Fading into nothing in compliance with the forms

The RNZ story that will stalk the nightmares of every mother and father

Preface I: This is not an essay about the culture wars. It does not take a side in the endless online skirmishes about gender identity or parental rights. It does not claim to resolve difficult questions of adolescence, autonomy or belief. There is a place for those arguments. It is not this place.

Preface II: It is right and proper to hold in contempt those whose first instinct is to blame the parents. There is a particular cruelty in rushing to condemn a mother and father who have just buried their child. From certain sectors, there is too much readiness to defend institutional orthodoxy by implying guilt despite the absence of any evidence of dishonesty or bad conduct.

Preface III: I have no time for those who are quick to attack care workers or accuse people working in the system of indifference. That’s not just lazy - it’s wrong. People in these roles are doing their best in difficult circumstances, often under-resourced and over-stretched. They care deeply. They’re not the problem but, as this essay gets into, they will never have the tools to do what only a parent can do.

***

In a detailed and frightening report published by Ruth Hill at RNZ, New Zealanders were told the story of a teenage girl referred to as “Vanessa” who died alone in emergency accommodation. She had just turned seventeen. Her parents had received a final text: “Mama, I love you.”

Days later, police found her body in a locked motel room, emaciated and lifeless. The post-mortem was clear: she had starved to death. But the truth behind her death is darker still.

Vanessa spent five years under the watch of multiple government agencies. More than ten hospitalisations. Mental health services knew her case. Education officials had her file. Youth workers tracked her progress. Housing providers monitored her placement.

She had not vanished from view. She had been processed.

None of that stopped her from dying alone in that room, the soundless forms properly filled and the protocols dutifully followed.

Her death was not the product of some catastrophic oversight. It was not the result of agencies or individuals failing. In fact, what makes this story so horrifying is that nothing went obviously wrong.

No files were lost. No reports were forged. No staff were asleep at their desks. The system performed much as it was designed to. It monitored. It referred. It documented. It delegated.

And while it did these things with bureaucratic precision, a child with a known, long-standing eating disorder slowly disappeared into herself, and then into the grave.

Her real and immediate problem was anorexia. But that reality seems to have been made much worse by a rift with her parents. That situation, in turn, appears to have been exacerbated by various well-meaning but ultimately not responsible agents of the state.

It is clear that gender identity questions emerged during her illness. At some point, she began identifying differently. Her parents, following the advice of her long-term psychiatrist, did not affirm this new identity. The psychiatrist believed it was an expression of her anorexia. Rather than true gender dysphoria, it was another attempt to reject her body, to escape it.

But instead of supporting the parents in responding to a known, life-threatening disorder, parts of the system responded to their caution as a problem. The refusal to affirm was treated as a barrier to be worked around. And so the rift widened.

The state, instead of supporting the parent–child relationship, seems to have helped facilitate its collapse.

According to the parents, the unconditional affirmation of Vanessa’s identity claims became more than just a distraction from her underlying illness. Her parents say it became a shield for it. The narrative that she was rejecting her body because she was “really a boy” conveniently explained away the desire for physical emaciation.

When her parents expressed concern about her health or questioned her rapid identification shift, Vanessa accused them of bigotry and transphobia to the authorities. And in this way, the parents say, the anorexia could hide in plain sight, reinterpreted as gender dysphoria and therefore left unchallenged.

What should have been seen as a cry for help was recast as a sacred declaration, and the people closest to her, who were trying to confront the eating disorder head-on, became obstacles to that paramount ideal.

This is not an attack on the individuals or agencies involved. Many professionals had contact with Vanessa in the months and years before her death: Health New Zealand, Oranga Tamariki, the Ministry of Social Development, the Ministry of Education, Presbyterian Support, the Salvation Army, Family Works and her school. There were mental health workers, social workers, case managers, youth support staff and educators. I know enough people in those roles to say, without hesitation, that they are not careless or cruel.

On the contrary, they are overwhelmingly well-meaning, professional and motivated by a genuine desire to help. They care. They enter these fields not for wealth or prestige but because they want to serve, protect and support those in need. This is not about them as individuals. The failure here is not one of heart, but of structure – a system that denies even the best people the authority to act when it matters most.

But none of that – not the care, the training or the good intentions – was of any practical use to a very sick teenager left alone to confront an illness that had nearly killed her before. In the end, she was expected to manage it without supervision, without insistence, and without the one thing that could have made the difference: the reassertion of loving, responsible parental authority.

Care workers have boundaries. They operate within professional frameworks designed to protect not only the people they serve, but themselves. And those must be in place.

Professionals must manage caseloads. They must document every action, follow procedure and respect autonomy, even when autonomy looks like self-destruction.

These constraints are not arbitrary. They exist because no one person can be asked to carry the full weight of another’s suffering day in and day out without limits. A social worker cannot chain themselves to a hospital bed to stop a child from leaving. A case manager cannot sleep on a teenager’s floor to make sure she eats. A housing support worker cannot override policy and take a child home just because their instincts scream that something is wrong.

Their role is defined by what they are allowed to do, not what they wish they could do.

Parents have no such restrictions. The moral claim of a mother or father is not procedural. It is personal. And total.

There is no quitting time. No professional detachment. A parent does not back away when things become emotionally fraught or physically exhausting. They go in deeper. They absorb the blows, the abuse, the sleepless nights, because they must.

There is no paperwork, no scope of practice. Parental authority is not one delegated by policy, but conferred by nature, forged in sleepless infancy and carried – willingly or not – to the gates of adulthood.

The only force that stands a chance of confronting a stubborn and cunning illness like anorexia is one that is equally stubborn and unrelenting. Only a parent can meet that fight on its own terms.

There was only one class of people who could see the entire story of what was going on with Vanessa: her mother and father.

They were the only ones who had walked with her from early childhood to adolescence, from the first signs of trauma through years of hospitalisations, from one diagnosis to the next. They knew her history not in fragments but in full. Not in files, but in memory.

They were present not only for the clinical turning points, but for the ordinary, invisible ones: the small shifts in behaviour, the quiet retreats, the moments of hope and despair that never make it into a case note. They had the most global view of the whole situation, and yet they were the very people the system ended up freezing out.

While professionals came and went – rotated, reallocated, promoted, seconded – her parents remained the one constant in her life. They saw the patterns others missed. They connected the dots others could not. But their insight, grounded in long memory and daily presence, was treated as secondary to the immediate wishes of a very unwell teenager.

When they raised concerns, they were not met with curiosity but suspicion. When they acted cautiously, they were not trusted. And when they refused to affirm something they believed – on sound medical advice – was harmful, they were cast as another problem rather than the key to the solution.

There is something deeply perverse about this inversion. The people with the deepest knowledge and the greatest love were sidelined, while a rotating cast of strangers was asked to carry responsibilities they could never fulfil.

This is not a flaw in the execution of the system. It is a flaw that no system can escape. It is the problem of belief in buzzwords like “wraparound care”, which can never replace the kind of authority and insight that only kindred blood provides. A programme can monitor, a service can support, but only a parent bears the burden with no off-switch, no professional detachment and no competing interest.

It goes without saying that parents cannot be perfect narrators of this tragedy. Grief and loss inevitably shape memory. Their account carries the weight of unbearable sorrow and, perhaps, inevitable feelings of guilt.

Yet the reason we have heard from them and not the agencies is precisely because the processes and decisions that seem to have enabled Vanessa’s isolation remain bound by the same bureaucratic protocols that governed her care. They are unable to speak because they are trapped in yet another procedural web.

We know with grim certainty that whatever emerges from the coroner's inquiry, whatever recommendations follow, whatever new protocols are drafted and new boxes added to the endless checklists, none of it will answer the only questions that really matter.

***

I hope none of this comes across as overwrought. I’ve tried to be careful, but the truth is I found the article deeply frightening. Not in a distant or abstract way, but in a close-to-home, keeps-you-up-at-night sort of way. It lingered.

I have four children. The eldest is on the cusp of those adolescent years. That strange, volatile territory where so much can go right, and so much can quietly unravel.

Like every parent, I worry. I worry about the pressures they’ll face, the influences I can’t control, and the moments when my love for them might not be enough to carry the day.

This kind of thing — a child lost not to sudden tragedy but to a long, slow isolation — is one of those things parents fear most. And if I knew how to guarantee it would never happen, to draw a line around my own family and keep the world’s madness at bay, I would do it in a heartbeat.

But I don’t. No one does. That’s why stories like this, for all their horror, really do matter. Not because they confirm what we want to believe, but because they force us to confront what we’d rather not.