Storied experiences of the Havelock North drinking water crisis: A case for a ‘narrative green victimology’

Abstract

The number of victims from environmental harm far exceeds that from everyday property and interpersonal crime, yet little is known about the experience of environmental victimisation. This paper makes a case for a narrative green victimology to advance scholarship about environmental victims, drawing on data from interviews with persons affected by a waterborne outbreak of campylobacter in the small town of Havelock North, New Zealand, in August 2016. Findings demonstrate that understandings of environmental harm are developed in narratives, with narratives. In particular, participants’ stories of harm and victimisation revealed fragments of larger, cultural narratives about sacrifice, nation-building, motherhood, and environmental purity, each of which affected their understanding of the impact of the outbreak on their autonomy as agentive persons. It is proposed that a narrative green victimology offers environmental victimology a platform upon which it can foot its frameworks.

Keywords

Environmental victims narrative victimology cultural narratives drinking water Havelock North

Introduction

At the nucleus of green criminology is its victimology. Given the lack of clear limits about environmental harm in criminal, civil and rights discourses, it would be near impossible to make claims about injurious activity without a human, non-human animal or ecological victim (or victims). Yet intellectual inquiry into environmental victimology has been slow to develop a coherent centre (Hall, 2013, 2014, 2018; Natali, 2015, 2017; Pemberton, 2017; White, 2018; Williams, 1996a, 1996b). Part of the problem is that potential victims are socialised to imagine Earth as a ‘resource’ (Lynch and Stretesky, 2018), and so their encounters with instances of harm are likely to go unnoticed. Scholars also disagree about the nature of environmental victimisation and what avenue is best for responding to those who have been victimised. Compounding these issues is a lack of empirical data that documents how victims understand their experiences of harm (Hall, 2013, 2018; Pemberton, 2017; Walklate, 2017; White, 2014).

This paper makes a case for a narrative green victimology to advance scholarship about environmental victims, drawing from interviews with persons affected by a waterborne outbreak of campylobacter in the small town of Havelock North, New Zealand (NZ), in August 2016. The paper explores how interviewees made sense of becoming ill from contaminated water (or caring for an ill person), in addition to their engagement with a victim identity. The data demonstrate Pemberton’s (2017) claim that understandings of environmental harm are developed in narratives, and reveal that such narratives are infused with narratives drawn from elsewhere. I will illustrate how participants’ stories about what they endured and witnessed were peppered with fragments of larger, cultural narratives about sacrifice, nation-building, motherhood, and environmental purity.

The paper proceeds in the following order. First, the discussion explores the developments in environmental victimology so far and introduces a narrative green victimology. Second, the methods used to gather the empirical data are described and participants’ accounts of the events are traced. Third, I describe and consider their varied engagements with a sense of victimhood, noting the operation of cultural narratives that were littered amongst their accounts. I then bring the paper to a close by considering the potential of a narrative approach for green victimology.

Environmental victimisation

Victimisation from environmental harm far exceeds that from everyday property and interpersonal crime (Spapens, 2014). Statistics for pollution harms, for example, are markedly higher than violent interpersonal acts, whichever study one draws on. Pollution is responsible for 15 times more deaths than wars and all other forms of violence (Landrigan et al., 2018). In 2015 the global number of deaths from total pollution (air, water and soil) was 23 times higher than the number of deaths from interpersonal violence (war and homicide) (Brink, 2017). United States residents are 35,000 times more likely to be exposed to water pollution than they are to encounter an act of street violence (Lynch and Stretesky, 2018). More harrowing is the fact that these figures barely scratch the surface of suffering from environmental harm endured under the Anthropocene. Why, then, is more not made of it?

For Skinnider (2012), it is the failure of environmental harm to evoke the kind of moral repugnance that interpersonal crime does that explains the gulf between harms from issues such as water pollution and their recognition (see also Pemberton, 2017). Our speciesism makes it difficult to imagine that monkeys, mice or mosquitos might have a right to a place in the world just as we do. As Flynn and Hall (2017) note, many animals meet all the criteria for Christie’s (1986) ‘ideal victim’, and yet it takes a rare occasion, such as the recent bushfires in Australia, that will make us pay attention to their suffering. Similarly, our Westernism makes it hard to imagine mountains and trees as grandparents and wise elders as they are in many indigenous cultures. Time is also an enemy insofar as it introduces doubt to the question of responsibility. As Natali (2017) illustrates in the example of historical pollution, is the original polluter the problem maker? Or the governing body of the present who has inherited the consequences and yet does nothing to address them? Polluters also tend to be corporations who hold the power to shape the law. The state, in turn, might turn a blind eye to harm done to appease influential voters, or simply may not have the capacity to take action (Pemberton, 2017). Pemberton (2017) additionally calls attention to ‘free-rider’ problems that are a culmination of lots of small problems that on their own would not cause harm. In such cases, victims’ injuries are often dismissed as medical issues (Williams, 1996a), or worse, rationalised away as a necessary sacrifice for economic growth (Pemberton, 2017). Large corporations may choose to operate in lands that have loose rules stemming from fraught political histories. Alternatively, they might conduct their business across many contexts and escape the authority of any one jurisdiction. Such is the transnational nature of corporate business and of environmental harm (White, 2013). Harms can also be couched in the sanitising language of accidents and tragedies (Ofrias, 2017). Combined, these issues result in a lack of understanding of what environmental harm is and how it affects the lives of human and other living beings.

Another reason that environmental victimology has been slow to develop is that scholars employ varying theoretical frameworks for understanding the nature of environmental victimisation and how best to respond to it. For some, such as Pemberton (2017), existing justice frameworks provide the means for the successful criminalisation of environmental destruction, followed by wider recognition of its victims. As Williams (1996a) notes, environmental harm is ultimately a human activity, mediated by the environment, therefore it should not be too much of a stretch to include crimes against the environment under current criminal justice regimes. However, given the scale of environmentally mediated harm and its threat to human safety at corporeal, social and political levels, Williams (1996b) proposes that the interests of environmental victims are best articulated within a global security framework. Others favour a rights-based framework. Hall (2013; 2018) calls for extending and adapting existing human rights frameworks where there is a ready foundation for articulating environmental victimisation. In particular, ‘abuses of power’ rights, such as those stipulated in the 1985 Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, provide for acts and omissions that result in individual or collective harms and currently sit outside of criminal law. White (2018) considers environmental harm in terms of ecojustice and is concerned with the rights of human beings to have access to environmental resources for sustenance; the rights of ecosystems to remain undisturbed; and the rights of non-human animals to live as sentient beings. Critically, an ecojustice perspective directly confronts the anthropocentric notions that underpin orthodox understandings of crime and those common in protectionist discourses (see Benton, 1998). It also offers ready benchmarks by which to judge harm and its effects.

Lynch and Stretesky (2018) take a more radical position with their contention that environmental victimology is best served by a political economy framework. They explain that the root cause of environmental harm is the expansion of the capitalist economic system insofar as it involves taking raw resources from nature to produce, followed by dumping of the waste products from the productive process into nature. The consumer, for their part, disposes of both the packaging and the product itself once it is no longer useful or fashionable, and then goes on to sustain the harms associated with the productive process as they make new purchases. Lynch and Stretesky (2018) also document a myriad of ways by which pollution and other harms are woven into our everyday lives and justified as the necessary costs of ‘progress’.

Though each of these positions makes defensible arguments, there are uncertainties associated with all of them. Criminal law’s reliance on the immediate proximity of offender and victim, as mentioned above, presents a challenge for articulating environmental harm under existing justice frameworks. On the other hand, the amorphousness of ‘rights’ often does little to persuade governments to take action (Williams, 1996b; see also Hall 2013; Green and Ward, 2004). Indeed, international charters are full of rights that can be ignored or undermined by national authorities.¹ There is additionally the potential for tension between the rights of one category of victim and another (Flynn and Hall, 2017; White, 2018). And, while it is impossible to disagree with the value of exposing the inherently exploitative nature of advanced capitalism, this critical view has the potential to marginalise environmental victimology’s credibility in a scholarly environment that is shaped by neoliberal interests (Hall, 2013, 2017a, b; White, 2018).

Natali’s (2015, 2017) work, alternatively, begins from an incentive to articulate the ‘view from within’ and as such focuses on developing methodologies that capture victims’ experience of environmental harm. The ‘itinerant soliloquy’ technique (Natali and de Nardin Budo, 2019), for example, involves a researcher shadowing a participant as they walk around a contaminated area, narrating their engagement with it. Where this is not possible, photographs and other visual accompaniments might be used to elicit participants’ stories (Natali and McClanahan, 2017). The same appreciation of victims’ sensemaking through narrativisation can be seen in narrative victimology. In this emerging field, particularly in the work of Green and Pemberton (2017) and Pemberton et al. (2019), victims are seen as sovereign agents who are alone in their capacity to articulate how an ontological assault has affected their ability to exercise autonomy over their life.

The narrative green victimology I develop here, however, originated in my response to my participants as they told stories of their experiences of harm from contaminated water. It was an unanticipated, emergent feature of my research, in other words. It also developed from my observations of the larger cultural narratives participants wove in and throughout their intimately personal accounts, revealing in particular that notions of NZ as an egalitarian settler nation and the environment as an idyllic ‘pure’ paradise were embedded in who they understood themselves to be and how they understood the harm they had experienced. Some of the women told of an injury to motherhood, thus revealing a gendered dimension to encounters with contaminated water. My proposal for a narrative green victimology is, therefore, twofold: i) to recognise and capture the victim experience as understood through narrative, and ii) to identify how cultural narratives condition the impact of environmental harm. More detail will be offered in sections below. Next, I introduce the case of the Havelock North drinking water crisis.

The Havelock North drinking water crisis

Havelock North, affectionately known as ‘the village’ among its locals, is no ordinary NZ town. Geographically situated in the area of Hawkes Bay, on the east coast of the North Island, it is officially a suburb of Hastings, a larger township located just two kilometers northwest. Unofficially, Havelock North is its own jurisdiction, a legacy borne from having been an independent borough up until 1989. Napier, located 20 kilometers northeast, is known internationally for the art deco style in which it was rebuilt after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in 1931 flattened much of the Hawkes Bay area.

Havelock North is surrounded by orchards and vineyards that sustain the town’s export economy. Each of the three roads into the town is flanked by fields of trees or vines lined up in row after row, covered in nets if the season calls for it. As one approaches the town centre there are symbols of affluence at every turn: manicured gardens; litter-free footpaths; a discernible absence of chain stores; and a conspicuous presence of designer dogs. Everyone seems to own a late model European car. It is not the kind of place that one would expect to come into contact with contaminated drinking water.

Yet, in August 2016, there was a mass outbreak of gastroenteritis in Havelock North. A third of the town’s 14,000 residents were estimated to have become ill; 45 people were admitted to hospital; and 4 people died (Government Inquiry into Havelock North Drinking Water, 2017). Some people who fell ill developed Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and others, including children, suffered reactive arthritis. A government inquiry (hereafter the ‘Inquiry’) concluded that faecal matter had contaminated the water supply following a series of oversights on behalf of the parties responsible. Tests linked the matter to a handful of sheep grazing in a paddock on Brookvale Road, close to three bores that sourced water for Havelock North from the Te Mata aquifer. The paddock had flooded during a storm the first weekend of August 2016, which, according to the Inquiry, resulted in faeces travelling to the bore chamber and entering the water supply system (Government Inquiry into Havelock North Drinking Water, 2017).²

The Havelock North drinking water crisis made headlines around the world as the largest waterborne outbreak of disease in recent history. The Inquiry that followed led to a review of the local body governance structure adopted for regulating drinking water supplies, as well as plans to strengthen central oversight of local body drinking water regulators. For reasons unknown, the Inquiry’s terms of reference stated that it was not to determine any criminal liability. Despite so, among multiple references to failures, faults and omissions, the Inquiry identified breaches of the Resource Management Act 1991, the Drinking Water Standards, and the Health Act 1956. Penalties under the latter carry fines of up to $200,000 per individual.

The Inquiry was also not required to record the crisis from the perspective of the people who lived through it. The casualty count (5,500 estimated to have become ill; 45 hospitalised; 4 deaths) that now appears across multiple government reports to justify policy changes around drinking water provision is where the official story of the victims begins and ends. Consequently, the real embodied victims of the Havelock crisis have not been formally acknowledged nor offered reparation for the harm they suffered. The invisibility of those affected seemed odd in light of the Inquiry’s findings of Acts and Standards breached, particularly given the NZ government has made a commitment to better recognise and address the impact of crime on victims in recent years, including the establishment (and appointment) of a Chief Victims’ Advisor in 2015. Who were the people behind the casualty figures? How did they make sense of their experiences? What were they aggrieved by? Did they view what had happened to them in terms of criminal harm? How have they sought and/or secured justice? These questions, from Natali (2015), were at the foundation of the research reported on in this paper.

Method

I travelled to Havelock North a number of times during late 2018 and early 2019. To recruit participants, I posted information about the research on my Facebook page in the days prior to my first visit there and asked my ‘friends’ to share the post among their networks; asked social support organisations to share information about the research with people who might be willing to be interviewed; and posted flyers on supermarket and community centre noticeboards. During two trips I also dropped flyers into letter boxes across several streets at a time, which proved a particularly successful recruitment strategy.

The final sample included 41 participants, 21 male and 20 female. Although Havelock North has a large retired population, I managed to attract participants between the ages of 17 and 84 years with no particular concentration in any age grouping. There was a range of occupations, lifestyles and interests among them. All but one were Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent), reflecting the relatively homogenous ethnic profile of Havelock North. Most of the interviews were with individuals, but a few were with family groups of two or three.

Though I had planned to conduct semi-structured interviews I very quickly discovered that participants each had a story they wanted to tell on their own terms, beginning and ending at points that they thought important, and veering off in however many directions they deemed necessary. Cook and Walklate (2019) had similar encounters with their interviewees who had experienced violent bereavement. Additionally striking amongst my participants was the sense of urgency that many exhibited in their telling. It was as if there was a fear that their story would evaporate if the opportunity to tell it passed them by. I would come to understand that telling their stories was part of a recovery they felt had been denied them. As Tracey said: ‘No-one has wanted to listen. We feel invisible.’

My method of data collection therefore evolved during fieldwork and became one that is best described as a process where I was the facilitator in an encounter with a narrator (participant), to whom I would become the audience (Hourigan, 2019). Each interview was charged with emotion: pain, anger, despair, confusion, and anticipation. There was an onus on me as the researcher to be attentive to signs of distress and to be prepared to suspend or terminate an interview. While no such case transpired, some interviews were more challenging than others. The participants in these had suffered in ways I had not expected. I was mindful, too, of the risk that participants were taking by inviting me into their homes. They had to invest trust in me, a stranger, to share intimate details of profound impacts from contaminated water on their physical (and emotional) wellbeing. Allowing participants to control the telling was important in light of a sense of enduring powerlessness that many would express (Cook and Walklate, 2019). Some participants would also see me as someone who could potentially advance a case for redress. I assured them that I cared deeply about their stories and their integrity as tellers and refrained from making promises I would not necessarily be able to deliver on (Stanley, 2012).

Analysing the autonomous narratives told was my next challenge. I began by sketching as much as I could of each participant’s life story that could shed light on the meanings made, connecting demographic variables (age, socio-economic status, family situation) with fragments they had revealed in their story about their history, beliefs and worldviews. This was easier for some participants than for others and I had to remain mindful of drawing too much from the life history sketches that were more detailed when compared to others to preserve the validity of my overall findings and the dignity of each participant (Cook and Walklate, 2019). I followed with the more familiar practice of embedding myself within each transcript and considering the content for points of emphasis. Typically, participants recounted the events of the crisis in sequence, pausing to reflect on those that were important to their individual stories. The sequence of events, however, allowed me to construct a timeline that was useful for comparing content across other participant’s stories. Although my method of analysis as described here was not a standardised one that can be found in methodological textbooks, but one that developed in response to the nature of the data collected, I consider it akin to an inductive thematic narrative analysis (Allen, 2017).

Participants’ experiences

Pure Havelock North

Life in Havelock North was an idyllic one for most participants. The town was described as small and charming with an English country character, that at one time had been home to a sun-worshipping cult and other eccentric types, as well as artists, writers and filmmakers. Director Geoff Murphy, internationally known for his work on The Last Outlaw and Young Guns 2, had raised his family in nearby Waimarama. It was also the kind of place where people felt like they were part of a community who would rally together in times of need; it was a ‘watch out for everybody place’, as Lee called it. Community was also an everyday encounter. Cara described her trip to the supermarket the morning of our interview: ‘and it took us like an hour cos you bump into everybody…it’s like a little social hub really’(Cara).

One downside to Havelock North was that it was home to a set of characters described as ‘pretentious’, ‘hoity toity’, and ‘cliquey’. Michelle, one of my first interviewees, warned me of an unwritten code of appropriate behaviour when in Havelock North. She and her sister had once forgotten themselves and had engaged in a play fight in the aisles at the local supermarket, and she described how they had been stopped short by a number of discerning looks from other shoppers. ‘You don’t do that sort of stuff in Havelock’, Michelle explained. Colin described it in a way that I would later come to appreciate: ‘It’s very pure – like the water’ (Colin).

Participants typically followed their condemnation of ‘the pretentious set’ by making a point of telling me that they weren’t ‘like that’; that they weren’t from Havelock North originally; that they didn’t fit the mould. I could have predicted this disclaimer, knowing that NZ-ers do not take well to displays of opulence. We are a people who suffer from a cultural condition known as ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’ that sees us renounce those who stand out for being successful, whether that be through hard work or by a stroke of luck. Tall poppies grate against our sense that we are egalitarian, and that we live in a place where everyone gets a ‘fair go’. That notion is a blatant myth propagated to deny ill relations between Māori and Pākehā, the divide between farmers and townies, the gap between the haves and have nots (Phillips, 1987). Nevertheless, it also explains why NZ-ers from outside of Havelock North found the news of the contamination humorous:

Quite hilarious you know, snooty Havelock having the bug…even our friends in Hastings thought it was funny and just laughed. (Steven)

I was soon to discover, however, that there was nothing remotely funny about what the residents of Havelock North had endured.

‘A really nasty bug’

According to official sources, campylobacteriosis is rarely a serious illness. The World Health Organisation (WHO), for example, states that the majority of people who contract the infection will make a full recovery within 10 days, and that campylobacter infection rarely results in long-term health problems. My participants, however, described an illness that was like no other:

We’ve all had dysentery, but this was like nothing I’d ever had before. (George)

I’ve travelled quite a bit and I’ve had quite a lot of food poisoning and water-borne illness and this was the worst of it. (Richard)

Certainly, I’ve never been sick like that. (Judith)

Probably been the worst that I can remember over a lifetime. (Lee)

I’ve never been ill before like that…that was something different. (Emma)

Steven also said it had ‘quite a different smell’. Others told me it was ‘the worst’, ‘from hell’, that it ‘knocked them for six’. Emma, for example, couldn’t move for days. Michelle felt like her insides were being pulled apart. Gavin remembered the pain being so excruciating that it was ‘like lava’. Chris knew of folks who had lived for a week in the bath to avoid making a mess. More than a few said there were moments when, as Judith put it, they would have ‘happily died’.

Recovery from the illness was also long and slow: months-long diarrhoea; significant weight loss; exhaustion despite long periods of sleep; unpredictable cramps; delayed development in young children; chronic skin rashes; cellulitis; ulceration; polyps in the bowel; potential amputation; lactose intolerance; spleen enlargement and reduced immunity. Chris, who was in charge of a large organisation, said it took a long time before his staff were at full capacity. ‘They just couldn’t bounce out of it’ (Chris). Kathy had trouble describing how she felt for months afterward: ‘Just…really off’ (Kathy). Michelle continues to feel like she has the illness in a low-grade way. Emma also has had problems ever since. Judith has ongoing aches and pains that she can’t explain. Several others also noted that they or their loved ones were just coming right at the point at which I spoke to them, two and a half years after the crisis. One of these was Derek, whose son had been hospitalised twice. Derek was having a particularly hard time reconciling the official information about campylobacter with what he saw his child go through: ‘How does a really young healthy fit person get completely smashed by this thing?’ (Derek). Margot told me the names of many more that she knew had died after falling ill with the campylobacter than the four officially recorded. I spoke to people who can no longer work, who are no longer able to engage in their favourite activities and who have abandoned plans for the future. By all accounts this extraordinary town had suffered an extraordinary outbreak.

While the source of the illness was infected water, its impact was intensified by human inaction. In NZ campylobacteriosis is a notifiable disease. Under the Health Act 1956 attending medical practitioners or laboratories must immediately notify the local Medical Officer of Health of cases of probable or confirmed campylobacteriosis. If an outbreak looks imminent then the respective community is to be notified and a ‘boil water’ notice put in place. Hastings District Council (HDC) made a public announcement that Havelock North’s water was contaminated on the evening of Friday 12 August. However, the timing of this announcement was questioned during the Inquiry in relation to a positive E. coli test reported by a tanker transporting water from the town supply to rural properties on Wednesday 10 August. HDC had dismissed the test as indicative of anything given its own testing on Tuesday 9 August had returned clear. Another test on the morning of Thursday 11 August was positive for E. coli, however, and at that point HDC ordered further testing to confirm. The Inquiry accepted that HDC did not know that the water was contaminated until that point, noting that it matched the District Health Board (DHB)’s claim it knew of only one confirmed and four suspected cases of campylobacteriosis by Friday morning.

Yet most of my participants recalled falling ill early in the week beginning Monday 8 August and having been aware of others who had too. Moreover, Andrea’s doctor had confirmed to her on Thursday 11 August that she had campylobacteriosis and told her that she was one of hundreds of others with the same diagnosis. Cara had received confirmation on Wednesday 10 August. Others in the community had been given information about the infected water early in the week. Grant’s brother-in-law had phoned him from Napier to tell him the water was contaminated on Wednesday 10th. Judith had contacts at the hospital, and they told her that nurses were concerned at the silence of the authorities when there was an increased number of people being admitted with gastroenteritis. Tracey recalled wondering why residents in her mother’s nursing home had been on bottled water for several days prior to the HDC announcement. ‘I don’t know whether they had an inkling before?’ (Tracey). Cindy also recalled that sickness set in shortly following the weekend: ‘within 24 hours, easy’ (Cindy). The overwhelming consistency about when the outbreak started in their accounts raises questions about the time it took to notify residents that the water was contaminated. There was certainly a feeling amongst participants that there was an unacceptable gap between the time that people became sick and the community was notified, because those who had begun to feel unwell were doing what the medical establishment advises for gastroenteritis related illnesses and ‘furiously’ drinking water. In doing so, they had inadvertently continued to infect themselves with campylobacter microorganisms. This may account for the severity of the illness in the community. It most certainly inflamed negative emotions. As Grant contended: ‘A lot of people including myself felt very bitter about that for a long, long time’. For some, including Grant, the delay roused suspicions that the authorities were hiding something and/or protecting someone at the expense of the community’s health.

The inquiry also accepted HDC’s statement that making a public announcement on their website, which they shared on their Facebook page, was appropriate. Yet my participants were in unanimous agreement that it was an inappropriate platform to announce something so important for a community with a larger aged population than most. As Lee, in his late 50s, said to me: ‘Do I look like a facebooker?’. Besides, as Lee then pointed out: ‘There’s no way on God’s earth that you’re gonna look at a council website to understand why you’ve got diarrhoea’.

Participants’ anger at both the timing and mode of the announcement was compounded by the sense the community had been left to fend for themselves. Havelock North, I was told, became a ghost town as the illness took hold:

It was a bit like you’ve had an earthquake – a major one – and you know that no-one’s gonna come for five or six days. Well this went on for weeks sort of thing, you know where’s the council in all of this? Where are they? What are they doing? There’s nothing. Did the army come in? (Gavin)

Emma added that there was no form of follow up with residents as time passed, either. No-one at any stage had asked residents how they were nor investigated whether they were continuing to have issues, which, as mentioned above, most were. Maree attributed HDC’s reluctance to engage with the community to a fear of retribution:

They were nowhere to be seen…I think they didn’t want to be in the firing line. (Maree)

In addition to their anger at HDC for the delayed announcement via social media and the lack of support they received, participants were averse to the treatment of the water with chlorine. Indeed, most of the people I spoke to were passionately against treated water despite the fact that untreated water was the reason they became sick. This is known in the literature as chemophobia (Gribble, 2013).³

Now we’ve got bloody chlorine in the water and it’s like drinking a bloody swimming pool. (Judith)

For some, the decision to chlorinate the water on an ongoing basis was evidence that HDC was taking insurance against future mistakes, which added to an inclination that stemmed from the delay in telling the community, that the official line on the source of the problem was not adding up:

They tell us the water does not have E. coli in it and it’s safe to drink but that they are going to indefinitely put chemicals in it. Have you fixed the damn problem or not? If you’ve fixed it, stop chlorinating. If you feel they need the chlorine as a precautionary measure are you telling me you don’t actually think you’ve eliminated the problem? (Neil)

Is there not a way to find the problem, solve the problem and move on? Do we have to keep chlorinating? Like are they chlorinating to cover? So is this going to happen again or not? (Michelle)

In the wake of a crisis that had left deep scars, there was a sense that someone, irrespective of whether they were at fault or not, needed to step up and apologise (Cara), fall on their sword (Kirsten), be given a shake-up (Emma), take the community seriously (Robert), show some empathy (Maree), offer a gesture (Grant). Richard drew on the example of Denis Marshall, CEO of the Department of Conservation, who stood down after the Cave Creek collapse on the West Coast of the South Island in 1995:

He was so far above the actual blokes who were actually putting the nails in the viewing platform that collapsed, but he still stood down. For me, in my mind, there’s a lot of mana⁴ in that. (Richard)

Participants’ narratives of their experiences during the Havelock North drinking water crisis told of a severe acute illness that had left long term physical, psychological and emotional impacts. Their stories revealed that the community felt abandoned and ignored. People felt that things did not add up, that they had been lied to and that their concerns were swept under the carpet. Moreover, there was an overwhelming consistency across their stories, a point that I will return to in the discussion. What I want to turn to now are the individual narratives that participants offered when I asked about their victimisation.

Are we victims?

References to being victimised were noticeably absent across the first few interviews, despite participants’ explicit and detailed accounts of harm. I began from that point to ask as I wrapped up the interviews, ‘Would you say you were a victim of the crisis?’ For a few the answer was crystal clear: Maree, Nadine and Neil, for example, said they absolutely, definitely, 100% would. But for most the suggestion that they had been ‘victimised’ was a contentious one. Colin, for example, said:

Am I a victim? A victim…oh my gosh, are we victims? Are we a victim? You can see it’s just not so cut and dry is it? I can see that we’re probably a victim. (Colin)

For many participants, the threshold by which they felt justified to claim victim status was dependent on the suffering of others. Cara, for example, after describing to me a harrowing 12 months post contamination, said: ‘It’s not bad. It’s nothing life or death…probably one of the least heartbreaking stories.’ Michelle, too, felt that her illness had not been extreme enough or compounded by her life circumstances as it was for people around her:

I wouldn’t say I’m a victim ‘cause I wasn’t in the hospital, I wasn’t at death’s door. I didn’t have a kid who I was trying to look after as well. (Michelle)

For some participants, like Ben, to be a victim there had to have been an intent to harm the community. Others, such as Neil, associated victimisation with vulnerability, and the fact that people were harmed from drinking tap water in the same way they do every day meant they were unsuspecting. In his view, both himself and other residents were therefore victims. Others again, such as Stuart and Robert, felt angry, and they saw this as being at odds with being a victim:

I don’t know what victimised means cause it’s an ambiguous word…a loaded term. I don’t feel victimised, I just feel pissed off. (Robert)

Judith was willing to claim victimisation for the period she was acutely unwell but like Robert she was not comfortable with the connotations associated with the term ‘victim’. As we finished up our interview, she was concerned about how I would interpret her participation in the research:

I hope I haven’t got the victim mentality sitting back here going ‘oh dear’. I’m not talking to you just to have a whinge and to say I’ve been completely hard-done by. (Judith)

Daryl thought about a victim status in this way too: ‘To me it’s like you’re feeling sorry for yourself, and there’s too much of that in this society’. (Daryl)

The notion of a victim as agentless is reflected in these responses by Stuart, Robert, Judith and Daryl. Walklate (2017) notes the term ‘victim’ conjures images of a frail feminine character because it originates from the practice of sacrificial ritual in premodern cultures, which predominantly involved the slaughter of women. It is a narrative that feminist researchers have sought so hard to challenge with respect to sexual violence, in particular. Indeed, the reason many female victims of rape prefer the term ‘survivor’ is because it recovers for them a sense of agency. The rejection of a victim label might be seen, then, as ‘interpretative denial’, where affect is acknowledged, but the outcome is disputed (Cohen, 2001). Like Campbell and Manning’s (2018) perceived ‘victimhood culture’ in which the smallest of slights are experienced as irreparable harms, a ‘victim mentality’ and ‘feeling sorry for oneself’ appear to incite interpretative denial.

The survivor narrative can also be problematic as it tends to neutralise the fact that a person has suffered (Jordan, 2013). Consider the stories of Janet and Leslie as an illustration. I did not ask either of these participants the question of whether they were a victim of the crisis, as for their cases I regarded it a tactless inquiry. Both had suffered greatly, and the impacts of the crisis will be with them for the remainder of their lives. Yet both of them told me stories of survival. Janet, for example, told me about a number of frightening moments in inimitable detail. I was struck by her narration, as it was emotionless, as if she was talking about someone else. What stood out most of all, however, was her occasional reflections on how ‘funny’ her experiences of being gravely ill had been. Although often unsettling for audiences to encounter, humour is a common coping mechanism deployed by people who have gone through extreme trauma, known as ‘holocaust laughter’ (Des Pres, 1988). Leslie, on the other hand, was intensely angry about the lack of accountability for the water contamination, and in particular the lack of redress for victims. His was an active anger, directed and expressed at those he deemed responsible. He described how he had engaged in a number of confrontations with authorities, at the Inquiry hearings, on the street, and inside government premises. He told me that he had been forcibly removed from spaces on several occasions and that once he had been arrested for shouting obscenities in a public arena. Both Janet and Leslie are survivors who have sought autonomy over their lives by adopting practices that confront the harm they’ve experienced (Green and Pemberton, 2017). However, the crisis nevertheless continues to impact them in ways not of their choosing. As Jordan (2013) argues, survivorship does not follow victimisation, but coexists alongside it.

Some of the women spoke about how the contaminated water had affected their motherhood:

As a mother I feel incredibly guilty – and this took a long time for me to get over – that I was poisoning my children and my family. I felt so bad about that. (Nadine)

But I suppose the biggest thing for me, that it’s just, I mean I feel terrible having a child that I’m saying to ‘drink more, drink more’. (Judith)

Motherhood is agency on behalf of someone else, and so the crisis inflicted injury on both the concept of motherhood and the women’s understanding of themselves as mothers. Green and Pemberton’s (2017) understanding of victimisation as an injury to autonomy is relevant here. For Nadine, regaining autonomy required time. For Judith the injury is perpetual, much like motherhood itself (Wright, 2016).

Embedded in each of the responses discussed, then, were cultural narratives pertaining to notions of ‘count your blessings’ and ‘it could be worse’, in addition to agentless victims and powerful survivors, and the sanctity of motherhood. Brisman (2017) notes that cultural narratives help us to make sense of things. Cultural narratives particular to subject positions, roles, populations, communities and nations function as a lens through which to view our new encounters and interpret our new experiences by giving meaning to them. Subsequently, they shape the way we respond to the said encounters and experiences. There were two additional cultural narratives that appeared across participants’ stories that were familiar to me as a NZ-er. I discuss these narratives in the next section.

National cultural narratives

Derek’s survivor story was a pragmatic one. Derek had installed a highly sophisticated filtration system that would ensure the water coming into his home was safe. He did not trust that local authorities would invest in his family’s security to the extent that he would. Despite his grievances, he also believed that pursuing justice would be a futile exercise:

Is that the right thing to do? I don’t know. I’m not really that way inclined. I’ll fight for something at the go and then you look at it and you go, this is just gonna get tied up in so much bureaucracy and crap that it’s just blowing into the wind. No point crying over spilt milk. I’ve fixed my own backyard so it’s never coming in here again. (Derek)

Derek’s response embodies NZ-ers’ independent ‘can-do’ attitude and a lack of respect for elite processes. Both are characteristics borne in the early colonial period. The first European settlers to NZ had no choice but to be self-reliant (Phillips, 1987) in this new society, freed from old European class structures (Pratt, 2013). Other participants, like Derek, chose not to pursue action, but because they did not want to be seen ‘stirring things up’ or ‘as a troublemaker’. As discussed earlier, it is not the NZ way to stand out from the crowd. For these participants, and for Derek, survivorship is as much a tale of NZ culture as it is a tale of an individual. In particular, an image of the self-sufficient settler who was averse to authoritative oversight and knew to keep his head down, is woven through their narratives of experiencing harm and victimisation.

Participants’ stories were also shaped by a cultural narrative about water. Water quality and cleanliness have long been associated with civilisation, population health and moral virtue (Bakker, 2012; Dew 2012). Citizens of advanced nations are assured through the social contract that governing parties will protect their health and security through the provision of basic amenities such as clean drinking water. Exercising vigilance with regards to the safety of drinking water is not something citizens in modern developed countries do, as was demonstrated in participants feeling uncomfortable about having to be conscious about their water:

And now we’re thinking about the water. (Colin)

You just don’t think about having to boil water, do you? You just turn on the tap and the water comes out. (Judith)

As it would turn out, they had thought about the water, or more to the point they had thought about the purity of the water of Havelock North. The interview data was striking in the sense that one participant after another made reference to how beautiful the water had been before the crisis had occurred:

I remember loving the water. You know how you go some places and you think gee, that’s really nice tap water. Havelock North was like that. (Richard)

Before the campylobacter outbreak it was perfect, I mean, our water was delicious, you didn’t have to think about it, it was just so yummy. (Cara)

Our water was great before that [the crisis]…was as pure as you can get supposedly. (Derek)

It is significant, in light of these statements, that it is unlikely that Havelock North has ever had ‘pure water’. Public health surveillance reports released by the (Institute of) Environmental Science and Research, New Zealand’s Crown Research Unit, indicate that Hawkes Bay DHB has consistently had one of the highest annual recorded incidences of campylobacteriosis, the same infection that made people ill during the 2016 drinking water crisis. This was also noted by the Inquiry. In Wright’s (1996) comprehensive history of Havelock North, too, it is revealed that the stench and cloudiness of water, thought to be a result of shallow bores, was a big problem in the early 1960s. What Havelock North does have, however, is a long history of opposition to chemicals being added to the public water supply. As Wright (1996) reports, there were multiple public protests to adding fluoride to the public supply across the mid to late 20th century. The correct terminology for Havelock North’s water, therefore, is ‘untreated’.

It is easy to imagine how an untreated water supply might come to be understood as ‘pure’ in a country that actively promotes itself as ‘100% Pure’, ‘clean and green’ (Bell, 2008; Dew, 1999). Indeed, several participants commented on the irony of having experienced water contamination in NZ:

Clean, green NZ and there you are, our water’s contaminated. (Emma)

You know in such a clean, green place…how is something like contaminated water a possibility? (Michelle)

The notion of NZ as clean, green and pure is a discourse that emerged in 19th century campaigns to attract settlers to the ‘new’ society and is one that has travelled through several iterations. The early representations of an arcadian landscape were replaced by notions of a ‘scenic wonderland’ as efforts to place NZ on the cultural map gathered momentum in the 20th century (Dew, 1999; Dürr 2008). Contemporary imagery denotes NZ as a remote land nestled among epic landscapes of towering mountains, lush rainforest and clear, flowing waters, designed to be simultaneously appealing to tourists, filmmakers and overseas consumers. The idea that NZ’s water is pure is further promoted by water bottling companies that draw from the country’s springs and aquifers. Though their specific marketing spiels differ, all draw on the same narrative: water hundreds of years old sourced from deep underground (or remote rainforest), naturally filtered by Mother Earth, rich in minerals and untouched by human activity. Many also have the word ‘pure’ in their name: OnePure; Pure NZ Spring Water; O Pure; Pure H2GO. Dürr (2008) notes that a purity narrative symbolises authenticity and is an implicit assurance of rigorously tested quality. Havelock North’s water contamination crisis demonstrates, however, the potential a purity narrative has to be hazardous.

Dew (2012) observes that public health is often in conflict with the state’s agenda to support capital interests. In this case, public health was in conflict with the social capital of Havelock North. The transcripts of the Inquiry hearings reveal that one of HDC’s officials had repeatedly (and knowingly) failed to communicate the number of transgressions of drinking water standards the supply had recorded, and had failed, subsequently, to inform the people of Havelock North about the high level of risk associated with their untreated water supply. The official rationalized his inactions to the Inquiry by explaining that the people of Havelock North were committed to having ‘pure water’. In his mind, he was delivering to demand. His had not been an act of complacency. He had knowingly chosen to protect the myth about Havelock North’s pure water ahead of his responsibility to protect residents from the risk to their health.

Discussion

A narrative green victimology seeks understanding of environmental harm in the stories victims tell as they make sense of what has happened to them (Pemberton et al., 2019). The people I spoke to about their experience of the Havelock North drinking water crisis told me about harm that had multiple layers. The physical experience of severe illness from water contaminated with faecal matter was compounded by distress and anger at a delay in communication and at the mode by which the announcement was eventually delivered. These feelings were intensified, first by an absence of immediate and ongoing support from the local authorities; second, by a developing sense that the community was being lied to about the source of the contamination; third, by a lack of acknowledgement of the seriousness of injuries; and fourth, by an absence of accountability for the failure to ensure the delivery of safe drinking water to Havelock North.

A narrative green victimology would pay attention to the stories that condition the impact of harm and/or the agency to claim redress. My participants spoke of their sense of victimhood as tempered by the suffering of others. They wove in tales of ancient sacrifice and the jurisdiction of motherhood, and of the stoic resilience, anti-establishment and camaraderie amongst peers that are mythologised characteristics of the early European settlers in NZ. Some refused to enter victimhood to avoid its restrictions, some rejected its connotations. One woman felt that her role as a mother had been irrevocably injured, as motherhood itself is eternal (Wright, 2016). Others had invested in the characteristics of the stoic settler, whose silence would prevail irrespective of the impact of the injury. Each of these stories shaped both their sense of the harm they experienced as well as the way they responded. It seems then, that cultural stories that shape victims’ narratives can obstruct justice or embed and extend harm. Sovereign victims therefore have to be understood in terms of their socio-historical location, and the saliency of the broader narratives through which they may understand their encounters with harm. In addition, the interpretation of narratives is dependent on a researcher’s fluency with the context of victims’ experiences. Where this is lacking, insider colleagues who can identify local meanings will be valuable research partners.

The chemophobic response to treating Havelock North’s water, and the references to ‘loving’ the beautiful water in pre-crisis times, also reflect the NZ cultural narratives of ‘clean and green’ and ‘100% Pure’ that were initially constructed to attract consumers in offshore markets. Adversity to chlorinated water might also have been as people had not consented to a change in how they understood their idyllic country town, with its ‘hoity toity’ residents and pristine streets. The decisions subsequently made by a council employee, when he neglected to inform the residents of the grave risk to their health to protect their autonomy to have their water untreated shows that cultural stories can become dangerous stories (Presser and Sandberg, 2015).

A narrative green victimology would include victims of harms that are ‘mediated’ by the environment and are not currently seen as crimes, as well as victims from non-human animal and ecological populations. Appreciating the sensemaking of victims’ experiences by those who have no ability to narrate in terms that we will readily understand, whether they be non-human, inanimate or not yet born, does present a challenge. At the very least it demands an extension of the concept of the sovereign victim and the establishment of relationships with those outside of our discipline, the academy and a Western way of thinking, those who understand other beings to be more than furniture in our anthropocentric lives (Hamilton and Taylor, 2017). The question of whose voice can speak and on what grounds suffering can be claimed requires ongoing attention.

A narrative green victimology would also consider the consistency between victims’ stories and the potential this has to be seen as evidence. Though the sense of victimisation was different for each participant, their experiences of campylobacteriosis were consistently similar, and, moreover, they departed from the WHO’s understanding of the illness as relatively mild. Participants’ narratives were also in conflict with the official acknowledgement of the onset of the illness in the community. Of note then, are statements submitted by the DHB, the Medical Officer of Health, and Hawkes Bay Regional Council based on epidemiological data collected after the crisis, that located the onset of the outbreak between 5 August and 7 August and indicated that the contamination would have to have been large in order to cause such widespread acute illness. These statements throw into question the validity of the negative Tuesday test undertaken by HDC, and the DHB’s own testimony that at the time it had been unaware of the contaminated water supply. Some participants were also privy to information that directly contradicted that testimony. Cara, for example, said:

I know for a fact that the people who work at the DHB were messaging their families saying ‘don’t drink the water’…they all knew about it before we did. (Cara)

Questions in relation to the onset and source of the contamination also emerge from a scene witnessed by one of my interviewees on an evening approximately three days prior to the first reports of people becoming ill. As a former infrastructure engineer, this participant was familiar with events unfolding in front of them. They told me that a team of road workers was digging up the intersection between St Hill Lane and Te Mata Road to work on the systems underneath when suddenly they appeared to panic. The foreman, in particular, was pacing and speaking intensely on his phone. Shortly thereafter, a ‘sucker truck’ (vacuum tanker) arrived. By morning, the road was covered up again, leaving no trace of the previous night’s dramas. Is it possible that during routine maintenance the water pipes had come into contact with the sewer pipes? Or was it a failure somewhere else in the reticulation system which had been under question for some time, as was noted in the evidence brief submitted to the Inquiry by the Medical Officer of Health? A further task, then, for narrative green victimology, is to uncover the absent narratives and to connect them with those present, with a view towards building a storyscape of evidence pertaining to a particular harm that will be difficult for authorities to ignore. Kramer’s (2020) argument that delayed action can be conceived of as predatory is pertinent here, as is the newly coined area of ‘public health criminology’ (Michalowski and Brown, 2020). Whether stories of lived experience constitute ‘truth’ remains contentious, however. As Walklate et al. (2019) note, stories are social constructions of events told by creative tellers. Yet scholars drawing on narrative data might find support in Fischer’s (2019) contention that the attributed validity of any knowledge depends on the degree to which it supports an ideological direction. Fischer (2019) argues that this is patently illustrated in the employment of alternative facts to deny climate change.

A narrative green victimology would also challenge official stories that obstruct processes for victim redress. As I identified earlier, the terms of reference for the Inquiry explicitly prevented it from establishing any civil or criminal conduct, or potential liability, in relation to the crisis. This has in turn obstructed the opportunity for injured parties to claim damages from NZ’s Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC). The legislation that established ACC as a no-fault insurance system for all injuries occurring in NZ (including for visitors) contains a clause stipulating that if a person ingests or inhales a bacterium, it is not considered an accident unless it is the result of a criminal act. Calling on the failure of the Inquiry to find criminality in the Havelock North crisis, despite the fact that it was instructed to that end, ACC rejected eight initial claims (Sharpe, 2017). Therefore, the people of Havelock North who were affected by the contamination of August 2016 remain unheard and their injuries continue to be unaddressed. It is of note here that though NZ’s Victims’ Rights Act 2002 interprets ‘victims’ as ‘persons against whom an offence is committed’, the definition of ‘offence’ in the Act includes ‘an alleged offence committed against a victim’ (emphasis added). Perhaps inconsistencies like this one could assist the pursuit of redress for those who were affected by the contaminated water in Havelock North and other victims of environmental harm in NZ. In the meantime, stories that identify factors significant to victim recovery can function as calls for restorative action on behalf of authorities concerned where thus far there has been none.

Conclusion

Narratives told by the victims of environmentally mediated injury give a window into an experience that scholars know little about. Stories told by those who are directly affected can provide important information about what constitutes environmental harm as well as how it impacts lives. My findings in relation to experiences of the Havelock North drinking water crisis demonstrate that harm becomes understood as narratives are told of it, and that these narratives are entangled with other, broader narratives that victims tell about themselves.

A narrative green victimology, by centering the narratives told by environmental victims, offers environmental victimology a platform upon which it can foot its frameworks. Narrative green victimology will also help to unpack the anthropocentrism that currently dominates victimological thinking by learning to listen to the stories of sovereign victims who belong to non-human and inanimate populations. Capturing those stories will involve partnering with indigenous peoples in research on environmental victims and democratising the notion of ‘evidence’ to include non-Western knowledge. Narrative green victimology will also challenge some of the concepts of environmental victimology. In particular, as discussed in this paper, the notion that victims are sovereign agents in their own biographies is empowering only insofar as it is recognised that each agent is situated within socio-historical structures that are made sense of through narratives. These narratives are embedded in people’s understandings of themselves, and therefore will be reflected in their interpretations of environmental harm, its impacts upon their autonomy and the manner in which they respond.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was supported by research grants from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Notes

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