We went to Hamilton to interview two incredible ladies, Nayda Te Rangi and Jane Stevens, who had formerly been connected with the Black Power and Mongrel Mob from a really early age.  They were also both involved in the Aroha Trust in Wellington in the 70’s, and their stories were included in an acclaimed book by Pip Desmond titled TRUST – A True Story of Women and Gangs.

Nayda’s partner was a Chapter President of the Mongrel Mob, but she eventually separated from him with her children to escape gang life and the cycle of Methamphetamine use of her partner and all the baggage that brought with it. She went on to put her children through school and returned to school herself. She graduated on the same day with one of her children.  She has written a paper for her masters titled “The Liberated Voice of Wāhine within a Gang Collective” and I would encourage you to read it online here – https://www.teipuwhakahauaa.co.nz/uploads/terangi/2016/1147_TeRangi2016.pdf  We interviewed her at the Waikato University where she is completing a degree and then went out to Ngaruawahia to interview Jane.

Jane and Nayda both share a history of experiencing institutional racism from a young age which is incredibly painful for young people. After enduring, then escaping, a childhood scarred with abuse, Jane found safety and security with the Aroha Trust, a work co-op set up by a group of women enmeshed in the gang scene. Wellington journalist Pip Desmond, herself a founding member of Aroha Trust, spent 11 years collecting the stories of the women involved and convincing them they needed to be told.

Jane told us a story she has shared with others before and which needs to be heard as it is a very common narrative amongst many people, both men and women, connected with gangs.

At 11 she was sexually abused by an art teacher. Two years later she was raped by a man in his mid-20s from a V8 gang. She was raped many times over the next decade – once by a gang associate but mostly by “respectable” men: a church worker, a St John Ambulance man who took her home from Girl Guides and a family acquaintance, among others. As a result, Jane went seriously off the rails, stealing, drinking, taking drugs, becoming violent. She was expelled from one high school for stabbing a classmate, then asked to leave the next after hitting a classmate.

“I was self-destructive, angry, I was just lashing out at the world, blaming myself for what had happened,” she says. “But at the time, and to this day, people never picked up on that, never looked at the reasons why I was acting that way.”

At 15, Jane began living at a halfway house run by youth worker Pip Desmond, who was little more than a teenager herself. When that didn’t work out and a brief time flatting was just as unsuccessful, 16-year-old Jane ran away to Wellington with a friend. There, her newfound freedom ended almost immediately when she was kidnapped by an older man she met at a pub. Jane was kept prisoner in his house for several weeks, during which time she desperately tried to get hold of Desmond, who had by then returned to Wellington and set up Aroha Trust.

Desmond finally made contact and, with the help of some of her Black Power connections, got Jane out. “Some of the boys came out and made the guy hand over my suitcases,” Jane recalls in Trust. “They did a big heavy on him. I remember thinking: wow, this is so cool having someone to stick up for me.”

It’s hard to understand how close contact with a group of widely feared and routinely violent men could be a good thing for such a vulnerable young woman, but Jane says it offered a measure of security. “For me, what was incredibly unsafe was mainstream society,” she says quietly. “Abuse came from people in positions of power, people who were supposed to be keeping me safe. Think about trying to report abuse of a parent or schoolteacher back then, or even now. You learn very quickly that you can’t tell anyone. Where do you go when the world that’s supposed to be safe for you is a place of danger?”

By comparison, living and working with the women of Aroha Trust – themselves all battle-scarred by tough upbringings, violence and cultural alienation – was “amazing”.