State care has key role in creating violent gang members – submission

An overwhelming number of New Zealand's gang members endured violent and often sexual abuse as youths in state welfare institutions, according to a submission recently presented to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. With the Commission’s final report made public today, Aaron Smale reports on the glaring link between gang membership and state care.

There was a deathly silence. About forty Māori men, all of them gang members, had gathered at a marae. The silence wasn’t hostility, it was vulnerability. Because these men had been silenced since childhood and didn’t know how to articulate the trauma that had dominated their lives ever since. They didn’t know what to say in response to someone acknowledging, even obliquely, what had happened to them.

But that vulnerability stood in sharp contrast to how these men would be perceived by most New Zealanders. They were members of our most feared gangs: Mongrel Mob. Black Power. Tribesmen. Nomads.

A haka performed by inmates at Hawke's Bay Regoinal Prison. Photo: Aaron Smale (Source: Supplied)

But once, before they’d donned those patches and facial tattoos, they were children.

I’d been invited to this hui which took place near Featherston in 2017 and when I got there I was asked to speak about the recent stories I’d done on the abuse of children in state custody. Most of those I was talking to knew far more about the subject than I did.

After meandering around for a bit I pointed out that if they’d gone through state welfare institutions, the state was their parent. It was part of their whakapapa.

That’s when the silence got even thicker.

When researching previous stories, I’d heard repeatedly of the link between welfare institutions, like Kohitere and Hokio in Levin, where I live, and the high numbers of Māori in both gangs and prisons. What I was wanting to try and understand was, how deep was that connection?

What I’ve found in the eight years since is that it’s not just a connection but a seamless whole.

The law-breaking law makers

The abuse in those institutions was one part of the story. The other part was the silencing, another form of abuse. Perpetrators silence their victims, and the state has tens of thousands of victims.

In past decades, members of the Crown have carried out an ongoing and sophisticated denial that has indirectly cost the taxpayer tens of millions (in bureaucrats, lawyers and compensation) and the victims a life of carrying horrific trauma inflicted on them when they were children, while being blamed for the impacts it has had on them.

The law-maker has been breaking the law, frequently placing children in the care of paedophiles and violent abusers and covering up its crimes, for decades.

The now abandoned Kohitere Boys' Training Centre, Levin, holds grim memories for former residents. Photo: Aaron Smale (Source: Supplied)

I didn’t “break” the story. It had been hiding in plain sight for decades, periodically rearing its head in public and media discourse, only to be quietened down again. The tactics in silencing the victims had been so successful that they led to the victims effectively silencing themselves.

Until now. Today the final report from the five-and-a-half-year Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care will be tabled in parliament. It documents the widespread abuse of children in the custody of the state for more than 50 years. It will also document the efforts of Crown agencies and officials to minimise and deny decades of allegations.

Albie Epere's story

One of those who contributed to the Inquiry being held in the first place was Albie Epere from the Black Power. At the hui I attended in 2017 he spoke to me on the record, opening up a space for others to talk, even among themselves.

Albie Epere, photograhed by Aaron Smale.

Epere’s breaking of that silence added to the momentum building around Aotearoa which ultimately resulted in the Royal Commission of Inquiry. Thousands of victims have given evidence in private and in public hearings since 2018.

As part of the inquiry, gang leaders organised a hui late last year for gang members to talk about their abuse. Out of that hui came a submission, presented to the Royal Commission last month.

What Epere told me in Featherston seven years ago I’ve heard dozens of times since, with slight variations, and it was echoed in the gang report: that gang members had often ended up in state care as children for trivial reasons but then spent years experiencing violence and often sexual abuse. Even those who were placed in care due to serious harm in their families were then subjected to worse by the state.

The submission from gang members fed into today's released report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. (Source: 1News)

'We learned to take a hiding — and to give one'

"Home wasn't bad,” Epere told me in a previous interview. “My mum and my dad worked. I think they looked after us reasonably well. For me I just wanted to be with my brother. That's how I ended up being in the boys’ homes, I just kept running away so I could.

"Going through the boys' homes and that, we were accustomed to violence. It was either perpetrated on us, or we perpetrated it on someone else.

"I took a lot of bashings in there from staff. We used to run away all the time and they'd put us in the secure block, but before they put us in the secure block they used to bash us. It became normal for us. So we used to run away more.

"After I got out of those places you could sit there and watch somebody get a hiding and you would think nothing about it. But anybody else that would be looking at it, that had never seen violence in their life or hadn't had it in their life, they'd freak out... These were the things we learnt when we were younger, how to take a hiding and how to give a hiding.”

Albie Epere photograhed by Aaron Smale. (Source: Supplied)

For young men, leaving state institutions, cut off from their families and accustomed to a culture of violence and abuse, it was natural to look for a place to belong.

"Once you get separated from everything, you start looking for something. Something to connect to, something to belong to.”

'A nonchalant wickedness'

While the abuse suffered in state institutions by Pākehā kids is every bit as bad, the disproportionate number of Māori children affected is impossible to ignore. By the 1970s the numbers of Māori in welfare institutions were 70 to 80% in some institutions.

The removal of indigenous children from their families in other colonised countries is well-known, but New Zealand has yet to have a reckoning with the reality of its own version of this practice, or be exposed to international awareness and shame. Australia has its Stolen Generations, Canada and the US have their indigenous residential schools. But New Zealand’s narrative in this vein is little known.

Peter Read is the historian who coined the term Stolen Generations. I interviewed him in 2017 and he said it wasn’t until he started looking into the government archives that he realised the individual stories were part of something bigger, something he describes in one of his books as “nonchalant wickedness”.

After spending eight years going through files here I’d say that’s an accurate description of what has happened in New Zealand.

New Zealand's hidden shame

The Royal Commission released an interim report that estimates that 258,000 children went through the state welfare system between 1950 and 2019. The peak was in the 1970s at around 56,000 children (incidentally, this is the period when most of the senior gang members went through). While the Royal Commission has acknowledged that the data is incomplete and definitions of abuse contested, it has estimated that up to 40 percent of these children were abused.

The majority of these children were Māori, even though Māori made up around 12 percent of the population. And, given our small population, the picture that emerges is that New Zealand’s history of removing indigenous children from their family environments and inflicting abuse on them is at least as shameful as that of Canada or Australia.

Yet the staggering figures that have emerged over the past decade, not just of the more than 250,000 who went through state care, but the percentage of those who suffered abuse and the disproportionate numbers of Māori have rarely been included in the public conversations about gangs.

Jarrod Gilbert is a criminologist at Canterbury University and author of Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand, which came just before Stanley’s book and only mentions the welfare homes in one paragraph. Gilbert’s work on gangs started with motorcycle gangs which were predominantly white. While his book gives a useful overview, it fails to account for the predominance of Māori in gangs and talks in generalisations, if at all, about Māori history and how institutional and societal racism led to the high numbers of Māori children in the welfare system.

Sociologist and author Jarrod Gilbert (Source: TVNZ)

Urbanisation is often blamed for the emergence of ethnic gangs, with the implication that Māori were a simple, rural people who couldn’t cope with the sophistication of urban life. In fact, many of the male adults who moved to the cities in the post-war period were veterans of the famed 28th Māori Battalion who had fought with distinction in WWII. Many became fluent in Italian during that time and were hardly the same kids that they were when they left New Zealand.

But many also came back carrying a heavy burden of trauma and found themselves still treated as second-class citizens in the country they’d served. Their children often suffered the consequences. (A theory I’ve heard is that this led to a hatred for what their fathers stood for and the Nazi slogans and symbols that became a part of Mongrel Mob culture.) It was often the kids of these veterans who ended up in state-run welfare.

The Māori majority in these institutions was well entrenched by the late '60s. This contrasts with virtually no Māori in such institutions prior to WWII when Māori lived in rural enclaves out of the sight and mind of the state.

It was the 2016 book by British criminologist Elizabeth Stanley, The Road to Hell: State Violence Against Children in Postwar New Zealand that led me to try and understand the connection between the welfare institutions and gangs. I’d heard about the link when working on a story about the high numbers of Māori in prison.

A haka at Hawke's Bay Regional Prison. Photo: Aaron Smale (Source: Supplied)

Physical, psychological and sexual crimes

The physical violence endured in state care was only part of it. There was also the psychological violence. At Kohitere and many of the other institutions solitary confinement was routine, sometimes for months. In one file I have seen a 14-year-old boy, who had already been through horrific abuse in both his home and institutions, spent a total of 321 days in solitary confinement during his two years at Kohitere in the late 1980s. One stint was three months, followed shortly after by a stint of nearly five months. He was then sent to a boot-camp program at one of the country’s army bases where he and other children had live rounds and artillery fired over their heads. He is now in jail serving what may turn out to be a lifelong sentence.

And then there’s the sexual violence.

Judge Carolyn Henwood was asked to chair a panel that heard from victims before the Royal Commission was established. The panel heard from more than 1100 victims over seven years. “We were so astounded, dumbfounded you might say,”says Henwood. “The degree of physical violence, just how harsh it was. Nobody came about trivial things. When we’re talking about violence, we’re talking about beatings, punchings, whacking with pieces of wood, jug cords, really extreme violence.

“Then there was sexual abuse. We thought it would be rape of girls, of which there was a lot, hundreds. With the men, however, exactly the same.”

Victims I have spoken to have talked me through all the institutions they went through and named two to three staff in each who had raped or sexually abused them. Thousands of children would have passed through those same institutions. Lawyer Sonja Cooper has multiple clients who name the same perpetrators.

Alf's story

One of their victims was former Mongrel Mob member Alf, who I spoke to for an in-depth investigation into Lake Alice psychiatric hospital. Lake Alice was for criminally insane adults but it hosted an adolescent unit in the 1970s run by the now notorious Dr Selwyn Leeks.

Lake Alice psychiatrist Dr Selwyn Leeks. (Source: 1News)

Alf’s pathway into gangs was paved by the abuse and violence he experienced in several state institutions. He was initially sent to Epuni Boys Home after his mother died: “I was locked up all the time because I was running away all the time. Then I went to Holdsworth where I met Drake. He was sexually abusing me.”

It was the late John Drake, now recognised as a paedophile with multiple victims over decades, who sent Alf to Lake Alice. He was ten. “I got shoved in villa eight with the most looniest patients in maximum security. I was put in a strait jacket in a padded cell. It was unbelievable, no clothes on. All night and all day for about two days I was being called a black c***, a little black c***, they said they were going to put me down with the mental patients and I’d be raped. I was terrified. Then I was knocked out by pills. Every time I came around from being knocked out in villa eight, there was a male nurse. He was another child molester. I woke up all drugged up, f***, I’ve got no clothes on, he’s holding my f***en hand. He’d put more pills in me and I’d be knocked out. For a good two weeks I was drugged out. He could have been [raping] me and everything and I wouldn’t know.

“I had ECT, I know exactly what that’s all about. F*** it was the worst pain.”

Lake Alice Hospital was a rural psychiatric facility in Lake Alice, Manawatū-Whanganui. (Source: 1News)

Investigations into Lake Alice have revealed that a nurse called Howard Lawrence, now deceased, was accused not just of raping children but placing them in one of the adult units, Villa 8, where they were raped by criminally insane adults. Documentary evidence corroborates these allegations, both in victim files and in correspondence between staff, which indicates that both the head of mental health and the superintendent of Lake Alice were aware of the situation.

Legacy of anger

Alf later joined the Mongrel Mob and says the abuse he’d experienced as a child left him with a rage that even his fellow Mobsters found alarming.

“I used to have rages where I’d black out when I had fights. I’d come to after the fights, ‘f***, what happened?’ I couldn’t remember myself. I wouldn’t tell people. People would say, ‘F***, Alf, you were unreal, you were doing this and doing that,’... I just went along with it, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, of course’. But really I didn’t remember one thing. It scared me. I could kill someone or get killed and not even know. But I believe that was from the treatment that happened to me. People react differently. Some people become drug addicts or commit suicide. I had rage. I never got it sorted until I was in my 40s.”

Alf’s observations that violence, drugs and suicide are common among victims is unfortunately correct.

The Australian Royal Commission into sexual abuse found that it takes, on average, 22 years for victims of sexual abuse to come forward, if they speak at all. Many don’t. From my observation I’d say it is even more difficult for Māori men.

And particularly difficult for anyone used to being disbelieved. In many of the state care files I’ve seen it was the perpetrator who was writing assessments of the children he was abusing. It’s as if the abusers were carrying out a pre-emptive strike on the child’s credibility – etching labels into the official record, calling them liars, sticking psuedo-psychological descriptions on them – so that in the event of the child making allegations they could easily be dismissed.

I’ve got a file on Hokio boys’ home which names kids who were given powerful anti-psychotic drugs by Dr Selwyn Leeks before his role at Lake Alice. I know from other accounts that kids were often given these drugs to subdue them after they had run away. They were often fleeing paedophiles but were taken back to the institutions by the police.

The late Dr Selwyn Leeks, left, with journalist Ian Sinclair on a hidden camera planted by TVNZ's Sunday programme in 2007. (Source: TVNZ)

One of the kids named in the Hokio file ended up in Paremoremo maximum security prison ten years later where he committed suicide.

Government agencies have known about these connections for decades. A report by the Ministry of Justice in 1981 about Paremoremo gave a profile of inmates that made up the population. The prison had only been operating for about 10 years by that stage but already a clear pattern had emerged.

“Many have spent a large proportion of their lives in state-run institutions and some have experienced the whole gamut of social welfare, penal and psychiatric institutions. A not unfamiliar pattern is for an individual to have progressed through the social welfare system to Kohitere Boys Training Centre, from there to borstal, then one or more short prison sentences in lower security prisons before arriving in maximum security having been sentenced to a major term of imprisonment for a serious offence. Along the way he may well have spent time in a psychiatric hospital for either evaluation prior to trial or as the result of a crisis in prison.”

One who has done more than any other person to throw light on the failures of the criminal justice system and its connections to state welfare was lawyer and author Moana Jackson, who died in 2022. In a paper he wrote in 1999 he estimated that 85% of the Mongrel Mob and 88% of Black Power members had been state wards.

The late Moana Jackson CRSNZ (Source: TVNZ)

Police failing victims

The police have often failed to properly investigate when state abuse victims have made complaints about being raped and sexually abused as children by state employees.

Alf made a criminal complaint in 2007 about John Drake, the man who’d sent him to Lake Alice as a 10-year-old and who also raped him as a child. Drake worked in the welfare system for around 20 years and 14 people had filed civil claims against the state alleging Drake had raped and sexually abused them.

However the police investigation into Alf’s complaint could barely be called an investigation at all. The complaint languished for more than a year during which time Drake became terminally ill and died.

New Zealand’s shameful history of abuse in state care involves an estimated 1600 facilities (including foster homes) harbouring a wide variety of criminals. However in my years of researching this issue, Lake Alice has come to represent to me a kind of apex of both abuse and of the state’s documented efforts to ignore victims and protect perpetrators such as Dr Selwyn Leeks, John Drake and Howard Lawrence.

Crown law protected Dr Selwyn Leeks for decades before a finding by the UN that New Zealand was in breach of the Convention Against Torture forced police to reopen the case. They found Crown Law were continuing to withhold significant evidence as late as 2020.

The police had to make a formal apology to victims at the Royal Commission hearing into Lake Alice, admitting a number of failures. One was that there were more than a dozen formal complaints of sexual abuse and rape at Lake Alice that were never followed up by police.

When Justice Gallen interviewed dozens of Lake Alice victims in the early 2000s to assess their compensation claims he described what happened at the adolescent unit as “outrageous in the extreme.” He noted: “The detail associated with such accounts, together with certain other corroborative material, establishes that behaviour of this kind did occur.”

'Reporting abuse led to further abuse'

Last year’s hui between the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care and gang members was remarkable for the frankness and openness of those who attended.

Out of that meeting the submission has been compiled, with the aid of Auckland University academic Professor Tracey McIntosh. One of the consistent themes that emerged in the submission was the silencing.

The submission states: “their stories of abuse were rarely believed and routinely dismissed. In too many cases reporting abuse led to further abuse and punitive action.”

Silence has become an integral part of gang culture, the no-narking code. One member stated at the meeting: “I come from a world of no comment, you don't speak, especially to the system. All the interviews, no comment, no comment. So, for us to be here today to speak is really hard.”

Despite the difficulty, more than 400 gang survivors of abuse in state care have now spoken to the Inquiry. “The survivors represent a range of gang affiliations including (but not limited to) Mongrel Mob, Black Power, Headhunters, and King Cobras. Survivors report time in care ranging from a period of months to a period of years. In several accounts survivors describe “growing up” in state care.

“Most gang whānau describe negative and traumatic experiences with several arms of the State (not limited to the State care system itself) including Police, the Courts, and Corrections. The common element for the stories heard was how whānau were treated as if they do not matter, that they were not recognised as the children they were but treated as the criminals they were expected to become.”

Future gang connections forged

For many, the relationships they formed in welfare institutions were the basis for their relationships in gangs. One gang member stated: “Of the four boys’ homes I went to probably 85% of the boys I was in with became gang members, 5% committed suicide and the other 10% joined churches.”

The submission highlights how gangs offered a sense of camaraderie, belonging, and sometimes even reunification. “Survivors describe the excitement of joining, and how in many instances doing so meant reuniting with people they knew from State care. That detail is significant and recurs across several survivor accounts signalling that a pipeline did exist between State care and gangs.

Gangs can bring members a sense of belonging.

But that collective bonding meant much of what these men had learned as children in state institutions became the culture of the gangs they formed as adults and spilled over into their families and communities. “Several survivors describe how carers would turn to violence to impose order in the home. In turn, those survivors would utilise violence to impose order within their own gangs or whānau. That learned tendency to violence meant that the emerging gangs were quickly earning a fearsome reputation.”

The abuse they suffered as children created a hostility towards authority that persists among adult gang members to this day. “The Inquiry heard from survivors who went on to become patched members as both a ‘fuck*** you’ to the State and as a means of seeking protection from it,” read the submission.

“For many New Zealanders gangs might be understood as aggressors. In short, law-breakers. But to many of the survivors who formed gangs, or turned to them in need, the gang was just as often seen as a defence mechanism.”

Violence in state care 'the rule, not exception'

As mentioned, one gang member told the inquiry how the violence in the welfare homes was often inflicted from staff from a military background: “It was horrible sh**. Now, a lot of these guys were ex-army by the sounds of it. When I look back to it these days, I can tell the army type side of it. They must have come back from Vietnam or something like that or the Korean War. They were just really angry people there. Their anger becomes mine.”

The submission also stated that being sexually abused as children in state custody was a common experience for gang members. “A significant number of gang whānau also directly and indirectly describe traumatic sexual assaults. It is wrong to assume this violence was the exception in otherwise non-violent institutions. Survivor accounts confirm that violence was ordinary. It was the rule, not the exception in State care institutions.”

One victim describes being raped repeatedly at Epuni Boys Home: “One would hold me down on one side, one would hold me down on the other side, bend me over and, you know. Nobody believed a word I said.”

Another victim who spent time in an adult prison as a teenager describes the state he was in when he re-entered the world. “I was so angry and so full of hate that I would let it out on anybody, and anybody that was in front of me, and that included my own family, my own whānau, my wife, my kids, and I'm not talking a slap in the ears, I'm talking full-on punch, kick, all of that stuff, because I was so angry. By the time I got out of the jail mode, I never ever started talking. I actually shut up. I never had a voice because my voice were these two things here, my fists.”

It wasn’t only men who found safety in gangs. Many women who went through the welfare system felt safer with gangs than with the police. “We ain’t asking Police for help, they take us, not help us. The Mob protects us. [We] feel safe around gangs, not police,” one woman told the report.

Klare Timoti, married to a Black Power president in South Auckland, is part of a series of interviews with women affiliated with gangs, on TVNZ+. (Source: TVNZ)

One study the report quotes shows there is a direct correlation between an increase in unemployment and gang numbers. “Gang formation is an adaptation to economic and social disadvantage. In this sense, then, the gang scene does not form separate to the State. Gangs form in reaction to the State and the economic and social conditions it creates.”

The gang report concludes that the response from the Crown must start with an honest reckoning with the harm it has caused, including those who have ended up in gangs: “In moving forward, there is no easy road to help find justice for the children abused in care who later formed and joined gangs within the timeframe of 1950-1999. However, redress must start with understanding gang whānau and their world so that the state can enable the healing of gang whānau appropriately for the harms imposed upon them by the state and their agents as this report highlights.”

The harm didn’t stop in 1999

According to the government’s own monitoring agency, last year more than 500 children in the custody of the state were abused and harmed, most of them more than once. The State continues to create a pool of children who are susceptible to joining gangs.

Albie Epere opened a door for gang members and other victims to talk openly about the abuse they suffered when they were children in the custody of the state. The Royal Commission has heard from thousands of those voices and also uncovered the lengths the state went to in hiding that abuse. Its final report will include official findings built on evidence, not political rhetoric or police self-interest or headlines from media that have failed to do their job.

Will the government and government agencies listen to that evidence, to the voices of gang members like Albie Epere and the thousands like him? Or will they be silenced and ignored again and the government continue its decades-long denial and failed policies?

Aaron Smale (Ngāti Porou) is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. He has been investigating and reporting on abuse in state care for eight years.