This week saw the release of the Glenn Report, a report on child abuse and domestic violence in New Zealand. It makes for pretty depressing reading. Also this week we see another senseless murder of one of our children, an 8 month old killed and a man charged with his murder, It’s heart breaking to me. We have the 5th highest rate of child abuse in the OECD.
We should ALL be talking about this, we should ALL be demanding action. It should have been all over the news. Instead a particularly biased media has chosen to fill it’s bulletin’s with David Cunliffe and an 11 year old letter. Shame on them.
148,659 notifications of suspected child abuse were reported to CYFS in the year ending June 2013, which leaves me wondering how many more weren’t reported. Police respond to a family violence call every 7 minutes in this country. EVERY 7 MINUTES. Where are our social agencies in all of this, why is the National Government standing by and letting our children be hurt and killed? It is well past the time when something desperately needs to be done. Paula Bennett Minister of Social Destruction denies poverty, she denies that funding has been cut and laughs and belittles this subject in Parliament when questioned. She is an embarrassment to this country with her lack of empathy, understanding and action. Allowing our kids to live in poverty as she brags about cutting $1 billion from welfare spending is child abuse through chosen ignorance by this National Party, as parents and kids are living in tents and parks. She doesn’t care.
New Zealand is currently not a great place for many families, especially our women and children as our many systems including family court fail them. Poverty is adding to the stress and depression and causing an inability to cope for many as help rapidly disappears and National brags about the money they have saved. It makes my blood boil.
It is time to stand up for our rights, stand up for our kids and our elderly as abuse rises on both because one day it could be you or your kids that no one stands up and shouts for, it could be you that needs some help. Or should we just keep doing nothing and hope it goes away? It won’t.
How many more babies need to die before this heartless Government does something about our national shame? For me, one was one too many. It is to me a disgusting indication of our Government’s priorities, it’s money, money over a precious life every single time.
glenninquiry.org.nz Read it.
The Glen report is irrelevant, the MSM have made it so. What people don’t know, or understand, does not upset them. The MSM is doing a fine job of making certain that people don’t know that National does not work for them.
Good points. Although the Owen report is good in many ways it does not suggest any solutions. I don’t know whether this was because it was not meant to, or whether it was assumed that government would pick up on it and recommend action. If it was the latter then we were all sadly mistaken. National is too busy with personality assassination politics to worry about whether the nation’s children are safe and healthy.
Perhaps the denials coming (mainly) from the right are because the whole idea of child abuse is just too squeamish to talk about (like suicide) and it is easier just to shut their ears and eyes and deny its existence (like climate change). Whatever spin National can put on it the fact is here: New Zealand is now not Godzone and no longer the best place to bring up children. It is a sick society. People feel angry, confused and helpless as case after case appears in the media of children being beaten, raped, used as pornographic models, or murdered. This is surely one of the most urgent ills in our society that needs to be dealt with and no expense should be spared. Forget the f…n roads of national significance, flyovers, stadiums, conference centres, Americas Cup, seat on the Security Council, etc. – the war against our children is infinitely more important.
It seems to National that our children are only important to use as photo ops for kissing when an election looms, to look after us when we are elderly or to clean up our environmental despoilage in the future. The government should eat a big slice of humble pie and acknowledge the problems that exist in New Zealand and work in a non-partisan manner with other parties to help fix them. Sadly I think they are preoccupied with their own images and egos.
You are right, however the next step in the inquiry is exactly that, solutions. Due out in a couple of months.
“Instead a particularly biased media has chosen to fill it’s bulletin’s with David Cunliffe and an 11 year old letter. Shame on them.”
I absolutely agree – and in addition there was the publication of an important book on child poverty in NZ – this too has been almost totally ignored by the media – especially Radio NZ – in their clamour to fall all over themselves with articles on the non-event of the century.
Well said Samantha Anderson and Murray Simmonds.
(Where is the ‘like x100’ button when you need it?)
National choosing to release that crap about Cunliffe and the media choosing to air it far and wide on the day that this report was released show they didn’t want awareness raised of the problems detailed in this report. How do we find solutions when public awareness is obstructed in such ways? This situation is becoming increasingly appalling in more ways than one.
why is the National Government standing by and letting our children be hurt and killed?
That is the plan, Samantha. That is the plan.
National knows full well that there are far too many ‘proles’ and that numbers have to be reduced in line with the continuing decline in global net energy extraction and collapse of the environment.
The long game being played is to transfer as much wealth as possible from the bottom and middle to the top, and sequester that wealth somewhere it cannot be easily recovered by ‘proles’ before the whole system collapses, so that members of ‘the club’ can ride the collapse tsunami in relative comfort while the masses slowly starve and fight amongst themselves, as has been happening in Greece, Spain, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan etc. and is now starting to happen in Britain and the US.
In the meantime the psychotic sociopaths at the top will continue to cram as many proles as possible into ghettos and exploit them, as has happened throughout most of ‘civilised’ history. Think of Dickens’ London without the inflow of food and wealth from colonies and you have an idea where things are headed for most people.
The really clever part is to get proles to vote for their own enslavement and exploitation via a constant stream of misinformation delivered by mainstream media, as noted by DIRK.
I do not like the suggestion in the Glenn report that in the family court those accused of abuse or violence be deemed guilty and must prove their innocence. That is a really dumb idea and open to horrible abuse.
What I think would work better for Family Court is an inquisitorial styled system, rather than the adversarial system we have now. But that would require a huge mind shift of judges and lawyers involved, and that could be problematic when they’re still working within the adversarial system in the rest of our so called “justice” system.
At the end of the day its a cultural problem. In NZ we value women and children so very little, so little in fact mothers of young children are deemed to be “not working” when they care for their kids, but someone else doing it has a “job” although they get paid minimum wage mostly. We value our kids so little most NZers thought it should be legal to hit them and wanted the anti-smacking bill repealed. Although its illegal to hit anyone else, somehow they think it should be okay for adults to hit the smallest and most vulnerable amongst us.
I think the Glenn report will be deemed irrelevant and many NZers will put a bunch of labels on it (if they think or it or read any of it at all) like “feminazi” and “PC do gooders” and dismiss its findings completely.
Absolutely Samantha,
It would be a grave mistake to believe things couldn’t get much worse.
Here is a 22 min doco you won’t see on MSM of Nationals brighter future they have in mind..
http://www.presstv.com/detail/2014/06/19/367660/us-grapples-with-high-youth-detention/
A must watch.
I was waiting for a painting to dry on Thursday and flicked on the Parliament T.V. I was so impressed with the Dunedin North Labour David Clark’s speech and of course all of the Greens who spoke that day. They are explaining the poverty issue clearly and are articulate. The right are just a bunch of arrogant wankers with no care or passion just ego and pomp. I believe the news should be swapped for watching channel 22. There is no bias, no slant just the pure unadulterated truth. Also I am a survivor of domestic violence from an ex army nut, who smashed my jaw and broke 5 of my teeth, I went to court and he was made to pay me a pitiful amount of $2400 which he drip fed over 5 years when it cost me $20 thousand and two years of my life having to pay and fix what the damage he did. I could have been killed and he got slapped with a wet bus ticket. Also I drove myself that night to A and E with a broken jaw and teeth and was sent home again into god knows what! No police visit no one checked on me, I had to try and get away from my crazy ex partner by getting to the police station with my two little dogs (he used to threaten to kill if I didn’t do what he wanted) and get the police to get him hold up in a cell just so I could pack and leave. I had no help or support I was a total nervous wreck. This system needs to change, I wore all the damage and costs. It makes me so angry my blood boils. And especially when we have to see the faces of these total assholes paraded on t.v night after night like in the case of Sophie Elliott!
P.s woman tell other woman as in my case not to bother going to court as they will treat you like shit and as a female it is always your fault. As if the male of the species is so special that he can do no wrong without the evil woman tempting him to eat the apple from Eden. It is a mindset that is medieval outdated and pathetic. Also the woman is always slanted as a nut or slut in the system so you can’t win. In my case, this guy had restraining orders against him from other woman which of course I never knew about so I just walked straight into a trap. These abusive guys know the system is easy to manipulate, they are playing with it and woman’s lives.
I think the most depressing aspect of all of this is that the links between economic inequality and the rise in social ills like this have been charted so many times now. And yet the media and the government will do their damndest to make sure that by and large New Zealanders don’t understand this, and thus stay apathetic about the issue of inequality.
Rather – they’d just prefer to bring up ‘anti-smacking’ legislation from those ‘loony lefties’ and just turn the whole conversation into a sick, cruel, demented fucking joke.
The poverty issue should be treated separately, abuse and poverty are interrelated but not causative of one another. Poverty is not so much about relative income, but about how priorities are focused. Working in deprived area’s, you see many refugee families such as the Burmese who are on extremely limited incomes, but they aren’t living in poverty, their children are well-fed, clothed, warm and educated. They might not have flat screen t.v’s and use public transport as opposed to spending beyond their means.
The factors that lead to child or partner abuse are alcohol & drug abuse, the cycle of violence, poor family structures and mental illness. Focusing all our resources solely on the ‘end game’ does little to stop the cyclical nature of it all, you need to have an interventionist policy and an extremely well-funded and resourced CYFS department.
One thing that has never ceased to amaze me with the current CYFS policy is that they are bound by legislation to try and place abused children with other family members, what this means is that if the children are being beaten or abused by their parents, they will often be placed with the grandparents. And of course whom did the parents learn from in the first place?
hey you forgot to say about ‘personal responsibility’
I’m sure that it is a comfort to the child being beaten with a 4 by 2 that right wing idiots think that endlessly hearing “You child beaters should exercise some personal responsibility” will one day stop people from beating their children.
We can put it alongside the right’s crime prevention strategy of sternly telling criminals that the best way to prevent crime is for them to stop robbing people and live a morally upright life.
What I meant was, what a poor, ill conceived, judgemental comment. I sarcastically wrote what about this magical ingredient so prized by tories called ‘personal responsibility’ which is just like the morals one may have IF one can afford them. I don’t believe there is such a simple formula to family violence but if there is I don’t buy the one posted by tamiherejj.
It is crap to compare the way that refugee families manage with the way that people siphoned into despairing circumstances by a system designed to do just that cope. (in my humble opinion)
It’s got nothing to do with personal responsibility, that’s a right wing cop out. It has everything to do with societal responsibility.
My point is that a solution to combat poverty and abuse by throwing the down trodden an extra 50 dollars a week and telling them to shut up, is playing exactly into the same system that put them there and will do absolutely nothing to address the root causes.
We know that unemployment, alcohol abuse and young single mothers who have a succession of young angry male partners, create a poverty ridden abusive environment. And when you are unemployed and on the booze thurs-sunday, where do you think an increase in benefit payments will go?
You have to look beyond capitilist solutions for a capitilist problem.
What the Glen report tells us,is that culture and its dominating relevance is important to our existance.What is also tells us is that culture has to adapt to social progressive care.
If I may suggest punishing those responsible for the abuse of childrens protection services by the court..not the elections as the enemy constantly tell us. Lets start a fund to pay lawyers to file barrage of charges against those responsible.Mc cready has shown the way…1 man successfully made a liar pay …in court. Ill donate 15%of my taxes for such a fund. Government is wasting my taxes,ill be happier seeing extra go to this great cause.
Mr Banks has lots of friends who are proven liars(see high court evidence). Liars don’t protect children.
Martyn Bradbury is absolutely correct…shameful.
Lets make them responsible,and we know theres young lawyers massively indentured to the state system…lets help them pay off their student loans doing gods work….jailing the greedy liars who have laid waste to the children and consequently the future of our once beautiful country.
I’d also be happy to see a greater enforcement in this area.
The bloke who killed the 8-month old baby should be up in front of a firing squad. I have no time for people of that ilk.
And the woman who let him into her family should be steralised. She is clearly not fit to be a parent in a modern society.
We need to stop beating around the bush on this issue and get moving on it. We need to admit as a society that some of our citizens are not fit to be parents and actually do something about it. Taking kids away from parents is putting the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We need to ensure every kid who is born has parents who can provide the resources for that kid to succeed.
Here is my three point plan:
– Free steralisation
– Compulsory family financial health check for every baby born. No pass equals both parents permanently steralised.
– Every family is financially re-checked when child turns 5. No pass equals both parents permanently steralised.
Your comment sent chills down my spine.
I just can’t even….
Basically you are saying that if you’re poor you get sterilised.
Its nothing to do with the economy apparently, its all about poor people breeding.
So what happens to a nice middle class family when the main income earner is made redundant and cannot find another job because, you know, sometimes economies are like that. What if this happens while the woman is pregnant? Should they be sterliised after the baby is born?
I don’t think you’ve really thought this one through very well.
And you’ve assumed that poverty = child abuse. Thats a hell of an assumption to make.
I’ve got news for you dude. Rich people can be abusive too. The people who abused me as a child? Not poor. Nice white middle class men. What to do with them?
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