A feminist critique of MPs cosying up to gangs – Deborah Coddington
When the controversy erupted over Green MP Hūhana Lyndon and Te Pāti Māori MPs Oriini Kaipara and Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke visiting the Mongrel Mob pad then posting selfies on social media, I was sure these three women would apologise. It wasn’t a sacking offence, but they needed to back down and explain.
Instead, their parties dug deeper into a hole. Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson refused to apologise and said she was “proud” to meet with all communities. Her colleague, Chlöe Swarbrick, stated stopping gang violence was “to understand what was driving it in the first place”.
Oriini Kaipara reckoned she would “restore mana” to the gangs. Nothing like aiming high.
Listening to the words coming from the mouths of these women, I thought of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who reckoned the most famous thing she said was when she spoke at Hillary Clinton’s Democratic primary rally in 2016: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support women.”
Albright came to mind because despite New Zealand being the first self-governing nation to give women the vote, in some archaic pockets of this country – cults, religions, occupations – we remain male dominated, and nowhere has that domination and violence been more profound for the past six decades than in the dark recesses of the gangs.
(Before I leave Albright, she had been saying those words for years because she said her female friends criticised her staying devoted to her husband and family despite being a successful politico.)
The gangs’ women – molls as they were called – and their children have largely borne the brunt of their partners’ crimes. Family violence, we could call it. So I found it extraordinarily naïve that women MPs whom many people admire and aspire to become would pose proudly with representatives of these patched gangs, like tourists who come upon celebrities strolling along Hollywood Walk of Fame. Then their leaders not only defend them, but go further and excuse the macho behaviour and, ipso facto, generations of family misery left in their wake.
I’m what Swarbrick would deride as a Boomer. Back in the mid-1980s one of my journalism colleagues, Carol du Chateau, wrote a major feature for Metro magazine on the Ambury Park rapes. The Mongrel Mob held a 19-year-old girl for nine hours, beat her, covered her in petrol, and 15 of them gang-raped her, until she got away. They took photos of the victim during the attack. It was brutal and horrific, with gut-churning images. White, middle-class Carol was sent to interview some of these guys. She had guts. In those days gangs weren’t glamorous. We’d all read Tom Wolfe’s These Radical Chic Evenings, an essay about Leonard Bernstein holding a soiree for the Black Panthers. We considered gangsters criminals and sympathised with their female victims. We were old-fashioned.
In 2016, the Ministry of Social Development did a report into the social cost of gangs and found nearly “half the serious offending committed by gang members are family violence related”. Furthermore, “a high proportion of gang members’ children experience multiple incidences of abuse or neglect”.
That abuse included physical, emotional, sexual and neglect and Child Youth and Family (as it was then) recorded that 27% of its alleged perpetrators of abuse of children were gang members.
The report goes on and depressingly on when you realise behind these statistics are women and children suffering in appalling pain. I do not understand how taking selfies measures up with Swarbrick’s desire to understand what is driving crime.
Where is the point of banning smartphones or social media for children because they may access damaging content, when our legislators carry on like this? We are justifiably concerned about young boys growing up thinking it’s okay to treat rough sex as normal, but what do we expect when they see honourable members cosying up to the dishonourable members of the Mongrel Mob or Black Power, the two most powerful criminal gangs in the country? That it’s cool to grow up like that?
I’m not opposed to politicians having a meeting with criminals. It happens all the time – you get official permission to visit someone in prison, for example. Or a crim can come to your office. And all of us have people in our family who’ve done things we’re not proud of – we’re not necessarily guilty by association. Love the relly, condemn the behaviour.
But don’t offer excuses for their crimes. Gang members fronted up to the Abuse in Care Royal Commission of Inquiry and told of their own abuse as children – neglect, physical, and sexual abuse. Abandoned, they endured miserable lives, and as a result, they joined gangs. I believe them. Just as I believe anyone who tells of abuse.
But answer me this: According to statistics, more women report abuse than men. Statistics like this must be used with caution, because males are reluctant to report such things. But still, if being abused is why men join gangs and go on to hurt women and children, why are there no female gangs equivalent to the Mongrel Mob, and Black Power, roaring around on motorbikes, terrorising citizens, holding up highways when there’s a tangi, abusing their partners and children? They’ve been raised in the same circumstances; it’s they who deserve our sympathy, not these Jake the Muss types.
Alan Duff’s bestselling book Once Were Warriors could have been labelled nonfiction when you start researching the damage gangs have meted out to women. The Mob claims it has improved its behaviour. Maybe, but its membership continues to grow; their braggadocio hasn’t dissipated.
Every human being has a choice, and blaming your past doesn’t wash. Thousands of New Zealanders have been abused, they don’t all join gangs. Members can choose to leave, or stay and recognise women are family, not provided for rape and torture.
And if women MPs want to support other women, when they’re on the campaign trail they could do worse than channel Beth Heke by condemning those men who terrorise their families: “Cook your own eggs, Jake”.
Deborah Coddington is a publisher and writer who lives in Karāpiro. She is a former Act MP.
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