Read Online Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen - Free Book Online

landmark 1946 study, Juvenile Delinquency in New Zealand , for example, was what the researcher described as a chronic departmental muddle of statistics that left researchers little the wiser about what was the actual problem. Philipp complained that the lack of reliable information served as an impediment not only to her own work, but also to the practical business of making any sense whatsoever of the problem at the heart of what was fast becoming a national obsession. Indeed, she hinted it was almost as if public concern was surging in inverse proportion to the real problem.
    Thus began a banner period in the official search for a residential plan to deal with wayward youth. By 1954 the government had opened its first ‘family home’, the name for the larger residential houses owned, furnished and maintained by the state, and run bya couple of foster parents who received a special board rate for the children in care. The plan was that these residences would provide temporary care for kids in transit, and long-term care for others who, while not thought to be in need of institutional training, were unsuitable candidates for fostering.
    Next the government convened what it called the Joint Committee on Young Offenders, an interagency initiative comprised of officials drawn from the departments of police, justice, child welfare and education, to nut out a more durable solution. The committee looked at the efficacy of the children’s courts and, in the time-honoured tradition of political leaders picking out safe issues on which to cut a tough posture, announced the constitution of a dedicated research group to consider the problem afresh.
    Part of the political answer was also the hasty passage of another Child Welfare Amendment Act, spurred in part by yet another public outcry after 29 children were found to be in the care of a single woman who was subsequently convicted on a charge of neglect. The legislation tightened the rules surrounding childcare, allowing greater opportunities to streamline more young offenders into ‘correctional training’ institutions.
    The next big challenge was to identify the best geographic setting in which to build a new institution.
     
    HISTORICALLY, WHAT WE KNOW TODAY AS THE SUBURB of Epuni was named for Honiana Te Puni, a Te Ati Awa chief who was among the signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi and of the deed of purchase of the land about Wellington. Epuni (as he was known) was just about the best friend the English settlers could possibly have asked for. Along with his nephew, Wharepouri, he turned up in 1839 to welcome the New Zealand Company traders from the Tory , the first colonial ship to anchor in Port Nicholson, assuring the newcomers that he would be only too happy to do business with them.
    Unfortunately, the two sides had strikingly different ideas of what doing business meant. For Epuni, the bedazzling natural setting in which they met was not among the commodities to be traded; still less were the river and valley lying to the immediate north, an expanse of few souls and deep shadows, items to be bartered like so many muskets. No, the land stood as a sacred gift, a treasure that the Maori received from Hands they did not have a chance to see clearly but in whose thrall they lived and moved and had their tribal being. The river in question they called Te Awakairangi, or the watercourse of greatest value, a mirror of their own legendary journey to the new isles. This was their papa kainga tuturu, an earth home where one can stand.
    The settlers did indeed have other ideas. Within days they had renamed the same river after one of their company directors back in England, William Hutt, and soon they began reconstituting the area they named for him as their own market garden. Epuni saw the writing on the wall. Gathering some of his fellow chieftains and their sons, he headed back to his ancestral lands in Taranaki, arriving in time for some of the worst bloodletting between the