KEY POINTS:
Auckland psychotherapist Judith Morris says society cannot expect people to "nark" on adults abusing children when everyone involved lives in fear of the abusers.
Ms Morris, who specialises in treating traumatised children, said such children and the adults around them suffer from "abuse accommodation syndrome".
"Children are quite helpless," she said. "Even the mother, the neighbours, the people who didn't manage to disclose, are helpless because they are also fearful about their own survival. The abuser will have used some kind of silencing threat. The mother and neighbours are living under this threat."
She was commenting on the tragic case of Rotorua toddler Nia Glassie, who died after being abused by her mother's 16-year-old partner Wiremu Curtis and Wiremu's brother Michael. Neighbours said they had been warned to stay away from the family because of its gang connections.
Child safety advocate Hone Kaa said New Zealanders had to "learn to nark" when they saw child abuse.
But Ms Morris said people trapped by fear did not behave rationally and often coped by pretending that what they saw was "normal". Neighbour Rawhiti Simiona told the Herald that he did not report seeing Nia hung out on a washing line because it seemed like "just your normal domestic violence".
"There is a normalisation of the whole thing that completely discounts any real sense of understanding what happened," Ms Morris said.
"People say, 'You should have narked'. I think that is a very simplistic analysis because they can't take responsibility."
She has treated many traumatised children, often referred by Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS).
She noted that the Curtis brothers' father, William Curtis, was a member of Black Power in his youth and said he was "hard" on his son Michael.
"What I feel for Wiremu and Michael Curtis is that those young men will have been subjected to tremendous abuse themselves, and ended up acting it out themselves. I think that's inevitable for anyone to be that violent and unthinking and lacking in empathy," she said.
"I think the same thing happened to the mother. Something happened so that she was able to go on and choose such problematic partners."
But she said society was still not doing enough to help abuse victims, often cancelling funding as soon as treatment reduced immediate behavioural problems but without addressing the underlying trauma.
She has been working with a 12-year-old boy who has stopped being violent and has caught up with four years of maths in two months at a residential school. But CYFS, Special Education and mental health agencies have refused to fund more psychological tests required to develop a personalised programme for him.
"The children I work with don't know how to trust adults, how to tell people about their feelings," Ms Morris said. "It takes one month for every year of their life to treat them, and then more to get them involved in learning, making friends and constructive leisure activities, but that takes time."
