Hey, hey, hey! How many babies have you stolen today?
The deaths of young kids have been used to create a ministry for vulnerable children whose focus was removing kids with rules that are draconian- parents aren’t eligible for legal aid when battling OT & if you’ve had one child removed you automatically lose any others.
Remember – Oranga Tamariki was originally called ‘Ministry for Vulnerable Children’ – it was a move towards “child rescue” rather than working with & supporting whanau – this is a simplistic neoliberal view about the causes of abuse which doesn’t recognise systemic issues.
The State trying to steal a baby from a mother is exactly what this philosophy leads to. A curse on all who support and defend it. Thank Jesus Māori are so tolerant of hateful Pakeha social policy or there would be bloodshed. I’d die to protect my child from this kind of horror.
What man could call themselves a father if they allowed the state to steal their child and put them into state care where there is a higher statistical chance of the child being abused.
I’ve been banging on about this since 2016, The Hui & Radio Waatea have been telling the story of CYFS/OT stealing children for years and Māori have been talking about their children being stolen since the 1940s. Pakeha middle class media cover it and suddenly it’s headline news.
Are the Wellington Twitteratti Unionists screaming about supporting Oranga Tamariki today?
This is a blight and a stain on us as a people and listening to mostly white people hold up the bodies of dead children to justify a brutal neoliberal agency who are cost cutting and pretending they are protecting children makes me vomit.
Awesome that you are able to point out the neoliberal aspects of OT – of course this was borne of the Expert Advisory Report from a team with NO social work experience and chaired by an economist! The original doctrine that drove CYF and now OT was Poua-te -ata-tu … you need to research this and how this applies to Maori before flying off
And you can see this in how a neo-liberal response to successful initiatives is to axe them.
The best way to protect a child from the dysfunctional Oranga Tamariki in NZ,is to go to court and have the child made a “ward of the court”. Then a judge orders what is to happen and the dept is only the courts agent. This stops any dysfunctional decisions/actions being made by the dept.
Clearly from the story those social workers were bullshitting. Not just to the family but to the courts as well. And the judge made his decisions based on bullshit. Only way to clean that up is to just clean em out the loonies.
Y’know no one in there right mind would question whether or not a child has to be remove from its parents if the facts are laid out bare for all to see. But there are questions, big questions that need to be answered like why social workers have to lie to judges so to steal children.
It does not matter what they change their name to to me they will ALWAYS be. Welcome to Cyfs We kill your children quicker.
Yes, neo-liberal indeed. Don’t forget its predecessor was the Ministry for Vulnerable Children. It’s a wonder they didn’t change a few other names while they were at it. HNZ would become the Ministry for Homelessness.
Te Puni Kokiri would be the Department of Racism. Corrections and MoJ would respectively become the Ministry for Criminals and the Department of Crime. Police would come under a new Department for Social Control. In line with tradition Work and Income could again be resubsumed into MSD and the whole shebang become the Ministry for Underclass Development, or MUD for short.
1000%, Chris
Yes, history is important. But I think the point here is that a neo-liberal repsonse to problems has the objective of containment only, together with a wider objective of maintaining the problem. The existence of poverty and everything that comes with that are the lifeblood of neo-liberal thought. The neo-liberals need a particular level of social dysfunction in the same way that vampires need blood.
This was meant to be a response to Pete above at 8.30am.
I’m pretty certain the average voter never meant to consent to or authorize baby snatch squads, any more than the average cop signed up to do escort duty for them. Yet, here we are.
+100
cyfs need to go it is time. And its interesting how the number of Maori children in cyfs have increased since 2013 and continued to incraese and yet what has been done about i. We need to look at why and how this occurred. This was happening under the previous government but just like our Maori incarceration rates its all down hill when we have right wing government in power. Our Maori and PI whanau suffer and bare the brunt of these poorly thought out social policies and all the cuts to social services there to help those that fall through the cracks. I have had dealings with cyfs trying to get my brothers kids back and out of their fucked up system and its hard when they don’t bother to contact you so much for whanau, hapu and iwi involvement they are all shit they don’t even do this and they make up lies saying they didn’t know where you were. I have caught them out dumping my nephews in the first placement which didnt last long just to get them of their books and make them and the national government look good.
Who thinks Lincoln Wakefield would have been glad to have been uplifted? It’s got loads more to do with chronic multi-generational dis-function than it has with skin colour.
Oranga Tamariki has become a gravy train for too many so-called social workers, caregivers, lawyers, psychiatrists whoever. It’s a closed little world, soaking up money in committees, panels, hearings. At hte bottom of the heap are the kids and that’s the tragedy.
Too true. Money needs instead to go to families and friends who could actually help if they had the wherewithal.
You, forgot to mention team building/bonding functions here there!!
Winz was – and perhaps sections of it still are – wedded to dumb childish team-building exercises whose only outcome is uniting staff in a hatred of management.
One Special Services Manager told me it, “gave the staff a day off work”. A Service Manager told me he always arranged to take annual leave to avoid them.
One of the more chilling revelations of Melanie Reid’s film clip was the social workers ignoring the fact that the family’s lawyer had filed an injunction against the uplift order, in other words they considered that their
“protocols”, overrode legal process. That’s anarchy.
Snow White: “…dumb childish team-building exercises….”
Those things became fashionable throughout the public and private sectors in the 1990s. Oh they were awful! I shudder at the memory: a pointless waste of time.
“….the social workers ignoring the fact that the family’s lawyer had filed an injunction against the uplift order…..they considered that their “protocols”overrode legal process. That’s anarchy.”
In fairness, my impression was that they believed their processes trumped that of the lawyer. More like a misunderstanding of how the legal process works.
It also seemed to me that they hadn’t previously been challenged in that way over an uplift. They were on uncertain ground, so they stuck to established process. It’s understandable: they aren’t paid to make independent decisions about such matters.
Ok, D’Esterre, then they should have checked in with their own lawyer – and from memory, I think that they did touch base with a lawyer during that awful saga.
From what Grainne Moss has had to say about uplifts, over and over again, was how difficult they were for the uplifters, it was the hardest thing that a social worker ever had to do etc, then the social workers , not surprisingly, do face opposition when they are removing babies and children.
I would expect any educated professionally trained person to heed what a lawyer was saying, and to get advice if necessary, and not see it as an adversarial situation with one side “trumping” the other.
The SW’s may not “be paid to make independent decisions,” but govt depts have solicitors who are.
If the SW’s were on uncertain ground, then that is the time to touch base.
Snow White: this reply thread is getting skinny! I agree with your comments.
“…I think that they did touch base with a lawyer during that awful saga.”
Yup, think that they did. And legal opinions can differ. It was awful to watch, that’s for sure. I’ve said somewhere that I’d have hoped for some common sense to prevail sooner than it did.
“…how difficult they were for the uplifters…”
That was obvious to anyone watching; but I’m guessing that removing older children is likely even worse. The thing is: we don’t have all the pertinent information. Maybe the uplift was the right thing to do, given the knowledge OT had about this case.
“…and not see it as an adversarial situation…”
I don’t think that was the case; however, as I said earlier, I got the impression that the OT staff weren’t used to being challenged in that way, and didn’t know how to react.
“…that is the time to touch base.”
Agreed. And it’s what I expected to happen very early on. It didn’t, sadly. OT staff could have backed off: nothing to lose at that stage.
It’s really important not to see this as purely a Maori issue. Babies aren’t removed because they’re Maori: it happens to non-Maori as well. They’re removed because of identified risks to their safety.
Martyn: “The State trying to steal a baby from a mother is exactly what this philosophy leads to. A curse on all who support and defend it. Thank Jesus Māori are so tolerant of hateful Pakeha social policy or there would be bloodshed. I’d kill anyone from the state trying to take my child.”
We all feel that way.
There’s a deep history of the State taking babies and children from people considered unfit to parent. Decades back, it was as likely to be non-Maori as Maori. The driving issue then, as now, was poverty and the effects it has on families. NZ practices and attitudes derived from the UK, and were Victorian in origin, heavily influenced by social Darwinism and we-know-best Fabian socialism.
In addition, nobody my age could forget the practice of closed adoptions: the newborn babies taken from young unmarried mothers and given to couples looking to adopt. I knew women to whom this happened. Those babies were disproportionately pakeha: in those days, it was usual for Maori babies born to unmarried women to be adopted within the extended family. It was the enactment of the DPB which finally put an end to the adoption racket.
It’s critical to remember the history, with regard to how child welfare and protection services got to where they are now. In the 1980s, a report was produced by some staff (if I recall rightly) on the issue of “institutional racism” in the then Department of Social Welfare.That prompted this:
https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/archive/1988-puaoteatatu.pdf
I recommend it to you; it’s an enlightening read, not least because it shows how little change there’s actually been. It’s worth remembering that this was at a time when Rogernomics was already laying waste both to jobs and to the social fabric of this country. It was also before the big Treaty settlements had begun. And some of the recommendations have been overtaken by technological and societal developments.
At the time the above report was published, I remember that the DSW took on many more Maori social workers and changed its practices, such that Maori children were placed firstly with extended family, rather than with pakeha foster carers.
Unfortunately, that didn’t stop Maori children being harmed. It seems eventually to have dawned on DSW that poor parenting practices in the child’s birth family were for obvious reasons likely also to be present in the extended family.
In the years since the above report was published, there have been repeated restructurings in the child welfare and protection services. None of them appears to have made much difference to the plight of at-risk children. Oranga Tamariki apparently still removes newborns, having assessed the family for risk factors – drugs, family violence, crime, probably gang connections – and then getting a Family Court order. That seems to have been what was happening at HB hospital recently. Note that the social workers involved were Maori.
It isn’t just Maori children being removed. And children aren’t being removed just because some OT social worker thinks that it’s a good idea: such children are deemed to be at serious risk of harm. Nor is it just Maori children being harmed and killed by their carers. But children aren’t being uplifted because they’re Maori: let’s at least accept that OT doesn’t do that; it is there to protect all children.
For reasons I’ve given on many comments here and elsewhere, I disagree with the term “racism” being applied to the actions of individuals. And in my view, this is where the original DSW report went wrong.
The legal system in NZ isn’t racist. I don’t doubt that pakeha social workers in the old DSW were often or usually ignorant of Maori culture and ways of doing things, but that isn’t racism. However, the characterisation of ignorance as “racism” caused the pendulum to over-correct, such that – sadly – many Maori children were as badly-off in the care of extended family as they had been in their birth families.
In principle, and for reasons of cultural connectedness and so on, I think that Maori children are generally better off being placed with suitable extended family, or other Maori carers.
The same is also true of pakeha children; they’re better off being placed with carers who are like them and share their cultural mores.
D’Esterre, this is a good historical summary you’ve given here, and I also know some haunting stories, and some terribly sad and tragic aftermaths.
There was one racial difference in those closed adoption days though- which is why I’d hesitate to describe it in terms of race and class.
Whereas Maori traditionally, as far as I know, always had informal family adoption practices, the removal of babies from unwed Pakeha mothers was very strongly supported, sanctioned, and advocated by the white middle class, to avoid scandal.
I think I’d be right in saying that the family and the mother’s reputation was paramount – not anybody’s well-being – except for their social well being. It is hard for today’s people to grasp this huge prejudice among “respectable” middle-class Pakeha against their own illegitimate kin and the bearers of.
Further in my mother’s generation and possibly mine, was a belief that bastards had bad blood, which was why many Pakeha also disapproved of adoption- my ma-in-law warned me against adopting.
In terms of personal well-being, and community well-being, NZ Maori were streets ahead of Pakeha.
+100 …very good points SNOW WHITE about misogyny and crimes against women ( imo these values came from religious institutionalised churches of patriarchal monotheism eg just look at what happened to the women of Catholic Ireland)
…at least Maori with their concepts of sharing children with the extended family and informal adoption were somewhat shielded
….but this was an absolute tragedy for Pakeha women:
“Whereas Maori traditionally, as far as I know, always had informal family adoption practices, the removal of babies from unwed Pakeha mothers was very strongly supported, sanctioned, and advocated by the white middle class, to avoid scandal…
Snow White: “There was one racial difference in those closed adoption days though- which is why I’d hesitate to describe it in terms of race and class.”
You’d be right to characterise it in terms of race and class, because it was. Pakeha middle class people were disproportionately involved. I did know an individual of Maori descent who was adopted, but it wasn’t usual. I believe that babies of mixed descent were difficult to adopt out.
I spent most of my career working in poor communities. I came across more than one working class pakeha family, in which a daughter’s child had been adopted by the grandparents. Sometimes the child knew the full situation, sometimes they thought their birth mother was an older sibling. More or less the Maori whangai practice.
“I think I’d be right in saying that the family and the mother’s reputation was paramount….”
You’re right: that’s the situation I recall. But I also remember the pain of some of those young women, whose babies were taken (which is why I found that video such a hard watch). Reputation schmeputation: those I knew would have kept the child, had it been possible financially, and had they had family support. In fact, I knew someone about my age who refused to give up her baby; she badgered DSW until they gave in and paid her an unemployment benefit until the child was school age. More power to her! And to others who did the same. It was, I believe, those brave women who spurred the then government to introduce the DPB.
“…many Pakeha also disapproved of adoption- my ma-in-law warned me against adopting.”
I’m also generally opposed to adoption, but not for that old “bad blood” reason, which I see as nonsense. Nowadays, my view is that children usually do better in life if they grow up with their own kin.
With regard to the at-risk innocents in our country, my view is that our welfare system ought to be putting serious grunt into preventing or ameliorating the desperate social conditions under which the poorest suffer. A truckload of money is needed, along with expertise. And a large quantity of that truckload should go into raising benefit levels to the point at which people can live with dignity. That wouldn’t deal to every social problem, but it’d go along way to fixing much of what ails the very poor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2TgehDuBOU
Why call it ‘uplift’? Talk about a euphamism. ‘Forced orphaning by the state’ would be closer to being accurate.
I have seen first-hand unnecessary removal of children, simply because some idiot had a knee-jerk reaction to a situation that was not what it appeared. A short time after the removal, the underlying problem was discovered, (which turned out to be something very basic that anyone with half a functioning brain should have worked out) BUT was completely ignored. Oranga Tamariki carried on in their usual bulldozer “We’re right, you’re wrong” fashion.
Also, the children in this case were NOT Maori, they are pakeha.
A couple of years later, I was listening to a talkback show, where the hot topic of the day was Oranga Tamariki, or Child, Youth & Family, as it was called teen.
A guest on the show (sadly I can’t recall his name) stated that even back in the 1950’s, CYF were removing children children from low-income families, and placing them with higher-income families, under the excuse of – wait for it – “that the children would be better provided for.”
Child, Youth, & Family Services; Child, Youth & Family, Ministry for Vulnerable Children; Oranga Tamariki; and whatever the hell else they have been called over the years, and goodness knows how many investigations into, have only proven that name changes do NOT change the underlying culture. Which is the wrong side of rotting and putrid.
Not only does this government department need to be completely scrapped, and none of it’s workers permitted to be employed by whatever is served up as a replacement, but, surely the whole curriculum of the appropriate qualifications needs to be seriously overhauled.
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