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.
Ummmm because Maori are more likely, proven stats, to bash and kill their kids!
I’m unsure what part of this you don’t understand Martyn? 20% of NZ do the most bashing and killing of babies/children. If leaving these kids with proven history of violence and neglect parents, will you post that the Govt should have taken these vulnerable kids off the parent(s)…..I will not hold my breath!
So your answer is to keep doing the same thing expecting a different result?
You’d rather perpetuate the same old shite and wonder why things have reached the stage of blowing up?
In many of the OT cases there have been better options if you’d care to look into it – and there are a few successes where extended family have become involved.
Still………I’m sure you’re right – EndofStory! (/sarc)
Oncewastim: “In many of the OT cases there have been better options if you’d care to look into it – and there are a few successes where extended family have become involved.”
There will be some: OT won’t always get it right. Let’s hope that this case is one such. Fingers crossed:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/394918/new-law-returns-child-to-whanau-in-oranga-tamariki-dispute
I note that the child at the centre of this story has been taken to Australia; evidently one doesn’t need to be in NZ to make whakapapa connections. Though quite how that works, I’m not sure.
Because of the nature of the work I used to do, I’ve long taken an interest in the child protection issue. I recall what followed from the 1980s report into so-called “institutional racism” in the old DSW.
As I recall, child protection made greater efforts to place Maori children with extended family. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the harm and deaths. For obvious reasons, poor parenting practices in the birth family were also likely to be found in the extended family.
Throughout the 90s, child protection removed children after abuse – or suspicion of it – was reported. So these children were already damaged.
But the white paper which preceded the establishment of OT proposed a preventive model: infants are removed from parents who exhibit risk factors. The aim is to prevent harm, rather than having to repair already-damaged children. It sounds callous; looks callous when one sees Melanie Reid’s video. But I can understand why they’ve opted to do this.Better by far, surely, to prevent harm, than to be obliged to pick up the damaged pieces after the fact.
I am sceptical about the likelihood of fewer abusers/killers coming before the courts as a result of the greater focus on the Treaty of Waitangi and whakapapa. I hope for better things, but what I’ve seen in my longish life means I don’t have any great expectations.
There’s another thing that bothers me about all of this. OT also takes infants who aren’t Maori; what about their family connections, their genealogy? It also matters. But as far as I can tell, the amended Act doesn’t make provision for them.
Now, what I learned in the early hours of this morning, Oranga Tamariki contract out all of their foster care to a faceless Multinational Corporation, KeyAssets for $1.5 billion of the MoH’s annual budget!
So I guess with the gummint signing off the ctppa/tppa. We’re fuck’d! Locked into the contract and can’t break it without getting sued!
– ‘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!
The inevitable consequence of progressive policies that have undermined the nuclear family.
Boys need dads
Andrew: “The inevitable consequence of progressive policies that have undermined the nuclear family.”
I doubt that this an accurate analysis of what’s gone wrong for Maori. Were it that, the problems besetting a large chunk of Maori society would be widespread to universal throughout NZ society in general. And we know that’s not so.
“Boys need dads”
So do girls. But neither Maori girls nor boys need fathers with so many of the issues plaguing Maori men at present. Like all children, they need men who are present in every sense: not wasted on drugs, wrestling with the resulting mental health issues, beholden to a gang, and prone to discipline with fists or a belt around the head. Or liable to bugger off with, and father yet more children to, another woman.
Martin you say this inequality of outcome is unequivocal evidence of racism. If that’s the case, then I’m starting to wonder if the All Black selectors are racist – when are we going to see an Asian All Black? And the education system must be sexist and misandrist – look at the gross underrepresentation of men among school teachers. What about the gender difference in life expectancy? https://www.stats.govt.nz/topics/life-expectancy The health system must be sexist.
Racism is about inequality of opportunities, not inequality of outcome.
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