Fraser Crichton - Featured Portfolio
Fraser Crichton, Interiors from Mt Crawford and New Plymouth prisons, 2019
The Moral Drift
Fraser Crichton
Featured Portfolio
Essay by Elizabeth Stanley for PhotoForum, 21 January 2021
Content warning: includes reference to child abuse and sexual assault.
Photographer Fraser Crichton lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington. He graduated with a Masters in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at University of Arts London in 2019.
His work takes on the power of the state. Exposing the inter-generational impacts of social welfare and criminal justice practices, he draws our attention to how violence and abuse are structured in laws, policies and everyday institutional and cultural practices. His investigations – bringing together videos, archival documents and still images – demonstrate the ability of state officials to silence trauma and maintain impunity for past and ongoing harms. Importantly, his contributions always illustrate the tenacity, courage, resilience and challenge of victims-survivors. He has a keen eye for hope.
Boys outside the Mercy Jenkins Boys' Home, Eltham, Taranaki, circa 1910s. Standish, R :Photographs of Eltham.
Ref: 1/2-044821-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22758224
Kohitere Boy's Training Centre, Levin 2019. One of the many institutions in Aotearoa/New Zealand that The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care is now hearing evidence about. Kohitere was notorious for psychological, physical and sexual abuse. It now lies abandoned outside Levin.
In the years following World War Two, New Zealand authorities obsessed with declining moralities. According to prominent actors like Oswald Mazengarb, the country was drifting into deviancy. His ‘Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents’ (whose report was posted to nearly 300,000 homes in 1954) targeted the development of comic books, cinema, indecent literature, advertising and all manner of suspected parental frivolities as explanations for the perceived waywardness of New Zealand’s young people.
Authorities reiterated the panic. By 1957, the police had created the Juvenile Crime Prevention Branch and Child Welfare staff had given over 500 presentations to community groups, encouraging audiences to report those ‘out of parental control’. This latter concept provided a narrative net for the trawling of hundreds and thousands of children and their families for official examination, reporting, sorting and removals. At a time of Māori migration into towns and cities, the widespread racism and economic marginalisation ensured that Māori children were quickly funnelled into the care system.
Wanda Paki
John Paki's great-granddaughter Wanda Paki holds claim to a surprising area of land under the Treaty of Waitangi. The land that the former Kohitere Boys' Training Centre sits on - the institution where routine abuse of children occurred over a period of twenty years before its closure in 1985 - is Muaūpoko land; Wanda's whakapapa. After Kohitere was closed the Nomads gang briefly took up residence before Wanda requested they leave. Wanda's presence on the land, as kaitiaki, means she has the right to make a Treaty claim for ownership of the land which she is in the process of doing. She now lives with her whānau in the main office complex of what's left of Kohitere.
Wanda is a tipuna wahine who is the guardian of a number of her children's tamariki. Her youngest, the last time we spoke, was 9 months old whilst Wanda is in her sixties. Oranga Tamariki regularly surveil Wanda to check up on the kids and the cops often come round on the pretext of just passing by. Oranga Tamariki are worried Wanda - sixty-seven - has gang affiliations (which she doesn't) and they are concerned for the safety of the children. But they don't say that. Instead, they say they are worried that Wanda might not be able to cope at her age. So OT and the cops coordinate. It's an example of the networked repression that Māori now face from joined-up government agencies. Something that isolates them from institutions - hospitals, schools, the cops - that Pākehā take for granted.
Were the children to be removed they would end up in state care as there is no one else in the family to look after them. Some of Wanda's tamariki are in their very early teens so they wouldn't easily find a placement and instead - as is a common pattern - would be placed in a series of temporary foster homes until they were old enough to leave state care. At which point were Wanda and their whānau not around, there would be limited support.
Including Wanda's photo here wasn't an easy decision. We spoke about how photos don't tell people's stories but we also spoke about how people like Wanda are made invisible by the institutions that are meant to offer support. We also talked about me as a Pākehā photographer and how this should be a Māori photographer's story. And there isn’t an easy answer to that.
In the second half of the 20th Century, tens of thousands of children were placed into ‘care’. They were met by foster carers, social workers, residential housemasters, priests, nuns, among others. Many youngsters ricocheted around the country. Some, moving between islands, thought they were being sent to a different country. Some had dozens of placements in a few years. This constant moving – an administrative-led approach that is still so common for children in care today –caused great anxiety. Children, always unsettled and on edge, felt unloved. They lost their lives with friends, siblings, parents, aunties, cousins, whānau. Submerged in a Pākehā world, Māori children also lost te reo, marae and cultural identity.
Aroha was rare. In social welfare institutions, for example, children had to harden up, and quickly. We are still learning about the levels and nature of physical, sexual and psychological violence directed by official ‘carers’ to their charges. Many survivors recount horrific terrors from individual predators but also from institutional control practices. Children could be given electro-convulsive ‘treatment’ for being ‘cheeky’, or held in silent secure cells for not doing homework. Some were told that they would never be released, or that their parents were dead.
On leaving care, many children had few supports. Juggling traumas, they often spiralled into early adulthood with mental health problems, raging drug dependencies, deep anxieties. Of the 105 residential care-leavers featured in The Road to Hell, 96 ended up in custody by the age of 21, and over a third had joined a gang.
New Zealanders are not always keen to acknowledge how many of the country’s ongoing crime problems have emerged from the crimes of state officials or their ‘contractors’. While most people who have care histories do not go on to offend, the connection between care and custody is staggering. The majority of NZ prisoners have a care history. Yet, commentators still persist in falsely separating the identities of ‘victims’ and ‘offenders’ as if they are different populations.
And, in turn, we have sought refuge in increased criminalisation, more policing, surveillant community punishments, as well as the continual building of prisons. The Office of the Ombudsman now publish regular reports to chart the deleterious conditions in which people are incarcerated, as well as the damaging treatments those held in prisons endure. Tie down beds. Excessive restraints. Long lockdowns. In 2020, women at Auckland prison (of whom over two-thirds are Māori) were held down in their small cells for up to 29 hours at a time. They complained of abusive and neglectful treatments from officers. We will no doubt expect them to be confident, caring and ‘together’ when they are released.
The Confidential Listening and Assistance Service (CLAS) worked with 1103 victims of historical abuse in care. This included 551 men and 552 women and of these, 670 people identified as European/Pākehā, 411 identified as Māori, 21 identified as Pacific and one as Asian. Of these participants, 78% had been in child welfare care, 20% in psychiatric care and in health camps, and 2% in residential education. Many of the participants were currently incarcerated with a total of 156 prisoners registering. CLAS was chaired by Judge Carolyn Henwood who in her report said, "It became clear to us that the neglect and abuse of children and the previously frequent practice of locking children up in institutions has contributed to a dark legacy of suffering and crime in this country. The knock-on effect of the severe treatment of these children was clearly demonstrated to us in the stories we heard. There was a clear outcome of subsequent violent and criminal behaviour, together with the growth of criminal gangs. Many participants moved from Social Welfare care to borstal to prison. For instance, Boys’ Homes set up young people to align with a gang, for friendship and protection . . . It was often reported to us by prisoners that they saw crime as retaliation for the way they had been treated in care. In its final report to Parliament, CLAS finds more than half of the participants reported being sexually abused and that as many boys as girls were sexually abused. Eighty-nine referrals were made to the Police. Judge Henwood's recommendations included urgent action to resolve claims, independent bodies to help resolution and for the Government to put in place a Duty of Care at all levels for children. Henwood's recommendations were redacted by the State at the time of publication.
Over recent years, we have also remained vigilant in separating (again, mostly Māori) tamariki from their families, under the guise of ‘well-being’ for ‘vulnerable’ children. Oranga Tamariki have even recently engaged armed police to ‘uplift’ children. Can you imagine the terror? Despite such scenes and long histories of violence, state officials still sometimes wonder why parents and whānau care-givers do not trust them. Mothers report that they do not come forward to seek help for drug use or family violence or for struggling to get by, as they fear the consequences. For decades, those who look for help have been regarded as risks, as wanting, irresponsible or incapable.
And for all the state violence, abuse, and inter-generational harms, there has not yet been a real reckoning. Impunity has reigned. Survivors still wait for a formal, collective apology. Compensation may be given – but survivors have to apply to the Ministry of Social Development (an offending agency!) to put themselves forward for a non-transparent process. They receive negligible sums for lost lives. Meanwhile, at the 2020 hearings of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, state agency protectionism is on regular display.
Who is morally adrift?
Elizabeth Stanley is a Professor and Director of the Institute of Criminology at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington. She has written widely on state crimes, human rights and incarceration. In 2016, she published ‘The Road to Hell: State Violence against Children in Postwar New Zealand’ (Auckland University Press) that contributed to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care.
Content created with the support of Creative New Zealand.