Crime ends young girl's childhood

First love turned bad for two Te Puke 13-year-olds subjected to a shocking sexual attack. WARREN GAMBLE talks to a teenager whose abuse drove her out of town.

Ten months after an attack which ended her childhood, she seems like an ordinary teenager. Fourteen-year-old Debbie (not her real name) laughs often with her parents, jokes about her mother's cooking and gets excited about learning Japanese and the bass guitar.

But the events of a fine Saturday afternoon last November in Te Puke, the Bay of Plenty kiwifruit town with its welcoming "Get A Slice of Happiness" sign, still cast shadows which chase away her natural exuberance.

It was a Saturday afternoon, Debbie's first real date, an afternoon of video games and a walk to nearby Jamieson Oval, 100m from the police station and 200m from her home.

She and her 13-year-old boyfriend were supposed to have gone to the movies, but did not want to see Pokemon. Instead they were sitting, sipping softdrinks and chatting in the rundown, wooden grandstand when four girls and an 11-year-old boy came upon them. The group had been drinking vodka they said had been bought by an adult at a nearby liquor store and were in aggressive moods.

Their ringleader, a 14-year-old girl we will call Sharon, accused Debbie of going out with one of her former boyfriends. She had met Sharon only once before and says while one of the boys she named had asked her out, she turned him down.

But that did not stop the group. The pair were first forced into a small space under the grandstand steps where Debbie had her jewellery ripped off her and was made to drink vodka. Then, after her would-be boyfriend tried to run off, they were both dragged to a disused scoreboard building at the other end of the ground.

On a floor barely a metre wide, littered with concrete rubble, cigarette packets, beer labels and an empty rum bottle, the pair were forced to strip, simulate sex and then made to perform other sexual indecencies. When Debbie tried to resist, a highly agitated Sharon used a craft knife to cut her own arms and threatened to kill her.

The abuse only stopped when the group were disturbed by a passerby.

"I was feeling sick, sore, tired and scared. I cried the whole time," Debbie later told a court hearing.

Her boyfriend testified: "I was sort of crying and sort of trying to be brave."

But the pain was not over. The pair were obliged to give evidence in the case against the eldest offender, 18-year-old Paula Quinlyn Ahomiro. She was the only one of the group who can be named. The others were given name suppression, largely because of their ages. Ahomiro initially denied the charges, but pleaded guilty at her trial to assault and kidnapping and was sentenced this month to two years' prison.

Two of the group, the 11-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, were too young to go to court, while a 16-year-old girl received a suspended sentence. Sharon was jailed for three years on charges including sexual violation, attempted rape and kidnapping.

Experienced police investigating the attack say they have never encountered anything like it. The offenders had not given reasons, and there was no indication it was racially motivated - the offenders were Maori, the victims both Pakeha.

"There is still a question mark about what made five kids do this to two 13-year-old innocent bystanders," says Te Puke youth aid officer Shane Blanchard. "It's totally unbelievable that it occurred."

Constable Blanchard said Te Puke's youth problems were no different from any other place in New Zealand - boredom leading to graffiti, shoplifting, alcohol and drug abuse. "That some of our local kids could do this to local kids - it did send shockwaves through the community, and I certainly hope we will never see anything like it again."

At the kitchen table of her family's temporary home in a North Island city, Debbie says she has tried hard to put the attack behind her. "But every now and then it just pops up in my head and says, 'Hello, I'm here.' I'm like, 'No, go away, I don't want you,' but it's still in there."

In the first weeks after the attack she took a personal alarm wherever she went, even if it was for a walk on the driveway. But no alarm could stop the emotional persecution which started within hours of the attack, and eventually drove the family out of Te Puke. Only one of the attackers, the 16-year-old girl, had seemed genuinely sorry, the others appeared smug, and did not seem to care what they had done. Some treated it as a joke.

The identity of those involved was soon known all over town - some of the offenders even boasted about their deeds in a takeaway shop after the incident. One of the shop's staff was Debbie's cousin. On her first day back at school after a week off, Debbie was called a slut by some of her classmates. Later she was threatened with a hiding by other youngsters if she did not tell them the gory details.

And incredibly, some of the offenders, including Sharon who was on bail and the young boy who was being dealt with by youth aid, were still hassling her on the streets of Te Puke weeks afterwards. Debbie recalls one incident where the boy and a group of his friends called out for her to come over and perform more indecencies.

In the end the family, also fearful of a possible connection between some of the offenders and the local Mongrel Mob gang, decided to move to Tauranga. This month they have shifted again, this time to a smaller town, after discovering relatives of the offenders were living in their Tauranga neighbourhood.

For Debbie, the outward legacy of her first disastrous date is failing school grades, trouble concentrating and difficulty getting to sleep. "Instead of sleeping I would lie there and lie there," she says. "Now I can get to sleep but I have to have my radio on or something."

Otherwise, she seems in remarkable spirits, chatting brightly about her future as a Japanese translator in the tourism industry and getting good enough on the guitar to play in a band. She even gets peeved at her mother for not being allowed another boyfriend.

Only when asked about her feelings for the offenders does she stumble. She agrees to being angry, but cannot describe what else she feels. "I don't know how to put it".

Debbie, the eldest of three sisters, comes from a working-class family, her father is a truck driver, her mother a former sewing machinist. The family had moved to Te Puke only a month before the attack to make a fresh start and save money by staying in a caravan at a relative's house.

Her mother says that fateful Saturday afternoon last November was the first time they had allowed Debbie out on a proper date.

"It was a time when we thought we can put a little trust in her because, as she's always been taught, after 5 o'clock you're not allowed out of our gate. I'm very particular about where the kids go. So we thought we would put our trust in them to be at the pictures or at spacies.

"We knew the pictures would be out at four so we thought we would walk down and meet them. Of course, we get down there, we're waiting, waiting and no sign of them, and we happened to look up and see them going past in a police car."

Debbie's father says he thinks she has coped as well as she has because they made a pact to face the consequences head-on. "We decided we were never going to be victims and let her suffer the rest of her life." As a result, Debbie faced her attackers at family group conferences, had read the newspaper accounts and watched the television coverage.

On the other hand, says her father, the boy's family tried a different approach, avoiding anything to do with the incident, and he did not seem to be coping as well. Debbie has talked to him several times since, but not for long, and there had been no recent contact. Debbie's father says the boy blamed himself for failing to protect her, despite their assurances that there was nothing he could do against a group of bigger girls armed with a knife.

Another downside for Debbie and her family was the media attention given to Sharon when she was jailed in Mt Eden for several days before being shifted to the Kingslea Centre for youth offenders in Christchurch. As Debbie's father pointed out, the attention was focused on Sharon - her upbringing and the injustice of being detained in an adult's prison - rather than on her crimes and the impact of her abuse on his daughter and her friend.

"If you do a serious crime you should do the time because they still know right from wrong," he says.

Says Debbie's mother: "The way we look at it, what happened in their childhood has nothing to do with the attack itself."

Sharon, who was known to the police, came from a troubled background. Her 61-year-old grandmother, who lives in Te Puke, says she took over care of the girl when she was only two weeks old because her mother was only 15. "She was a nice baby, and she was still a nice girl."

The grandmother rejects claims that Sharon was physically or sexually abused. "No, no, it's all lies." She also insists that although Sharon's teachers reported she was a bully at school, "she hasn't got a temper or anything ... at the moment I'm still thinking where did she go wrong?"

Sharon's lawyer, Craig Horsley, on the other hand, told the court during her sentencing that she had missed out on love, nurturing, protection and care, and her psychological and sexual safety had been neglected.

"What she did might only have been a reflection of the drug and alcohol abuse, violence and neglect she had witnessed throughout her life and seen as normal and acceptable."

He said there had been four notifications about her to the Children and Young Persons Service, but none were followed up.

Horsley told the Weekend Herald that he believed the attack was a case of bullying gone too far, a case of children finding the meanest thing they could do.

After intermediate school Sharon was a truant for most of the next two years. Only after the attack, when she was enrolled at an alternative training centre for truant or suspended students, did she begin performing well, possibly for the first time.

Her grandmother says Sharon writes and rings her from the Christchurch centre and is doing well. She wants to return to Te Puke to work in the kiwifruit industry: "She will be all right," says the grandmother. "She's very easy to please."

As Horsley says, ironically this could be Sharon's big chance. She could benefit from her time at Kingslea with its formal and lifestyle education programmes.

"Without this opportunity the prognosis would be pretty bleak, but at least now she has been given a chance. Whether she takes it, one certainly hopes so."

Debbie's mother can find the charity to hope so, too, but doubts whether Sharon can change. "In some ways I'm glad they have got their just deserts. But I'm just hoping the system doesn't fail the younger ones."

Debbie, who has just started her third school in a year, is more animated talking about feeding new calves on a nearby farm than the events of last November. She is still a teenager, but with a sense of innocence lost. "Now I realise that there is no such thing as 'it will never happen' because it could happen."

When the Weekend Herald visited Jamieson Oval this month, a teenage girl wagging school and drinking with friends in the grandstand gave some insight into why the victims got such a hard time from their classmates and peers.

"That's how it works round here," she said. "If something bad happens you keep it to yourself.

"You just don't nark."