Nia Glassie - Why?

First her father;

"I've got no feelings. I can't explain - at the end of the day my baby's gone and nothing will bring her back."

Shedding some big crocodile tears. And talking about 'shedding' isn't this the guy who was found by Kuka having an 'affair' with her niece in the garden shed?

Isn't this the guy that buggered off to Australia and left his kids behind?

Talk about there being no moral compass in these groupings of people called whanau.

And aren't we all getting sick to death of being commanded to take responsibility? Whether it be for 'narking' (I'll write more about that) or as a taxpayer, who should fork out more to alleviate the poverty that apparently lies at the heart of this dysfunction?

I knew a couple of kids living in a not dissimilar home and agonised over what to do. So did others. You are dealing with people for whom retribution is everything; that retribution could extend to the kids themselves, or the neighbours and their children. Their extended whanau, the first place CYF will look to remove the children to, may be no better. These families aren't just one bad apple surrounded by good. The neglect is measured not by its existence but by degrees of. Neglect doesn't kill but abuse can. They tend to be two sides of the same coin but not always. A lot of lies and cover-ups are par for the course as people guilty only of victimless crimes like smoking dope, or ripping off the benefit system, lie low. 'Narking' is no simple matter whether considering the best interests of the at-risk child, your child or yourself.

It is not black and white and the many moralisers who call talkback today agreeing that we will stop child abuse by looking out for it and not tolerating it, are simply feeding their own emotional need to do something. Then they will put down the phone and carry on in their middle class world where what to have for dinner is the most pressing issue.

What we are seeing in the Glassie case, and every other that does or doesn't hit the headlines, is supposed adults who have not grown up. Old enough to breed babies, do drugs and drink, get a menial job if it suits or not, but incapable of rationalising and controlling their fleeting, feckless, roller-coaster emotions. A child is perceived as weak or 'ugly'. It is targeted. This is grown-up bullying that has gone too far. The minds of these boy-men are further deranged by drink and the normalisation of violence through their daily cerebral activities. But they are just a cog in the generational wheel.

Here's the difference though. Forty years ago they wouldn't have been allowed to form the kind of groups loosely call families. There would have been no financial mechanism to create them. Babies were adopted out, sometimes to extended whanau, sometimes to strangers. But to people who WANTED them. It wasn't a perfect answer by any means, but what ever is?

So 40 years ago we weren't seeing the kind of mayhem we see now. Child abuse and neglect most certainly happened. But from everything I have read it was on a much smaller scale.

Expecting the solution to this problem to come from watchful dobbers-in is just avoiding the true problem and shifting blame. Tomorrows victims are being born right now and being sent home by CYF people who hold fast to the ideology that the child must always remain with its biological mother; being written onto a benefit by WINZ people who are not tasked to ask any questions.

Welcome to the compassionate and caring society.