David Farrar has
written about Kommissar Kiro's desire to inspect the homes of every New Zealand child. He describes
"how desperately bad our child abuse story is," with its
"barbaric toll."I say every life lost (and the intolerable lead up to the loss) is a gut-wrenching waste BUT let's summarise the facts;
- the number of deaths due to intentional injury is decreasing
- the notifications for child abuse are increasing, as are substantiated findings
- however, those findings include in descending order emotional abuse, neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse
- the majority of notifications do not result in a substantiated finding
- about 10 children (or 1 %) in 1,000 have a finding of some sort of abuse or neglect against them
- the rate of abuse for Maori children is around three times higher yet even their child deaths due to maltreatment are decreasing
- the high number of Maori children dying at the hands of their young mothers was documented in the 50s and 60s
Can we have some perspective here. Most mothers already willingly let Plunket into their homes. Forcing those who don't to accept state interference is enough to make them go underground. I am not kidding. Many are already transient and lawless.
And I won't even go into the problem of where these children will be put after removal. That can be literally out of the the frying pan and into the fire.
By Pakeha standards many Maori children would be categorised as neglected. This lack of supervision is however the norm in some whanau and even wider communities. It isn't necessarily life threatening. Good god. Some kids could do with a bit more time away from paranoid, over fussy mothers.
I'm not talking about kids in P houses. I'm talking, for instance, about children where mothers are working and sometimes the care falls to older siblings. I go back to my own childhood when my mother worked full-time and with four children; we looked out for each other. Yes, times are different but a lot of the hysteria now afoot is manufactured. It's quite sickening and DPF is a prime example of how reasonable and intelligent people can be (grudgingly) suckered into accepting the machinery of state to all-knowingly handle 'epidemics'. (Sorry David.)
Let's focus on where the known problems are.