiple approaches – helping men to change, helping women to leave, and helping kids deal with what they’ve seen and experienced so they don’t repeat the cycle. From her decade at Women’s Refuge, she estimates about 20 per cent of abusing men are just bad people. The other 80 per cent are not beyond help.
‘‘There are men who commit violence who are just violent men, and who get a great deal of pleasure out of it. And I’ve met plenty of them in my time. But I’ve also met a whole lot of men who abuse who don’t know and have never known anything other than that.’’
Henare’s mission for Skylight is to make its information and counselling resources userfriendly (that means online for kids) and free for those who can’t afford it.
There, she’s back where she started – with children. Her first social work job was with the child abuse assessment team at Auckland Hospital. They saw everything from subtle abuse to attempted murder. Even all these years later some cases stand out – the STD children; the mother who repeatedly tried to drown her child in the bath, who turned out to have been raped; the religious family who held their child hostage and tried to starve the child, then tried to break into the hospital to kill the child.
Having also worked as a government social worker, Henare realises some children must be removed from their families to keep them safe. However, she fears too many are being taken into state care instead of being placed with wider family members – despite growing revelations of the damage that causes.
‘‘I worry that we’ve got more children in care than we’ve ever had, and everything in our history tells us that’s not what children need . . . Plucking children out and putting them with another family, and not connecting them with their family, will not help us grow children that are going to grow up connected and be safe people.’’
It’s knowledge born of professional and personal experience. Her Pa¯ keha¯ parents adopted a Ma¯ ori boy, Jimmy, who was 10 years younger than her. They fed him and kept him safe, but couldn’t draw together the strands of his cultural identity. ‘‘That should never have been allowed.’’ When Henare helped him trace his whakapapa, the knowledge changed his life dramatically.
Skylight works to help children and their families through trauma, loss and grief. Henare knows, too, about grief, having lost her second child, Chantelle, in her 20s, two days after the baby’s birth. She thought she was fine, until the supervisor of her social work student placement noticed she was spending all her time with the families of terminal cancer kids. She sent her on a 12-week counselling course, which turned her into a blithering mess.
Henare is getting better at looking after herself – the gastric bypass surgery helped with her weight fluctuation, and she goes to the gym and swims to stay healthy. But she’s determined not to be a victim. ‘‘At the end of the day – just like in my early years of being a mum – I’m hellbent on being a survivor.’’
‘‘A whole lot of men who abuse ... have never known anything other than that.’’