●Kerre McIvor
Some years ago, I vowed I would never write another column in this newspaper about another dead baby, murdered by the very people who were supposed to be protecting and caring for them. I couldn’t. It seemed almost disrespectful to the baby to be wringing my hands, exploding with anger, railing against families who closed ranks to protect the perpetrator of appalling violence from being brought to justice when nothing happened to change things. Nada. Zip.
I felt better for venting my spleen but babies kept being broken and pulverised and shattered and my columns were utterly irrelevant in the face of that. Word + word + word might equal power in Margaret Atwood’s world, but I’d love to see how a woman even as skilled as she could use words to bring reason to the sorts of men and women who kill their babies.
And when you read of the horrific injuries they suffer, this is not a man or woman having a momentary rush of blood to the head and lashing out once. These children are tortured over a period of time, and any number of adults must have known what was going on. Yet they made the choice to do nothing.
It was the Salvation Army’s State of the Nation report released this week that shocked me enough to take to the keyboard again. Among its findings, the authors reported that serious assaults on children resulting in serious injury had risen 40 per cent over the past four years.
Forty per cent. Our figures were already appalling — in 2012, a report prepared for the Ministry of Health found that a child was admitted to hospital every two days as a result of assault, neglect or maltreatment — and the report suggested the numbers of abused children were likely under-reported.
What the hell is going on in this country? The Salvation Army’s findings came in the same week that police launched a homicide inquiry into the death of a Rotorua 5-year-old — a family member is facing assault charges — and a 4-year-old boy suffered the worst injuries a veteran cop said had seen in his 30 years of policing. No charges have been laid as, once again, a family has closed ranks.
The Chair of the Whanau Ora Commissioning Agency, Merepeka Raukawa Tait, says Ma¯ ori are overrepresented in the appalling child abuse statistics but taking children away from families is not the answer. There needs to be more funding for an holistic approach, she says. One where kuia and members of the Ma¯ ori community who are trusted by wha¯ nau can come in and assist a family in crisis.
Raukawa Tait told me on my radio show this week that some Ma¯ ori are so wary and mistrustful of state agencies like the police and Oranga Tamariki they would rather leave a child in a dangerous situation than alert the authorities.
As soon as the words had come out