‘PRISON WAS HEAVEN’ compared to foster care
Isaac Davison tells the stories of three New Zealand children who were uplifted only to be abused
New Zealand children have long been taken from their families by the state because they were considered at risk of abuse or neglect. But despite being taken for their own safety, they were often placed in the hands of families who hurt or neglected them.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care shifted its focus this week to foster care and family homes in New Zealand in the second half of the 20th century.
During that period, half of all children in state care were placed in foster arrangements.
Most of them were Ma¯ori, and they lost connection not only to their families but their cultural identity. Many were shuffled through a dizzying number of placements and homes.
Complaints of abuse went unheard or were downplayed.
The commission’s assisting counsel, Allan Cooke, said this week that the victims’ testimonies were only a “glimpse of what occurred and a fraction of what was endured”. Here are three of their stories.
‘The ugly one’
At age 17, a young man known only as EC was moved into the “murderers wing” in Mt Eden Prison, bunking with 14 men on remand. It was the safest place he’d ever been.
“Prison was actually heaven compared to what I had been through,” he said.
After growing up in foster families, it was the first time in his life he was regularly fed, had a roof over his head, and was not regularly beaten.
“It was a better life,” he told the commission this week. “It was the first time I was respected. And that’s from murderers.”
EC, who has name suppression, was first placed as a wha¯ngai because his parents couldn’t care for him.
He has a single memory of his biological father from the time — chasing his car up the road somewhere in King Country.
When his wha¯ngai father died, he was put on a train to Auckland with two siblings. A social worker changed his name without discussion.
After a brief stint in a foster home in O¯ tara, EC moved in with a family in Ma¯ngere. The abuse he endured at this home was barely imaginable.
EC, speaking in a gravelly voice, spoke of daily beatings, starvation and forced labour.
“[The father] put a dog chain around me and chained me to the dinner table,” he said in his statement.
He would use his fists, kick me with steelcapped boots, hit me with hunks of steel, wood, chains, deer antlers, pipes, straps, the vacuum cleaner tube, and dog collars — anything he could get his hands on.
Hemi McCallum
“He then filled a large enamel bowl with leftovers from the meals and gave this to me and the family dog as our dinner. I had to compete with the dog like this every night.”
The family had four children, but he could not participate in family life because he was “the ugly one”.
Fortnightly visits by a social worker, named Mr Thompson, were an opportunity to complain about the severe abuse. But his foster father always provided excuses for the marks on his body, and was believed by the social worker.
Complaints to teachers went unheeded because he was considered a troublemaker.
“I was just another Ma¯ori boy getting into trouble.”
He was eventually moved after two years but endured further abuse at foster homes in Clevedon, Papatoetoe, and Waiuku.
Aged 16 or 17 and at a foster home in Patumahoe, near Pukekohe, there was a brief glimmer of a brighter future. The farmer he worked for was retiring and wanted him to take over the farm. But his brother said he had a place to stay and a job in Pukekohe. The job, he discovered, was burglary.
That began a lifetime in and out of jail, including the stint in Mt Eden.
EC had 14 children to seven mothers. He had intermittent jobs — most recently as a drain layer — but struggled to work because of permanent injuries from his beatings in care.
Now aged 62, he is easily triggered and has to turn the TV off when anyone yells.
He has had a partner for 13 years but insisted on living apart and said he could not sleep in the same room as them.
“Even though all this has happened, I try to make sure I am happy and people want to be around me.”
‘My nightmare’
Hemi McCallum (Nga¯i Tahu, Nga¯puhi) died in March, aged 58, before he could tell his story to the commission.
The former state ward said he had once hoped to write a book about the abuse he suffered in foster homes.
The working title was, Am I going to die today?
In a statement read by his sister Dannette Carran and Tania Tonga, McCallum said he was the youngest in a family of seven in Invercargill and became a foster child at age 2. He accepted this was “necessary” because of the Once Were Warriors lifestyle of his parents.
He was moved through 12 foster homes between ages 2 and 9. Then the “worst of my nightmare” began, he said, after being placed with a family in the tiny farming settlement of Orawia in Southland.
“I was beaten regularly, if not on a daily basis, [by the father].
“He would use his fists, kick me with steel-capped boots, hit me with hunks of steel, wood, chains, deer antlers, pipes, straps, the vacuum cleaner tube, and dog collars — anything he could get his hands on.”
The father, who worked for the pest destruction board, would often shoot at McCallum to scare him, he said.
“One day he was showing off in front of a group of hunters. [Redacted] and I were down on the river bank putting bricks on a walkway for them to shoot at, and [he] was shooting them out of my hand from 300 yards away with his high-powered rifle.
“He would sometimes fire his shotgun at the ground near my feet, that was really very frightening and added to my belief that he could or eventually would kill me.”
McCallum said he was a “glorified slave” for the family.
He was not allowed inside the house except to cook or do chores and slept in a storage shed which only had room for a bed.
Visits by social welfare were “orchestrated”, he said, with the family putting on a banquet and no opportunity for him to speak to social workers alone.
He finally escaped when he told another family about the abuse and they reported it to the Department of Social Welfare. McCallum spoke of the moment when a social worker, Lucy Sanford, intervened.
“He leapt up, was swearing, threatening me with death and about to beat me up . . .
“She got me in her car and we left. She had to stop down the road a bit because she was shaking so much. She burst out crying, she had seen a glimpse of the man I had seen every day for four years.”
‘I didn’t know who I was’
Until age 7, Kathleen Coster thought she was an only child.
She had a happy upbringing with Pa¯keha¯ parents. She had brown skin but they explained to others that “she loves being out in the sun”.
One day, Coster returned from school to find her bags packed and her caregivers crying.
She discovered she had been fostered at birth because of domestic violence within her family in Christchurch. Her birth father had arrived to take her back.
“From that point on it was darkness,” she wrote in her statement for the commission. “I was a completely different person from that day.”
At the time, social welfare aimed to return foster children to their families where possible.
But her birth mother did not want her back home and beat her viciously.
“I had a broken arm and leg, a split head, a split lip, all from my mum’s abuse.
“She would pull my hair. She tried to drown me in the bath but luckily my father stopped that.”
When she was admitted to hospital, her mother made excuses for her injuries.
“One time when I was in hospital from the injuries, the staff told me it was my 11th birthday, as they saw it on my files. I didn’t even know.”
The police eventually intervened and Coster was made a ward of the state at age 7. Over the next nine years, she was shuffled through 11 foster placements, where she was physically assaulted and sexually abused.
Racist and anti-Ma¯ori attitudes followed her through her foster placements.
At one foster home, the two Pa¯keha¯ daughters of her foster parents spoke about bleaching her skin and told her Ma¯ori people were “dirty”.
“I really didn’t know who I was at this point. It was the first time I realised there was something wrong with me from a colour point of view. It was horrible because I didn’t fit in. For a long time in my life after . . . I won’t go out into the sun.”
Coster said it was drummed into her throughout state care that Ma¯ori beat their children and lived on the streets.
As a result, she rejected her heritage. She lied about being Ma¯ori until she was 30 years old, telling people she was Greek.
“I believe one of the biggest things I wish I had was knowing who I am. I am still triggered by this as I look like a Ma¯ori and yet I have no understanding of my culture.”