Children adopted overseas, have been raped, beaten and held captive in New Zealand in cases where their adoptive parents had previous criminal histories, according to court documents and child welfare agencies.
A 12-year-old boy was among them, put to work in New Zealand and assaulted despite his adopted ‘father’ already having convictions for violence.
Immigration New Zealand said it was not its role to carry out police checks on adoptive parents when it is issuing dependent or adoption visas to minors.
A trafficking expert said the documented cases of children being trafficked through adoption spanned more than a quarter-century, amid several warnings to authorities of a loophole that allowed it to happen.
A specific example given by Oranga Tamariki to ministers in 2018 was a convicted sex offender, said independent trafficking in persons legal specialist Rebecca Kingi.
“There’s been granting of adoptions to children who have come into New Zealand through this pathway, and they’ve had to provide housekeeping labour, or they’ve been provided to provide labour for business services. Or they’ve been adoptions granted to parents who have got significant care and protection history with Oranga Tamariki,” Kingi said.
“What we’ve seen in practice is cases of children being adopted, where there have been adoptive parents who have got previous convictions.”
The Law Commission reported in 2000 that the former Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS) had found two cases involving several victims, said Kingi.
“So, we’re talking 25 years ago, there were eight children living in a Wellington home with a couple who had been recently charged with slavery and cruelty to children and CYFS understood that some of the children in this circumstance had been adopted by this country adoption pathway.”
Where it happens and how
Thousands of inter-country adoptions occur every year in New Zealand, mainly from the Pacific Islands and south-east Asia, and mostly without incident, abuse or trafficking.
However, reviews and reports down the years have catalogued the harm in several cases involving countries that are not signatories to the Hague Convention. The adoption happens overseas, sometimes without official checks, but under current NZ legislation, it is accepted and not subject to approval by child welfare staff here, or immigration screening.
“There was a man who was sentenced in 1999 to 14 years imprisonment and his wife for eight years for multiple rape charges against their daughter who was adopted at age 13 through this adoption pathway,” Kingi said.
“It could have been avoided if we had the appropriate mechanisms to safeguard and protect children that are being brought to our country and where this unspeakable harm is happening.”
More recently, an Oranga Tamariki (OT) report alerted ministers in 2019 to the issue, and was again raised by OT with ministers in 2021.
Kingi said INZ bore responsibility for not playing its part in ensuring that a child adopted overseas is not being brought into New Zealand by adoptive parents with previous convictions or pending criminal charges.
In a case RNZ revealed on Monday, a 13-year-old girl, given the pseudonym Grace by OT, was held in slavery-like conditions as a servant after being trafficked into the country.
INZ and OT both refused to say this week whether Grace was adopted. OT cited privacy grounds, also refusing to divulge the names of the defendants, or details of the court case.
Saving Sione
OT’s international child protection manager Sharyn Titchener previously spoke about Grace in a webinar, which outlined that trafficking and slavery charges were not brought.
But she also spoke about another youngster, with the pseudonym Sione. His adoptive father, Joseph Auga Matamata, withdrew Sione from school and put him to work, covering his tracks by saying the boy had returned to his home country.
“So, no one went looking for him for a year. And he was behind the big six-foot fences, padlocked gates and he was in domestic servitude, and he was being made to work in the field,” Titchener said.
“[Sione] lived a life of fear, and he was absolutely the servant. He’d never been registered with a GP, he had visited multiple healthcare facilities, so there wasn’t one doctor seeing him, he was always accompanied to the medical appointments by Mr Matamata. So, there was always one narrative and it was Mr Matamata’s. And he often didn’t receive medical treatment for injuries and infections. There was many, many scars on Sione.”
Court documents show Matamata already had convictions for violence when he adopted the 12-year-old, and two older boys. He was jailed in 2020 for 11 years for trafficking and slavery offences in Hawke’s Bay involving 13 Samoans, three of whom he adopted.
His past history reveals several assaults – including wilful ill-treatment of children and wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm in 1999, and two for assaults with weapons in 2012 – well before 2016, when he started adopting and enslaving the three boys.
The older teenagers had escaped, jumping the tall perimeter fence in the middle of the night, and making their way to a relative’s house.
Police checks for overseas adoptions
INZ said its role is to determine whether the adopted child can lawfully arrive on the visa, which does not include asking for, or requiring, police checks on the adoptive parents. If INZ had concerns, though, if could refer those onto other agencies such as OT, said Kylie Seumanu, INZ’s head of irregular migration and trafficking in persons.
“When INZ receives applications relating to children whose adoption is completed overseas, INZ will make a decision about the visa to facilitate entry into New Zealand. In these cases, young people are already recognised as the lawful children of the New Zealand citizen or resident parents and INZ is making a decision about the child as the primary applicant, and not the parent.”
If concerns are later raised about trafficking or exploitation of a migrant child, they are also referred to OT, she said. The crime type, however, was often difficult to detect and measure.
“Victimisation happens in a lot of different scenarios, whether that be employment related or domestic, so if you think about the typologies that I’m particularly interested in, it’s domestic servitude, it’s forced marriage, it’s labour exploitation, it’s sexual exploitation. And so having eyes and ears in multiple parts of government to kind of draw information out, and make sure that the children are protected in those circumstances, is really important,” Seumanu, said.
“We’re working really, really hard to make sure that we have the best view of that system. But there’s no single reporting mechanism for that currently, and I think that is a good space to work on. For me, I can do my best to make sure that we provide the right advice at the right time, based on the priorities that are set by ministers.”
Agencies were working together, to stop the levels of trafficking seen overseas.
“So, yes, it’s complicated. It’s a complex crime type, and we do rely on a multitude of people to play their role. We’ve got everything working in our favour, being New Zealand – with no shared land borders and the challenges that our partners overseas experience – and so I want to see us using [that] opportunity to protect vulnerable people. That is why I get up every day and come to work, and I know that’s why all of my colleagues across partner agencies do as well.”
For campaigners now, the rallying call is around urgent legislation already before Parliament – a member’s bill, and proposed amendments to expand its scope. Kingi was also one of the experts who drafted a bill to overhaul trafficking law more comprehensively last year. A change to standing order rules means if it has the support of 61 non-executive members of Parliament, it can get its first reading without being pulled from the ballot.
The passage of time – with harrowing stories and missed warnings to stop trafficking and slavery – has not dulled Kingi’s determination.
“We’ve known about it for a long time,” she said. “This is not new. I’m adding my voice to a chorus of what I hope will be the last song. We need to ensure that there is safeguarding, that there is a proper welfare and inquiry about the appropriateness of an adoption for the child, so it is in the child’s best interests.
“Are those adoptive parents appropriate, and this is basic things like do they have a criminal history? Are they actually going to care for this child as opposed to use them for labour or other services? There is a real clear call here for urgent action and accountability, not another tick box and a plan of action. Not another commitment to a broad review of legislation that never happens, but urgent action.
“So, not another child is trafficked to our country and subjected to this cruel and inhumane treatment on the back of policies that we have created.”
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