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Breaking the family ties that bind

(This article was published in the Herald on Sunday on June 25 2006, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Herald on Sunday and the author, Deborah Coddington.)

By Deborah Coddington
25 June 2006

Every five weeks a child in New Zealand is killed by a family or whanau member.

That chilling statistic, released early this year, is probably conservative. Last weekend's deaths of baby twins Chris and Cru Kahui make this nation's horrific child abuse record even worse.

New Zealand is proud of taking on the world in sport, films and business, but has a shameful child homicide record - out of 27 OECD countries we are third after the US and Mexico.

Talkback callers said the Kahui twins' deaths were yet another a wake-up call. Former Winz boss, now child-safety advocate, Christine Rankin asked, ``How many wake-up calls do you need?''

The names of murdered children - all wake-up calls in their time - have become household names - James Whakaruru, Delcelia Witika, Lillybing, Coral-Ellen Burrows - but nothing seems to change.

Their short lives all had commonalities - welfare dependency, young and inadequate parents who were poorly educated; drug and/or alcohol abuse, apathy, poverty of spirit. Families where severe physical abuse using belts, jug cords, vacuum cleaner pipes, fists, is considered normal discipline.

Sally Thompson, chair of the Christchurch Family Help Trust, said the Kahui deaths ``once again highlight the nation's child-abuse epidemic''. She added: ``The nation will be shocked and horrified at the deaths for a couple of weeks, then forget about them until something similar happens again.'' If the Kahui twins had been born in Christchurch, their lives might have been saved by the Family Help Trust.

With no Government funding, Libby Robbins, the trust's chief executive, employs six fulltime social workers, many ex-Child Youth and Family staff, and turns families' lives around.

One example is a young couple called [for this story] Dwayne and Tracey. I met them more than a year ago, on a visit as an MP. Their baby, Jessica, was then 10 months old. Tracey was a former drug addict, prostitute, and had spent time in prison for cashing stolen cheques.

She told us she hadn't thought it was stealing, because ``banks have plenty of money''.

She said one night, while still in the early stages of pregnancy, she came home from a night out selling her body, looked at Dwayne asleep in bed, then at herself in the mirror, and said, ``I don't want this for my baby.''

A midwife referred her to the Family Help Trust. One of Robbins' social workers swept into action and put Tracey on a methadone programme. Strict conditions were laid down - Tracey had to be careful about the health of her unborn baby. Dwayne had to help. There would be no soft ride for the couple.

Today, Robbins says, the three are still together and ``doing really well - we are so proud of them''. They've had ``hiccups'', she says, but that's expected, and ``their little girl is the centre of their lives''.

``Tracey is now the first in three generations of her family to have a proper job and she's legally buying Jessica's toys. Previously they'd fall off the back of a truck, or she `got them down at the pub'.'' The change in attitude, says Robbins, was brought about by the social worker being ``very hard-nosed'' about the bad example Tracey was setting for her daughter.

Tracey and Dwayne are both well aware that without intervention from the Family Help Trust they would not be together, off drugs and out of jail, and Jessica would have been removed from their care.

In Hamilton, Maxine Hodgson runs Parentline, a similarly effective child-protection organisation, registered as a charitable trust. Hodgson employs 25 trained social workers and receives about $800,000 of Government funding, just over half her annual budget.

Instead of removing children from families in trouble, Parentline, like the Family Help Trust, works intensively with parents and children for as long as necessary to keep them safe.

But in a recent interview Hodgson admitted the difficulties of apathy - walls of silence erected by family and whanau when children are ill-treated. When a child dies, she said, ``research shows up to 20 people had a feeling of unease about or actual knowledge of the abuse''.

When the Auckland Regional Council ran a clean air campaign, called ``Dob in a Smokey'', it received 16,000 calls reporting vehicles with dirty exhaust emissions.

Already parallels are being drawn between the Kahui case and the shocking death of Wairarapa's Lillybing - Hinewaioriki Karaitiana-Matiaha. Her whanau adopted a circle-the-wagons attitude and made it extremely difficult for police to find the toddler's killer.

Her vaginal injuries alone would have killed her, but whoever inflicted these has never been brought to justice. Police believe he was a young person, protected by his whanau, free to possibly abuse another child.

Among the public hand-wringing over the deaths of the Kahui babies, Auckland's Baptist Action proposed ``one-stop-shops'' for child protection agencies in South Auckland, which would cater for abuse victims and families seeking help on financial, housing and parenting issues.

But the Family Service Centre already exists in South Auckland, in Papakura East. It is one of five such one-stop-shops which prevent abuse by providing social workers, Plunket, health checks and parenting programmes. It's where Lesley Max's extraordinarily successful Hippy programme (Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters) helps mums and dads, ranging from the merely ignorant to outright abusive, to become loving parents. In turn, they become tutors to other at-risk families.

Yet only half of the $2.2 million operating budget for all five centres and 1300 families, plus their parent organisation - Great Potentials Foundation - comes from Government.

Max's Hippy programmes have been proven to work, and she estimates she could reach 4000 families with $7.2 million. That's a little over twice the sum taxpayers pay for the upkeep of one recidivist criminal in his or her lifetime.

So why can't government agencies, with all their resources, be as effective as these three privately run, money-poor examples?

Max, Robbins and Hodgson say they constantly evaluate their programmes. Robbins won't take her clients' word that her trust is effective - she's just spent the equivalent of two fulltime social workers proving it. The three women are experts at opening private cheque books, but, as Robbins says, no one will sponsor or donate to an organisation which can't prove its effectiveness.

Government departments - and there are many charged with children's health and safety - only have to justify their funding requests to government ministers, who'd be committing political suicide if they admitted their portfolios had failed.

Christine Rankin, who heads the privately run For the Sake of Our Children Trust, says CYF ``is immune to evil and works under a flawed philosophy - that the family is more important than the child''.

In 1989 the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act changed the focus on how authorities monitor and protect children. Instead of being removed from the family and placed in an institution, at-risk children were placed within the extended family, or whanau.

Rankin: ``So when an abused child is taken from parents, he or she might be placed with the grandparents, who probably abused that child's parents when they were little.''

She says it doesn't have to be like this, and cites Tauranga's Homes of Hope, where two Christian women have bought a cluster of houses, take in children and ``run it like an orphanage but it's very family oriented and it's wonderfully safe. This should be replicated all over the country.''

Max, who as a journalist wrote grim features on child killings and a book called Children - An Endangered Species?, says no one is sending the message to young New Zealanders that having a baby is a matter for very careful consideration. ``We have babies being born to very young Maori - and Pakeha - mothers and there's no commitment to a relationship.''

Max is adamant that nothing she says about officialdom ``takes anything away from the individuals responsible for what they did to those twins''. But she is angry the ``vast machinery of Government with its resources and personnel can't come to terms with our national shame''.

The problem, she says, is that policy arising from Wellington is conceived by ``reasonably well-off and well-educated people who are not personally acquainted with the kinds of communities and lifestyles they're making policy for.

``They live in a different world from where these atrocities are taking place.'' Rankin puts it a different way. ``They're all so jolly politically correct and terrified that what they say might offend Maori.''

In 1994, when New Zealand's record on deaths from child abuse placed us sixth in the world, Helen Clark called this ``shameful'' and said we needed action ``more than rhetoric''.

Why then, asks National's social welfare spokeswoman Judith Collins, have we got worse?

Collins has been asking questions in Parliament on the whereabouts of CYF's overdue report, which was meant to investigate why so many children were being killed.

The review was prompted in 2004 by a flurry of high-profile deaths, including James Whakaruru's. CYF would examine abused children's health records to see if a pattern emerged alerting authorities to looming disaster.

But sometime next year James Whakaruru's killer, Benny Haerewa, will be eligible for parole and the public still hasn't sighted this review.

Collins doubts the full report will be released publicly. ``Ruth Dyson [Minister for CYF] has admitted it contains `contentious issues'. Those will be around which people are killing their kids.'' Could the censorship be because the majority of people killing their kids are Maori?

``Maori are way over-represented in the statistics,'' says Collins, ``and Pacific [Island] parents kill their children less than anyone else. So it's not a race issue. ``It's about taking responsibility for your children and not using them for an income and another house. We're talking about intergenerational welfare dependency here.''

Rankin is adamant this country's appalling record can be turned around: ``We changed the culture about drinking and driving - we can stop child abuse.''

Libby Robbins says we're not short of services, but ``the much bigger issue is the effectiveness of services''. Max believes every low-income area needs a one-stop shop, ``but they need to be very well run with personnel of a quality that is, quite frankly, very hard to find''.

Yesterday Chris and Cru Kahui were buried, amid much weeping. Flowers were placed on their grave. Early Tuesday morning a torchlight vigil of 1000 people from Mangere, where the Kahui twins would have grown up, will pledge an end to family violence.

And in five weeks time', another child will be killed by a parent or caregiver.