Male Survivors Taranaki

The Marist Brothers and Fathers have educated prime ministers, judges, cardinals and All Blacks at their prestigious Catholic high schools. But their record of sexual abuse is horrific. Worse still was their handling of the abuse when it was exposed. In this series, The Secret History, Steve Kilgallon investigates the power, abuse and cover-ups at the heart of two highly-influential and wealthy religious groups.

Waiheke Island, 2002. Robbie West* isn’t in a good way. He’s taking a lot of methamphetamine and drinking heavily, but making a valiant effort to tidy his life up.

After nearly three decades, he’s realised that the recurring nightmares that keep pushing him back to drink and drugs are actually painful memories he’s been working hard to bury. Having tried police and lawyers to gain redress and compensation for the abuse he suffered at the hands of his schoolteacher – a man we cannot name for legal reasons – he’s now turned to his teacher’s religious order, the Marist Brothers.

West turns up with his counsellor to a small church hall in Oneroa – the main town on the Hauraki Gulf island – where he’s met by Brothers Henry Spinks (who has since died) and Richard Dunleavy, who between them handled the Brothers’ compensation settlements for over 20 years.

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Call Bethel: The Telegraph’s investigative team delivers a powerful podcast.

A five-part series from The Telegraph’s award-winning investigative team looks into decades of alleged child sex abuse in the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

It all began when the team received a tip-off in August last year claiming the church had a secret database of abuse allegations.

They decide to follow that lead and what followed was a year-long probe into what extent evidence of child abuse within the Jehovah’s Witnesses was ignored and covered-up by the global organisation.

The two episodes released so far have been promising, with host Katherine Rushton taking listeners through the steps the investigative team took chasing their initial lead and the unexpected events that later followed.

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The Marist Brothers and Fathers have educated prime ministers, judges, cardinals and All Blacks at their Catholic high schools. But their record of sexual abuse is horrific. Worse still was their handling of the abuse when it was exposed. In this series The Secret History, Steve Kilgallon investigates the power, abuse and cover-ups at the heart of two highly influential and wealthy religious groups.

When John Wilson* was 12 years old, he was repeatedly raped and sexually abused by his school principal, Kevin Waters.

Over two years at Christchurch’s Xavier Intermediate, John was groomed, then threatened, beaten, and even burned with a cigarette lighter. He was an altar server, and Waters would trick John by summoning him to the city’s Catholic cathedral on the pretence of helping at a mass, then abuse him.

As a 12-year-old boy, to have this towering guy standing over you in a black robe: he was very intimidating.

John says

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Poor financial management of sexual violence services has forced Oranga Tamariki to take the “additional measure” of reviewing what it did with all the funding it got in Budget 2019-20.

In a briefing released under the OIA, the ministry said it was doing the review of “financial management and controls to minimise the risk of the issues described in this report occurring again”, referring to a damning report into its sexual violence services project.

It said it would give the review to the government by the end of this month.

Read the briefing report from Oranga Tamariki: Budget 2019 Funding for Sexual Violence Services (PDF, 2MB)

In the briefing, OT admitted its “inadequate” work and “slow delivery” led to the project having to be shut down last August.

We did not get this right and we have let down the communities we were meant to be assisting.

OT chief executive Chappie Te Kani told the Children’s Minister Kelvin Davis

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A Tairāwhiti contingent represented the region’s peer support service for male survivors of sexual abuse at the second annual Male Survivors Aotearoa hui in Nelson last week.

Five members of the Tauawhi Charitable Trust, which provides governance for Te Hōkai: Male Survivors Tairāwhiti, attended the three-day hui along with MSA representatives from across the country.

Day one was focused on operational and practice issues, supporting peer workers in the survivor space.

The major part of the hui was held the next day at Whakatu Marae, where peer workers, managers and governance representatives met alongside national trustees and their tangata whenua sub-committee Te Roopu Tautoko.

Emma Powell, the new chief executive of the Joint Venture for Family and Sexual Violence, attended the hui and Minister for Family and Sexual Violence Marama Davidson joined by Zoom during the day.

It was a good opportunity to hear from the Minister about the newly-released strategy Te Aorerekura and to hear her commitment and ongoing relationship with Male Survivors Aotearoa, for whom the voice of men as survivors has not always been heard in the family and sexual violence sector

Tauawhi trust member and men’s centre coordinator Tim Marshall

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The fragile dynamic between the sexes has always been somewhat fraught. Thirty years ago, American relationship counsellor John Gray seemed to hit both a nerve and a gold mine when he managed to shift more than 15 million copies of his bestseller, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

Since then, things appear to have got even more complicated, with incels (involuntary celibates), #MeToo, easy-access pornography and revenge politics prompting some to question the gravitational forces driving the entire solar system. What on earth is going on? English writer and philosopher Nina Power thinks she knows. Chasms have opened up in society because the battle between the sexes has become a zero-sum game, she maintains.

In What Do Men Want? Masculinity and its discontents, Power, 43, attempts to paper over the cracks and engineer bridges over the canyons. The book is practically guaranteed to make everyone uncomfortable.

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One man’s contribution to more than 50 years of fighting institutional racism in the judicial system have been recognised with a Queen’s Birthday honour.

Dr Oliver Sutherland worked in and alongside groups like the Nelson Māori Committee, the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination, and others from the 1970s onwards, fighting to bring about a fairer justice system for Māori and Pasifika people.

Sutherland’s contributions to law and the Māori and Pacific communities were recognised this weekend with an induction into the New Zealand Order of Merit.

We first submitted to the Ministry of Justice in 1972, exactly 50 years ago this year, it was Roy Jack at the time, and he said ‘no, we have the best of British justice for all’, and that said it all really because that was the problem that we were complaining about: we had a British system.

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