Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (20 page)

With a sharp economic downturn on one hand and a nominally conservative political administration eager to weed out wasteful public spending on the other, at least some of the debate spurred by the coverage has turned on the question of publicly funded class actions and what critics describe as the country’s credulous system of legal aid. Writing in
The National Business Review
, commentator Matthew Hooten homed in on Cooper for being what he considered a poster child on both fronts. Hooten has acknowledged that the substance of the claims Cooper’s firm has worked on may be correct, and that the erstwhile wards she has represented deserve to be heard and to receive some sort of apology, compensation and a chance to make the most of the rest of their lives. At the same time, however, he argued that the passage of time and the murky environments in which past abuse may have occurred simply make it too difficult to prove criminal wrongdoing.

And even if these cases had a reasonable chance of success, he added, the trauma of reliving the past on the witness stand was ‘a barrier to resolution’. Why, he demanded, had the system forked out $4.4 million in aid for Cooper to pursue historic claims at a time when other more appropriate avenues of appeal existed?

One possible answer might be that not dispensing legal aid could constitute a fresh abuse. Cooper’s own answer was slightly longer. For one thing, she pointed out, she does not work as a sole operator but as the principal of a medium-sized firm employing solicitors and administrative staff. And the claim that her firm had enjoyed no success in historical abuse cases was simply incorrect, having successfully argued a number of interlocutory applications for leave as well as settling around 30 cases in 2009 alone.

Nor was Hooten present during one of the cases argued by Cooper, in the Court of Appeal in 2009, at the end of which one
of the presiding judges, visibly moved, described her standard of research and presentation over three days as ‘impeccable’.

‘We do a lot of work here that we have absolutely no guarantee we’re going to be paid for, but we do it anyway,’ Cooper said. ‘We do it because we have to protect the clients. That,’ she added, ‘is what this firm is about. We’re a human-rights firm. So believe you me, it’s not all sun and roses.’

To be sure, none of the testimonies assembled by Cooper and her team makes for cheerful reading. But one need not be a conservative newspaper critic to find at least a small number of them a bit problematic. One claimant, for instance, recounts that boys regularly had sex with female staff members, ‘either in the gym or in our rooms while no one else was about’, while another adds the intriguing detail that one of these women would sometimes insist on the boy shaving her legs for good measure.

Another litigant claims that, ‘on a date he does not specifically recall’, a staff member grabbed him by the hair and held him over a urinal while another pissed on him, apparently as punishment for some trifling neglect of cleaning duties. Here again, one supposes, the hopeful claimant doesn’t appear destined for a hefty payout, not least because of the doubt cast by the sheer logistics involved in two housemasters having to dispatch 40 other unattended wards to various parts of the relatively confined residence in order to proceed, as it were, unmolested. Stories of boys forced to mow fields with a hand-mower, or even scissors, also abound.

Not surprisingly, few of the people who were involved with Epuni buy into many of the allegations. Even Mike Doolan, perhaps the most liberal-minded and sympathetic of former administrators, admitted to being worried about how ‘a black and white memory has a way of becoming technicolour with the help of some advisers’, which he believes has in some cases led to ‘apocryphal’ recollections, such as the recurrent theme of boys
being sent out to giant paddocks with hand-mowers, which is after all a staple of army folklore, too.

‘But people who say these things come to believe them,’ Doolan added, underscoring an unarguable psychological truth. As a rule, most of us romanticise the past — it’s a natural thing to do. But when one has been most horribly betrayed, or at any rate feels that way, an opposite effect kicks in, the experience becoming infinitely more tainted and rancid in recollection than perhaps it really was.

Something else. Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of some individual claims, it has to be said that this activity is oddly depressing for another reason: one of the things about growing older is the revelation of how young everyone is, all the more so when they figure as characters involved in some long-gone incident. Most of Cooper’s claimants are now significantly older than were the accused men at the time of the alleged incidents. They might say, and many do, that what happened plunged their lives into a state of crisis, but aren’t crises by definition supposed to pass at some point, all the more so as we grow to appreciate the hurt we have caused others along life’s way?

Cooper has every confidence she has good systems in place to winnow out the dubious claims — ‘hundreds’ of which she has declined to take up because of lack of corroboration or simply a professional hunch that a file might better remain closed — and bring about justice for those who deserve it. But she added: ‘I have to be careful too because I don’t also want to be someone who sits in judgement over someone else’s damage … I kind of have to be careful walking that line, really, because it’s not for me to judge.’

Yet for every tale whose retelling may include some liberties there have been many other allegations of abuse or neglect that have been supported with strong anecdotal evidence and credible testimony. Such cases can even be found in the institution’s own official files. On the evening of July 30, 1976, for instance,
a note was made of a visit made to Epuni housemaster Graeme Stewart’s office by a 13-year-old boy who for legal reasons cannot be identified. The boy wanted to discuss an incident that had occurred the previous spring involving one of his caregivers. The boy said he felt ashamed of himself and scared, and unable to walk past a moving vehicle without wanting to throw himself in front of it. He was still reeling from the experience, still licking his wounds, he indicated, and could no longer sleep at night. Stewart, by his written account, didn’t disbelieve what he was hearing, but also lacked the wherewithal to do anything about it. So he sent the kid to bed. The following morning a couple of housemasters found the boy hanging in his room.

Cooper’s files include the case of a boy born to a mother confined to a mental institution and a father serving time for gang-related activities, who notched up his first run-in with the authorities at the age of seven. A predictable relocation to Epuni contributed to what a psychiatric examiner would later characterise as the boy’s profound attachment difficulties, dysfunctional relationships with the outside world, which he found unremittingly hostile, causing him to develop a lifelong pattern of narcissistic thinking, educational failure and a compelling attraction to others with a similarly desolate experience. ‘I have attacked people violently and I have hurt a lot of people,’ the former ward, now in his 40s, admitted.

‘I always have good intentions towards people,’ he continued, ‘but I always screw up. I don’t know how to respect other people. It is natural for me to rip someone off. I am not good at working with people, and my experience hasn’t made me respect women much, but I can’t say exactly why that is.’ He still wants to be normal, wants some shot at happiness. But he’s a lifelong gang member, so what chance is there of that?

Instead, he finds himself in a maximum-security cell, always mulling over what happened and what could have been — the
education he missed, the skills he might have acquired and the places he might have gone — had Epuni not got in the way. Bad dreams in the day, bad dreams in the night. ‘I dream all the time. I have dreams about people chasing me and me running away. I dream about demons and keys. I dream about dead people walking about.’ And he dreams about whatever violent crime might next land him back in jail during his increasingly infrequent sojourns back into the wider community.

SONJA COOPER WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE BEING KEPT
busy as 2010 drew to a close. Only a few hundred metres from her modest Wellington offices, the Ministry of Social Development also found its institutional hand hard to the plough attempting to bring some kind of resolution to many of the same cases. Indeed, the ministry’s Care, Claims and Resolution unit, which was set up for this purpose, is headed by an individual who in some respects might just as well have been cut from the same cloth as Cooper. Both are committed, likeable professionals, their backgrounds are not at all dissimilar, and both are in the prime of their careers, with each in their own way enhancing the reputation of the other’s work.

Garth Young — a soft-spoken man who peers out at visitors from behind designer glasses set underneath a rug of grey hair — hails originally from coastal Southland. He, too, was raised in the Christian faith, in his case a staunchly Presbyterian household, and there was never a time when the social values imbued in him by the church weren’t taken seriously. Very seriously. Such imperatives, he said, have hovered above his career path, propelling him on, forcing him, like Cooper, to work hard in helping to pick up the human wreckage left by the old welfare system. For all that, however, the two central characters in the aftermath of the great residential experiment find themselves barely on speaking terms.

The son of a farmer, Young was the middle child of five kids. His parents thought he had abilities beyond the sheep and cattle that had been a mainstay of the family for a couple of generations. Yet this didn’t necessarily make choosing his eventual career path any the easier. ‘I always felt a bit different,’ he said. ‘I didn’t particularly get along or fit in with the rural New Zealand blokes, and actually I’ve never identified as a typical New Zealand bloke, either.’ His father, a good National man, detested the socialist ideas the boy had already started soaking up at high school. The two clashed over issues like Vietnam or whether an employer’s first responsibility ought to be to their employees rather than the shareholders, and, most of all, whether the ‘blinkered vision’ of Southland was all there might be to life.

At the University of Otago, Young read psychology — thanks to the likes of the fashionable French anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss
and the Scottish oddball R.D. Laing, the subject was on something of an academic roll at this point in the mid-1970s — but got detoured on account of his childhood sweetheart falling pregnant with their first child. He completed an undergraduate degree, in educational psychology rather than clinical psychology, rounding off his early academic experience with a teaching diploma. He picked up work at a local school in Invercargill.

Then, perhaps inspired by an older sister who was already a social worker, he successfully applied for a social-work position himself, at the local branch office of the former Social Welfare, the department with which he would remain as it morphed into what became the Ministry of Social Development. And it was here, too, that he first began working with disadvantaged kids, sometimes shunting them back and forth between Invercargill and the youth facility then operating in Dunedin, taking kids there or else picking them up.

By this time Young was in his late 20s, but still ‘naive’ about the
residential system. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I thought too much, in terms of residential care, about, you know, was it okay or not.’ Something that just was? ‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘And I have to say, I don’t recall ever really consciously questioning what it was about or why we used it. I have to say my experience with Dunedin Boys’ Home was always really positive. I mean, the number of times I went there, in all honesty despite the work I’d been involved with, I can’t ever recall seeing or hearing anything that gave me any cause for concern.’

By 1990 Young was no longer out in the field, but heading a small team of social workers based in Whangarei — he also completed a post-grad diploma during this period — before Wellington and a position in national office, in what was called the ministerial team, beckoned. And it was in this latter capacity that his current work took shape.

A group of people who had been in Salvation Army homes in the 1950s through to the 1970s were beginning to talk publicly about the way they had been treated and were looking to make claims against the Army. A number of them had also been state wards, under a department scheme that saw them placed in those homes. ‘So we were teamed to see what we could do to work with them positively rather than wait until they sued us,’ Young explained. ‘This was 2004, and at the time it was just myself and one of our solicitors who worked part-time. We did a specific bit of work. We went out and talked to all of that group of people who wanted to meet and talk with us, so it was a very sort of defined piece of work which came to a conclusion. But during that year it was becoming evident that more and more people were contemplating filing claims directly against the ministry.’

WITHIN A COUPLE OF YEARS THE NUMBER OF CLAIMS
in their quiver had grown to 140, with no end in sight. By this
point Young was heading a fully fledged team, the Historical Claims Unit, which by 2010 would comprise five advisers and a couple of administrative staff.

‘Bizarrely enough,’ he admitted with a smile, he loves the work ‘most of the time’. It takes him back to his social work days, back to the time when finding a resolution for people was the main focus of what he did. ‘I know that there are plenty of people out there who are suspicious and cynical of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, but I am really very proud of the work that the team is doing in the face-to-face interactions that they have with the people who come to us with whatever complaint or claim that they have. And clearly we don’t resolve every case to everyone’s satisfaction, but for many we do, and just seeing that is significant.’

By Young’s estimate, around two-thirds of the claims his team has worked on have ended up with some kind of agreed resolution, whether it simply be the provision of important information or the issuing of an ex gratia payment, usually at the lower end of the spectrum but in one case $30,000. By early 2010 the unit had resolved 36 such claims; a further 137 still awaited action. ‘The stance we’ve taken is that if somebody has clearly been wronged by us then, legal issues aside, we’ve got some kind of moral obligation to acknowledge that in some way,’ Young said.