It almost seemed natural that the corollary of relatively less contact with parents and other adults was the priority ascribed to the relationships amongst the children at the community. The role of the peer group featured strongly in almost all our participants’ accounts about their growing up at Centrepoint.
By far the majority of our participants reported experiencing very close relationships with their peer group at Centrepoint. For some their strongest initial impression of the
participant talked about her first memory of being at Centrepoint; attending another child’s birthday party and being immediately struck by the closeness between the children:
You know, there was a real sense of family, that these kids weren’t only just friends, these kids were bonded, you know. There was more to the relationship that they had…These kids were siblings, just from different blood you know, all their lives together, these children: these kids were born there and they had grown up there and they, you know, they were just as much brothers and sisters as any nuclear family would be.
Another explained how these relationships were as close as siblings and in some ways better:
I mean living there was definitely… it created a lot of very close friends because growing up with someone, it’s almost like they’re a brother or sister but they’re not quite so you don’t …I don’t know. I guess I have a bit more respect, not respect but you know, you can fight a lot more with brothers and sisters. It’s almost like you have that brother and sister bond without having to have all the squabbles and things like that which is good.
Several participants talked about there being a ‘tribe’ of children and one explained how easy it was to find her place in this after her arrival:
So it was an easier transition by a ready-made tribe, and that, you know, there was probably about eight or ten other people sort of around my age. So starting school I had all of these people you know walking down the drive to get the bus with me and showing me what to do and telling me about the school. And I had people to hang out with, and I was doing pretty much the same subjects as some people. So I had people that I lived with that I was also going to school with.
For several of our participants this sense of connection with their peers has persisted:
So I think that’s one bond that we will always have. Um when you see them with the other children, you, you’ve all grown up so similar, and you’ve got, you can’t share that with anyone else that you went to school with or anything. That we’ve got: that strong bond.
From our participants’ accounts it was evident that there was not so much one ‘child tribe’ to which all children and teenagers belonged. Instead there were several groups that were formed largely along age lines. The ‘tribes’ that some spoke about would have most likely been made up separately of younger children, older children, young teenagers or older teenagers.
For many of the younger children, there was the delight of there always being “somebody to do something with”. Several described their enjoyment of having almost constant access to playmates:
So there were lots of like fun times. Like when I was a kid it was really fun – we’d have like spy clubs and stay up late at night and run around so that was like the good part of it um…and also everyone was really close.
I think as a child it was just a dream to be able to run off and play with your friends and do whatever you want; it was a really, really fun time.
Obviously the number of teenagers at the community fluctuated during its history but one described how when he was at Centrepoint there were probably about 40 young people between the ages of 13 and 19. Another participant who was there during the later period, in which the community was in the process of being dismantled, said she was with only a small group of teenagers, but even then they were a close group and relied on one another for support.
According to our participants, the teenagers lived alone in an annexe area where there was the opportunity for time away from the adults:
And as teenagers we were allowed to socialise and have parties and have friends home for weekends and stuff but to drink had to do it down in the little annexe, in our rooms you know kind of go away from people. So we were separate to the adults if you chose to be, um, and because the whole annexe was all teenagers, which I don’t know, it was kind of quite close to the bush, so you could go and be rebellious and smoke cigarettes, and you know, a lot of them grew pot.
A number of our participants talked about how they enjoyed this automatic access to a comfortable teenage world of social gatherings, music, smoking and drinking. Centrepoint was, for a time, a popular party venue that would attract other teens from around the North Shore. When friends from outside visited, one participant described how even they seemed to be drawn into the ‘tribe’:
It was almost like Centrepoint created that bond, once they were involved with us at Centrepoint, then they became almost lifelong friends.
But some of the participants provided alternative explanations for the closeness that sometimes developed between the children or teens at Centrepoint. One suggested that the
bonds developed partly as a necessary way of offering one another support under challenging circumstances. As she put it:
I felt that there was a certain amount of solidarity amongst my friends that was strengthened by the fact that we were struggling with abuse at the same time and that we were in an environment that in some ways was unsafe for us – that that actually helped to kind of pull us together in a way.
Another participant conjured up a rather more sinister image by talking about the “Lord of the flies” children, using the novel by William Golding in which a group of children ran wild without the control of adults and eventually turned, violently, on one of their own as a metaphor for peer relationships at Centrepoint.
Although most of our participants emphasised unity within the child groups, a few had clearly had quite different experiences. Some spoke about how they had been victim to some kind of bullying in the child groups. One described predominantly feeling like an “outcast” during his childhood. He described how he was picked on by other children so badly that he ended up avoiding them when he could and being in conflict with them if he couldn’t. Another participant also described what she called “a lot of bullying” that she attributed to being young and the fact that she was relatively new to the community:
But the kids kind of had to fend for themselves around that time because we were new we, I felt, and I suppose my age, I felt like I was picked on a lot.
While there were sometimes physical fights between the boys, the girls tended to employ more subtle forms of social ostracism. One described how she found her age group quite factionalised:
it was kind of the stuff that you went through at school with your little cliquey groups except it was, you were in closer quarters.
As this participant points out, while this kind of bullying or ostracism may be no different to what you would find at any school, it was distinguished by the fact that these children were mainly living with one another on an on-going basis and there was often little adult
mediation. One participant described relationships at Centrepoint as a “social pressure cooker”. His comment refers to all relationships at Centrepoint rather than just those between the children, but might easily apply here too:
This is all the time, continuous – 24 hours a day pressure cooker…It was all the time, it was 24/7. It was absolute pressure cooker. Whereas everybody else would go back to the safe-haven of their home – ‘whew that was a big day at the office, man I fucking, some guy yelled at me’ – this was happening 24/7…It was your whole life, all the time.
For a small number of participants the experience of bullying or social isolation was more than a transient dynamic in the child group. Amongst the participants who described being severely abused there seemed to have been an almost continuous experience of social isolation. As one participant explained, this may have been because they became preoccupied with trying to guard themselves against harm.
It was like no-one, it was really we, very much like looking after ourselves. Protecting ourselves, I felt. It wasn’t, like we weren’t unified, it wasn’t a unity. It wasn’t like we, we were looking after each other, we were just like looking out for ourselves, because you know, you had to protect yourself all the time.
Because of the age defined nature of most of the social groups, sibling relationships did not on the whole seem to feature strongly in the day-to-day lives of our participants. In many cases siblings appeared to have inhabited quite different social circles and our participants were not entirely sure about how their experiences might have differed from their own.
In a few instances though, an older sibling had taken on the role of supporting, and sometimes even parenting younger siblings. This may have been partly because parents were less available to the younger children and an older brother or sister stepped into the breach. One participant spoke about two younger sisters as ‘daughters’, explaining that he saw himself clearly as a primary parent to them. Another woman described reluctantly taking on this role in relation to her much younger sister because she felt that her mother was unable to parent effectively.
Another participant described how she had been protected and supported by an older sibling, until she left Centrepoint:
And my [sibling], I think around that time. [Sibling] used to be quite supportive of me because [sibling] knew that I was going through the worst of it because of being that much older…[Sibling] was the one, like looking after me all the time, so
[sibling] used to be like the Mum, because my Mum wasn’t very good at being a Mum anyway.
Some of the older children were also, it seemed, involved in taking care of younger children that weren’t their siblings. One described how this had helped her and her friends to feel more confident about their ability to manage children:
You grow up seeing children being born, you know, we’re little kids and we’re looking after other little kids you know, because you know, it was quite easy.
For the majority of our participants, their relationships with the other children at
Centrepoint appeared to be their strongest point of reference during their childhood. While their parents were engaged in self-exploration and experimentation, they appeared to have relied heavily on one another for support and companionship. With on-going contact and little parental supervision these peer relationships had the potential to impact significantly on the lives of our participants as they grew up. For most of our participants these
relationships were primarily experienced as positive, both warm and lasting, but a few experienced some difficulties with bullying and ostracism. While it may be that challenging circumstances at the community served to draw the child group closer together for support, it may have been difficult for those most affected by abuse to make use of this resource and, as a result, their experience of abuse was compounded by social isolation.