by Grace Odlum on the NZ Herald
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Te Kāhu Tiu director Amelia Trotter. (Photo by David Haxton)
Deep in the hills of rural Reikorangi, on the outskirts of Waikanae, a special building is being created to support a transformative approach aimed at diverting young men from jail.
The multi-faceted programme at Te Kāhu Tiu [see this website —Eds] will give troubled youth, who are going through the court system because of their offending, a real opportunity to change for the better.
Te Kāhu Tiu has been the dream of Amelia Trotter for more than three decades. Trotter studied psychology and criminology at Victoria University, and when she did her Master’s in criminal justice, she worked with a lot of young offenders.
She noticed these young offenders had all suffered some form of trauma in their lives, and a lot of them had no chance to turn their lives around. That’s when she decided she wanted to start up a youth justice centre.
I am very pleased you have developed such a positive alternative approach to managing youth offenders which is a very perplexing area in our society. These approaches are desperately needed.
Our institutions of justice , education and social welfare are clearly failing.
For me the basic error lies in the current ideology with a bias toward blaming low SES , bad parenting and racism. However the elephant in the room is the devastating failure in the basics particularly this century.
A good review, on line, of the damage done to children is ‘Literacy and Behaviour’ , by Dr. Kerry Hempenstall .This explains how failing to learn to read specifically, is directly linked to many adverse externalizing behaviours.
I have experienced these while assisting my mother Doris Ferry who privately taught phonics to many hundreds of Kapiti students, last century. These failing children of various ages, were from high SES stable homes. They were victims of incompetence of local schools seeped in a wrong ideology of teaching AND discipline. Here the children’s trauma came from years of failure in reading and they had frequently developed bizarre and destructive behaviours. These vanisned after remediation.