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By Gill Bonnett of 

Children as young as 6 are being adopted overseas and being made to work as house slaves, suffering threats, beatings and rape.

Kris Teikamata – a social worker at a community agency – spoke about the harrowing cases she encountered in her work, from 2019 to 2024, with children who had escaped their abusers in Auckland and Wellington.

“They’re incredibly traumatised because it’s years and years and years of physical abuse, physical labour and and a lot of the time, sexual abuse, either by the siblings or other family members. They were definitely threatened, they were definitely coerced and they had no freedom. When I met each girl, [by then] 17, 18, 19 years old, it was like meeting a 50-year-old. The light had gone out of their eyes. They were just really withdrawn and shut down.”

In one case a church minister raped his adopted daughter and got her pregnant.

Teikamata and her team helped 10 Samoan teenagers who had managed to escape their homes, and slavery – two boys and eight girls – with health, housing and counselling. She fears they are the tip of the iceberg, and that many remain under lock and key.

“They were brought over as a child or a teenager, sometimes they knew the family in Samoa, sometimes they didn’t – they had promised them a better life over here, an education and citizenship.

“When they arrived they would generally always be put into slavery. They would have to get up at 5, 6 in the morning, start cleaning, start breakfast, do the washing, then go to school and then after school again do cleaning and dinner and the chores – and do that every day until a certain age, until they were workable.

“Then they were sent out to factories in Auckland or Wellington and their bank account was taken away from them and their Eftpos card. They were given $20 a week. From the age of 16 they were put to work. And they were also not allowed to have a phone – most of them had no contact with family back in Samoa.”

‘It’s still going on’

Nothing stopped the abusive families from being able to adopt again and they did, she said. A recent briefing to ministers reiterated that New Zealanders with criminal histories or significant child welfare records have used overseas courts to approve adoptions, which were recognised under New Zealand law without further checks.

“When I delved more into it, I just found out that it was a very easy process to adopt from Samoa,” she said. “There’s no checks, it’s a very easy process. So about a thousand kids [a year] are today being adopted from Samoa, it’s such a high number – whereas other countries have checks or very robust systems. And it’s still going on.”

As children, they could not play with friends and all of their movements were controlled.

Oranga Tamariki uplifted younger children, who were sometimes siblings of older children who had escaped. “The ones that I met had escaped and found a friend or were homeless or had reached out to the police.”

When they were reunited with their birth parents on video calls, it was clear they came from loving families who had been deceived, she said.

While some adoptive parents faced court for assault, only one has been prosecuted for trafficking.

Government, police and Oranga Tamariki were aware and in talks with the Samoan government, she said.

Adoption Action member and researcher Anne Else said several opportunities to overhaul the 70-year-old Adoption Act had been thwarted, and the whole legislation needed ripping up.

“The entire law needs to be redone, it dates back to 1955 for goodness sake,” she said. “But there’s a big difference between understanding how badly and urgently the law needs changing and actually getting it done.

“Oranga Tamariki are trying, I know, to work with for example Tonga to try and make sure that their law is a bit more conformant with ours, and ensure there are more checks done to avoid these exploitative cases.”

Children from other countries had been sold for adoption, she said, and the adoption rules depended on which country they came from. Even the Hague Convention, which is supposed to provide safeguards between countries, was no guarantee.

Immigration Minister Erica Stanford said other ministers were looking at what can be done to crack down on trafficking through international adoption.

“If there are non-genuine adoptions and potential trafficking, we need to get on top of that. It falls outside of the legislation that I am responsible for, but there are other ministers who have it on their radars because we’re all worried about it. I’ve read a recent report on it and it was pretty horrifying. So it is being looked at.”

A meeting was held between New Zealand and Samoan authorities in March. A summary of discussions said it focused on aligning policies, information sharing, and “culturally grounded frameworks” that uphold the rights, identity, and wellbeing of children, following earlier work in 2018 and 2021.

-RNZ