Who are the National Government Protecting by refusing to investigate historic State abuse?

What is the National Government hiding and who are they protecting by refusing to hold an independent inquest into historic and current child abuse by State services?

If we look around the world, there are serious inquests in most modern societies looking into state protected  paedophile rings and in the UK it’s moved from the political and broadcasting world into the sport’s world…

Coach at centre of English abuse scandal hospitalised

The coach at the centre of English football’s sex abuse scandal has been hospitalised.

Barry Bennell, a former youth-team coach with professional clubs who was convicted on three separate occasions for abusing youngsters, was reportedly taken to a hospital on Friday.

Thames Valley Police say “a 62-year-old man was located and was taken to hospital in order to receive medical treatment, where he remains.”

Bennell was convicted in 1995, 1998 and 2015. But over the last two weeks, there has been a renewed focus on Bennell as former professional players have publicly discussed the abuse they suffered.

…so everywhere else there is a recognition that there has been something terribly sick and twisted going on, but apparently in NZ, we not only have none of those problems, and there is no current problem, yet when you look at the last 15 years, 80 children have been murdered in state care and thousands have been sexually assaulted and abused.

Who are National protecting, the state abusers of children or the children who are being abused?

Our denial at how rife abuse was in the state agencies of the past is a blind spot we seem incapable of seeing because it would also demand that we examine the present as well.

In 2015 when damning report after damning report came out about CYFs, the main justification for the need of change came about from the astounding level of children being sexually abused and assaulted…

The report says there were 88 cases of substantiated abuse of children by CYF caregivers in 2013-14, plus 25 of children abused while with their parents but still formally in state care, and five abused in unapproved placements.

These figures are much higher than the 23 to 39 children a year abused by caregivers reported by the agency itself in the past four years.

…and what exactly was that suggestion by Anne Tolley? Why it was sterilisation of beneficiaries and privatisation of services.

Suggesting sterilisation as the solution to children being sexually abused and beaten while in state care is throwing the baby out with bathwater after drowning the baby first in the bathwater.

Not pleasant imagery, but almost as ugly as the Minister’s own answer to the question of why women who had children taken into state care were still having babies – which, according to the Minister, was because those women enjoyed having sex.

That’s the intellectual bankruptcy of what we are facing here.

We refuse to look at abuse in state care because our cultural need to blame the beneficiary for being in such personal circumstances that require state intervention is what most angers muddle Nu Zilind , NOT that the state then goes onto abuse, assault and sexually molest the taken children.

We have the same headspace when prisoners are abused by prisons (they wouldn’t be in prison being abused if they didn’t deserve to be there in the first place).

We refuse to blame the system of poverty that sees tens of thousands of children go to school hungry each day and we blame the parents for the 305 000 kids who live in poverty. We won’t even talk about the 550 000 NZers who experience extreme hardship annually.

30 years of neoliberalism has concreted in the belief that success and failure has nothing to do with the hegemonic structures within society, it’s all a personal dynamic.

You are rich because you are smart. You are poor because you are dumb. If you get caught up in the horrors of the neoliberal welfare state, well you deserve all you get.

We can not acknowledge the past abuse and we can not acknowledge the ongoing abuses that WINZ, Housing NZ, MSD, Corrections, CYFs and Probations create because it would challenge the very foundations of our neoliberal cultural mythology.