SONJA COOPER
Tough justice
’’I don’t want to be another person in the long line of people in the system that has let these people down. And I’m not going to be ...’’
There’s nothing swanky about Sonja Cooper’s law offices. No frosted glass and mahogany boardrooms. The meeting room desk clock is labelled ‘‘Cooper Legal’’, presumably in case a client should decide to pocket it.
Taped to the window are two Sharon Murdoch cartoons: ‘‘I was abused and neglected by the state,’’ one speech bubble reads. ‘‘You let the state be the judge of that,’’ comes the response.
While the two words ‘‘state abuse’’ would send most people running, Cooper has spent the past 20 years seeking justice for some 800 Kiwis abused while in psychiatric and Child, Youth and Family care.
Their stories fill her Wellington offices – up to 50 fat folders of awfulness for just one client. There’s a warehouse lock-up for the overflow.
When the torrid tales get too much, Cooper’s team make up silly limericks and tell sick jokes to defuse the emotion that’s inevitable when work is a relentless parade of damaged lives.
Yet 54-year-old Cooper is surprisingly sunny. She likes clothes and escapist fiction – 15 romances for $1.99. She likes to waterski and fish (and release) at her Taupo holiday house, and travel – with strict cellphone access restrictions. It’s only when she talks about battling the state for recognition of abuse in its care that her voice rises to an exasperated squeak.
‘‘It was hard,’’ Cooper says matter-of-factly of those first mid-1990s child abuse cases, pioneering untested law. Everyone said historical abuse claims would fail, because of time limitations prescribed by law, but Cooper figured there must be a way.
A 2003 Court of Appeal win proved it was possible, and the floodgates opened. Victims of abuse in both Child, Youth and Family and psychiatric care began bringing their claims – and their stories – to Cooper’s tiny sole practice. She grew her firm and became one of the country’s biggest recipients of legal aid.
She returned to work six weeks after the birth of her son, who is now 20. Her stay-at-home husband would bring him in at lunchtimes for breastfeeding.
And then everything fell apart. In 2007, three cases failed, based on the Limitation Act, and the Legal Services Agency began withdrawing legal aid for 800 remaining claimants.
For four years, she fought to keep the firm afloat, shedding staff and doing work unpaid. It looked increasingly like a losing battle, but Cooper didn’t want to give up.
‘‘What has kept me going about this work is I don’t want to be another person in the long line of people in the system that has let these people down. And I’m not going to be ... You say, ‘how can I do this work?’ For me, it’s ‘how can I not’?’’
Human rights lawyer Tony Ellis provided the breakthrough. You’re doing it wrong, he said. By focusing on the government’s human rights obligations – complaining to the Human Rights Commission and United Nations Committee Against Torture, Cooper helped spark action outside the courts.
She’s achieved about 700 settlements for victims of abuse in state care. But for all the publicity, compensation, and listening forums, the safety of our children still keeps her up at night. As a Youth Court advocate she still sees young people the government is failing to protect.
Her youngest historical abuse client is just 17 – that’s hardly historical, she points out. Which is why she supports calls for an inquiry into historical abuse, to ensure another generation cannot be ruined by the same mistakes.
Cooper was 12 when she decided to be a lawyer. A girly swot at Wellington’s Erskine College, she liked the intellectual challenge and the idea of looking out for the underdog. She was musical and theatrical, so the drama of court work also appealed.
It wasn’t an easy childhood. When she was seven, her parents split, her cousin was killed in a car accident, her grandfather died and she was hit by a car. She became the poor kid of separated parents at a Catholic school.
She wears a cross, but calls herself a lapsed Catholic. In her pre-teens, a visiting priest put his tongue in her mouth. She’s reticent discussing it, but realises it’s important given her work. She complained immediately, but understands why most don’t.
She understands, too, the impact – she has no vendetta against the church, but for years the experience made her wary of men and those in positions of trust.
Fortunately, she found her future husband at 17. The lout on the train turned out to be amazing, supporting her when she worked crazy hours and was constantly out of town, and giving up teaching to be a house-dad. She won’t give his name, or her son’s, for safety reasons. All her staff are unlisted. Many of their clients are among the huge percentage of prisoners with a history of state care – little surprise when you consider the antisocial behaviour likely to result from being abused by authority figures.
Cooper thought she’d be a family lawyer, using her experience as a child of separated parents to help couples realise what was important – the children. But the squabbles over knives and forks wearied her.
The septic power plays in one case particularly affected her. She miscarried and believes it was due to related stress.
She fought misogyny and ridiculous expectations in big law firms, before going it alone in 1995. At Russell McVeagh, known as ‘‘The Factory’’, she was told her 7.30am to 7pm days constituted too much work-life balance.
She worked as a district inspector in mental health and thinks it’s a good model for better monitoring of young people in state care. Inspectors had mandated visits at different points in a patient’s stay, and keys to visit unannounced. She once caught a staff nurse dragging a patient down the hallway by their hair.
While she frets about today’s poor quality social work, her inspiring team of Youth Court colleagues – cops, social workers, judges, counsellors – gives her hope. And there are wins – a Youth Court client contacted her years later to say she’d become a lawyer because of her.
But there’s still work to do. She wants an independent body to assess historical claims, to remove the situation of government departments deciding compensation – ‘‘the abuser as the saviour’’. And she rejects government claims that it knows enough about historical abuse to make an inquiry unnecessary.
‘‘I say you don’t know what happened in the past, and you deny a lot of what happened in the past, so if that’s the approach you’re going to take, how on earth can we guarantee the safety of our children now? We can’t.’’