One Strike, You're Out

So the week has gone, little Nia is dead and still kids are daily arriving at A & E everywhere around the country with whanau-inflicted wounds. After 10 days of angst and handwringing, how further advanced are we at finding and fighting the child abusers and killers in our midst?

We are - precisely - nowhere.

Rather it is has been but more angst agony from the usual suspects, with all their words and wisdom summarised in just one sentence.

Um, maiming and killing kids is really bad.

Yeah, thanks for that. We would never have guessed. Nor did we realise - dammit - that if they'd only learned "te reo" then all the abusers might have been saved. Or that, according to the Maori Party, if their "Aunty initiative" had only been allowed by serial flagellist and Social Welfare minister Steve Maharey then the Kahui twins, Nia, Jhia, Lilybing and all those other Maori innocents would still be alive.

So, let's go back to Square One, shall we? Let's profile the average baby/toddler attacker and proceed from there. Because we now know exactly what they will look like. Their characteristics will be a combination of most, if not all, of the following;

They will be predominantly Maori;

They will be on welfare;

They will have no school qualifications;

They will be transient;

Mum will have shacked up with at least a couple of other guys in the past five years;

They will be getting regularly smashed on drink or drugs;

They will have a low IQ.

Oh yes, and one other thing. They don't give a shit what any government official or law-enforcement agency thinks. They'll look after their kids their ways, f--k off.

Literally thousands of New Zealand kids now live in the above Paradise. Soon it will be tens of thousands. They may not necessarily die at the hand of Mum's latest lover, or have the crap shaken or kicked out of them by the whanau's familial associates, but chances are that their young lives will be still be blighted. That they too will fail school and fail life, and end up perpetuating their parents' underclass upbringing.

None of the above is brain surgery. It is a simply profile of New Zealand's shameful toxicity - this merging of welfare, waste and ethnicity. Quite why Maori are grossly over-represented in all these worst statistics, no one can really say. All we know, is that they are. And that Maoridom hasn't got a clue what to do about it. Like soccer hooliganism was the English disease, and corruption the African disease, then child abuse has become the Maori disease.

Or rather that sub-cultures exist within those cultures that spawn and spew such vileness.

So what do we do? Except express this impotent rage every week when Starship Hospital meets the latest victim of toddler meets terror. Although not just Starship.

A senior journo from my local newspaper, the Wanganui Chronicle, asked me why Wanganui seemed to be so immune from the acid rot that was Rotorua's child abuse. Then his paper did some basic research, and discovered that 10 cases of serious child abuse are treated by local hospital paediatricians every month. I'll repeat that: every month.

Wanganui then is no different than anywhere else. There wouldn't be a city or town anywhere that does not have this dark stain writ upon it. We are all in the midst of this child abuse epidemic. And the time for talk is over.

So too is the inalienable right of people to have kids and raise them regardless. Because nothing less than direct and daily intervention will work or redeem the blasted lives of these young kids. And, yes, it will cost. Hell, it might even add a cent per dollar to your tax. But it won't cost as much as dead children cost this country's soul.

And, it is not a difficult solution. You profile and match all the above wasters and losers and you place them on a central register. That you don't provide them any government-funded benefit - DPB or state house - unless and until they are discharging defined obligations to the State.

Don't give second chances. One conviction and they automatically forfeit their chances to have children again. That they must prove their fitness, their sobriety, their changed attitude or every child they produce is whisked away for adoption.

And a sidebar: a drug conviction and you similarly lose your children. Automatic.

When you're clean, and proven clean - then we'll talk. But you must earn your way back into parenthood.

Identify particularly all at-risk Maori whanau using all the official information that is already collected and collated - through schools, truant officers, police, social workers, hospitals and Income Support.

Then admit the reality that there are a group of people who simply can't look after themselves, let alone any children that they might breed. The peculiarly white, middle-class concept that everyone is, really, just like us, must be the first victim in our war on child abuse.

Professor Jim Flynn of Otago University was right a couple of months back when he said the wrong people are breeding in this country. That is how we ended up with our underclass. We cannot afford their failure to infect the next generation, or the one after that. The time for draconian action is here.

And the solution is not rocket science.

From now on, their assistance is delivered by neighbourhood-based one-stop shops - food and hot meals, second chance education, parenting skills, free health and dental, community-based work and skill programmes. When they graduate -clean, responsive and aspirational -then they get the right to have and care for children. Until then children have the right not to be born to them and not to be killed by them.

Nia's death was an evil tragedy. It won't be the last. Because last night, the same trash got smashed off its face and their kids were their last consideration. This morning, those children's future dawns no different.

from Michael Laws in SST 5 Aug 2007