Family stuck in cycle of violence

When a seriously damaged sex offender was due to be released from jail last year, his mother grew anxious. She knew he had not got the counselling he needed in jail.

And sure enough, two months to the day after his release, another young girl paid the price.

All her life, the mother has fought against a stain in the family line which saw her own father abuse her and her siblings, and her husband jailed for murdering a woman.

But our justice system has proved better at locking up each generation of offenders than at healing them to stop the cycle being perpetuated.

The two specialist child sex offender units at Paremoremo and Christchurch prisons are well regarded, but they treat a total of only 80 people a year out of the 250 child sex offenders released annually.

The woman's son Jack (not his real name), now 32, did not volunteer for the units. But his mother knew he needed help. When he was 15, she found out that her father had abused him as a young child.

"Then at the time I stepped out to get this boy some help when he was 15, his father ended up beating his son up, and we ended up being in a refuge," she says.

"By the time we came back, his father had killed the lady he was with right in front of Jack. So Jack has been abused in every form - mentally, physically, the whole works."

As a child, she says, his father belittled him. It didn't matter what Jack tried to do, it wasn't good enough. He had no confidence.

By 19, he was in jail for assault. He was jailed again for molesting, and then for more serious crimes. "The longest time he had out was when he lasted close to possibly a year," his mother says.

Six years ago, his partner left him and took their two young children to live with Jack's mother.

One night, Jack talked his partner into coming back to his house. In the early hours of the morning, she told him she had had sex with his father.

"That set the whole thing off," his mother says. "From then till I came down about 12.30 the next day, he continually did nasty things to her. It wasn't till I got there that she was able to escape from the situation.

"Jack was floating in and out of himself. It took him a while to realise that it was me holding and shaking him. His whole body just went into a slump. I have never seen such a shattered person in all my days."

The mother herself "went into shock" when she realised what her husband, and then her son, had done. But she had the two children with her and had to keep going.

Jack spent the next six years in jail. He did an intensive anti-violence programme, but as the time for his release approached, his mother worried that he still had not dealt with his traumas.

"I said I felt that Jack really needed psychological help. They didn't give me any indication that that had been offered to him. He needed in-depth counselling, one to one, rather than this group stuff."

Despite her worries, Jack was released. A Christian agency found him a place to live with other ex-prisoners. He wanted to work, but he had to wait to attend a programme as a condition of his parole.

"Things didn't move fast enough," his mother says. "He would be so bored saying, 'I need a job'."

One weekend he went out nightclubbing. On his way home, he invited himself in to a party and went into a young girl's bedroom.

"It was like I could see myself there, and it's like I'm fighting so hard not to do the wrong thing," he told his mother later.

So he is back in jail. His mother is now worried about his young son, Jason, who she thinks has been abused. But she has still not given up. Perhaps, this time around, the jail system will finally give her son the treatment he needs.