Suffer the children

It may come as a surprise to many adults that our police last year apprehended a 5-year-old and two 6-year-old boys for "sexual assault" - among a dozen children aged under 9 who committed "sexual offences".

No person under the age of 10 can be convicted of an offence but, since it is the job of the police to uphold the law, they must act upon complaints or when they have grounds for believing an offence has been committed.

Sensible parents are well aware that a child of tender years will at some point engage in harmless exploration of a sexual nature and some would argue that it is a normal part of how a child begins to understand itself and its body.

But for most adults it would be a long reach to describe this kind of activity as "sexual assault".

Is a child of 5 or 6 able to comprehend what "sexual assault" might be? Or are the reported cases the result of a panicked parent discovering some infantile experimentation?It is simply extraordinary that the police "apprehended" a 4-year-old girl, two 5-year-old girls and five 5-year-old boys last year for offences such as shoplifting, burglary or the theft of property valued under $500.

Was there a Fagin-like character hidden in the shadows? We cannot tell because the police decline to disclose any details, on the spurious grounds of "privacy".

There is, perhaps, a clue in comments by an Auckland University psychologist noting children who committed crimes generally modelled their behaviour on that of their parents.

The country certainly needs no reminding of the appalling way some adults, including parents, treat children.

Our rates of child abuse are a national disgrace but in reviewing the child crime statistics provided by the police, a large degree of caution is required, especially in relation to alleged "crimes" committed by the very young.

It is a different matter with some of the more serious offences involving somewhat older children.

While the 156 offences involving shoplifting might be considered nothing out of the ordinary, what should the community think of the nine assaults with a weapon, the single instance of threatening to kill, the five caught in possession of cannabis, the 34 arsonists? These all involved older - but still primary school-aged - children, and there were among them those with severe behavioural problems.

Yet efforts by the police youth services, schools, Child, Youth and Family and parents have led to a decrease in the number of very young offenders.

Ten years ago the numbers were twice those of the past year, which surely reflects the subsequent success of co-ordinated intervention.

Even so, it is a disturbing reflection of modern society that more than 700 young children were considered sufficiently delinquent to justify police apprehension for criminal offences.

Although such children cannot be charged, they are given warning or otherwise cautioned, or referred to the police's youth aid section, and in rare cases referred to the Family Court.

But what is being done about the real transgressors: the parents and caregivers? We need as a community to look deeply into our own hearts and behaviour, examine the society we have constructed and its innate dark side, and seek ways of ensuring the safety of the innocent.

It is obvious that normality is represented in some households by children being routinely abused and neglected, drugs traded and consumed, liquor freely sought and drunk, employment a novelty, gambling common, personal relationships as changeable as the weather, and hostility towards or suspicion of neighbours, let alone help agencies, customary.

A child brought up in such circumstances is bound to be influenced in a negative way.

It may well be "sexual assault" or "threatening to kill" or "burglary" in the dry, unemotional language of the law, but much more likely to be "normal" behaviour in the mind of a neglected child.

And by neglected, surely that must mean a child brought up within a family quite ignorant about proper upbringing, safety, general health and eating habits - there are all too many such, if the evidence and melancholy statistics produced by the authorities are a reliable guide.

In truth, a community gets what it asks for.

It asked for the freedom to gamble 24 hours a day; it asked for alcohol to be sold to anyone over 18 years at any time; it turns a blind eye to minor drug use, ignores or tolerates minor offending; permits the proliferation of offensive imported popular culture likely to influence the behaviour of indiscriminate and uncritical mentalities, and repeatedly elects governments which resile from giving the highest priority to confronting and correcting the attitudes of the illiterate and the unthinking towards our most precious national resource: our children.

If every child is to be safe - and safe from crime - every citizen must make safety in all its senses their priority.

Strong, loving and safe families and neighbourhoods - not the over-burdened State - will guarantee a healthy future for our children, and we must never forget that all children are our children.