Gloriavale (Not all Heroes wear a Cape)

Hopeful and Victory Disciple, remeber those names. They are two of a long list of people who have escaped the clutches of the cult called Gloriavale. If you are not from New Zealand follow this link here which can give you a potted hostory of Gloriavale.https://teara.govt.nz/en/video/28133/gloriavale. Think well I don’t know how to compare them but a cult they are. Similar to the Exclusive Bretheren but worse if that can be immagined.

Hopeful and Victory Disciple a caouple who left Gloriavale with their children commented on the school. Victory had intimate knowledge of the school as she was a fromer student and also a teacher at the school. It was at first interesting as Victory described the school, how girls were taught upto the age of 16 in one class by an early childhood teacher, where as the boys recieved a slightly wider education from a senior teacher. The girls are essentially taught to cook, clean, sew and how to look after children. All women at Gloriavale work, they run a preschool and those who don’t work there are either cooking in the communal kitchen, sewing the communal uniforms or cleaning the communal spaces. The men might be farmers, process workeres, builders, all the jobs that are needed to keep a community running.

The Education review Office just delivered a damning report on the school that Gloriavale runs for its children. It wouldn’t be out of place in a Siberian Gulag, a place for indoctrination and making the children into complete robots, good little Gloriavalians. a private school to keep the children away from the evil influences of the outside world like careers, equality, free choice, https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/2018913552/resounding-failure-for-gloriavale-school-in-latest-ero-report.

Victory then started to talk about the punishment in the school. The teachers were admonished to ad minister corparal punishment to any child who got out of line. I wondered, where is this going to go, will the interviewer ask her did she also assault the children? To my surprise he did. With only a slightest hesitation with a voice brimming with emotion she said that she did. I thought does she know what she is saying, confessing to assault? She clearly did, she said that she intensely disliked it however was pressured into administering the punishment. She was clearly remorseful and ashamed. The interviewer then asked her husband hopeful did he have anything he wanted to say.

The interviewer aske Hopeful how the children were adjusting to school, I was interested in this as well. Hopeful said they were homeschooling their children. I quickly thought really? Hopeful said that they did so because their children were so traumatised by their treatment at school that they were too anxious to send them to school. Hopeful went on to say that it wasn’t until they got out of the community that they realised how much hurt the school had inflicted on them. The next statement was a straight shooting explanation of how they had personally contributed to the trauma and abuse that happed at school by essentially modelling it at home. He said it was heart breaking, sitting and listening to their children tell them about how broken and hurt they were by the way they had been treated.

Hopeful said it was a slow progress building trust in the children and allowing them space to speak about the abuse that he and Victory had done to their children. Somethings stood out to me. Hopeful and Victory did not shy away from being identified as past members of the cult, their continued use of their names marks them out as have being members. Secondly they did not resile from the facts that they had also abused their children. Thirdly Hopeful voiced his concern about the 50 or so nieces and nephews that were still at Gloriavale. They said the school should be shut down and implied so should the community.

Now none of this is particularly new news, it is however eye witness testament to the culture. The question that needs to be answered by the authorities like the Child Welfare (Oranga Tamariki) the Education review Office, the Ministry of Education, with this and all the other information they have are they really going to allow the school to continue, the ERO says they will return in 12 months and conduct another review, woopy do fire truck do. The evicdence of continuing abuse is clear, softly softly is not the approach. In my next blog I will talk about how I attempted to get Oranga Tamariki to act upon the clear and present danger that existed at Gloriavale.

This failing of the authorities is in the end a failure of society, we have allowed this to continue, shame on us, that includes me.

Paul