The Post: The poverty pipeline which delivers the victims of abuse in care

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The Royal Commission’s report into the abuse of children in state and church care is a landmark moment of accountability: an event during which powerful institutions finally acknowledged harm done. That’s its past-facing component.

Real accountability, however, also faces forward. Apologies, support and financial redress for victims must follow. And we, as a country, must ensure such evils are never visited again upon the vulnerable.

That is largely a question of what goes on inside so-called “care” institutions. But we should also consider why so many children come to be in care in the first place.

That pipeline has been fed by racism, and by a culture of separating children from their families instead of supporting those whānau to heal. Another central force, though, is poverty.

In 2019, researcher Angie Wilkinson and I wrote a background report for the Royal Commission in which we compared family stress to cracks in a dam, building up slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, until the pressure forces a break. A family becomes unable to cope; their home stops being a safe environment.

These stresses are felt in multiple ways. Poorer parents, unable to afford basic items like food and clothing, warm housing and school supplies, may feel they are failing. This stress can worsen their anxiety, depression and anger, compromising their ability to be patient with their children or invest in them emotionally.

Struggling constantly to pay bills and deal with unexpected costs, parents may end up withdrawing attention from their offspring. Erratic or unsociable working hours, including night shifts, make parenting harder still.

Families living under severe financial pressure, surrounded by others in similar hardship, may struggle to forge the social connections that could have buoyed them up in tough times. It’s no surprise, then, that New Zealand researchers have found poverty can “sap parental energy, undermine parental sense of competence, and reduce parental sense of control”. And this stress and anxiety is often absorbed by the children themselves.

As well as poverty, there’s inequality. In societies with sweeping disparities of wealth, poorer families feel themselves to be at the bottom of a steep hierarchy, leaving them with stigma, a loss of control over their lives and psychosocial stress. This has been strongly linked to heart disease and other stress-related health conditions.

Once again, it’s no surprise that global research consistently finds a close connection between poverty, inequality and the maltreatment of children. One British academic, Paul Bywaters, notes that deprivation is “the largest factor explaining major differences [from area to area] in key aspects of child welfare, such as the proportion of children entering the care system”.

Here in New Zealand, we know that “substantiation” – an official finding that abuse has occurred – is 13 times more common in the poorest fifth of neighbourhoods than in the richest fifth. That can occur because of official bias against certain communities. But it also points to the role of poverty.

Māori children, experiencing both racism and disproportionate rates of poverty, have been hit hard by every aspect of the system. In 2019, they made up around two-thirds of all care placements.

And the whole system is, in many senses, a depressing downward spiral. According to a 1999 paper by Moana Jackson, an estimated 85-90% of Mongrel Mob and Black Power members had once been wards of the state.

In that environment, they faced, to quote Mongrel Mob founding member Gary Gerbes, “sexual abuse by the people that ran the place [and] absolutely shocking violence... Those places destroyed our f...in’ heads, man”.

As cited in Jarrod Gilbert’s book Patched, Gerbes’ response was to say, “F... the system - if that is the way they are going to treat us, then we will treat them the same way. We are going to give them what they gave us - and [via the Mongrel Mob] they got it alright.”

Breaking that ugly cycle is colossally complex. But tackling deprivation could play a part. Bywaters’ work shows that lifting families out of poverty has a “statistically significant” impact on rates of child abuse and neglect. American researchers Lindsey Rose Bullinger and Kerri Raissian, meanwhile, estimate that a $1 increase in the minimum wage leads to a near-10% decline in reports of neglect.

All the more reason to worry, then, that it emerged this week that National had quietly downgraded its ambitions for reducing child poverty. Labour’s target had been to reduce material hardship rates from the 13.3% it inherited in 2017 to just 9% this year.

Admittedly it failed: the rate last year was 12.5%, owing to the cost-of-living crisis, and has probably risen since. But National’s new target is for 11% of children to still be in hardship in three years’ time. That’s twice the rate of some European countries.

It’s an unacceptably low level of ambition – and one that will, alas, keep the pipeline of care placements flowing freely.