Woman steps in to protect baby with head injuries when Oranga Tamariki fails to act

The child protection agency has also accepted that Stephanie took on responsibilities that should have been Oranga Tamariki’s.

Stephanie was not a blood relation of the child. So, why did she do it?

“I didn’t want that little girl to not have someone to love her,” Stephanie told NZME in an exclusive interview.

“There was a newborn baby and … it was really concerning that no one was doing anything.”

Stephanie obtained the court order in early 2023, when baby Zita was just 7 days old.

After failing to respond to three warnings received before Zita was born, Oranga Tamariki had still not become involved in the case.

Stephanie had no idea what to do next.

So she called 111 to say that she had just gained a court order putting Zita into her care, and she did not know where the baby was.

The police responded quickly, but by the time they found and uplifted the week-old child, who was living with her homeless birth parents in a car, the damage had been done.

Zita was dirty, lethargic and “clearly unwell”. A paediatric assessment later found she had sustained a fractured skull and a brain bleed, and had been exposed to methamphetamine.

Three years later, Zita still suffers the physical effects of the events that took place in her first week of life.

Meanwhile, Stephanie, who took on a life-long commitment to provide Zita with love and safety, had found battling the system that should have protected the girl “exhausting, traumatising and honestly soul-destroying”.

“I trusted Oranga Tamariki to protect a child,” Stephanie said.

“Instead, I found myself having to step in because the very system that was supposed to protect her failed.

“No caregiver or family member should ever be put in the position where they feel they have to fight the system itself just to keep a child safe.”

Stephanie and Zita are not their real names. Family Court reporting restrictions prevent the people involved from being identified.

The names used are pseudonyms inserted by the court into a published decision, which recorded that Stephanie was later granted an adoption order for Zita.

Decades ago,Stephanie had a relationship with Zita’s birth father, long before he became a convicted drug-dealer.

Through that relationship, Stephanie has an adult daughter, who is Zita’s half-sibling. That is how she learned of the baby’s impending birth.

Worried, Stephanie and her eldest daughter went to Oranga Tamariki expecting it to step in. It did not.

“The social worker turned around to us and she says, ‘Look, we are slammed. We know this baby’s being born now, but it’s going to be quicker for you to get orders than us’,” Stephanie told NZME.

“I said, how do I do that? She says, ‘Go and find a lawyer’. So I did.”

In an internal report, seen by NZME, Oranga Tamariki said that using workload pressures as a justification for delaying action was “inconsistent with Oranga Tamariki’s practice framework”, which dictates that the safety of the child is the paramount consideration.

The report also says that “known risks were not acted on in a timely way, leaving the newborn exposed to significant and preventable harm at a critical and vulnerable point”.

“Oranga Tamariki had multiple opportunities to identify and mitigate the risks to [Zita] yet failed to take the appropriate and expected action,” the report said.

The report said that Zita’s case had been flagged as “urgent” even before she was born, requiring contact with the parents within 10 working days.

It was not allocated to a social worker for seven weeks, by which time Stephanie already had Zita in her care.

The report acknowledged that Stephanie had essentially done its job for them – it said she “undertook responsibilities that would ordinarily be supported or co-ordinated by Oranga Tamariki”.

For Stephanie, having Oranga Tamariki admit that there had been preventable harm was not a positive thing – it was “devastating”.

“That harm was not theoretical to us. It was real life, real fear, real trauma and real consequences that our family now has to carry forever.

“Hearing those admissions confirmed everything we had been trying to say for so long, but it also came with the heart-breaking reality that the damage had already been done,” she said.

“I carry a lot of anger over this process,” Stephanie said. “Anger that concerns were not acted on sooner. Anger that we had to push so hard just to get acknowledgment. Anger that vulnerable children and families can be left carrying this level of trauma while systems move slowly behind paperwork, policies and procedures.

“What hurts the most is knowing this could have been different. If concerns had been taken seriously earlier, so much pain may have been avoided.”

Stephanie has received formal apologies from Oranga Tamariki – at a hui and in writing. In these, the child’s name was spelled incorrectly.

“To receive a formal apology letter with my child’s name spelled wrong after everything, honestly, broke me,” she said.

“People might think that sounds like a small mistake, but when you have spent years fighting for a child to be seen, heard, believed and protected, seeing their name repeatedly written incorrectly in an apology about the harm they suffered feels like another slap in the face.”

Stephanie was not the only person who raised concerns with Oranga Tamariki around the time of Zita’s birth.

Hospital staff made a report of concernto Oranga Tamariki when Zita was born, and four days later asked if the case had been allocated to a social worker.

In the meantime, the health workers tried to delay discharging Zita and her mother from hospital, in the hope that a social worker would come to see them.

However, they had no legal mandate to stop the mother and baby leaving on the fourth day, despite them having no safe address to go to.

When hospital staff asked later why no one from Oranga Tamariki had come to the hospital, they were told the government agency did not want to make a “knee-jerk response”.

The timeline of events suggests that Zita’s head injuries were caused in the three days after her discharge from hospital.

In her response to the apology given at the hui, Stephanie said she made a promise.

“As long as I am alive, she will never be left to suffer again,” she told the meeting.

“She will never be left without protection, without advocacy, or without someone standing up for her.

“Because that little girl is not just a file number. She is not just a name on a report. She is a child who fought from the very beginning. She is strong. She is resilient.

“She is the real fighter in all of this.”

Oranga Tamariki’s deputy chief executive of tamariki and whānau services, Thomas Ronan, said the organisation was committed to improving the way it responded to reports of concern.

“When this case was raised three years ago, we failed to appropriately respond to reports of concern raised regarding this child’s safety, and we have extended our apologies to those involved,” Ronan said.

“We acknowledge in this case we should have provided greater support, including more timely engagement and referrals to appropriate community agencies.

“For privacy reasons and an ongoing complaints process, we cannot disclose any further information.”

Ric Stevens spent many years working for the former New Zealand Press Association news agency, including as a political reporter at Parliament, before holding senior positions at various daily newspapers. He joined NZME’s Open Justice team in 2022 and is based in Hawke’s Bay.