"State Scanctioned Abuse" of NZ Children, with different yardsticks for Maori/Pasifika and White Middle Class

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Taken By The State

Child uplifts: Stop trying to plaster over the cracks

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 By Ruth Herbert, Co-Founder of the Backbone Collective (Backbone) which provides victim survivors of all forms of violence against women (primarily domestic, family and sexual violence) a safe way to have their voices heard.

 Read a more about Backbone.

.. The Prime Minister talks about wanting to break the intergenerational cycle of abuse while at the same time she is heading a system that is sanctioning and directly contributing to the intergenerational cycle of abuse.

Every case of family violence is different, but from the many hundreds of cases Backbone has seen a continuum or pattern of how the state funded system responds.

At one end of this continuum are Māori or Pacific whanau and those who are lower socioeconomic and have experienced intergenerational abuse (from within the whānau and from the state). They are likely to be known to Police and Oranga Tamariki for multiple call outs for physical family violence.


In this group state agencies label both the child’s parents as ‘bad’ and ‘high risk’. The mother is not trusted, and not valued or supported as the natural protective parent for the child. Children of these parents are far more likely to be made wards of the state and uplifted under provisions of the Oranga Tamariki Act and placed in state care. Once the child has been taken it is almost impossible for the mother to ever get the child back into her care and there are hardly any independent advocates available for her or the whānau to try and achieve this.

Conversely at the other end of the continuum are many middle or upper socioeconomic Pakeha families who despite experiencing equal levels of family violence, are less likely to be known to Police and Oranga Tamariki – these are the 75%- 80% of family violence cases that are not reported to police. But if these victims separate from the abuser and reach out for help (as the Government's well resourced ‘It’s not OK’ campaign encourages them to do), they will invariably find themselves in the Family Court where they will be told the abuse never happened and then further abused by the very system that is supposed to help.
In these cases, the mother and her children are more likely to have been sexually, psychologically (e.g gaslighting, stalking, intimidation, harassment etc), or financially abused and any physical abuse is likely to have been kept well hidden by both the abuser and the mother.

Many of the abusers in these families are blue/white collar workers or professionals – of independent financial means and narcissistic. They present well in court, are charming, believable, master manipulators (and other well-known traits of narcissistic abusers) and are thus deemed to be ‘good fathers’, ‘believable’ and ‘low or no risk’ to their children. 

These mothers are also not valued or supported as the protective parent. When they report the abuse, they are disbelieved and accused of making false allegations despite empirical evidence telling us false allegations by mothers are rare. The court professionals tell themselves ‘he seems to be a nice guy so he couldn’t possibly have been abusive’ and they reframe it as situational or mutual violence – in effect saying it never happened.

When these mothers try and keep their children safe the system says they are psychologically abusing them ...

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