Speak Up-Kōrerotia18 May 2016

Monitoring places of detention

Male This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s community access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of New Zealand on Air.

Female Coming up next: Conversations on human rights with “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana, E ngā reo, E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”. Join the New Zealand Human Rights Commission as it engages in conversations around diversity in our country. Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Nau mai haere ma ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”. I am your host Sally Carlton, a human rights specialist here in Christchurch and today’s topic is places of detention and we’re going to hear a little bit more about what those places actually are. We’ve got Jacki Jones, Chief Inspector (Crimes of Torture Act) within the Office of the Ombudsman. Jacki, so many people have said to me “Wow, that’s an amazing, very impressive title!” come in over the phone and Jolyon White who is here representing the Howard League. Just before we get going, just to let you know that the Department of Corrections is going to be responding to any questions that are raised during this conversation today; they’ve agreed to respond in writing. So if we have any questions that crop up, we can note those down, I’ll send those off and then those responses will be posted to the Speak Up Facebook page.

Just to begin if you could potentially introduce yourselves and the work that you do, the organisations that you represent.

Jacki My name is Jacki Jones and I’m the Chief Inspector under the Crimes of Torture Act, myself and my team of three inspectors monitor and inspect places of detention within New Zealand on behalf of the Ombudsman who are the designated National Preventive Mechanism and that’s in respect of prisons, premises approved or agreed under the Immigration Act, health and disability places of detention and we also have a joint designation with the Children’s Commissioner to monitor, inspect youth justice residences and care and protection residences - but to be honest we tend to leave those last ones to the Children’s Commission because we’ve actually got enough of our own to inspect and monitor.

Sally So how much of your job is going into these places of detention?

Jacki If you think about what we have to do in a 12 month period and if I sort of say at the beginning of March this year there was a total of 102 facilities that we have to inspect and monitor - and that’s excluding the four child care and protection residences and the five youth justices residences - we’re required currently to inspect 22 establishments and do 10 informal visits. Usually the informal visits are to sort of check up on the recommendations or really just to drop in and make sure that the agencies know that we’re still there and we’re still sort of following up on certain issues. So within a 12 month period we have to do 32 visits to places of detention.

Sally It sounds like quite a lot.

Jacki It is and I would say currently this year probably 95% of our visits are unannounced inspections which is always a bonus for us and I actually think it shows agencies in their true light which is why we tend to go down that path. So I would guess in between doing the visits, we’re back in the office, we’re writing reports or we’re following up on information that we’ve received. So it’s quite a full-on job for the four inspectors in the team.

Sally And I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about it as we go on.

Jolyon I’m with the Howard League in Canterbury and we do a couple of things, we run a prison information service - so we have advocates from Canterbury University Law Department volunteers (it’s a project between us and Community Law Canterbury), we spend time in the three Christchurch prisons - and we run a service where the prisoners can come and find out about their rights or bring to us complaints or talk to us about things that they’re concerned about and we either help them work out where they’re really supposed to go with that issue or we help them resolve the issue if we can. So we’re in the prisons really regularly but the main role of the Howard League really is we consider ourselves to be a prison advocacy group so we’re also really interested in the types of policies around the way Corrections functions and the things that may or may not be helpful about that. And as much as possible, if we can, we’re involved in trying to get better policies that result in lower recidivism rates and safer communities because of it.

Sally Just maybe for the listeners, that word you said… lower recidivism?

Jolyon In New Zealand we have reasonably high reoffending rates. If someone has been in a Corrections facility we have this really good opportunity to address some of the underlying complex needs or some of the… I’m sure we’ll talk about this as we go - but the low literacy rates and really high prevalence of mental health issues. If we don’t deal with those things when we have that opportunity, when someone is released from

Corrections, if they re-offend then we’ve got quite high rates of those people reoffending and being reconvicted and coming back into Corrections again. So at times it’s considered a bit of a revolving door.

Sally That’s definitely one of the issues, isn’t it?

Jolyon I think so and a lot more attention needs to be given to reintegration, as well as what happens in the Correctional facilities, the effort that we put into helping people adjust again. For some of them it’s a massive adjustment trying to make their way on the outside.

Sally We’ve been speaking about prisons - and Jacki you mentioned these 102 facilities and then the youth facilities as well - I guess it’s important to define before we go too much further exactly what constitutes a place of detention. I mean, prisons are the obvious ones but there are also others.

Jacki There are indeed. Our definition really is a place where the detainee cannot freely exit that facility and if you think about mental health facilities, probably people will have a better understanding that there are forensic service around and imagine that they are locked. But we also have acute adult services around the country which usually don’t lock their front doors but within that facility there’s usually a seclusion area where the detainee or the patient or the client can’t freely exit. So from our point of view it’s somewhere where a detainee cannot freely exit.

Sally Does the Howard League operate in these various facilities as well?

Jolyon We don’t operate in all of them, we don’t operate in the health and disability places, immigration centre, there’s some child care and protection facilities that we’re not in but in terms of places like the prisons themselves or in police cells, so those sorts of places we’re interested in what happens in and all of those spaces.

Sally Well I think that’s probably almost our first segment up so we will play our first song. It’s New Zealand Music Month in May, so in celebration of that we’ve got three Kiwi songs on the show. Jolyon the first one was your choice: ‘So True’ by the Black Seeds. Was there a reason you chose that one?

Jolyon Yes there was for me. I was a little late to the New Zealand music scene and this was one of the first songs that I heard that made me go, “Wow, New Zealand music has come a long way, there’s a really distinctive Kiwi quality about it” that I really liked so it seemed appropriate to bring that one.

Sally A good positive recommendation for New Zealand Music Month as well.

MUSIC BY THE BLACK SEEDS – SO TRUESally Welcome back to Speak Up-Kōrerotia, here on Plains FM 96.9. I’m your

host Sally Carlton based here in Christchurch and we’ve got Jacki Jones from Wellington, Chief Inspector (Crimes of Torture Act) and Jolyon White who is in Christchurch representing the Howard League. We thought we might kick off this next segment thinking about the OPCAT and Jacki you might be the first person to talk to, what is the OPCAT and what does it mean for New Zealand?

Jacki Well for those who don’t know, New Zealand signed the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment upon humans - shortened version, the OPCAT - on the 24 September 2003 and then ratified it on 16 March 2007. The objective of the OPCAT is to establish a system of regular visits by both international and national bodies to places of detention in order to prevent any form of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. And I guess the difference, for us, is that unlike other human rights treaty processes that deal with violations of rights after the fact, the OPCAT is primarily concerned with prevention of violations. So the international body - the UN Subcommittee for the Prevention of Torture - will periodically visit each country that has signed up to the OPCAT, and in fact they were actually in New Zealand in April/May 2013 and produced a report at the end of that. But also each country that signs up has to establish independent national monitoring bodies which are called National Preventive Mechanisms and these bodies are to regularly visit places of detention and make recommendations aimed at strengthening protections and improving treatment and conditions and preventing torture and ill treatment.

Jolyon How much of your work, Jacki, is about following up on the recommendations that that Sub-committee makes? Because in that report that you mentioned in 2014, there was some pretty serious concerns that they raised. So how much of your ongoing work is doing your own monitoring and how much is really pushing not only your recommendations but their recommendations and also the Coroner’s recommendations? None of those things are binding, so how much of your work is about pushing for good reform around those recommendations?

Jacki You’re right Jolyon, our recommendations aren’t binding and we do have to work… Like I say, we are a Preventative Mechanism so I guess it’s about trying to persuade and work with the agencies concerned to try and get them to change their perspective on things. But certainly when we’re doing our inspections, yes, we’re going to follow up on previous inspection reports that we’ve written but we also try to incorporate some of the recommendations that the Sub-committee have brought up in their report as well.

I guess the example that springs to mind at the moment is mealtimes within prisons. Both the UN and ourselves have written many times and made many recommendations about the mealtimes within prisons being too truncated so that prisoners really are having meals within… three

meals within six hours which is not ideal and then you’ve got some prisoners who can’t afford to buy their own canteen while they’re in there. So of course they’re having their evening meal as early as 3.45pm sometimes and then not getting breakfast until 8.30am. I guess that’s a good example for us but we’ve got quite a few of those.

Jolyon And from your perspective, can you just explain why that’s such a big problem, having an early evening meal?

Jacki If you’re going to give somebody an evening meal at about 3.30pm they’re not getting their breakfast until 8.30am, they’re going 14 hours without actually having a meal.

Jolyon We’re really concerned about that same thing. I guess what my question was about was wondering whether you’ve got different reasons for being concerned about some of those things. One of the big concerns of the Howard League around those mealtimes is not just about what that’s like on the inside - and it’s immensely frustrating for a lot of them - but also about what happens when they attempt to reintegrate back into society. There’s already so many things that are so incredibly difficult about that, that when you’ve been really institutionalised to a really set way to do things, anything that can be made as similar as possible to what it’s going to be like on release is a really sensible way of trying to help people reintegrate better.

Jacki Absolutely.

Sally I think that’s probably a point that not many people think about actually, the disconnect between routines in prisons and habits that are developed outside and the disconnect between those two worlds.

Jolyon And you think about people who have been in for a long time and for some of them, social media wasn’t a thing, no understanding about how you go about banking now, so many of the things that have changed, they all add up to things that are kind of stacked against you when you’re having a go at reintegrating well.

Sally What sort of things do you look for when you go into the prisons as the Howard League?

Jolyon We look for a variety of things, one of them is the areas in which the prisoners feel like they have had their either rights violated or feel angry or frustrated about the way the system works. And in some cases in fact we’re really able to sit down with them and say actually no, Corrections does have a right to do that and because we’re an external body, we’re an outside agency, they tend to take our word for that more. But some of the things that cause immense frustration for them - mealtimes was one and is perhaps not one of the biggest ones - but things like, if someone goes up before the Parole Board and is told they have to do course A, B and C before they’ll be released, say an anger management course and

maybe something else, a literacy course or an alcohol course might be a more appropriate one, and then they come back into Corrections and are told that those courses are not available and that sort of communication disconnect for them, they don’t understand the reasons for that, they’re not told the reasons for that and it causes immense frustration.

And that frustration and anger is really unhelpful because for a number of them they say, “Oh well, no-one is here to help us so I’ll just opt out.” And the more you get people opting out and deciding that the system is really not for them, the harder it’s going to be for them to stay involved in the system when they leave. We look for all those sorts of things: times when they feel like their rights have been violated and we hopefully help them see whether or not that is in fact the case and look for some of the other things that perhaps people are less inclined to consider and that’s the things that cause unnecessary frustration and hassle for people that might be trying to engage as much as possible.

Jacki And I guess just picking up on that, Jolyon, when we go around and do our inspections, a lot of feedback that we’re getting at the moment is that the prison muster is increasing, access to these courses and educations and programmes and activities is getting more and more difficult because the infrastructure around increasing your prison population is not sufficiently adequate to meet that rising muster.

Jolyon That’s right and we have a muster approaching 10,000. A third of the people inside are not there for any violent or sexual offending and it is so much cheaper to keep them outside on things like home detention or electronic monitoring; there’s a number of other community based options. So when it gets so crowded inside that we don’t even have the opportunity to address some of the mental health issues and some of the courses that people really need, we are setting ourselves up for a massive problem.

Sally Am I right in thinking that... Jacki, the Mechanisms that you’re talking about are trying to see that the places of detention are following international laws and protocols and Jolyon, perhaps you’re operating more within the domestic framework?

Jolyon That certainly sounds fair from my perspective. There’s a few things that we do look to international norms for, because our goal is to try to make the prisons work as well as possible. A good example of that would be: the UN minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners would say no double bunking, that you look for separate sleeping standards but we’re looking at bringing that into the domestic situation. But I would imagine Jacki, you would be doing the same?

Jacki It is predominantly about the international standards but when we go in and inspect we also are looking at Corrections regulations or how the Mental Health Act is administered so we are also looking domestically to make sure that the agencies concerned are also following their own

policies and procedures, that sort of thing.

Jolyon I wonder if one of the differences is that we are specifically looking for places where there perhaps should be policies or there should be legislation and there just isn’t. So that communication between Parole Board and Corrections, they’re not doing anything wrong there by law but it’s just ridiculous. So maybe we’re looking from that sort of advocacy perspective of the way the laws are set down that are unhelpful.

Sally I think that’s probably a good place to wind up our second segment already, we’re whooshing through this really fast. Jacki you’ve got Crowded House as your choice.

Jacki I have Sally, and this was really after consultation with the COTA team and we just thought it was apt because of the amount of travel that we do and we like to think that we always take the weather with us wherever we go. But if I may Sally, I would also like to dedicate this song to Thomas who is one of our inspectors who is actually unfortunately leaving the team to return to the UN and he will be leaving us in July so he’s going to take up a position at the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. So it’s really from Tessa, Emma and myself, it’s just to wish him all the luck in the future for himself, Rachel and Nico.

Sally Hopefully he’s taking good weather with him when he goes.

MUSIC BY CROWDED HOUSE – WEATHER WITH YOU Sally Nau mai haere ma welcome back to “Speak Up-Kōrerotia” on Plains FM

96.9. I am here in the studio with Jacki Jones and Jolyon White and we’re talking places of detention. We’re going to move now to think more specifically about rights and human rights within the prison or places of detention environment. I guess the most obvious - but perhaps difficult question - is: What rights do people in places of detention have, or I suppose, not have?

Jolyon The basic thing is people still have the right to be treated with dignity and humanity and fundamentally they have the right to enjoy the same sort of good health, both physical and mental, and access to the same sort of care that the rest of society has. So really it’s the depravation, it’s the loss of liberty is what’s taken away from them and they maintain their other rights as people.

Jacki And I would agree with that one, Sally. The punishment is actually going into detention, it’s not about being punished when you are in detention.

Sally Critical difference.

Jacki From an NPM [National Preventive Mechanism] point of view we have some very specific areas that we look at, but one of the most important areas I think is making sure that agencies have really robust and efficient complaint mechanisms in place and that they also have… So if you take

Corrections, they’ll have an internal complaints process but if they’re not happy with that, the outcome of that complaint they can then go the Prisoner Inspectorate, they can ring the Office of the Ombudsman, there’s the Health and Disability Commissioner, there’s a Privacy Commissioner so there’s a host of other agencies who are out there and that they can access freely without any repercussions coming back to them. So I think that’s vitally important in any place of detention and that’s one of the key areas that we focus our attention on is actually going through the complaints, making sure that they’ve been answered in a timely fashion and also speaking with the individuals concerned and seeing if they were happy with that kind of response.

Jolyon What sort of response do you get when you talk to the prisoners about that? One of the things that we’ve find is someone will come to us about something and we’ll say this is something you really could make a formal complaint about and they’ll say it’s just not worth it, it’s not worth the potential retaliation that’s going to come our way if we do it. And whether that’s real or perceived, it’s still a serious problem that that’s the way that prisoners see it. The Howard League has traditionally been a place that they can turn to as well, but our mail is read, for example, when people write letters to us and all of those things just lead to something that on paper looks like there’s a whole bunch of mechanisms that the prisoners can use to bring up complaints but in practice are not well utilised.

Jacki I think it’s important I guess, as well as just going in and doing our inspections, we also do a questionnaire with the prisoners and we try and capture as many of those as we can so that we get a true understanding of what they’re feeling and what they’re having to deal with on a day-to-day basis and there is a section within that questionnaire that talks about complaints and how are they handled and they effective and efficient. And it’s actually quite interesting, some of the results that have come out this year: the inspections that we’ve already carried out are clearly showing that there is little faith in the complaints system, internal complaints system.

Jolyon That’s my experience too.

Jacki And that’s something then… Yes as well as putting it in our COTA report, that is something also the Ombudsman’s Office is following through with the Department of Corrections to look at the complaints process because at this moment in time we don’t feel that the Corrections complaint process is working effectively and because it’s not working effectively we in this office are tending to get overburdened with the complaints.

Jolyon I’m not surprised and actually a lot of the people that speak to us with their complaints, it takes us quite a while to help filter down some of the little rant that we get to find out what the actual complaint is at the core of it and I imagine some of that comes through pretty unfiltered to you guys as well.

Jacki Yes it does.

Jolyon Just on the subject of those rights, I think what people are often unaware of is - whether we like it or not - prisons at the moment can be quite a violent place. There’s a whole bunch of other things that happen when you’re in prison and when you’re going into prison. There’s nothing that helps people out at the remand end, when they first… not sentenced yet but they’re first going into detention. They end up losing, in some cases, their identification, their bank accounts. They don’t have a chance to put things on hold so they start racking up debt. There’s all of those kinds of things that mean going into prison is not just the loss of liberty but you end up losing your identity and you rack up debt and you go into a place where violence is really likely and if we can’t work out how to keep our detention centres free from those things the sentence is actually far more harsh than anybody gives it credit for, particularly for so many of our offenders in there that are in for very minor things. Even the loss of the right to vote is kind of disgusting.

Jacki I think just picking up on that again, when we talk about the increase in muster it appears that it’s the remand population that is increasing currently and these are the people that actually haven’t been found guilty of anything and yet we’re treating them… They’re actually getting less of anything within the prison estate, they’re the ones that are usually locked up for the longest hours, they’re the ones that usually don’t get access to the education and to the programmes because they haven’t been found guilty of anything. It’s not unrealistic to find remand prisoners being locked in their cells for between 18 and 20 hours a day and like I say, this is not the way that we want to be treating our detainees.

Sally Can you just clarify what exactly is a remand prisoner?

Jacki So you could be a remand accused and you can be a remand sentenced. If you are a remand accused you haven’t actually been found guilty of anything, you’re just in that Court process. If you’re remand sentenced you’ve been to Court and you have been found guilty, you just haven’t been given a sentence yet, you’re waiting to go back and receive a sentence from the Court.

Jolyon And one of the problems that overcrowding causes is that you’re not allowed to keep the remand prisoners in the same place as the general prison population and so as those numbers grow and there’s increasing pressure, then I think this is one of the times in which Corrections takes action, like keeping people in lockdown for up to… in fact it was up to 23 hour a day, in one of the youth units, in fact it wasn’t a youth unit but it was young people who were being kept for up to 23 hours a day in lockdown and I suspect it was in order to keep them separated from the rest of the prison population. Which is not a good reason to be using what is essentially a pretty cruel form of punishment that can cause insanity.

Sally So these lockdowns is almost like solitary confinement.

Jolyon Its solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and one of the questions… I would have loved Corrections to have been here because one of the questions we would have for them is we’d love to know exactly how frequently that 23 hour maximum lockdown time is being used because it’s pretty had to get that information at the moment.

Sally And I suppose the reasoning might be for safety.

Jolyon There’s a variety of reasons. Sometimes prisoners can recommend or ask to go into that sort of lockdown themselves for their own fears of safety or for prison management or if someone is off sick and there isn’t enough funding to… All of this sounds like some quite serious complaints that we’ve got and it’s true, but I suppose we have a certain amount of sympathy for Corrections at the same time because their funding is frozen, the forecast 2011 levels up until 2020. And to have a funding freeze with a rising prison muster is going to result in not just problems in the way the prisoners are treated but pretty serious workplace problems for the staff as well.

Sally Very difficult situation to manage. We might wind up this segment now, we’re going to listen to ‘Beautiful Beast ‘by Taipei Teahouse and when we come back potentially think about mental health.

MUSIC BY TAIPEI TEEHOUSE Sally Welcome back to “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”. We’ve been talking about places

of detention and just to finish up we’re going to think about mental health. Jolyon I think you were going to kick this one off.

Jolyon Sure, in terms of the mental health issues in prison I think we have a really serious and really difficult to resolve dilemma. Sixty percent of people in prison have a mild to severe personality disorder, there’s really complicating factors around that in that a lot of those people also have experienced head injury and psychotic mood disorders and other addictions and if we’re using prisons now as a place to house people that have really serious mental health issues and other really complex social issues, we’re doing ourselves and them a huge disservice. So until we can try to sort out how to resolve those issues then we’re never going to be addressing the problems that saw people go to prison in the first place which means when they come out there’s a high chance they’re going to reoffend.

Sally So when you cite these statistics, is that people going into the prison system or the ones who are within it already?

Jolyon The ones who are within it already.

Sally So is there an idea of how many people who end up in prison had some sort of mental disorder or mental health condition before going in?

Jolyon I see what you mean, it’s for people who have gone in. They’re not suggesting that the prison has caused this; they’re suggesting that these are cause or factors for people ending up there.

Jacki I think it’s important to recognise that there are a significant amount of prisoners with mental health issues in the prisons in New Zealand and in fact in any prison across the world but I guess one of our concerns from our perspective when we go in and do our inspections is usually these people have been identified and some of them end up in what they call at-risk units, basically the at-risk unit is just an area where they can house them either until they get a bed out in the forensic service or until they’re at such a point where they can be returned back to the mainstream population. From our perspective, these at-risk units really lack any therapeutic intervention and basically people are just placed in concrete rooms with a bed and a toilet and get very little therapeutic engagement, they may come out of their cell for an hour of fresh air, they may make the odd phone call but there’s very little else that goes on in these at-risk units. And for us that’s really quite concerning because if you didn’t have a mental health issue when you went into one of these rooms you’re certainly going to have one by the time you leave because there’s just this lack of engagement to try and address some of those issues.

Jolyon It’s just an outrage and I think it goes to the heart of what we want our Corrections facilities to be like and ultimately we build them as places of containment and then we try to bolt on a few rehabilitation programmes on the side and at some point that has to be reversed so that we say these need to be places where we can address all of the underlying causes and provide educational opportunities, prisoners have the chance to do university courses, all of those sorts of things. But that of course takes long-term thinking and we still have a system in New Zealand where we have short-term thinking based on a three-year cycle where politicians can score some political points by selling a ‘tough on crime’ message which is proven to be pretty bankrupt. We need to start getting smart on crime, not just constantly belabouring a ‘tough on crime’ vote-winning campaign. That’s exactly how we ended up with removing the prisoner’s right to vote; there was no justification for it.

Jacki I think it’s also important to say that this isn’t just a Corrections problem either, I think they struggle and the forensic services struggle generally to try and accommodate these individuals therefore they’re left in the Correctional institutions because there are no beds out in the forensic services and whilst they may be seen by the psychiatrist once a fortnight, once a week, it’s more than that, it’s about engaging with them and trying to work with them on a daily basis. It’s a long term process, it’s not a quick fix, it’s not about just giving them the medication twice a day and saying yes, you sound good, you look good to me; it’s about engaging with them and trying to repair and make better.

Jolyon And that’s difficult, isn’t it, when you’ve got an underfunded department.

Jacki Absolutely.

Jolyon That is really struggling to provide the staff training they perhaps would like to and certainly need to.

Jacki It isn’t any fault of the officers. The officers are usually not trained in this field and are doing as good as a job as they can do but it’s a lack of funding and lack of bed spaces out in the forensic services.

Jolyon There’s case managers with case loans of 80 people and they’re not even sure who their clients are in some cases. So I agree, they do the job that they can do and occasionally they do a great job of it in some pretty difficult circumstances.

Sally I guess just to finish up then, we’ve kind of touched on a few questions for Corrections which I’ll pull together and send off to them. Are there any final questions or comments or suggestions that you’d like to put forward?

Jolyon I guess one of the last things I would like to say is that for all that we’ve spoken about what happens inside Corrections, there needs to be a far bigger focus on reintegration needs as well. People are coming out having lost their bank accounts and racking up huge debts and the Steps to Freedom, which is an amount of money that they’re given on leaving, is about $350 for two weeks, it doesn’t really go very far and so we’d like to see that tied to the cost of living.

Jacki And I guess from me, Sally, it’s about Corrections investing in mental health services so that we can hopefully address some of these key issues but it’s also about making sure that when prisoners are having to be detained that they are actively engaged in purposeful activities and they’re not locked up between 18 and 20 hours a day.

Sally Such a difficult issue, isn’t it? Well unfortunately we’re out of time; this seems to have gone really quick today. A huge thank you Jolyon and Jacki for sharing your vast experiences with us.

Jolyon Thank you and thank you Jacki.

Jacki Thanks Sally, thanks Jolyon.

Sally And just a reminder the Department of Corrections will be responding to our questions so check the Facebook page and look out for those.

Now we always do a bit of a shout out to upcoming human rights events and in June we’ve got the 40 Hour Famine which is a pretty significant event but I really wanted to profile this in the show because we’ve got Chelsea Yeoman here in the studio with us, she’s one of the World

Vision New Zealand representatives and Chelsea you’re here to talk a little bit about what is the 40 Hour Famine and why we should get behind it.

Chelsea Awesome. I am Chelsea and I am the Youth Ambassador for World Vision and the 40 Hour Famine this year is actually changing up quite a bit. For the past 41 years we’ve run a famine for hunger but this year we’ve changed it up and we’re doing it 40 hours for refugee children because of the massive humanitarian crisis going on in Syria at the moment.

I guess this project this year is really close to my heart because I was fortunate enough to travel to Jordan, which borders Syria, and experience it first hand and we met so many different people and heard so many different stories but they’re all kind of the same, they all just tell a story of heartbreak and how they had to leave their homes and families have been torn apart, family members have been killed and especially hard hitting when you hear little kids telling you these stories and how they’ve pretty much had their childhoods torn away from them. So the 40 Hour Famine this year is based on child-friendly spaces, so creating spaces where kids can come to get counselling, to get an education again and basically be kids again. So that’s what the money will be going to this year which is very exciting.

Sally Is there a particular story that struck you while you were there?

Chelsea Yes I think this one I tell everyone I meet but I find it so hard hitting. When we were in Asrak refugee camp which is the second biggest refugee camp in Jordan, I met this boy Hassam and he was 16 years old so I instantly related him to my 16-year old brother back home. He had an incredible story of how he was at school in Syria and out of the blue bombs started dropping on his school and he just so simply turned to us and told us something I will never forget, and he said my friend Majid he died and he knew at that point he couldn’t stay in Syria anymore it was too dangerous for him to stay so him and his family fled and they fled out of Syria to Jordan. But even fleeing wasn’t that easy; they fled with 100 people and in the middle of the night because it was too unsafe to go during the day and during this time they were being hunted by gunmen and there were even helicopters in the sky and he said that it was at that moment he didn’t know whether he would live or die. And I just found that so intense because this is a 16-year old kid telling me this story and I guess that was one really hard hitting moment for me meeting this kid.

Sally It must have had a big impact on you.

Chelsea Definitely.

Sally What have you done since coming back to try and do justice, if you want to call it that, to those kinds of stories and the faith that people have put in you, telling you those stories?

Chelsea That’s what’s been so epic about this whole trip is that we can come back and tell these stories because I know that I personally get so frustrated for these people if I wasn’t able to tell these stories. So we get to come back and we get to go to schools and we get to speak at schools and tell the youth of New Zealand what’s going on over there and tell them stories which are so relatable, telling them stories of their age group, things which are happening to kids over there. Just being able to speak at World Vision events as well, with the likes of Rachel Smalley, has been amazing and just knowing that there’s a whole crew backing me is amazing. We have about 40 youth ambassadors in New Zealand who are just so, so passionate about social justice and making a difference in this huge mind-blowing humanitarian crisis. We know that it may be massive but if you work at it one pace at a time you’re going to make a difference which is pretty cool.

Sally And I suppose that’s getting back to the 40 Hour Famine, where people can get involved, can’t they?

Chelsea Totally and it’s just going to make such a massive difference. We saw over there the start of Child-Friendly Spaces and it’s just making such a huge difference to these kids’ lives so being able to see what the famine will do in the future is just going to be incredible.

Sally And what can people do to get involved?

Chelsea Registrations have just opened for the 40 Hour Famine so by taking part, it’s the One Weekend, One Backpack challenge. Basically these refugees, when they have to flee, they have to pack really fast and put it all in their backpack and get out of there. So that’s what we’re doing for the weekend; we’re packing our bags and living out of our backpacks for the weekend. So that’s what 100,000 people around New Zealand will be fundraising for this year and you can get sponsorship and all the money collected will be going towards helping these kids out.

Sally I remember in high school we did it and we just ate dry biscuits for the weekend, instead of that this time it’s the backpack?

Chelsea Well they can totally still do that, we support 40 hours going without food or technology, any of that is still acceptable but we just like to add this new element because it’s not totally about hunger this year, it’s about helping these kids out.

Sally Very cool and we’ll make sure to stick that information on the Facebook as well, maybe we can even get a “Speak Up-Kōrerotia” team together, that would be fun. Thank you very much for coming in, Chelsea, and amazing work that you guys are doing so please keep it up.