‘The gates of hell opened’: after decades, Māori survivors of state abuse are finally heard
When Tupua Urlich – the first person to take the stand at a landmark Māori hearing on abuse in state care – is asked to talk about his upbringing, he puts his heads to his clasped hands and says he needs to take a minute. “This is an emotional thing to go through,” he says. “I don’t mind people seeing this because this is what we go through every day of our lives.”
Urlich, of Croatian and Ngāti Kahungunu ki Heretaunga descent, was five when he was separated from his mother and seven siblings, and sent to live with a non-whānau [non-family] caregiver chosen by the state. “That’s when the gates of hell opened up,” he says. “I can tell you, I was far safer in those first five years of my life,” he tells the hearing.
Over the next two years, in the early 2000s, he told the commission he was brutally beaten nearly every day. “I was a child at the mercy of a monster,” he says. “Beyond physical abuse, he was cruel. How anyone could deem him safe to take care of me I don’t understand.”
After one beating, Urlich says his caregiver swung open the door to his room where he lay bleeding and said: “Oh yeah, your dad’s dead by the way”, then slammed the door closed.
New Zealand’s royal commission into abuse in state and faith-based care is the largest and most complex royal commission the country has held. The independent investigation put in motion in 2018, is tasked with revealing the extent of abuse within the institutions designed to protect children, and its ongoing effects.
Over the past two weeks, the commission has held its first publichearings dedicated exclusively to Māori, giving survivors an opportunity to highlight the racism and cultural disconnection they also faced at the hands of the state. In total, 25 people – a tiny fraction of the estimated 200,000 Māori survivors of abuse – took to the stand to testify.
In the 1970s, most children taken into state care were Māori, and overrepresentation of Māori children in care has continued. According to the royal commission’s report, Māori today make up 69% of children in care and 81% of the children abused in care, despite accounting for only about 16% of the population.
The commission estimates about 655,000 people have been in care settings in New Zealand since the 1950s, and up to 256,000 may have been abused. Their testimony was livestreamed, and transcripts will be published on the commission’s website.
Urlich says being Māori, and raised in a system that separated him from his culture and knowledge is “modern day colonisation”.
“The only time I saw reference to Te Ao Māori [the Māori world] was outside of the education centre in a child, youth and family building – there were koru patterns in the glass frostings of the meeting rooms,” Urlich says. “I deserved more than that.”
Cultural separation ‘profoundly abusive’
The trauma of being deliberately separated from whānau, and Māori culture arises time and again during the hearings. Some survivors say it “was profoundly abusive in and of itself ”, says Julia Spelman (Ngāti Hikairo), independent legal counsel assisting the commission. “And this challenges us to think about abuse in a broader way.”
“Some survivors described hating being Māori, or of having their chance to be Māori taken away from them; of having experiences so painful that they do not feel able to reconnect with their identity and what it means to be Māori.”
The pain of that severance has intergenerational effects, some survivors say.
A woman of Sami, Navajo, Aboriginal and Māori descent was adopted by a Pākeha [European] family as a newborn, after doctors told her then-16 year-old mother that her baby was sick and the best thing to do was leave her at the hospital for staff to look after.
The doctors then falsely listed her ethnicity as European on her birth certificate, says the woman, who is acknowledged as Ms AF. “I think they did this because Māori babies were less desirable for adoption.”
“The moment my adoption happened was the minute I lost my legal Treaty rights as a Māori. This is the one thing that broke my heart.”
Ms AF, who had been adopted into a religious household, was sent to a Catholic school, where she was physically abused. “The nuns would use canes, their hands or whatever they could get their hands on to beat us.”
At age 18 when she fell pregnant, she was sent to a Catholic nun’s home for unwed mothers where she was put under duress to adopt her son out. “I had no advice provided to me. The next thing I know my son had disappeared. I returned to New Plymouth that day. I didn’t know that I could keep him.”
on being a criminal’
For others, the state’s intervention set them on the path of criminality.
Hohepa Taiaroa, 62, of Tuwharetoa descent, had his first interactions with social services aged 10, while struggling with the separation of his parents, and his mother’s new family. He started running away from home, and was sent to Kohitere boys training centre at 14 after he started stealing cars, and then Waikeria Borstal.
“That was the beginning of my schooling on being a criminal, and the start of learning how to fight,” Taiaroa says. “Instead of learning Māori and other stuff we were supposed to learn, we learned how to steal, how to gamble, how to get ahead of everybody else in the system.”
Taiaroa says he was intimidated and assaulted at the institutions, and reprimanded for speaking Māori. Because he was deemed “a runaway” he would frequently spend up to 23 hours in solitary confinement.
“I never had a voice because my voice was these two things here, my fists. I couldn’t even say a full sentence. It was just yes, no, and that was it. That’s how much mamae [pain] and anger I had inside me.”
Taiaroa spent time in prison during his adult years, and had his own children taken by the state. “I’ve lost three good families because of the violent way I was brought up in the system and the flow on effects on my whānau.”
Towards the end of Urlich’s testimony, he is asked by commissioners what the state should be doing now for Māori children.
“We can stop viewing children in isolation of their family,” he says. “If the whānau are not operating in a way that is safe or sustainable or nurturing for our tamariki [children] then do something about it, don’t just take away the children because guess what, Crown, you don’t have a nurturing, safe, loving environment yourselves.”
high death rate?
Before the fifth wave, Hong Kong had reported a total of 212 coronavirusrelated deaths. Now it is recording above that amount daily.
Virologist Siddharth Sridhar at Hong Kong University’s Department of Microbiology said Hong Kong’s Covid-19 death rate – among the worst in the world – was “tragic but expected”, pinning it on a “perfect storm” of low vaccination rates among elderly people, low rates of prior infection and an overwhelmed healthcare system.
Dhanasekaran said: “The data is really clear … Most people who end up in hospitals are not vaccinated, most people who are in severe conditions are elderly. It is really clear what has gone amiss.”
Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, has acknowledged that the city’s vaccination rate played a role. Currently, 81% of those aged 12 and over have received two doses of the vaccines available in Hong Kong – the Chinese-made Sinovac, a traditional inactivated vaccine, and BioNTech, an mRNA vaccine produced in Germany. However, that figure drops to almost 37% among those aged 80 and above.
Mistrust of the authorities after months of pro-democracy protests, arrests and an ensuing national security law crackdown have also been blamed for the low vaccine uptake, as well as an over-emphasis on potential side effects.
Has the use of the Sinovac vaccine added to the crisis?
Government data shows Sinovac to be the preferred vaccine among those aged 70 and over, despite several studies indicating it is less effective – particularly against Omicron – than the BioNTech vaccine. That could be, in part, because some elderly care homes offer only the Sinovac jab to residents.
According to Dhanasekaran, Sinovac
“has been shown to work really well in many countries” against earlier strains of the virus, although it was “not as effective as the BioNTech [jab]”.
Dhanasekaran said: “Having some vaccines is better than no vaccines”, adding that “Sinovac is not really the biggest issue here – the low vaccination rate is absolutely the problem.”
What does Hong Kong’s failure against Omicron mean for mainland China?
Mainland China is battling a number of Omicron outbreaks that have seen almost 30 million people locked down. The governor of northeastern Jilin province, the current centre of China’s infections, vowed to “achieve community zero-Covid in a week”, state media reported on Monday. But in a sign that thousands of Omicron infections might be forcing a more dynamic approach from authorities, China approved the use of rapid antigen tests last Sunday – a first in the country, which has relied exclusively on nucleic acid tests to confirm Covid patients.
Hong Kong made a similar pivot at the end of February, when laboratories were unable to process the sheer number of specimens from nucleic acid tests coming in, causing huge backlogs in cases being reported. In mainland China, about 50% of those aged 80 and above are fully vaccinated. At present, only Chinese-made vaccines have been approved for use in the mainland, none of which are mRNA jabs.Xi Chen, a health and development economist at Yale’s school of public health, recently tweeted a series of Financial Times charts highlighting Hong Kong’s death rate against countries with higher elderly vaccination rates. He captioned it: “A picture is worth a thousand words. A warning message to Chinese mainland.”
China has yet to report a surge in deaths related to its latest wave of infections, but experts agree that the country’s zero-Covid policy remains on a knife-edge. University of Oxford epidemiologist Chen Zhengmin told Reuters: “The next two weeks are key to determining whether existing policies can really be effective in curbing infection growth or even reaching completely zero cases in one city, as we saw last year.”