A Mother's Day Thought

Chris Trotter asks in today's Sunday Star Times;

"Because how much difference is there really between an Iraqi mother carrying her baby through a Baghdad market place - just before a terrorist's car bomb goes off: and a Wanganui mum putting her toddler down to sleep on the couch - just before the gangsters guns go off?"

Trotter at his blinkers-on best.

There is a world of difference. The Wanganui mother has every chance to protect her child by not being involved in the gang lifestyle. She knew her boyfriend was already on remand facing firearms charges for the same type of crime that ended her child's life. Society bends over backwards to give just such a woman an opportunity to turn her back on a gang lifestyle. It is pointless to keep offering the pathway out because it just gets exploited.

An Iraqi woman, on the other hand, is irrevocably trapped.

I sent this to talkback last Monday. I haven't changed my mind.

Children and gangs do not mix. If children were not meal tickets, there would be considerably less mixing. Gang members like to live off women on welfare, absolving themselves of any need to financially contribute to the home or family. Reforming welfare, beginning by stopping the availability of DPB to teenage parents from a specified future date, would create change. Why teenagers? Because that is generally when long-term welfare dependents, particularly Maori women, become mothers.

Counter-intuitively, it's women who can make the long-term difference to the gang problem, by not having babies to criminals and potentially producing more. If society didn't pay them an income to do so, their own self-interest and survival instincts would change their behaviour.