A place to be: Rangatahi in Whau

I was a classic ‘latch-key’ kid in the early 2000s definition of the word. I would walk the 2km or so home from school and let myself in where I would then enjoy a few deliciously unsupervised hours before my Mum or her partner got home. Sometimes I’d have a mate with me, sometimes two or three. Sometimes I’d do homework, more often I’d make strange combinations of food from what was on hand - bacon and peanut butter sandwiches and muffins with too many chocolate chips come to mind. I’d sing to the cat and imagine she was a Broadway audience. These were the days of landline phones, and it wouldn’t be uncommon to find me and an accomplice making prank calls. 

Predominantly innocent pursuits, but I also remember an occasion where a friend chased a younger neighbour pal of mine with a knife, several illicit sips of my step-father’s brandy, and a young male marketer who had to be threatened with the police before he left.

As my tweens turned to teens, these afternoons were increasingly spent in the nascent world of online connection. MSN Messenger. Bebo. MySpace. As fellow millennials will recall, it was a Wild West environment. Completely unsupervised, our parents entirely unaware of the extent to which we could bully, threaten, and harm each other silently from the confines of our rooms, granted unfettered access to computers and internet of varying quality because by this time, at least in my privileged world, homework simply couldn’t be done without them anymore. 

Every day after school, rangatahi in Whau are returning home to places they don’t feel safe in, places they don’t have their own space in, and places with the same online risks I faced but which have grown in number and sophistication substantially in the intervening 20 years. At an age when all you want to do is be with your mates, young people naturally navigate towards places that provide enough space and shelter for them to meet and be together in groups without the need to spend money. 

Playgrounds, shopping malls, libraries, train and bus stations. That’s really about it. There are vanishingly few places where anyone of any age can simply exist in safety and in a group without the need to spend far more money than the average teen has access to. But for groups of young people, none of these places come without obstacles either. In parks and playgrounds, they are regarded with suspicion by parents of younger children or other adults. “They just give you the side eye till you leave,” one Intermediate School student told me, even though the playground he referred to was designed for children up to two years older than he was at the time.

In shopping malls and transit spaces it’s the same story, and part of the reason for that suspicion is that these locations are also prone to becoming the sites of sometimes violent inter-school rivalries due to their centrality. So for most rangatahi, they find themselves in the unenviable position of being feared and judged as the instigators of the very behaviour they themselves are seeking to avoid. 

Libraries are a bastion of welcome in our city. No longer the forbidding arbiters of silence, our librarians are social workers, babysitters, security guards, educators, help desk operators, and about 50 other things besides the champions of literacy they also remain. But it’s still not really possible to hang out unselfconsciously in a library, and even if it were, there simply isn’t enough library space to go around.

A little while ago, the Whau Local Board visited Shore Junction on a fact-finding mission, where we saw shining new recording studios, modern study spaces, individual group rooms, rows of computers equipped with all the safety and monitoring features imaginable, neurodiverse-friendly spaces, quiet spaces, loud spaces, creative spaces, fully stoked kai spaces, and all of it temperature controlled and supervised by youth workers. It was a dream, and we all looked, misty-eyed, fantasising about one day bringing such a thing to our own area (and I think it wasn’t just me who bought an optimistic Lotto ticket that night).

So, fresh from that experience, when we went out to ask the youth of Whau what a potential youth space might include, we sat, pens poised, waiting to be asked for gaming stations and basketball courts and recording studios and mocktail bars. What they asked for over and over again was just… space. Tables. Chairs. Maybe even beanbags. “Do you think we could have, like, tea bags, and a kettle?” One teen asked me, to enthusiastic support from the rest of the group. 

It was heartbreakingly simple and undemanding. Again and again, from kids with loads and kids with next to nothing, from monosyllabic teens twice my height, and from minute kids barely out of primary school.The ask is simply for a place to exist and not feel like no one wants them there.

It’s hard not to feel like we’ve failed our rangatahi, when they ask for so little and yet there’s still such a lot of work ahead to provide even that. But it’s work that’s important and work that has already begun. The mandate from young people is clear, and now it’s up to us - the Whau Local Board, hopefully me as your Councillor, the local community - businesses, whānau, schools, clubs - all of us, to work together and make it happen. We will all be richer for it.