From Matangi Tonga Magazine Vol. 17, no. 2, August 2002.

The last time a Tongan solo-mother of five, saw her 17 year old son, who is doing time for burglary, she was horrified.

He called her on May 8 to come to the Vaiola Hospital, in Nuku‘alofa, where Prison authorities had taken him for emergency treatment for severe burns.

‘Sela’ (who did not want to be identified by her real name) told us the boy had been accidentally burned by an older inmate, scaring his middle torso down to his lower thighs. “The skin was all black, cracked, and blistered,” she cried. “The bottom bit looked like he was wearing a pair of black shorts.”

Her son went into Huatolitoli Prison in May to serve a four-month sentence for housebreaking.

According to Sela, an older inmate had tried to treat the boy’s skin, for what was possibly ringworm, and poured over his mid-section a bottle of a highly acidic solution used to cure warts.

Sela said the other inmate, who came from a neighbouring village, was using the solution to treat his own warts. Inmates told her son to lie down, and then the next thing he knew his stomach was burning, as the acid ran down his middle onto his legs and back. She said her son claimed it was an accident.

A jailer, who did not want to be named, also told Matangi Tonga, that prisons had a duty of care to ensure the safety of the inmates, but the boy claimed the burns were accidental. The jailer thought the other inmates had noticed the boy’s skin disease in the shower and “tried to fix it”. The boy was in excruciating pain because the acid “was eating away his skin” and the jailers rushed him to hospital, which is about a 20 minute drive away from the prison. At the end of July, the boy was still being treated bi-weekly for his injuries.

No school

Sela’s eldest son is a first offender, and at Huatolitoli Prison he has been housed in huts with much older inmates convicted of crimes such as drug offences, rape, and murder.

“He is only a child,” she said hoarsely, “and I was helpless.” Tears rolled down her face, as she recalled the desperation in his voice when, “he called me up from hospital and begged me to bail him out because he could not take it. But I had no money, and I have four other children to support,” she cried. “What was I to do?”

Sela recognised that her separation from her husband, her tiny allowance from her daily paid house-cleaning job, and the fact that her son no longer attended school, were contributing factors to his act of crime.

“He wanted to go to school, but his father always spent the money for his fees on something else, and we could no longer afford it,” she said, “so he had no choice, but to find a job to get us some money.”

In Tonga, there are no child labour laws, and at 14 years old, the boy found full-time work mowing lawns and gardening, which earned him around 75 seniti per hour. Then he went into selling corn for a Tongan company, getting whatever little he was offered by the entrepreneurs every week.

“These are seasonal jobs and they are not stable, and he needed money when he moved in with his dad, which is why I think he decided to steal,” Sela said.

Current statistics indicate that there are 64 inmates housed at Hu’atolitoli Prison, just over a dozen of them under 18 years old, with the majority aged between 20 to 45 years old.