Tyrone Marks KSO (Ngāti Raukawa) is a survivor of abuse in state care and a long-time advocate for recognition, redress and change. He has spent decades speaking out about what happened to him and working to improve the systems and support available for survivors.
Tyrone was a member of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care’s Survivor Advisory Group and later contributed to the design of a survivor-led redress system. In 2025, Tyrone was appointed a Companion of the King’s Service Order (KSO) for his services to survivors of abuse in care.
Aaron Smale (Ngāti Porou, Ngāpuhi and Whakatōhea) is an award-winning investigative journalist, photographer and researcher whose work has focused on the impacts of abuse in state care on Māori survivors, whānau and communities.
His extensive work contributed to growing public awareness of abuse in care and the establishment of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. He is the creator of The Stolen Children of Aotearoa and continues to bring the experiences of survivors to public attention.
Citizens Advice Bureau New Zealand thanks Tyrone and Aaron for sharing their insight and experiences in this interview, and for their guidance and participation in the development of Kōnae: My Records Guide.
Warning: This interview discusses the abuse and neglect of children in state care, including institutional abuse, family separation, trauma, and suicide. Some content may be distressing or triggering.
Subtitles are available. Click the Closed Captions (CC) button.
“Your files are not the whole story. They’re written for the system. Reading your records can be triggering, but you’re you. You know what happened.”
For survivors of abuse in state care, searching for records is often a search for an explanation. Getting access to childhood records can mean finally seeing a paper trail of a life they remember, but it can also mean encountering a version of themselves written by the very system that failed them.
Tyrone Marks KSO, a survivor and long-time advocate for survivors, has spent years navigating the systems and files created about him by welfare, education, health services and the institutions he was placed in.
What he found was not a single, coherent account of his childhood, but fragments held by different agencies.
“It’s really difficult to actually get a complete file because different agencies hold different information. You might find some information but if you don't get the whole thing, then you won't get the whole picture of what is actually written about you, and why.”
“So you've got to go fishing,” he says. The metaphor, inspired by Māui fishing up the North Island, captures what it can feel like to retrieve records scattered across Government archives.
“It’s like they’ve all been dumped in the ocean and you have to bring them in with a net”.
Events Tyrone remembered clearly were absent or reduced to a few lines, while judgements and descriptions of his behaviour were recorded in detail.
“Lots of what I read wasn’t true,” he says.
His records included information that he had not previously known about his parents’ involvement in the decision to put him into state care. At the same time, they presented his parents through the language and judgements of the system.
His father, Tyrone says, was a low-paid labourer and social drinker who had returned from the war and was struggling to provide for a large family. But the records portrayed his parents as irresponsible and neglectful - a picture Tyrone rejects.
This is part of the difficulty of making sense of care records. They can contain important pieces of a person's history while also reflecting the narratives and assumptions of the institutions that created them.
As a child, Tyrone was seriously injured by a car after trying to escape abuse he experienced at Holdsworth. It was thought he might not survive the night, but he managed to recover and spent the next five months in hospital. Yet, when he later read his records, the event was drastically minimised.
“They recorded the running away without recording what I was running from. They didn’t ask why”.
His records repeatedly describe him as disobedient, violent, mentally unwell or prone to running away, but rarely explained what came before those actions.
Labels recorded about a child in care can follow them into adulthood, influencing decisions about them and contributing to negative outcomes for decades.
Tyrone remembers being accepted into the military's selection process, only to be told that his history at Lake Alice meant he could not proceed.
“That stigma's going to follow you forever,” he recalls being told by the sergeant.
“They told me this is where it ends. When you look at your records, you can see how it’s been mapped out for you” he says.
But Tyrone does not accept the interpretation of him contained in his records. Where the records describe a “difficult” child, he sees a boy who was resisting what was being done to him.
“If you read my files,” he says, “you’ll see I resisted every single time. For me, the happy shit in my records is the stuff I did to resist. My records are: them, their actions and my reactions”.
“It wasn’t me who was the problem”.
That distinction is important, he says, but not every survivor will be able to look at it that way. For some people, reading decades-old descriptions of themselves can reinforce the shame and harm the system created.
Tyrone’s message to survivors is “it’s not your fault. Believe in yourself. Believe that you know that that's not you.”
There is also a wider need for access to care records for generations trying to make sense of their family histories. Survivors have waited decades for answers, and some have died without ever receiving their records.
Tyrone says some have lived their entire lives disconnected from their families because of experiences they were never able to explain.
“People have waited decades. Survivors have died. Some never got their records and never got answers.”
For the mokopuna and descendants of survivors, those records may provide answers to questions about what happened to their parent. Tyrone has seen this in his own family.
“My children did not fully understand what had happened to me in state care until they read what was written in my records. Afterwards, they started to understand some of my behaviour in a different way”.
A survivor may have spent years being seen by their family as different, distant, overprotective or troubled, without anyone knowing their back-story.
Records can sometimes help families make sense of something they have experienced but never understood. “Dad was angry” can become “Something happened to Dad”. That understanding can give context to a person’s behaviour and change how their whānau understand them.
“This wasn't them,” Tyrone says. “This is what other people have done to them. That kind of understanding matters”.
Tyrone sees the opportunity to make records easier to access as potentially significant but only if access means more than handing someone a box of documents.
Some survivors may struggle to read. Others may not understand the language used by psychologists, psychiatrists or government agencies.
“Even when a survivor gets their records, they may not get the whole story. Pages may be missing and information may have been withheld or redacted”.
Survivors may find gaps, contradictions or accounts that do not match what they remember. They may discover that something they have spent years trying to understand was never recorded at all.
“Ask for help. Ask for support. Ask the questions,” Tyrone says.
Tyrone says collective effort and properly functioning systems around survivors and their whānau are needed. That is where he sees potential in Kōnae, a website designed by Citizens Advice Bureau to make it easier for people to find their records.
Aaron Smale also sees value in CAB’s role, describing the organisation as “independent” and “one step removed from Government”.
For Tyrone, CAB’s role is to make access easier for survivors: “My understanding of their role, which is an important role, is to try to make access easier for individuals who might want to get that information.”
But Kōnae is only part of the work.
“There needs to be a process around that supports as part and parcel of Kōnae and everyone needs to work together on behalf of the group of survivors”.
State and non-state agencies holding those records also have a role to play.
Tyrone says “The system will only work if agencies cooperate, provide the full and unredacted records they hold and properly resource the work required to retrieve them, otherwise survivors will continue to only get pieces of the puzzle”.
For him, the value of accessing care records is not simply proving the abuse that happened or documenting institutional failure but helping survivors and their families understand what happened and access the support they need.
“Moving forward, I think that if the right mechanisms, the right supports and the right information is all generated in the right direction, then this will be successful. I hope that Kōnae will help in that process”.
And for survivors who have spent a lifetime carrying someone else's version of their story, reclaiming that distinction could be a powerful place to start.