No care, no inquiry, no compo: How the State abandoned a little girl
The Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Abuse In Care has trudged on since 2018 and doesn’t finally report until January next year.
Officially established to ‘‘inquire into and report on responses by institutions to instances and allegations of historic abuse in state care and faith based institutions between 1950 and 2000’’, the commission has heard stories from thousands of victims who – instead of being protected by government and church agencies – were deliberately harmed by them.
As a result their lives have been blighted.
But there are also individuals who today wish they had been taken into state care; removed from their dangerous families, rescued from the torture they endured.
One such survivor is Kataraina Tawera from Hamilton.
Kataraina Tawera was born in 1996. In October 2002 when Kataraina was six years old, child sex offender Jules Mikus was being sentenced for the rape and murder of another six-yearold girl, Teresa Cormack. Mikus had a record of child sex offending. Despite this, at the very same time that Child, Youth and Family (CYFS) expressed concern Mikus had been given access to children through Social Welfare’s foster system, CYFS case workers took the position that Kataraina and her brother were to be placed back with convicted paedophile Stuart Mitchell Boyd, who was married to their mother.
At that time I was a list MP for the ACT Party and Kataraina’s grandmother contacted me, pleading for help to stop her grandchildren going back to live with Boyd, and supplied me with the Family Court records. She knew I had already listed Boyd (now dead) in my 1996 book, The Paedophile & Sex Offender Index, for his June 1991 convictions against a 15-year-old girl. CYFS was first notified of his convictions in 1999 but still considered that he should still have care of the children.
I raised this in General Debate on October 16, 2002, and accused then Minister Steve Maharey that despite his assurances, this policy of returning children to the care of sex offenders had not been discontinued. But to no avail.
For privacy reasons, I did not then know the children’s names and I lost track of this family, but often wondered what happened, and if I had done the right thing. As politicians and journalists we duck in and out of private individuals’ lives, but does that help, or hinder, their cause? Then last March, 20 years later, from out of nowhere Kataraina tracked me down through the net, by emailing my husband, barrister Colin Carruthers:
‘‘Your wife went into debate about Child, Youth and Family Services returning kids to convicted sexual predators. I was the child she was fighting for, my stepfather was the predator mentioned. No-one listened to Deborah. They returned me to my mother and stepfather where I went on to be raped for three years, something that heavily impacted on my life. I never received justice because the man in question committed suicide.’’
Kataraina was not sure if I remembered her. Who could
forget, but what recourse is there for someone in her position, not strictly in state care when she was abused? ACC is a start, and she has applied, but that institution grinds slowly – they’ve replied stating they will assign an agent. So far, nothing.
Kataraina’s life story is depressingly similar to many who’ve been sexually abused. She has no academic qualifications, although it is evident from her emails she has a sharp mind. When she was 12 years old she finally told her mother what Boyd was doing to her. ‘‘She called me a slut and marched me down to the medical centre and demanded they prove me wrong.
‘‘Someone examined me and said she’s definitely not lying.
‘‘Three days after that Boyd killed himself.’’
Kataraina says her mother has never stuck by her. Her case notes, obtained from Social Welfare, state from her birth that her mother never bonded with her baby; her mother told CYFS she never left Kataraina alone with Boyd after she married him. ‘‘That’s not true,’’ Kataraina says.
Her mother and Boyd had two children together, who’ve changed their names and no longer use the family name Boyd, and who Kataraina says she ‘‘loves to bits’’.
‘‘My little sister and brother have my back 100%. Boyd knew I loved my little sister so much, so he used that against me to keep me quiet. Her and my baby brother. I couldn’t tell anyone
because I couldn’t let him hurt them.’’
Her grandmother, she says, couldn’t look after her because she ‘‘went crazy and went blind’’. She did end up tracking down her real father, whom she’d never known, but the relationship went nowhere, ‘‘but at least I got an answer’’.
Kataraina left secondary school after about two years, in her words, ending up on the streets trusting nobody, lost and scared, doing drugs, and nearly lost her life more than once.
So what turned her life around?
‘‘I had a baby. I loved her so much and she needed me. Suddenly it wasn’t about me any more. I had to look after her and in those nine months of pregnancy I knew I had to sort my shit out, get off drugs, to keep her.’’
She desperately did not want her child to be taken off her. ‘‘Before those appointments with the midwife I had to rent a legal car seat. I had to rent a room with decent people, have good transport, all this to get full custody of my daughter.
‘‘Then I had two more children, and I’m a good parent. I was never going to let my babies go through what I went through.’’
Does she wish she was taken into care, away from the nightmare, abusive family life she struggled through?
‘‘When I was a naive little kid, I used to dream I’d wake up and they’d say we got the wrong baby, you were mixed up, you belong with a good family. I looked at
friends crying because their parents divorced and think at least it’s a family. I wished everything was different. But now I’ve got my kids I know everything that happened got me to where I am now.
‘‘Sure it was an injustice, what happened to me, but it got me where I am.
‘‘I’ve gone from fearing the Family Court to standing my ground and taking charge of my babies, and my life.’’
Kataraina’s no victim. She’s put the years of abuse behind her. Nevertheless, she refuses to forgive CYFS, the state agency charged with protecting children from abuse, for returning her to a life of ‘‘sexual assault, molestation and rape’’.
She’d like a formal apology from her former case manager. She’d like Boyd’s headstone depicting him in full navy uniform addressed by the New Zealand Navy.
She’d like some compensation for her life ‘‘ruined’’ as she sees it, particularly the lack of education, but that may prove difficult.
Claims for historical sexual abuse can be made through the Ministry of Social Development if you were ‘‘in care’’.
But in Kataraina’s case, nobody ‘‘cared’’. She wasn’t strictly in state care, or faithbased care. She should have been protected; removed from Boyd and her mother, but the state system placed her in danger. Who compensates her for that?
Editors note: Oranga Tamariki Chief Executive Chappie Te Kani acknowledged in evidence to the Abuse in Care inquiry earlier this year that the State was guilty of multiple failings in the care and protection of young people between the years 1950 and 1999.
He said children had been abused by caregivers, staff and other state wards – emotionally, physically and sexually – and the State did not always believe reports of abuse or follow them up, meaning a lack of accountability for the abusers.
The Government is preparing an apology and redress scheme, the details of which will be announced soon.
‘‘When I was a naive little kid, I used to dream I’d wake up and they’d say we got the wrong baby, you were mixed up, you belong with a good family.’’
Kataraina Tawera