It is my experience that this occurred across all societal groups, the poor and the rich. Income is no arbiter on who becomes a child beater and the reasons are several, from just being unable to cope with children to being raised as a beaten child, not knowing any different.
Thankfully not all beaten children grow into child beaters. If that was the case, most children at school prior to 1987 in New Zealand would be child beaters as adults; they are most certainly not.
Up until 1987, it was legal for a child to be beaten by a teacher in New Zealand schools. Thankfully, by then it was a dying art in most schools but still a tool, literally, in the cupboard to be brought out on occasions.
Ah, the sound of bamboo on skinny bottoms still brings a tear to my eye and not in a nostalgic way. I always wondered why I got caned at school when my parents hardly ever used physical chastisement.
Many children grow up with violence in the home, either between their caregivers or against them or both. It is intergenerational in some families; accepted behaviour despite Sue Bradford's law change in 2007, when the legal defence of reasonable force to correct a child's behaviour was abolished.
Despite the rhetoric at the time, this probably meant little to most families who are frankly strangers to child violence. They love their children and are wise enough to use other methods of behaviour control. Sadly, it also meant little to those families where violence is endemic, a much harder problem to solve.
So children still get beaten, sometimes to death. Various studies done over differing periods of time show shocking child death rates in New Zealand. For example, between 2007 and 2016 61 children were homicide victims in New Zealand. In 2016 a child's life ended at the hands of another human being every five weeks in New Zealand.
Violence is just part of much of our society so it is not unusual to see that it permeated state care and religious institutions for years. Growing up near one of the most infamous Child Welfare boys' homes in the country, I always knew that their lives were miserable. It was used sometimes by parents as a threat to stop bad behaviour – "You'll end up in Epuni".
We only had to see the boys from the home at our local baths, predominately Māori, dressed in the institution's uniform of sorts and kept together well away from other children by a couple of supervisors. There was no joy in the group, no fun, no madcap antics that are seen at swimming pools. They were shuffled in, stayed a while, and shuffled out. No one interacted with them; they were bad boys and probably pretty tough.
Later in life as a cop, I would catch escapees from these institutions, young 11 to 14-year-olds. Just kids. We would hand them back to their supervisors probably to be punished under the institution's rules. It worried us at times when the attitude of some of the staff towards the boys was somewhat threatening. I am sure not all staff were like that.
I spent six weeks in state care as an 8-year-old at Health Camp. I do not recall any violence from the staff apart from a strange habit of dragging naughty boys from the boys' dormitory to the girls' dormitory to have their pants pulled down in front of the girls for some reason. Very strange.
The punishment system normally used was writing lines. I got a fair bit of practice at writing while I was there, being a gobby, defiant little kid at times. We attended school there but the teacher was a great person who taught right across the different classes in one room. My memories are mainly happy ones from my time there. I was a handful at times though, I concede that.
Will this Inquiry bring change to our society? Not sure, hope so.
