Victimhood

I don't actually know what I want to say about this, so I'm going to start writing and find out. Content warning probably required.

My life has been framed by an horrific, an unspeakable, act of violence.

I was not the victim; or not in the immediate sense. No one talked about it, really, although it sometimes found voice in the moan of nightmares from the room beside mine. But it still found me out. Trauma compounds and transmits, because misfortune seeks out the already unfortunate, then it goes after their children.

The latest proposal is to put kids in bootcamps. I read about it, I rolled my eyes, then I wrote about it. Friday, the day after I’d published my piece, I parked by the Upper Hutt mall. The police had closed off all the entrances, and they circled the block. People were gathered around, watching and chatting, like it was a civic event. ‘The gangs’, someone said to another as they looked on. I got back in my car and took a detour, got my kid Maccas instead of Subway.

You might ask, what does a lady like me, very much on the right side of the tracks, have to say on the topic of crime? It’s a fair question. I’m not yet sure. But I do know this: if we want a humane, evidence-based approach to justice policy, it’s people like me who need to speak out.

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In my adult life, I have managed to buck an almost unbuckable trend: I am a middle class, middle-aged, Pākehā repeat victim of crime. That isn’t really a thing. Let me run you through some stats from June this year. Like any stats, they signal a more complex story beneath - but in short, some of the people most likely to be victims are:

• young adults (aged 15–29)

• people who are bisexual

• Māori (but note that Māori are on average younger than other folks, so part of what we’re seeing through this stat is the victimisation of young people)

• separated people

• people who are not employed and not actively seeking work

• people living in a one-parent-with-child(ren) household or a multi-person household

• people renting government accommodation

• people under high levels of financial pressure

• people with low wellbeing factors; eg, experiencing psychological distress, low life satisfaction, or a low feeling of safety.

Most of these factors don’t describe me - yet somehow, when it comes to crime, I’m the unluckiest schmuck that ever lived. Let me offer you some of the highlights.

1. The sexual assault that’s so ubiquitous in our society we barely consider it a crime.

2. More burglaries than I can count, especially in the years we lived in Naenae. Someone even stole our frickin gate - a very BIG gate - in a scandal I dubbed ‘Gategate’.

3. Someone driving through our replaced gate and fence at high speed, then driving off again, before ramraids were even cool.

4. A group of people assaulting a guy on the street outside my house, seen by my son. I chased them into the darkness with my mum voice.

5. An assault on my kids’ dad, in the middle of the night, by someone who’d entered our home. Long story.

6. A minor incident - a kid trying to break into my car - which ended up with grossly unjust consequences for the kid involved.

7. Even more burglaries, but now in Upper Hutt, because a change is good as a holiday. A special shout out to the numbnuts who stole almost nothing of value, except for a necklace I was given when I graduated with my PhD. I guarantee it’s on the decolletage of some bogan’s girlfriend even as we speak. Hope you’re enjoying your honorary doctorate, Shazza.

8. The night prowler who slunk around our home as we slept, visiting us not once but twice - part of an escalating series of similar crimes in the neighbourhood, which culminated after two other female victims woke up to find him in their homes.

9. The - I’m serious - gang members who broke into my house and took a shit on the floor. When I raised the issue, as politely as one can from one’s 2007 Prius, one of them threatened me and punched the driver’s window with my irked face behind it. It’s bizarre. Don’t ask. For reasons of people’s safety and dignity, I can’t speak about it widely.

10. I feel like this list should end on an even number. So let’s go with generally annoying minor crimes. Like when someone stole my wallet when I was in hospital. That was generally annoying.

OK. Why did I just share the worst CV ever? Simply, because I think it gives me a particular outlook on the current debate. I come at with my head. The stats I led with suggest that crime, although unsettling, is not a huge problem for middle class people compared to others. The evidence I’ve read shows that bullshit populism, like the bootcamp thing, isn’t the answer.

I come it at with my heart as well. I’ve been afraid, although I don’t want to overstate my fear, or make it a reason to jump on any bandwagon. The gang thing scared me for a few days, as did the night prowler - because unlike the others, they were things that could have hurt my family, and they could not be fixed simply by locking the doors. In both cases, things settled down, and both me and my kids were OK.

The problem is, despite the experience and knowledge I have, there is no place for me - for my victimhood, if you want to call it that - in our debate around crime.

The redneck stuff - Deidre and Bruce going off on Facebook, nostalgic for smacking and compulsory military service - is laughable to me, naïve and stupid and ugly. I am sympathetic to structural explanations for crime: those that rightly point to Aotearoa’s brazen inequality, its colonialism. To the egregious path we laid from state care into gangs and prisons, the hurt children we ushered along that path in a grim march.

Even then, something is missing for me. This reasoning - that looks to structures, sometimes overlooking humans and their patchy humanity - asks me to explain away, rationally, compassionately, my own hurt. And God knows I am not a saint.

I want to bring my head and heart together; to talk about what I’ve been through and what I’ve learned. Emphatically, I do not speak for anyone else: it’s this speaking for others that is so much a part of the problem. And importantly, no two people’s experiences are alike. I have not been subjected to extreme violence, felt I couldn’t protect my kids, or felt prolonged unsafety in my own home. Whether I have or not, differently people, very legitimately, have different reactions to crime, big or small. I don’t get to judge.

With these caveats in place, let me tell you my thoughts.

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I will not be lectured to by anyone so privileged their car alarm is worth more than my car.

Because that’s how this ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric feels. It misinterprets and exploits my experience. It insults my intelligence. More than that, it takes away from me all over again. Here’s what I mean.

For the people promoting boot camps, or whatever is the populist platform de jour, crime is a hypothetical: something they’ve mostly read about. So too are its victims.

The first to be discounted are the imperfect victims: the ones who are poor, in gangs, get into trouble themselves. After all, there’s no votes in protecting them.

The next to be discounted are the intransigent ones. Ones like me. Ones who don’t care to produce soundbites for election campaigns. Ones who see how we got here - the poverty, the racism - and who awkwardly insist that, if we really want to debate the justice system, we need to face the uncomfortable, lay all our cards on the table.

My views come not just from my head and my heart, but from my wairua. That complexity is me, and to deny it is to erode my personhood, my dignity. I can’t stop old white dudes reducing the dimensions of my life to a flat and easy two. But guys: if you want to earn your racism badge, don’t enlist me, thanks.

You don’t get to choose how crime affects you - but middle class people still have more choice than others.

I’ll tread with caution here. The experience of victimhood isn’t an algorithm. There is no ranking system for what hurts more or less; no reasonableness test for what gives you bad dreams, or will not let you sleep in the first place.

I will say this much. Getting your car broken into is crap. Getting your fence tagged is crap. Getting your handbag pinched is crap. I’m not going to argue with you. Any of these things has an emotional impact, comes with a feeling of violation. But my experience - and I emphasise it is mine - is that middle class folks have protective factors. We’re insured. If the car is out of action for a day, we can still get to work. We fit better locks to our doors and mount security cameras. Our friends and family rally around us.

Here, we have an opportunity to consult both our heads and our hearts. My own experience is that, when I moved past the immediacy of my feelings - my legitimate feelings, which deserved recognition - I could see that, with the resources I have, I would probably be OK.

I haven’t met every person who’s victimised me. But I’ve met enough to know the score.

OK, this is not particularly scientific. But I’ve spoken in court at the sentencing of the man who punched my kids’ dad when he broke into our home, as I screamed on the phone to the police. I’ve hugged the child who broke into my car, put up to it by older gang members, when he apologised to me in the youth justice proceeding.

And I understood, or I tried to, the road each one had travelled. As for the others who victimised me, it could have been from any motivation, from chump change to cheap thrills. I can’t say. My suspicion is you’re less likely to do that stuff when you’re busy studying for a scholarship, or your mum is driving you between violin lessons and soccer practice. I can say that when rich white people want to do stupid shit, like beat a smaller kid with the leg of a stool, it can be fixed with a carefully worded media release and a bit of stalling, until the news cycle moves on.

Those two people who blundered into my life faced the consequences, and apologised to me; lifted their eyes to mine with the courage it takes to face your own shame. Acknowledged - with the reflection that comes from the inside of a cell no one even wants to collect you from - the f****ed-up-ness and the pain that they had wrought, and that had somehow caught up all of us. It’s a genuineness for which the victims of Sam Uffindell still wait.

Connection counters hurt.

Again, I will not speak for everyone, for every crime, for every situation. Restorative justice may work for some, but it cannot work for all.

I never said to either of those two who hurt me - or to the ones I never spoke to after, but only talked to in my head - that the path that led you here, its poverty and racism, somehow absolves you. That’s the thing about recognising our shared humanity: we can’t let each other off the hook.

I looked at them, and they looked at me. I don’t know if they became better people, or if I did. Wishing doesn’t make for happy endings. I just know this: in that moment, all of us, we tried. And trying doesn’t always fix stuff, but there is nothing good in life that’s won without it.

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After the incident at the mall, I kept checking the news. Eventually, I learned a person had been stabbed.

Someone posted about it on the Upper Hutt community page. People got riled up, furious about crime rates. A family member of the injured commented below that the man was in hospital. His whānau were desperately worried, were praying for him. A handful of people offered kind words or a heart emoji. But most were busy being angry, at Jacinda, at parents who go to work instead of staying home with their kids, at youngsters these days, at the World Economic Forum.

I stopped scrolling.

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Like I said, my life has been framed by an horrific, an unspeakable, act of violence. Although it is in part my story, it is not my story to tell. I will just say this.

The person who was the victim, in the immediate sense, has suffered in ways for which there is no language. In ways that defy the imaginations of the cynical policy pushers, do not make for soundbites; and are still there, like the fine-lined traces of fractures, when the news cycle has moved on. People get through that stuff however they get through it. Some ways are better than others. That’s an objective truth, and no one can be let off the hook. But there are no perfect victims.

Trauma compounds and transmits, because misfortune seeks out the already unfortunate, then it goes after their children. I did not ask to inherit it, and I did not mean to pass it on; but still I did, even if the hardest edges were rubbed off.

Yet that is not all I inherited. The one to whom it happened never gave in to the most vicious sentiments a person could, that they might even be entitled to. There was always an attempt at understanding, at humanity, at something better than what happened that night. It must have been hard to muster; fought for, even, in a solitary way, a sometimes desolate way, that those for whom crime is hypothetical can’t really grasp. Maybe that fight didn’t get the respect it deserves. Perhaps it can now, as we debate about other people’s lives.

That’s the thing about trauma. It’ll seek out anybody, turn us into people we might not want to be - and it’s only luck and money, the colour of our skins, that make or break us. You get a sense for all this, if you’ve been there; have come to understand, when it gets down to it, that you, with your flaws, are not inherently better than anybody else.

Plenty of us sleep some nights better than others.