Pity the poor Kiwi children
Our hapless recipients of Child, Youth and Family’s care have no one to speak for them other than that tireless paediatrician Dr Wills. If the children’s parents care about what happens to them, we don’t know, but we do know that when children don’t have anyone to stand up for them, they are truly lost, as kids in state care have been for decades.
Pity Children’s Commissioner Russell Wills, who released a chilling report on state care of children only to be jostled aside by the refugee crisis in Europe.
We could do something about his issue, but we can do damn-all about Syria and African nations in tumult, other than dab our tears and demand that we take in more refugees, a drop of help in a bottomless bucket of unrelieved awfulness. The refugees deserve refuge, no doubt about it, but I’m not sure how safe our homes are in this part of the world.
The story of the Syrian mother and two young sons drowned at sea has captured the world’s attention with a stunning photograph of one child’s small, lifeless body being carried to shore. In the background is a savage war we can’t comprehend, but neither the Syrian president nor Isis will be moved by that child’s death any more than we are by learning of abused children here in state care. That little family had a father to mourn them, and weep his grief to camera. Our hapless recipients of Child, Youth and Family’s care have no one to speak for them other than that tireless paediatrician Dr Wills. If the children’s parents care about what happens to them, we don’t know, but we do know that when children don’t have anyone to stand up for them, they are truly lost, as kids in state care have been for decades.
Dr Wills offered damning evidence that children taken from their families because of sexual and physical abuse and neglect will likely experience yet more of it in state-approved foster homes, or what he calls ‘‘stark, institutional’’ homes run by CYF. Social Development Minister Anne Tolley doesn’t argue the toss.
There are 16,000 substantiated cases of child abuse here every year, and at any one time, 5000 children are in CYF care. In 2013-4, 117 of them – that we know of – were abused in that custody, most of them living with an approved caregiver. A thousand children leave CYF care each year and are unaccounted for. Nearly a third of the 14 to 16 year olds in care have been charged with a criminal offence.
Dr Wills said children have told of sexual, verbal and physical abuse in foster homes, being moved constantly, separated from siblings, and of depression, drugs and alcohol. It isn’t hard to join the dots, yet there is no groundswell of national compassion in the offing. We judge the parents and leave the kids to – effectively – drown.
We tried boot camps for troubled kids. Currently, 40 boys who were sent to one of them, the government-funded Whakapakari Youth Trust camp, are suing the government. The camp, run by a former professional wrestler, had its own prison island, they say, where young troublemakers were dumped, without supervision or bedding and with minimal supplies, for weeks at a time.
In one incident, some men, back then accused of stealing a wristwatch, say they were terrorised by a reputed senior gang member with a gun, forced inside a kennel with a snapping doberman, and made to dig their own graves. They ran away, they say, when the man produced a slasher. The camp closed in 2004 after a torrent of abuse complaints. CYF later discovered that of the 69 boys who attended that final year, only 20 per cent had not offended, while 61 per cent had multiple criminal convictions. Some of what the men say is contested, but the failure rate speaks for itself.
Abuse of young people seems to be routine. Police are investigating ‘‘allegations of a sexual nature’’ at a Bay of Plenty college, while in Australia, even snobby Geelong Grammar School is accused of shielding a former boarding house assistant since convicted of sexually abusing 41 students.
Compare that with the parents of schoolboys here who won’t get their hair cut or, like the young rowers who leapt onto an airport luggage carousel, are punished for breaking school rules. Their parents hire lawyers to access courts smartly and argue their children’s rights, proudly showing that money buys you out of consequences.
I won’t say charity begins at home. Charity should be universal. But I question why we weep for disaster at a distance while hardening our hearts to the virtual refugees among us whose misery fuels tomorrow’s crime.