New Zealand's child abuse statistics are an international disgrace. Government agency Child, Youth and Family confirmed 21,000 cases of abuse and neglect in 2009-10; 13,315 hospital admissions in 2008-09 were for children under 5 that could have been avoided. In the same year, 1286 admissions for all children were a result of assault, neglect or maltreatment; and to complete the picture of family violence within which such abuse either occurs, or is learnt, 47,374 children between the ages of 0 and 16 were present or residing with the victim at an incident of such violence reported to the police in 2010.
These are figures from official government sources. We do not need the headlines of individual cases to know that child abuse in this country is a curse. Even so, the recent coverage of the horrific cruelty and violence inflicted upon a 9-year-old child by her mother exposed new lows in this particular hall of shame. The mother punched her daughter so hard she broke the bones on her own hand; she kicked her while wearing steel-capped boots; she tore off a toe-nail and poured salt and boiling water on the wound; she wrote abusive words on the child's body.
"It was sustained abuse, amounting to torture," the presiding judge said sentencing the mother to seven and a-half years in prison with a minimum non-parole period of five years. Such cases are a reminder of the extremes of depravity to which some people will descend. But high-profile instances of abuse cannot be allowed to mask the reality that lower-level, but still dangerous and criminal, child neglect and abuse is widespread. Nor should distracting arguments over how we talk about the subject be allowed to derail confronting it.
This week controversy has emerged over "Maori child abuse".
Auckland University of Technology Maori history professor Paul Moon says the term has crept into public and official use and this creates an "inaccurate and dangerous" stereotype. Ngapuhi leader David Rankin takes issue with Prof Moon and says that Maori are a warrior race, a "violent people", and Maori have to take ownership of their own high levels of child abuse. The Children's Social Health Monitor's record of hospital admissions of children after assaults in 2008-09 established instances per 100,000.
The figures, by ethnic group, were: Maori, 41; Pasifika, 22; European, 11; and Asian, 9.
But the figures in themselves say little about the causes of such violence - beyond the simplistic, and unsupported notion of genetic predisposition towards violence against children - and without looking more closely at the causes, the solutions are likely to remain elusive. A ministerial inquiry following the brutalisation of the 9-year-old girl at the hands of her mother recommended greater co-operation between government agencies, mandatory reporting of abuse and more social workers in schools.
This may be an appropriate start, but a broader and more far-reaching approach is required, one which delves into all the suspected contributing factors and sets out action plans to address them. These include poverty, poor health, drug and alcohol addiction, educational deficits, and privacy restrictions on inter-agency reporting. Cultural attitudes towards violence against children must also be addressed, but the reaction across the entire spectrum of New Zealand ethnicities to the so-called "anti-smacking" law shows just how complex such an approach to the issue can be.
Legislating against violence against children may, in time, be shown to have played some part in changing attitudes, but it will never address it in its entirety. The reality is that the problem is of scandalous proportions and the solutions to it - like the causes - will be complex and multi-faceted.
The Government, led by Social Development Minister Paula Bennett, has set the ball rolling for 2012 with its Green Paper for Vulnerable Children. For it to be effective it must achieve the participation of not just the entire New Zealand community, but cross-party consensus. The health and wellbeing of the children of this country is too important to be trifled with by petty and partisan politics. Effective action, supported across Parliament, must be implemented. Our children are our future - and every case of child abuse a blight upon it.
