1 in 14 Māori kids have a chance of being removed from parents, compared with 1 in 50 Pākeha kids…
Māori mothers fear and mistrust ‘systemically racist’ authorities
Māori kids are almost four times more likely to be removed from their parents than Pākehā, new research suggests – a disparity that exists whether they come from the richest or poorest neighbourhoods.
The study, which Wilson co-authored, tracked 56,904 children born in 1998 until the end of 2015. It found 42 per cent of Māori children came to the attention of child protective services, compared to one in five Pākehā kids.
Let’s just drop the whole ‘it’s not racist’ stuff now & acknowledge that the neoliberal reforms of 2016 to weaponise CYFs uplifts into Oranga Tamariki are dangerous & unjust.
The right have held up dead brown babies and screamed something must be done, we’ve allowed neoliberal big data social policy that watered down parental rights and removed any independent checks and balances to become functional and it is doing exactly what it was programmed to do, steal babies from environments that white middle class beurcrats in Wellington have decided put babies at risk.
How come defending civil servants seems to be far more important to this Government than defending the children taken and the whanau’s robbed from?
If only the PM and Minister could care for them as much as they do the reputation of bureaucrats.
Oh, and PS, it’s been 39 days since the footage went live & our Prime Minister and her Minister still haven’t watched it.
– ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ @ Martyn.
– “Good transformation takes time”
– “Let’s be pragmatic about this”
– “Our officials are genuinely caring people doing their best” (even if some of them are more concerned and worried about the consequences of ‘official bashing’)
– They’re not really as sneaky as you might think, and control freakery just doesn’t come into it.
– The new CEO has an impressive CV and as a mother, can sympathise. Oops empathise!!
– They’re doing a really really tough job!
etc.
etc.
etc.
(/sarc)
“Let’s just drop the whole ‘it’s not racist’ stuff now & acknowledge that the neoliberal reforms of 2016 to weaponise CYFs uplifts into Oranga Tamariki are dangerous & unjust.”
Nope. Let’s not do that. Let’s be brutally honest about the awful situations OT must deal with every day.
And let’s also point out that OT and its predecessors have also been obliged to remove the babies and children of other ethnicities. I know this: I’m acquainted with people who’ve been in this situation, going back many years.
OT works on prevention. Would you prefer that they wait until the innocents are horribly damaged or dead? Prevention sounds callous to many people; I think it preferable to the forensic approach.
“Let’s be brutally honest about the awful situations OT must deal with every day.”
Well aware of it D’Estere, as are those trying to make things better and change the processes that have allowed all that to continue – extended families, Healthcare workers, Midwives, Children’s Commissioner et al.
It’s about doing things differently because things haven’t worked and are getting worse. It’s almost become mechanical
(Just ONE example in the process): I’ve lost count of the number of FGC’s I’ve attended where desirable outcomes have been agreed, but then never monitored or enforced.
Oncewastim: “It’s about doing things differently because things haven’t worked and are getting worse.”
My concern is that the causes for things not working aren’t properly identified; if that’s so, the strategies devised to improve things will likely fail.
“I’ve lost count of the number of FGC’s I’ve attended where desirable outcomes have been agreed, but then never monitored or enforced.”
Yup: a story I’ve head over and over from various sources. Child protection agencies have been under-resourced over many many years. There aren’t enough staff and not enough funding to do the work that needs to be done; combine that with lack of trust on the part of the “clients”, and one has a recipe for inaction.
you are all all just repeating what has been said over and over but non of you have pointed to the fact of the increased numbers from when national came into power from 2008 which should warrant urgent action and change but this hasn’t happened instead they have carried on as business as usual like an industry. Change is coming because the system is mono-cultural and it needs to change.
Building a diverse cukture and society is hard. With New Zealand; we can only crib from hundreds of years of recorded history, and even fictional society is more mono than real society. It gets even worse when you add in imirgrants.
Michelle: “….but non of you have pointed to the fact of the increased numbers from when national came into power from 2008 which should warrant urgent action and change but this hasn’t happened….”
Maybe not in the comments here, but some of us have commented on that elsewhere. Increased numbers taken into care are a result of increased need. That would scarcely be surprising, given the crime statistics.
I’m sure that you know this full well.
From about the beginning of the 21st century, when methamphetamine arrived in NZ, the crime, violence and mental health issues associated with it have disproportionately affected Maori. Thus Maori children have been disproportionately taken into care. It has nothing to do with that overused term “racism”, or monoculturalism; it has to do with need. Moreover, since the establishment of OT, the approach has been a preventive one: children and babies are removed on the basis of risk factors that indicate the children are potentially in danger. Thus OT takes children before they can be harmed, rather than waiting until a harm notification is made. This may well look harsh to many people, but it’s on-balance to be preferred to an after-the-fact notification.
For the life of me, I can’t see why it is OT’s job to clean up that part of Maori society which is disproportionately responsible for so much damage, both to their own children and to each other. And the rest of us from time to time.
It looks to me like a Maori problem. If Maori are dead set on taking care of the babies and children uplifted by OT, it’s certainly well past time that they put real heft into cleaning up the drugs, crime and violence problems in that part of Maori society.
Over to you all, folks: have at it!
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