Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen
As a nation, New Zealand hardly treats its children well. Earlier this year, the UN slammed our staggering child mortality rates; stories of child abuse occur with depressing regularity in newspapers; and child poverty here is the higher than in any other OECD country. But this mistreatment of children is not confined to individual parents. For three decades, between 1960 and 1990, the government dealt with our country’s troubled youth by banishing them to residential institutions. These were places more like prisons than homes, places where a number of boys claim they were sexually and physically abused.
David Cohen’s latest book, Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys’ Home, shifts between daily life at Epuni Boys’ Home, one of the worst of these institutions, and the wider political landscape of the time. It’s an interesting, if disturbing, tale.
Cohen recounts how, in step with America, moral panic about juvenile delinquency developed in New Zealand. The result? Over 100,000 (mostly Maori) children were locked up in residential institutions. Lots of these were light offenders or kids who required temporary shelter from violent mothers, and all tended to come out rougher than they went in. And that was only one of many problems. Kids who moved to Epuni suffered scholastically: the home lacked proper teachers, and boys who were sent to local schools quickly fell behind. Many others pined for their families. Worse, a number of wards were abused during their time there. Cohen details this and more in his book, using personal experience - for he spent three months at Epuni as a child - to flesh out some of his descriptions.
The main problem with this book is how it’s written. The prose is clunky and informal, filled with odd tense changes and unnecessary sociological wordiness. Almost every chapter contains odd vignettes about boxing that seem completely unrelated to the wider story. And sometimes it just seems like Cohen was being lazy: there is no other way to explain the sentence “comparisons are invidious, but still” in a section on the evils of single-parent families.
If you can get past the flawed writing then this is an interesting book, definitely worth checking out for those interested in crime and sociology. Otherwise I’d recommend giving this one a miss.
Verdict:2/5. Dreadful writing. Interesting content.
Review also published in Craccum.
David Cohen’s latest book, Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys’ Home, shifts between daily life at Epuni Boys’ Home, one of the worst of these institutions, and the wider political landscape of the time. It’s an interesting, if disturbing, tale.
Cohen recounts how, in step with America, moral panic about juvenile delinquency developed in New Zealand. The result? Over 100,000 (mostly Maori) children were locked up in residential institutions. Lots of these were light offenders or kids who required temporary shelter from violent mothers, and all tended to come out rougher than they went in. And that was only one of many problems. Kids who moved to Epuni suffered scholastically: the home lacked proper teachers, and boys who were sent to local schools quickly fell behind. Many others pined for their families. Worse, a number of wards were abused during their time there. Cohen details this and more in his book, using personal experience - for he spent three months at Epuni as a child - to flesh out some of his descriptions.
The main problem with this book is how it’s written. The prose is clunky and informal, filled with odd tense changes and unnecessary sociological wordiness. Almost every chapter contains odd vignettes about boxing that seem completely unrelated to the wider story. And sometimes it just seems like Cohen was being lazy: there is no other way to explain the sentence “comparisons are invidious, but still” in a section on the evils of single-parent families.
If you can get past the flawed writing then this is an interesting book, definitely worth checking out for those interested in crime and sociology. Otherwise I’d recommend giving this one a miss.
Verdict:2/5. Dreadful writing. Interesting content.
Review also published in Craccum.