'I learned not to show weakness': A childhood in state care
Tuesday, 15 March 2022
Nobody was waiting when Harry Tutahi walked out of Rimutaka Prison, down to the train station alone and out of 11 years of institutions and abuse.
Tutahi, now in his mid-50s, was 8 years old when police knocked on his door and took him and his brother away into his new life – a series of homes, youth detention, prison and beatings.
Tutahi was flanked by his wife and wider whānau on Tuesday as a recorded interview was played of him discussing his life to the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry Māori public hearings, which are now into their second week of hearing from 25 survivors and their whānau.
The commission is working on the estimate up to 250,000 children, young people or at-risk adults were abused in state and faith-based care between 1950 and 2019, the period covered by it, and it appeared Māori were over-represented.
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“He never got to experience the love and awhi (embrace) of whānau,” his wife, Maria Tutahi, said.
Tutahi’s mother, who suffered from mental health issues, was in hospital when police took him and his brother to a family home in Naenae, Lower Hutt.
The strict household – the foster parents would use a ruler to make sure he set the table right – turned violent when he was accused of stealing a jacket and got whacked around the legs with a coal shovel.
He told a social worker but nothing happened, leading to a lesson that carried him through subsequent years: “If you say things, things just get worse,” he said.
He returned to his father for a couple of days, but it didn’t last. Tutahi was 10 when he first went to Epuni Boys’ Home in Lower Hutt.
He recalled having to cover himself in white powder, shower, then being locked in a secure concrete room with a wooden bed and sink for a week. Staff only turned the lights on when they checked on him.
“Otherwise you were just left in the dark,” he said.
Beatings by the other children were common. Staff did not intervene.
“I learned not to show weakness.”
He would be in and out of Epuni three times. Each time was about the same, including initially being locked in the dark in a secure room.
Tutahi was 12 when he was taken to the Hōkio Beach “training school” in Horowhenua, where the boys there took him for “initiation” – a beating in the sand dunes. He ran away and was strapped across the hands when he returned.
He spent seven years in institutions and was 15 when he returned to his still mentally-unwell mother. He had no contact with whānau the entire seven years.
He was soon in trouble with the law for stealing and was 16 years old when he found himself on remand in Mount Crawford prison in Wellington. It would begin years in and out of prisons.
But a prison officer saw something in him and got him some life skills courses. It was 11 years after being taken away from home as an 8-year-old boy that Tutahi got released from Rimutaka prison.
Nobody collected him so he walked to the train station and came to Wellington and decided to turn his life around. He now has five children and 14 mokopuna.
Maria Tutahi confirmed he had never been violent to them, but the scars from his earlier years ran deep.