Prosecutions to boost parenting?
New Zealand cannot prosecute its way out of truancy troubles. This isn’t to say we should just blankly behold the reality that parental prosecutions are such a statistical rarity. Despite a steady rise in truancy and absenteeism, just one parent has been prosecuted in New Zealand this year, three last year and two in 2016. Weirdly low numbers, on the face of it, especially when roughly 76,000 children are reportedly absent from school daily, for whatever reason.
Many of those ‘‘whatevers’’ are benign, but consider this statistical spike: more than 280,000 schoolchildren were reported to have fallen short of the 90 per cent standard of regular school attendance for the second term of last year. How much of that was attributed to illness? Just 5 per cent.
Say no more, some will say; what we have here is proof of schools and educational authorities showing a wimpy distaste for meaningful sanctions, even when the circumstances demand exactly that. It’s a disturbing thought that prosecution thresholds may be too indistinct, or the requirements to enact them too awkward, for authorities to be sufficiently motivated. But there is, at least arguably, a different scenario, or at least one that runs parallel.
Perhaps what we’re seeing is a huge number of students with absentee tendencies being identified (hence bad figures), but then helped by the coordinated attentions of many agencies, albeit more slowly and imperfectly than anyone’s really happy about (hence the bad figures hanging around longer) but still generally being brought sufficiently back into line without reaching the prosecution threshold (hence the low number of actual prosecutions).
If that’s really the case – not a small ‘‘if’’ – then what we should be identifying here is a strong case for further resourcing of the methods for intervention, ideally prevention, of these problems, rather than triggering more prosecutions on the assumption the core problem is fixable with a cattle prod.
Prosecutions would work for those cases where the problem simply lies with obstructive or truly negligent parents. But for pity’s sake let’s not confuse them with parents who aren’t coping, who may have lost, or perhaps never really had, control of their kids. Those struggling with social, economic and emotional problems of their own, who won’t find their parenting capacities enhanced by the censorious application of financial penalty or public humiliation.
The nostalgic view of truancy as the Ferris Bueller (kids, ask your parents about that) style of larrikinistic liberation has long been found out. Chronic truancy represents a disconnect from more than school; potentially a path either to isolation – how many truants are nowadays spending their time in the on-screen fantasy realms of gaming – or bonding with some highly unhealthy sub-communities out there.
Let’s not kid ourselves, either, that truancy is necessarily motivated by the allure of out-of-school activities. Often it can be flight from problems within the school boundaries. Each school community needs to be alert to this. Most already are, aren’t they?
‘‘Prosecutions would work for those cases where the problem simply lies with obstructive or truly negligent parents. But . . . let’s not confuse them with parents who aren’t coping . . .’’