Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen

had gifted him with special insights into the spiritual effects of a habit that he believed would first drain away the substance of the masturbator’s spine, then the wretch’s brain and immortal soul, consigning the youth to a stint in the mental asylum followed by almost-certain premature death.
    And while the housemaster’s language for the act itself was obscure, the punishments he meted out were vivid, at least by Lee’s account. ‘Now if any of you boys have done certain things you should not have done, you must come and tell me,’ Mr Denton is heard to bark in the story. ‘If you tell, I’ll let you off and help you. If I find out myself, I shall flog severely.’ And flog them he did, apparently, as if his life depended on it. Sadly, recounts Lee, this was never without reinforcing the sexual depravity that so exercised his imagination. Thus:
    As the branch grows crookedly to avoid an impassable obstacle, do did [our] sex life grow warped. The boys were the victims of an urge as old as life. Boys were thrust back on the fact of sex, however they tried to escape. They could not achieve forgetfulness in literature, in music, in exercise of the crafts. They had to sit down in leisure hours or lie  down in bed at night with no book and with no competing interest, thoughts went unerringly to certain manifestations of dawning manhood. And as the primal urge hypnotized their attention they knew they were unclean, for were they not told so by the manager. They were caught in the toils of foul sex, and turned upon themselves with secret loathing. As they were virile and healthy, so were they self-convicted. In their ignorance they believed they were not as other boys, and racked themselves with contrition .
    Mr Denton had his political supporters. In the same year Lee was sent down to the Christchurch correctional facility, a parliamentary report by the country’s stipendiary magistrate and commissioner, H.W. Bishop, made a ferocious case for punishing boys of ‘low morals’ with indefinite imprisonment.
    After all, Bishop reasoned, ‘it is no more right to endanger the community by giving such a person unrestrained liberty than it would be to release a savage wild beast into a school playground’. Nor should legal adulthood be an impediment to the state holding on to these degenerates. ‘I can imagine no greater incentive to reform in the case of most of these young people,’ Bishop raved, ‘than the fear of indeterminate detention. I believe it would do more to help forward the work of the reformatories than anything else.’
    Well, why not? Didn’t all the available official evidence confirm as much? The social historian Bronwyn Dalley’s account of the same period includes the improbable but apparently true story of a visiting delegation to Otekaike in North Otago being awoken on their first morning at the school by a squad of children singing in unison ‘The More We Are Together (The Happier We’ll Be)’ while polishing the linoleum in the passageway outside the bedroom doors.
    From around 1916 the pendulum had begun to swing again. This was spurred by a couple of developments. One was thelingering disquiet in the wake of an official inquiry into conditions at a girls’ residence in Christchurch known as Te Oranga, later Kingslea. It was found that female inmates were routinely stripped and flogged, forced to wear grotesque outfits and to undergo humiliating haircuts at the punishing hands of a notably joyless matron, Harriette Petremant, who told her accusers:
    Corporal punishment is the only punishment that tells. [The children] have neither brains nor consciences for any other form of punishment to have effect. They rather enjoy being sent to bed than otherwise. The things they do I am sure no normal child would either think of or dare to do .
    A far more positive development at this time was the intercession of the reform-minded John Beck, a Scottish immigrant who felt the colonies could be doing