I’m Mr HZ. When I was seven, I was taken off my parents and put into foster care. And that was the start of my life within the system and the start of my suffering. My parents didn’t have the skills to look after us properly, and they thought that by giving us to Social Welfare they were giving us a better chance in life.

My health records show I was labelled as ‘mentally retarded’. When I was nine years old, I was admitted to Lake Alice psychiatric hospital where I received electric shocks and was sexually abused. I was sent to Marylands School just before my 10th birthday and I spent four years there.

At Marylands, Brother McGrath sexually and physically abused me and other boys. One time, he got a few of us boys into his room. We were in a group on the floor, naked and kneeling. Brother McGrath would go around us all and try to put his penis in our mouths. Some of the other boys seemed to know what to do, but I didn’t. When he tried to shove his penis in my mouth, I bit him.

Brother McGrath had a baseball bat he’d hit us with, it was red plastic and hollow inside. One time we were in the TV room and he came in with lollies, biscuits and his baseball bat. He gave us lollies and turned the TV and lights off. He rubbed his penis along one boy’s face, holding onto the back of his head. Then he walked over to me and rubbed his penis in my face. I was trying to pull away, but he told me to stay there. He grabbed me by the head and tried to force his penis into my mouth. When I pulled away, he hit me with the baseball bat, so hard it made my nose bleed. I was terrified.

Brother Moloney also sexually abused me. Brother McGrath and Brother Moloney were very close and I often saw Brother Moloney coming out of Brother McGrath’s bedroom. One night, Brother McGrath came and got me out of bed and took me to his bedroom. Brother Moloney was in the bed naked and they played with each other sexually. They tried to make me perform oral sex and to sodomise me, but I wouldn’t keep still and that made them mad. Brother McGrath always had his baseball bat nearby and he whacked me with it.

After a while, I just started to adapt to the sexual things that happened at Marylands. Brother McGrath also threatened me to keep quiet. Once, he took me to the hospital morgue and showed me a corpse as a way of silencing me. I also saw him force a boy to eat his own shit in front of other boys because he messed his bed.

I told a teacher about the abuse but she didn’t believe me. She said brothers don’t do things like that and I must stop lying. I also told another woman and she didn’t believe us, so when we saw Brother McGrath take one of the boys, we went and got her to show her. She didn’t say or do anything though. I told three social workers but they didn’t believe me, either. At one point I ran away with another boy because of the abuse, and when the police caught us we told them, but nothing happened.

My teenage years were horrible and I ended up in prison. I was a patched gang member by 25 years old – it gave me a sense of belonging and heaps of power with the support of the gang behind me. I didn’t stay long though, because some beat up their kids and I didn’t like that.

I don’t trust people in authority. I’ve never had proper schooling or any real education – I only learned to read and write after I went to jail. I’ve never been given the chance to develop proper parenting skills, and my own kids have been taken away from me. I’ve never been taught about normal physical and emotional relationships with people I love.

I was totally separated from my Māori culture. This was the source of all my sense of identity and belonging. This land is our land, and I know I belong to it; I know I am supposed to live a healthy life on my land but this is being stopped by the institutions that are not designed to understand and care for Māori children. I have suffered, and my kids have suffered because of this racist system.

It is sad to say that the only sense of belonging and support I ever felt was being part of a gang.

All the places I’ve been – Marylands, Lake Alice, the Kimberly Centre, foster homes – simply haven’t been run correctly. Comfort has been taken out of these places. If the places I’ve been had been comfortable and had supported me, growing up as a child in the system, things would have been different. All I want now is that comfort.

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