Linda Hall Hawke's Bay Today's premium content editor
Linda Hall Hawke's Bay Today's premium content editor
It's happened again.
Another baby has died of suspected abuse.
Details of who and how are suppressed but what we do know is that this baby was seen by three different doctors and although the little boy was referred to Oranga Tamariki and the police child protection team hestill died.
The 16-month-old was taken to hospital by his mother because she noticed he wasn't using his leg. X-rays showed no sign of injury so it wasn't until a third hospital visit that an MR scan revealed he had a spiral fracture in his tibia.
In the meantime a student nurse noted he had bruising, blackened fingernails and missing teeth.
Another hospital recorded two black fingernails, two damaged fingernails, a missing left bottom incisor, bruises around the hips and chest, and a light pink discolouration over the right lower quadrant of the abdomen.
The injuries were explained away by his mother and he was allowed to go home. He was hurt again and died.
It's just absolutely horrendous to think about what this baby boy went through.
But we must.
Spending more money on preventing domestic violence make more sense than spending billions after the fact. Photo/file
We must do something to stop this happening again and again.
Every time a child dies from domestic violence we all, and that includes me, get up in arms.
We arrange marches and talk among our friends and families about how awful it is. But really we have no idea how really awful it was for this child who had no one to go to. No one to save him.
We have to do better. The Government has had a huge makeover of its social welfare department but from what I've read staff are just overwhelmed with work.
According to the Family Violence It's Not Ok/ It is OK to Ask for Help website a whopping 76 per cent of family violence incidents are not even reported to police.
That's a scary figure considering according to the same website police investigated 118,910 incidents of family violence in 2016 or about one every five minutes. This was an increase of more than 8000 on 2015.
We've all read the stories about how rife domestic violence is in Hawke's Bay with one of the highest incident rates in the country.
Another crazy statistic is that family violence is estimated to cost New Zealand between $4.1 and $7 billion each year.
Wouldn't it be better to spent at least half of that on preventative measures. Surely that makes sense.
Think about how prevalent drink driving was. Campaign after campaign in schools and media seems to have got through to drivers that if you drink and drive you are going to get caught.
There were ads depicting young people stepping in and stopping their drunk mates from driving,
Whatever the Government and agencies are doing at the moment isn't helping victims of domestic violence.
Perhaps social workers could go into schools and speak about domestic violence. Tell the children that it's not normal to be hit, that they can tell someone and they won't get in trouble.
Domestic violence messages of "it's not okay" need to be everywhere — school, workplaces, in the media.
If it helps one person open up and ask for help or saves one child from death it will be well worth it.
Let's not wait until the next child dies and get outraged all over again.
Let's stay outraged until we see some positive change — the babies — who are too young to ask for help, need help now.
NOTE: In last week's Middle NZ I wrote that I hoped Hawke's Bay Prison officers would get some slushie machines. In fact they do have them.
*Linda Hall is Hawke's Bay Today's premium content editor.
