Early in its history Centrepoint was involved with legal disputes with the North Shore City Council around residential permits for the community. As we noted in our introduction, Centrepoint had encountered legal disputes about building permits and taxation from its earliest establishment as a community. In the late 1980s and early 1990s though there was a significant change in the kind of legal clashes that Centrepoint encountered: Civil law was no longer the primary site of dispute and a series of police raids on the community for child pornography and drugs resulted in criminal charges and the imprisonment of key
community members. Our participants experienced these events as children and provided their perspective on Centrepoint’s clashes with the law during our interviews.
A number of our participants reported having been at Centrepoint during one or more of the police raids. One woman reflected on how the raids were relatively normalised during her time at the community:
You know, it was quite normal to be woken up, you know, with police knocking on the door, you know, and having the raids. To an extent it was kind of exciting, because we didn’t have to go to school for the day, you know. When you grow up that way, everything’s normal, you know, you don’t question any of it because you’ve, you’ve grown up with it.
Another participant gave this rather matter-of-fact account of the way in which raids typically unfolded at the community:
I can’t remember how many I was present for – I do remember that they always used to come really, really early so you were often woken up and everybody had to get out of bed and we just had to all go down to the kitchen area and you just weren’t allowed to leave until they had done what they were doing and then we’d be allowed to go on with our day and so we’d all have to get down there and then after that all have to get ready to go to school and then go to school and get to school at morning tea time and so, but, of course the school would have been alerted during the
morning – someone would have called the school to say ‘look, this is happening, we can’t – the kids can’t be there until such and such a time’ and so there was never that much of an issue.
Despite the sense in which police raids were normalised or ‘typical’ for some participants, others recalled them as more dramatically atypical of their everyday life in the community. One offered this more vivid and detailed account of her experience:
We all thought it was a drug raid at first, at the time, because it was a dawn raid. Three helicopters, there was like 42 police and investigators all-together, dogs, cameras everywhere, media lined up at the gate. Every gate there was media. The helicopter had a spotlight. You know, it was like movies, very dramatic. And it was at five am. And you stepped out of your room. My memory of it was this shining light coming in my window. ‘What the hell was that?’ I woke up, it was still dark. You could hear this thud, thud, thud, thud. I was thinking, ‘oh my God, what’s going on?’ I don’t know. Opened my door to the blinding helicopter light, shining right at me. I’m looking at it going ‘this has to be a dream.’…I looked down and there’s these investigators walking up and down with clipboards. I was just like ‘what?!’ and I shut my door. I was naked because I had been in bed and I thought, ‘what the – I don’t get it, I really don’t’ and I went out and then someone was at my door and he was like, ‘Okay, what room is this? What number room? What’s your name? And get dressed and get down to the kitchen.’… Walked down and there’s just people everywhere, just, they were just trashing the place, just trashing it. Absolutely, like pulling everything out of cupboards and just dumping it on the floor in piles. So disrespectful. Walking round with these big cameras on their shoulders. We were just so blown away and I got down to the lounge, dining room area and all the parents were just sort of sitting down together, murmuring, you know and I got to my Dad and I was like ‘Dad, what is this?’ You know, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And he’s like ‘I’m pretty sure it’s a drug raid and no-one’s going anywhere’. Basically they just did a whole lockdown on the place. There was, like 90 people living there at the time and it went on all day.
While a few participants described the raids as being ‘unpleasant’ for most they had been a source of excitement. Where they experienced anxiety at the police presence, it focused on the possibility that their own drug stashes might be discovered by the police. While one described how he threw his marijuana out of the window another rushed off to warn a friend:
I was just thinking, ‘shit’ and being teenagers being teenagers I started thinking ‘oh my God, what have I got in my room’, you know? I was 15, 16, you know. ‘Oh shit, what have I got? What have I got?’ And then I started thinking ‘oh my God, my friend’s got some dope’ and I ran into his room and I was like ‘Have you stashed everything you’ve got?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s all out’.
One participant recalled how he had been inadvertently involved in secreting drugs on the property while the police were there when he was a teenager. He had been attending to a task on the property when he saw flashing lights and police cars. Then he was told by an adult member of the community to pick up a 44 gallon of ‘tetra’ and take it by tractor to a barn across the road. It was only later that he found out this was one of the chemicals used to manufacture Ecstasy on the property.
But for most of our participants, the police raids did not seem to be taken seriously as a threat. Some described how they had challenged the police when they were being
questioned or asked to leave their rooms. The girls objected to police being there while they dressed. One man reported that when the police asked him where his mother was he jibed that he didn’t know whose bed she was sleeping in that night. Another described how, after waiting in the kitchen/dining room area as the police had requested, the teenagers began to get restless and decided to defy their orders:
They’re saying ‘Don’t leave, don’t leave’ and we’re just like, ‘No, piss off. We’re not sitting in this room all day’ and we got up and trolleyed down to the gate. This helicopter, news helicopter, followed us all the way down to the gate. And we’re just like [gesturing upwards] ‘Fuck off!’ you know, [laughing] like being little rascals and we got down to the gate and there were, honestly, like 15 media cars parked behind each other. All the media standing along the gate so it was like media car, police car, media car, police car, almost all the way from the gate, you know, like five hundred metres back to the road … We just like, ‘What the hell?’ So we just sort of rascalled around, ran around, and they managed to get us on the news doing that and yeah, I can’t remember what ended up happening. We missed a day of school and then, you know, it was all back in the media. Over nothing, nothing! Just, you know…
At the time of the raids, most of our participants seemed not to have reflected a great deal on the reasons for the police presence. When they did think about it they may have been somewhat confused as one participant’s account suggested:
I had an idea of what was going on the whole time but it wasn’t like I knew
everything. I mean the police raid happened and I sort of…‘cause we had a couple of police raids when I was younger, and I sort of knew what was, I mean I knew that a police raid was happening but I was more worried about my Dad had
um……um…you know like pirated DVDs or pirated videos: I was worried he would go to jail for pirating videos and things! I wasn’t so aware that there was, you know, the whole drug thing happening and, you know, that was more what the cops were searching for were the drugs and things like that.
Other participants were aware that the raids had something to do with ‘drugs’ or with ‘child pornography’ but explained that they had felt rather distant from these issues themselves:
At the same time I think there was a lot of stuff that we, we probably didn’t
necessarily know who was involved all the time and the charges. Not because it was hidden from us or anything but just because we were so, well to me I, I just, ‘cause I felt so removed from it because I didn’t have any personal experience of what was going on that any of it was to do with.
It was a little bit like a joke I think. You know, ‘Silly police – what are they raiding us for? We’re not nothing – what are we? They think we’re this big scary cult you know [laughs] we’re like ‘What? Honestly!’
Others suggested that the raids had been set up to intimidate the community and even claimed that false evidence had been planted to incriminate them. One participant also mentioned that when the police had first started investigating they were told to “lie to them”
While the police presence did not seem to have been taken particularly seriously by most of our participants, several noted that the raids marked the beginning of the community’s decline. As one put it, for the adults it was the “last straw – they didn’t want their kids to grow up having those kinds of memories”. It was at this time that a number of families began to leave Centrepoint.
For those whose parents were arrested the raids had an even more painful aspect. Several of our participants had had parents who had been charged and some who had been jailed for offences at Centrepoint. Imprisonment was not uncommon for adults at the community, according to at least one of our participants:
I guess in a sense it was easier, because you just knew that other people in the community had been to jail. It seemed like the kind of thing that happened: every male went to jail at one point or another, to an extent.
In spite of the perception that criminal charges against adults were relatively normalised within the Centrepoint community several of our participants hinted at their considerable distress at the loss of their parent in this way, despite being cared for by a remaining parent or another family at the community. Several spoke about how much they missed a parent and how months in prison could feel through a child’s eyes to be “years and years”. Another spoke very sadly about the fear he had experienced during his parent’s imprisonment and how this had haunted him through his childhood and adult life.
For participants who had experienced a parent’s imprisonment, their difficulties were generally exacerbated by the challenge of reconciling their parents’ alleged crimes with their role in their own lives. Several indicated awareness that their parents had been arrested for crimes related to sexual abuse and/or drugs. Mostly they were vague on the details of
their parents’ charges during our interviews, perhaps reflecting their unwillingness to acknowledge them specifically or in detail.
One of our participants who had subsequently come to acknowledge her parent’s
involvement in sexual abuse spoke about how he had initially reacted on finding out about this:
I remember being told that [a parent] was going to go to prison and I remember being just adamant that it wasn’t going to happen; that there was no way that society could do that. You know, that they could actually take my [parent] away. No – that was not going to happen…I was so naïve and wanted to write these letters to the people who had accused my [parent], well, that [my parent] abused and I
wanted to say like ‘How could you do this?’ ‘How can you take my [parent] away?’
Another of the few participants who spoke in detail about a parent’s crimes offered a rather uncertain and uncomfortable account of what had led to the imprisonment:
And I think the, the things that they were put into prison for – the [people] who went to prison at around that time – had sort of happened quite a lot longer ago, for example the girls who had the issues had grown up and so there’d been a bit of a gap in time between. Yeah I think [my parent] said many years ago. I don’t know if that’s a true figure or not but [my parent] says ‘I’m being, I was put into jail for stuff that happened many years ago’. So maybe then the girls were younger and [my parent] was put into jail for child molestation. Other [people] went to jail, one I think went for rape; one went for molestation and production of Ecstasy. I don’t know there was a few different things they all went for but I mean, yeah, they were all reasonably serious, serious things they went there for…It was strange but it wasn’t, like it wasn’t like it wasn’t talked about. I knew, I think I was younger and never really questioned it…yeah it wasn’t normal just…[someone] said [my
parent’s] in prison and that’s what [my parent’s] there for’ and I was like ‘okay’. I didn’t question, I didn’t question a lot of it.
Those who had had to confront the possibility of their parents’ conviction for crimes had clearly engaged in some later soul-searching. One participant explained how she had found herself having to think about what her father had done after he was imprisoned, despite still being quite young herself:
And there was some sort of family issues once we’d moved out, you know, where sort of I questioned a lot of things about his past and it made it quite difficult you know, like I sort of had to deal with, I don’t know, like I had to deal with issues that you wouldn’t expect someone of my age to deal with: I think I was only young when I heard about some stories that made me really upset and I lost contact with my dad for a whole year and dealt with a lot of that.
Others found a way to manage their experience by drawing attention to the normalising of intergenerational sexual behaviour, making comparisons among adults to minimise their parents’ culpability or denying their parents guilt altogether. One provided this explanation of her parent’s involvement in abuse:
You know that was what it was, probably, probably a task …people were probably asked to …and it was a weird world. I mean you went along with things because that was what you were there for…It was frustrating. A lot of people got away with stuff [who] were actually quite dangerous and a lot of people got done who were really not a problem. It was a shame.
Another participant acknowledged that his parent had been charged with abusing children at Centrepoint but questioned the significance of the charges given that they had subsequently been dropped:
And, and initially [my parent] was charged for abusing kids at Centrepoint but had left Centrepoint at the time, and all the charges got dropped, so I don’t know maybe it was some minor things or something, because surely they wouldn’t have dropped them if it was some full-on thing?
But not all participants attempted to defend their parents from responsibility for crimes committed at Centrepoint. One participant challenged her parent’s claims of not being involved in some of the crimes at the community:
[My parent] always wished [he/she] hadn’t done it, but [he/she] did. And as far as I’m concerned, if you’re willing to lie for these people and…you were obviously involved in it. You weren’t just impassively looking on. That’s my theory anyway.
Some prominent members of the community were jailed during the period in which the community was still active, and our participants reported attempts from the community to provide them with support both during their trials and their periods of imprisonment. Several of our participants acknowledged that the community had helped arrange transport for them to visit a relative in prison while others spoke about being allowed to attend the trials of community members.
Not surprisingly, the imprisonment of community members and claims of sexual abuse brought welfare services in the form of CYPS to Centrepoint. Some of our participants spoke about how they had experienced official welfare involvement at Centrepoint. For some it was not seen as supportive, but rather as a threat to their continued presence at their community and their relative security with their parents:
I just remember thinking ‘you guys are fricking crazy’, because we’re such happy intelligent kids, who have absolutely nothing wrong happening to us. You take us away from our families …
We heard about children being frightened of being questioned about sexual abuse by welfare workers. One participant described how she was instructed by her parents to ‘run