Broken, beaten, and bred for gangs — state care abuse survivor's struggle to break the cycle
Monday, 14 March 2022
The system that was designed to be a parent stole the childhood and future of Paora Sweeney.
Happy, healthy, and surrounded by whānau until the 1970s, the potential of Sweeney’s life was taken from him the moment the state became his guardian at 11 years old.
In three months Sweeney (Ngāti Porou) lost his mother in a car crash and his father to a stroke, changing the course of his life forever, he told the Abuse in Care Royal Commission on the second week of its inquiry for Māori.
“We had a fantastic home life,” Sweeney said. “We were very poor people, but we didn’t know that. Dad didn’t swear or raise his voice to us, he never raised a hand to us. We loved our dad, loved our mum, we were just a happy family.”
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His three sisters and four brothers were separated and Sweeney found himself in a home with his 6-year-old brother. It didn’t take long before Sweeney heard screams as the woman whipped at his brother’s legs.
Sweeney defended him, attacking the woman, but the threat that her husband would return and kill Sweeney forced him to abandon his brother.
“I took him to the gate because I was going to run away with him, but then I didn’t know where to go.
“I had to leave him at the house knowing those people are hitting him. So I put him down at the gate. I could hear him screaming as I was walking up the road.”
Not yet a teenager, and his life had become one of survival.
It led him to homelessness, prison, the Mongrel Mob, and ultimately to become an advocate for others whose paths were set by Social Welfare, he told the commission.
Flanked by his son and sister, Sweeney described how he had been running from the trauma of the abuse he suffered as he bounced around family homes, boarding school, foster care, detention centres, Hokio Beach School, Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre, borstal, and prison – all before he was 18.
After leaving his brother, he was picked up by Social Welfare and sent to Hamilton's Melville Boys’ Home. Sweeney was quiet, the loss of his whānau weighing on his young heart.
“I wasn’t talking and I think [the staff] thought I was being cheeky, so they’d give me a slap or grab my hair. I just think I missed my mum.”
Struggling to cope, Sweeney ran away from the house masters of Melville and boarding school, which he had won a scholarship to, before he was placed in a Taumarunui foster home at 12.
His new “mother” sexually assaulted him.
Again, Sweeney left, choosing to live on the streets near the Tūrangi urupā where his parents were buried.
“I would make huts down by the urupā so I could see my parents there.
“Soon I started taking alcohol and I started drinking myself into another world.”
Everything he had known was lost to him, but the good memories he had from his childhood remained as his first Christmas without his whānau arrived.
“I made a little hut next to the fence [of my family home] so that when Santa Claus would come he would see me in that little hut and give me a present in the morning.
“But when I woke up in the morning he didn't come, and that just devastated me.”
To eat and sleep, Sweeney would break in to buildings, but soon he was caught and sentenced to protective custody, spending a week at Hokio Boys’ Home before moving to Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre – still aged 12.
That’s where he learnt about survival of the fittest, and education wasn’t given a second thought. The hierarchy of boys relied on your ability to beat another into submission – and the staff, mainly Pākehā, at the centres didn’t step in.
“Everywhere we went it’s mostly Māori people, and everywhere we went it’s Pākehā people in charge.
“When I was a little kid I thought Pākehā people ruled the world.”
He earned his crown as the top dog at Kohitere after cracking another boy’s skull. After that the only abuse he had to worry about was from those trying to take his title.
“You just had to survive it,” Sweeney said.
“The gangs might have started 10 years before this, but this was the breeding ground.
“All those people that I’d been in the gangs with at Kohitere, I met them in prison my whole life. I should have been meeting them in university and polytech.
“If Social Welfare were doing what they were meant to be doing, I shouldn’t have gone to prison. I don’t think I’m that dumb. I could have made something of my life.”
Sweeney’s life became fuelled by drugs, alcohol, and the Mongrel Mob’s Hamilton Chapter which he established at 17 after he was released from Kohitere.
But as the mamae (pain) of his past continued to fester in his heart, sentences to institutions continued to plague his life.
He started to become free of the hurt once the state threatened to take his children away in 2001.
Fearful their lives would become a mirror of his if the social welfare system, by then known as CYFS, became their parents, he fought to be the father they needed to end the cycle of abuse in a single generation.
It's been 31 years since he made that change, and he’s proud of his whānau, but his criminal record is a tether to his past he can’t escape, causing him to lose jobs and struggle to maintain a career – unlike the Crown, Sweeney said.
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“For 31 years I was doing all sorts of crazy stuff – drugs, alcohol, gangs, prison – I was off the rails.
“Now it’s been 31 years I haven't offended, I haven't had drugs, alcohol, tobacco, whatever, and when I look at that I think, which is the more important record here?
“This record that I got, I got because of my life in the welfare.
“Social Welfare have been able to change their name, they cause all sorts of craziness all sorts of rubbish, abuse people, and then they change their name. I can’t change my name.”
The hearing continues.