Mazengarb Report
1954 governmental inquiry into perceived juvenile delinquency in New Zealand
The Mazengarb Report of 1954, formally titled the Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents, resulted from a New Zealand ministerial inquiry (the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents). The report gained its name from the inquiry chairman, Queen's Counsel Ossie Mazengarb. The Report, its origins and its significance still remain key items in the mythology of 1950s New Zealand social history. This is not to deny the importance of the Report; however, its real significance has been obscured by inaccurate accounts in popular histories and newspaper and magazine articles. It is frequently cited as an example case of moral panic in New Zealand.
The Petone incident
On 20 June 1954, shortly after her mother and stepfather had reported her as missing, a 15½-year-old girl turned up at the local police station in the former Hutt Valley borough of Petone. The report details from page 11:
She stated that, being unhappy at home with her stepfather, she had[...] been a member of what she called a "Milk Bar Gang", which [...] met "mostly for sex purposes"; she [...] was worried about the future of its younger members, and desired the police to break up the gang.
Shortly after, following a police round up of some of those named, a moral panic ensued in New Zealand, in which the above incident played no small part among several others, including a milk bar murder in Auckland (which resulted in one of the last executions in New Zealand.)
The Inquiry
A review of New Zealand newspapers of the time reveals reports of "youths charged with indecent assault upon, or carnal knowledge of" underage females. The inquiry's report notes this occurred "[in] the second week of July 1954".
After an outbreak of moral panic among the public and in newspaper media, the Crown appointed the Special Committee on 23 July, and it started its work only four days later, on 27 July.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mazengarb Report” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.