M¯aori and crime – why hurt people tend to hurt others

Last week, Justice Ministry deputy secretary Tim Hampton stated that ‘‘just being Ma¯ ori’’ increased the likelihood of being a victim of crime, in reference to the findings of the just-released Ma¯ ori and Victimisation in Aotearoa study.

He made that observation after accounting for other factors that increase the risk of victimisation, including youth, and deprivation factors such as inequities in housing, health and income.

The over-representation of Ma¯ ori in each of those risk categories partly accounts for our over-representation as victims, with much research confirming links between poverty and risk of both offending and victimisation. In contrast, Ma¯ ori are underrepresented among factors that protect people from victimisation, including being aged over 50, owning a home, being financially stable, and psychologically well.

Aotearoa is the fifth most unequal economy in the OECD – and that comes with high human cost. In 2019 a group of Ma¯ ori researchers highlighted the lack of compassionate understanding and policy directed towards ‘‘precariate Ma¯ ori households’’, where wha¯ nau live with marginalisation, stigma and persistent insecurity. This is not unique to Aotearoa, and is reflective of the increasing gaps between rich and poor.

In his 2011 book The Precariate, economist Guy Standing argues that this current phase of capitalism is producing a rapidly growing class of people producing significant instabilities in society. He describes the persistent survival strategies of the precariate as akin to ‘‘walking on moving sand’’. In our country, that class is dominated by Ma¯ ori, and the structural inequities that perpetuate our position at the bottom of the heap defy our founding national myth as a classless society.

The immediate responses to findings of this latest study include references to tackling poverty, but not to its origins. In 2019 the Ministry of Justice released the report Highly Victimised People, drawn from the same data set as the Ma¯ ori and Victimisation study. Unsurprisingly, the same demographic groups – youth and Ma¯ ori – feature in the 4 per cent of those considered ‘‘highly victimised’’.

The most common features among the 4 per cent are significant levels of psychological distress, including depression and anxiety, lower levels of life satisfaction, and feeling unsafe. These factors highlight the need to consider broader aspects of wellbeing that contribute to poor life outcomes and suppress potential. This aligns with Standing’s observation that occupational identity gives narrative to people’s lives, contributing to healthy citizens in a ‘‘Good Society’’.

Responses to the Ma¯ ori victimisation study have also avoided the uncomfortable truth of lateral violence in Ma¯ ori wha¯ nau and communities. This is defined as harm directed at your peers, and is often used to explain violence perpetuated by minorities on other minorities. It is therefore viewed as a form of displaced anger or frustration, a cycle of abuse whose roots lie in oppression, intergenerational trauma and – for indigenous peoples – colonisation and its close relative, racism.

It is outside the remit of this victimisation study to examine who the perpetrators of violence against Ma¯ ori are, but all the research and data points, for the most part, to other Ma¯ ori.

Generally speaking, people offend against other people in their own families, households and neighbourhoods. In simple terms, that points to intimate partner violence by Ma¯ ori men towards Ma¯ ori women, and to male-on-male violence in communities.

The study reports that 36 per cent of Ma¯ ori have experienced domestic or sexual violence in their lifetimes. However, victimisation tends to be concentrated in a small proportion of the population – with 5 per cent of all Ma¯ ori experiencing 81 per cent of all interpersonal violence.

Victimisation is multiple and repeated for a small section of our community. Also of concern is the embedded pattern of underreporting of crime, with around three-quarters of self-reported victimisation in the study not being brought to the attention of the police or other authorities.

These threads point to a number of pathways for future action. At the immediate level, when people do report crime, they need to be appropriately supported, by wellresourced agencies, providing culturally relevant, traumainformed care.

Law and policy makers, as well as decision makers, need to appreciate and understand how and why intersecting factors of race, class, age and gender are relevant to experiences of harm and victimisation. For example, Ma¯ ori women experience crime in ways that are different to Ma¯ ori men – and also to Pa¯ keha¯ women; their race causes their gender to be read and responded to in particular ways, both as victims and as offenders.

Successive governments need to continue to chip away at targeting poverty and inequity as drivers of both crime and victimisation. Bigger-picture responses require an understanding of structural inequities, including their historical derivations and their ongoing impacts.

Additionally, there needs to be work done on increasing public confidence in policing and justice systems, which remains a particular pain point for Ma¯ ori. All those pathways need to be underpinned by Ma¯ ori conceptual frameworks and understandings of both harm and responses to it, including what wellness looks like.

The elephant in the room is Te Tiriti o Waitangi – the ever-present blueprint for nationhood. It is a blueprint that needs to be part of this conversation.

Aotearoa is the fifth most unequal economy in the OECD – and that comes with high human cost.