Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Do we need to bring back orphanages?

A woman with eight children has been barred from Housing NZ because she was evicted from a meth contaminated home. WINZ is going to pay $100,000 to keep her in emergency accommodation until she can get back on the HNZ list.

This is madness. The threat of losing her home if it was abused obviously failed. WINZ can't turn her away because she has 8 children. Seems yet another instance of someone using their children as hostages to their lifestyle.

What's the answer? The children need to be cared for, housed and fed. Are we at a point in the welfare state cycle that we need to bring back orphanages that will care for children when their parent/s can't or won't?

But when you think about what it costs to keep one individual in prison the sums say it's cheaper to keep the children in their mother's care and pay out the $100,000.

Foster care? Probably best keeping the children together so a placement for 8 children would rule that out.

In any case, CYF must have deemed the mother the best care solution (if they are involved). So surely it would be better to find a house in a provincial centre, close to schools and other amenities, at around $300 a week and shift her there. She may not want to move out of Auckland but perhaps that's the price she will have to pay. Sorry, WE will have to pay. It's better than $100,000.

4 comments:

Redbaiter said...

Wouldn't it be good if shame and individual accountability were more prevalent in our society.

They were once.

Progressives have deliberately destroyed these concepts and now we require regulations, bureaucracy and massive invasions of privacy to replace them. Except even all of that is not working.

Atheists/ anti-Christians have to take a lot of the blame for our present condition.

There may well be a need for orphanages, but as Brendan O'Neill suggests in another thread, it is a spiritual re-awakening that is needed most.

gravedodger said...

The half century of animal husbandry involved in my journey to 2016 has me seriously questioning the current thinking around children and their nurturing through formative years.
That assessment begins before conception!

Without a safe environment, damaging influences will adversely harm the resulting young.

Shelter, food, care, training, love, role models, lifestyle and responsibility all need to be of a high standard to prevent bad outcomes, even then best intentions can leave room for improvements.

Welfare, unrealistic netherworld concepts, drugs, poor diet, chaotic social and moral atmospheres and directionless behaviours will create damaged offspring that will so easily lead to seriously damaged generations of any species.

Things can go awry at conception when millennia of natural selection can be manipulated by well intentioned laboratory minions intervening to overcome what may well be a natural mechanism to prevent genetic damaged traits from being perpetrated by in-vitro fertilization in moves to bypass what may well be a very natural barrier to conception for childless couples.

Chaotic relationships that prevent a stable safe environment for vulnerable offspring have become so ordinary there is little arousal of emotions from bystanding observers as to potential pitfalls. Hell look what it took for the torture and death of Baby Moko while too many other little souls were silently suffering such moronic abuse that failed to result in death and therefore never reached sunlight.

Welfare inadvertently creating and facilitating some of the more degrading departures from what was once regarded by society as necessary basic environments for children to be born and raised in.

I am not so naïve to suggest that things never went awry back in the day but having parents or individuals with children they did not want or were found they could not be given basic care and sustenance, were placed for adoption by others who desired children but were prevented by natural barriers was a very normal outcome.
Until of course "educated experts" decided that because sometimes such arrangements could throw up problems around less than ideal outcomes for any of many perceived "failures", adoption became a very last resort as a solution.
That moronic thinking needs to be reviewed and the thousands of successes from fostering and adoption need to be revisited as a desirable solution.

In nature other species can often adopt vulnerable young to permit survival while in other more aggressive species a male will kill young conceived from the mating of other males.
Crikey it has all been going on for centuries.

Yes orphanages do conjure some awful mental imagery, just as Hospice care and respite care can be viewed as less than desirable, however when measured against other options all can become acceptable so to dismiss them because of theoretical perceived learned opposition is dumb.

Michael said...

As someone who has been in an orphanage as a child (they existed as late as the early 1980s so there are a few middle aged people who did) it's not an ideal solution. They provide basic care but little emotional support as the carers/staff are emotionally tired and unable to look at each child individually.

However, compared to some parents the provision of three meals, books, warm beds (with reasonable bed times) and appropriate social outings are a big step up. Re-opening orphanages is treating a result, not stopping the neglect.

I did wonder why the reporter didn't ask if she was willing to take part in a drug test to prove she was not the one who contaminated the house. Or who had been smoking the P (Undeclared boyfriend, perhaps?) There is much more to the story than what we are being told.

The Slippery Slope said...

Media reports CYFS cleared her to keep the kids.
Which shows the deplorable state of 'care' available, if the reported set up is the best option.

Susan