State care 'just prepared me for prison really,' man tells Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry for Māori

Friday, 11 March 2022

Māori survivors of abuse in State and faith-based care will share what happened to them and what needs to change in a two-week hearing. (First published June, 2022)

Once Hohepa Taiaroa entered state care, his only education was how to be a criminal, he told the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry for Māori.

Violence was the only way to survive for Taiaroa in the Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre, and borstal as he was stripped of his Māoritanga, his whānau connections to Ngāti Kahungungu and Tūwharetoa, and ultimately his eldest child.

“Instead of learning Māori and other stuff we were supposed to learn, we learned how to steal, to gamble, to get ahead of everybody else in the system.

“It was only because of the violence that was there.”

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Hohepa Taiaroa’s life was turned upside down with the separation of his parents.

Taiaroa opened the fifth day of the Royal Commission’s two-week inquiry into the abuse Māori faced in state care between 1950 ad 1999.

Raised in Whanganui in his early years by his father and whānau, Taiaroa was surrounded by tikanga and te reo Māori before he went to live with his mother in Wellington when he was nine.

That was when his life took a turn, he told the Commission.

In and out of trouble, struggling at home due to his mother’s new family, he felt left behind.

Derelict buildings at Kohitere Boys Home in Levin. Kohitere was part of a network of welfare homes throughout the country that thousands of children went through in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

He ran away, lived on the streets, and joined a paper run so he wouldn’t have to steal to survive.

“In the summer I would go onto the roofs. In the winter I would sleep under the house.”

Soon, social welfare was fed up with him, Taiaroa said, and he was sent to live with his uncle briefly in Hastings at 12, before the Crown took him to Kohitere due to his behaviour when he was 14.

“[My uncle] believed he could do something with me and I believe he could have if he had the chance, being in a whānau environment with family.”

Hohepa Taiaroa says the only time a social worker came to visit him in prison was to force him to give up his daughter.

Instead, he faced violence, abuse, and racism, at the hands of the other boys at the centre, and the house parents.

“They were the ones that were supposed to stand between you and the bulls..t and the violence in that place, but never did. They would use others for their own advantage to try and calm you down to stop you being aggressive in places like that.”

Two years later he was sent to borstal, a youth detention centre, which was meant to lift up young people, but had the opposite effect.

“It just prepared me for prison really, to be honest,” Taiaroa said.

“My anger was so strong because of the trauma that I had gone through as a child that my senses were geared up for learning how to rip people off and do things better in a criminal point of view.

“I had no other option of doing anything else, there was no other avenue.”

Years later, as he served time in Mount Crawford with three months left, a social worker came to notify him his eldest daughter was being put up for adoption.

“I said, ‘Well, hello? She’s got a father. He’s coming out soon and he’ll be ready to pick her up,’ and they said no. They put it down because I was incarcerated.

”They gave me an ultimatum - either I sign the papers now, or they’re going to take me to court and do it anyway.”

Taiaroa wept silently as he told the Commission he signed on the condition her adoptive parents taught her reo Māori, an opportunity he never had, and smiled at her as she sat behind the camera in support of her father who she had reunited with at 12 years old.

Today, he had moved on from his anger and reconnected with his whānau, iwi and Māoritanga, but if the state had chosen to support others like him who were struggling, rather than lock them up, his life would be unrecognisable.

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“I want my name back,” he said when asked what redress looked like for him. “I’m not a number.

“If we had iwi involvement in these situations and if we had whānau involvement in these situations it would help bring that person out and help them have better choices.

“This is a whānau thing. You say that it’s an individual thing, that’s why we have problems today with our whānau. When one hurts, we all hurt.

“We need our Government to help us as an iwi, we need that treaty partner. Māori should help Māori.”

The hearing continues.