Survivor experience: Paora Crawford Moyle Ngā wheako o te purapura ora
Name Paora Crawford Moyle
Age when entered care 5 years old
Time in care 1967‒1981
Type of care facility Multiple foster homes and family homes, including Presbyterian Church-run homes
Ethnicity Māori (Ngāti Porou)
Kia ora koutou katoa
Ko Te Whetumatarau te maunga
Ko Awatere te awa
Ko Horouta te waka
Ko Ngāti Porou te iwi
Ko Tūwhakairiora te tangata
Ko Hinerupe te marae
Ko Karawhata me Crawford te ingoa whānau
Ko Paora Moyle tōku ingoa
Tihei Mauri Ora!
I am not just here by myself, I come from the love of thousands, I come from many tūpuna on both the tauiwi side and the Māori side and that whakapapa extends now to my own mokopuna. It's not just about the blood content, it's about the herstory and history of what came before us.
Before I tell you my story, you need to understand that we're not what happened to us. We're what we do with it. We're what we become. I am the author of my own story. Survivors came to do this journey in the world to teach others about their own humanity and how to treat them accordingly.
My going into care was a mix of things – my parents’ fighting, a very racist grandmother who liked things to be done the English way, racial profiling of my mum by the Department of Social Welfare and, in the end, about the utter abandonment of us by our parents. Dad went to Melbourne and Mum stopped trying to get us out of care, she went off and had another family with another husband. I don’t believe that I was abused by my parents, but I was very young when I left their care.
At 5 years old, you’re a child with a broken heart missing your family, you have no voice, no power or protective person looking out for you. You are susceptible to being groomed because the loneliness and desolation makes you crave any sort of connection with a human being.
For me, the grooming began immediately on my entering the first home. We were being indoctrinated with Presbyterian beliefs and made to love Jesus, but we were abused like empty vessels in his name. I still remember hearing the shuffling sound of his slippers, making their way down the long corridor of polished linoleum. The covers held tight around me so that my knuckles are white, my breath stopped, the threats he used to keep me silent, “You will be separated from your younger brothers” or “Your parents will never be able to come and see you or come and get you.”
After a time, I got used to the things that happened and I stopped protesting. You learn how to behave, how to respond and perform, and how to leave your body until it’s all over. The man who groomed me was a respected elder in the church. I was never safe, nor did I feel safe, in or around the Presbyterian Church. I experienced sexual abuse at after-church functions, at Sunday school, at Bible study, church picnics and in parishioners’ homes.
I started to notice that there was some organisation to the outings with parishioners. Church leaders started visiting the home and often the same ones came back later to pick us up on take us on outings, as they called them. These people weren’t vetted but were able to access us because of their standing in the church as good Christian people. Many of the outings were fun and legitimate, but many were not. This accessing us became part of our lives, the norm, it’s what happened to you when you’re nobody’s child. The passing around seemed to happen more and more when you were deemed amenable, quiet or compliant. Possibly made easier if you were being slipped a dose of Valium or something else.
There was always someone or more than one person who found an excuse to take me with them on a picnic, a children’s show, or to the beach or some other place. I always knew what was going to happen. I got to know the look in a person’s eye, the way he looked and spoke to me, I was always being told stuff like, I “had come to bed eyes”, I “had baby blues that asked for it”.
I knew I wasn’t the only one it was happening to. Although as children we talked to one another, we never really talked in detail about what was happening to us, but we just knew from the silence. Despite the threats to keep me quiet, I remember trying to tell trusted people. I talked to our reverend about it, to our Sunday school teacher and to school teachers, but nobody wanted to believe that good Christian folk abused children. I tried to talk to social workers on the rare occasions they would check on me, but nobody wanted to hear. Instead they saw us as unwanted children from dysfunctional families who made up stories to get attention.
At school I was targeted by my teacher for my behaviour and because I was Māori. I had an undiagnosed neurodiverse condition – I now know I have high functioning Autism. I was constantly sent to the corporal punishment teacher, and was strapped with a large leather belt, or caned across the backside or back of my legs. I was 8 years old when I was first strapped, and this abuse continued for at least the next three years.
I know now that other children have come forward from the places I was in. I didn’t. I didn’t know that until recently, I always thought that I was just the only one. And I say to them, “How do you know, that what I'm telling you is the truth?” And they look back and go, “Because others have come forward with the same story and the same people.” You can't know what that’s like in the moment to have that validation. And your whole life passes through your mind like a film reel, it goes, it fuckin’ happened, I did exist. It's quite indescribable, but it's also really powerful.
My given name was Paula. My whānau called me Paora because that meant Paul and Paula, but I always preferred the name Paul. I was a tomboy and I loved looking like my brothers, you know, short hair jeans, cotton shirts, boots – I still pretty much wear the same thing today. I couldn’t stand being put in a dress. I hated Sunday because Sunday put me put me in touch with abusers but also because it was when I had to put a dress on, with patent leather shoes and a little handbag and white gloves.
I didn't have words for it or fully understand it, but when I look back now, it's a part of my story.
I like that little non-binary person that didn't have words. Because, that's when they were themselves and that's when they felt most at home – playing bull rush, kicking the soccer ball around in jeans, roughing it and also smiling at the girls. The one thing I wanted to do was just be the way I felt inside, and I couldn't. I never understood how boys were allowed to dress the way they did, and girls had to wear shoes that you couldn't run in and dresses where they could see your knickers. Although I didn't have words for it then I was starting to understand that my love or my preference to love was different from my mates.
The Presbyterian parishioners who abused me and other children failed to conduct themselves in accordance with the gospel that they lived by – that all people are treated with honesty, transparency, dignity, and respect. The church failed to provide safe environments for us so that we might live life in all of its fullness as children in care were supposed to. It failed to protect us from physical or mental harm and neglect, including sexual abuse and exploitation.
The ones who didn’t take good care of us, they ruined our little lives and stole our childhoods. You can never get that back and grow up to be wholesome, contributing beings to your community, to your whānau or to yourself. It’s like being a vessel that somebody pisses into – that’s what you feel like you are. I find it really hard being amongst other people because I walk around feeling like I have a neon sign plastered to my head saying ‘fuck me’, and I can’t get away from it.
There are many more things I could tell you about the abuse, but that’s not why I am telling my story.
The heart of my kōrero today is about who we are and what we do. Being non-binary is not because of my trauma, or because I have high functioning Autism. These are distinctly different parts of myself that add to the rich person that I am today. We are not what happened to us. We are what we do with it and I have chosen to use everything that happened to me – the good, the bad and the ugly – to do the work that I do with those that are most important to me and that contributes to making a difference.
I work in family violence prevention. I work with our men, with children and with mamas, because I believe in the whole whānau approach. Rather than decimate families, let's work with them to strengthen them. My best work is with survivor whānau who have had three and four generations of child removal, of being decimated, disenfranchised from their whakapapa. I'll keep on doing that work till the day I die.
I have one surviving son who's about to have his third child with his partner. We are very close knit, we've survived a lot. He's a good daddy, I'm very proud of him and he really is the heart of everything that I do.
When my son was about 8 years old, I was struggling with living. He knew it and he said “Mamma, I don't want you to be sad, you're my hero and everything you do is really important to me. There's only you and me, what am I gonna do if you're not here? Mum don't you know that everything you went through teaches those people who don't understand, what it was like?” In that moment my son was validating my experience, and demonstrating back to me the importance of being who we are and why we are here. He was saying to me that I came into this life to be the example, and that in being the lived example you become the teacher, who through your own story teaches people about their own humanity, or lack of. My son was able to put that into words so that I realised my place in the world.
Survivors are not broken people, we are whole people, we have many facets to our being. When you look at us, all you see is somebody faulty, that's downtrodden, that needs to be saved or needs to be put on a conveyor belt and poked and prodded, or fixed and helped. We are not. We've lived our lives, we've managed to get here, many of us have led successful lives and we turned the difficulty around. Stop compartmentalising us, stop leaving us out of decisions or just giving us a token role where some of us can come together in an advisory group and provide some input. We are never allowed to actually formulate and be part of the machinery that would make change occur. Let us be part of making significant change occur for children who are vulnerable, let’s really put children at the centre around their whānau.