’ve been an admirer of Aaron Smale as a journalist and as a speaker to the public conscience. In this article Haunting memories: new doco explores horror of growing up in ‘care’ in NZ he referred to this documentary The Stolen Children of Aotearoa on TVNZ+.
How do you tell the story on film of how more than 200,000 children were abused when they were in the custody of the state and how that abuse is connected to colonisation, Māori urbanisation, incarceration, gangs and a decades-long policy by the government to cover it all up?
Short answer – you can’t. The story is simply too big to be conveyed in any form.
We should all reflect on his observation:
Perhaps the most troubling thing I have discovered in ten years of covering state abuse is not just the rape and torture of children, but the calculated ways lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians have gone about covering it up. The documentary implicitly speaks to this institutional willingness to not only abandon its victims but to inflict further harm by perverting and weakening the processes of accountability.
A decent society needs to honour the Aaron Smale’s courage and their ability to hold the mirror up to our society and show our ugly side. As he also said in the article:
Why is it that the connection between the violence inflicted on tens of thousands of children and the violence of prisons and gangs is repeatedly ignored in public discourse, particularly by the media and politicians? How is it that politicians prance around every election competing with each other about how tough they’re going to be on crime, when no one was properly held responsible for this mass crime that has been going on for generations?
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