Yet another case of severe child abuse on an infant that has much of the country up in arms this week - and yet it has a chilling resemblance to the Kahui twins where nobody saw, heard or said anything and criminally got away with it.
As someone vehemently opposed to the anti-smacking law which was enacted 10 years ago, I now have the facts and figures to back up the point that it just didn't work.
Child abuse has skyrocketed in the past decade. Child Matters believes that one one child every five weeks is killed as a result of domestic abuse. On average, nearly 160,000 reports of child abuse are made to Oranga Tamariki each year, more than 77,000 of which are direct referrals by police - who are, according to stats, reporting to one domestic violence report every seven minutes. And of those, 60% of them include both spouse and children.
Since the introduction of that ill-thought out piece of legislation in 2008, New Zealand domestic violence against children is now one of the highest in the world. It has risen, according to police statistics, 136% for family violence, 43% more for sexual abuse against kids and 45% more against neglect and ill-treatment. There have been 71 deaths of child abuse in the last 10 years. 71. Think about that. And 92% of them had killers that were close to them. It's no wonder the UN condemned New Zealand in 2015, calling us to task. And this is just from police reported figures, which are just the tip of the actual iceberg.
In an international study it was found that one in four girls were sexually abused before they reached the age of 15 and that Maori girls were twice as likely to be in the firing line. This was higher than any other country that was investigated in the study.
Additionally, it was discovered that 83% of male prisoners under the age of 20 had a care and protection record under CYFS/Oranga Tamariki. And if that wasn't enough, 70% of those same young men had endured sexual abuse themselves. Indeed, one in four boys in New Zealand are also sexually abused before they are 20.
There are predictive factors that researchers now know can be found for those most likely (but not all) to be at risk.
They include:
- Having a parent who has already abused a child in the past
- They are a product of an unwanted pregnancy
- Poverty
- They come from a background of abuse
- A young mother with little support and low or no education
- One or both parents have drug or alchohol addidtion, or mental health issues
- The child lives in an overcrowded home
- Lives in a family with a background of family violence
- Has at least one non-biological adult living in the house
- Can be a sick child with a lot of needs
So what we are seeing here is an absolute flipping of the bird as far as Sue Bradford's rose-coloured non-violence legislation was concerned and really, who would have been surprised?
The short, sad answer is no-one is surprised if they have any real experience of the New Zealand coal-face around them.
We have issues that our changing social engineering is causing; that our cultural structures, on both sides are simply not coping with, or at this stage, able to change. Maori for example, are 14.7 of the population. Yet the domestic and child abuse is more than double the rate for Maori children than it is for all other ethnicities.
My next observation is absolutely not going to win me any friends in a few quarters, but it has to be said.
There is a marked tendency by academics and by activists to state that colonisation is to blame for the huge disparity between the races of New Zealand and Maori when it comes to family and sexual abuse. Along with a few other aspects, such as poverty.
After almost six decades of life as a part Maori who vied with church mice to get fed at times, that's an absolute copout.
If you have an issue, if you are an alcoholic, or a smoker for example, you are the only ones who can fix that and to do that, you have to own the issue. In order for Maori particularly, who seem hellbent on putting the blame anywhere but in our own backyards, to begin to heal and to fix this internationally frowned on rate, we MUST step up to the plate and own the damn thing. Lord Normanby did not hit your child with a piece of wood - you did. Sir George Grey did not get into the pants of your 13 year old niece. You did. Sir Apirana Ngata did not discourage your child from attempting academic excellence. Your apathetic attitude did that. How hard is that to understand?
I look back to my own upbringing here, with a ward state Maori Dad who did love the grog a bit too much and that kept us sharing clothes, shoes and sometimes food for much of our formative years. But he and Mum taught us all how to stand tall, be proud of ourselves, to apply ourselves to be the best we could be and most importantly, that this was a country that allowed you to be anything you wanted to be. We took that to heart, all five of us. And we succeeded because of that parental taught belief.
There are ways I think are the way forward with this and not all of them are palatable. We already know that the loss of the "village raises a child" philosophy has hurt our young ones and by extension, the next generations. So perhaps we need to rethink how our social security actually works. Set up a five year time frame and let everyone know that at the end of that time, any young one having a child under the age of 21 will expect to have their family support them, or put the child up for adoption. That there will be no social security payments.
By the same token, all teenagers no matter what their social or economic status, must attend a parental course, which every college needs as part of a compulsory curriculum. This teaches the basics in budgeting, relationship skills, cooking, parenting. Everything that is needed. We can't license people to have kids - but we can teach them early what their responsibilities are and what they need to know. There is absolutely no argument that this last generation could never survive if the technological age should suddenly come to a halt. Perhaps we also need to introduce a social study curriculum that looks at human's interactions with one another and educate about what is acceptable and what is not, rather than trying erroneously as always to attempt to place blame, which solves nothing.
There needs to be absolute crushing of any person who is convicted of hurting a child to the point of death or hospitalisation, of being allowed to have any more or be caregivers to the children of others. Absolutely end of story. Putting abused children from one part of the same family to another also doesn't work - where do you think the abusers have had their abuse learned from? All too often the wider family.
The last point I have to make is that the changes that have to be made; the correcting the problem rather than manufacturing ambulances for the bottom of the cliffs, have to apply to all New Zealanders, no what what race, gender, culture etc. The problems are happening here and now - and it is those in the here and now that have to get off their fingerpointing fat asses and start making it happen so that we can show the rest of the world that we can turn things around.
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