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In New Zealand we have more child abuse deaths than most other OECD countries. The 2003 UNICEF report, Child Maltreatment Deaths in Rich Countries, has a table of nations in which we are in 22nd place out of 27. Most of these countries have reduced their child homicide rate in the last twenty years but ours has increased. Fifty five children were killed in the latest five year period chosen for the report. Nineteen were under one year of age. If we performed as well as the five best countries, Spain, Greece, Italy, Ireland and Norway we would have had no more than a quarter of these deaths.
We have become all too familiar with the human face of child homicide in New Zealand. Lesley Max told the story of Delcelia Witika in 1991, the first major publicity given to a child abuse death. That story has been followed by Craig’s, Jordan’s, James’s, Tangaroa’s, Hinewaoriki’s, Coral’s, Saliel’s and Olympia’s.
Have the public inquiries into these deaths made a difference? Experience in New Zealand and overseas is that they can help to reform and fine-tune services but too much expectation can be placed on them. They can be unhelpful.
Harry Ferguson’s 2004 book, “Protecting Children in Time: Child Abuse, Child Protection and the Consequences of Modernity” criticises, “The impulse to re-organise entire child welfare systems on the basis of isolated incidents and to produce reams of additional guidance.” He concludes, “There is no evidence for such responses being effective”
The system flaws that case inquiries do identify have become well known. Almost invariably they boil down to: lack of information sharing among services, failure of an individual worker or service to take responsibility and lapses in deliberate decision-making in relation to the child’s safety.
These are serious matters but further inquiries and the paper reforms that follow are a clumsy and expensive way of tackling them. Repetitive, high-profile reviews can be counter-productive in other ways. They can reduce morale in protection agencies and drive them into unhelpfully defensive practices. They can repeatedly raise public expectations that will inevitably be disappointed leading to scepticism and loss of support for efforts to deal with the essential problem of ill-treatment of children.
Nevertheless, publicity has been helpful in advancing public understanding. There is a process of accommodation to the fact of serious ill-treatment of children that is commonly experienced by people who deal with it in their professional lives. A similar process seems to have been followed in public understanding in the last fifteen years. It is similar in its stages to the well-known grieving process.
It begins with denial that child abuse is a real problem and claims that it has been exaggerated or even made up. This stage is followed by anger when the reality of its existence becomes inescapable. It is at this stage that transformative, heroic solutions are often proposed. Then follows avoidance and blaming, shifting the responsibility to other people and groups. When it becomes clear that it is something that can’t be avoided and is not amenable to short term solutions, despair and indifference appear. When this stage is overcome realistic solutions can be sought.
In the fifteen years since Delcelia’s death all of these stages have been evident in media and public responses. There has been movement backward and forward between stages. We are beginning to ask more penetrating questions and to look for more effective answers. One line of reasoning can be formulated as follows.
Ill-treatment of children comes from both personal failure and failure of social support. It is easy to see the point being made by recent commentators that it is mistaken, and insulting to most parents who are doing a good job of raising their children, to say that it is New Zealand as a whole that suffers from the problem. It is the social outliers who kill their children. If it were not a profoundly aberrant act we could hardly have survived as a species.
But the nagging question is, “why are the social outliers in this country more likely to kill their children than those in Italy, Spain and other countries?”. The answer must lie in aspects of tradition and social organisation that ensure that even the social outliers are embraced by a family, community and/or wider-society culture of child-rearing values and practices strong enough to enable them to be parents who are good enough to ensure their children’s survival.
Raising children was not meant to be a sole occupation. Nor was it meant to be done in the absence of child-rearing values and practices. These usually come from the culture into which the child is born. If some parents are physically alone and culturally isolated that is a situation which must be remedied or, better still, prevented.
If we took this proposition seriously we would make every effort to bring in to a child-rearing community every potential mother and father and at least everyone with a new baby. For many people this is a matter of course. For others it is a choice. For quite a number of people it is not easy because of life stresses, personal attributes, cultural dislocation and so on. Again, if we are serious we should focus our attention on these factors and do our best as individuals and as members of families, whanau, communities and the wider society to overcome them.
At a personal level as parents we must learn to exercise authority without resorting to violence. At a collective level we must raise the status of child rearing and bring every parent into a community, large or small which holds to its values and practices.
The basis for organised, effective child-rearing cultures that bring in the outliers and make all children safer already exist in New Zealand. In Maoridom, it is to be found in the values of manaakitanga and whanaungatanga together with traditions such as whangai. In pakeha New Zealand culture there are traditions of mutual help and organisation among parents. There are organisations such as Plunket, Parents Centres and Playcentre and the iwi-based organisations that embody these values and transmit these practices. There are local networks, including the service groups and sports clubs that are agents of mutual support and transmitters of values and practices.
This system which, in total, constitutes the child-rearing culture needs to be placed more centrally in public policies and our way-of-life so that it has the mandate, declared or unspoken, and the confidence to operate effectively to embrace all our families.
Ian Hassall
25 June 2006
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