KEY POINTS:
A child of three has been in a coma in hospital with injuries caused by, among other things, being spun in a clothes dryer. At the weekend a second child, just 12 weeks old, was flown to the Starship with "non-accidental" head injuries. Both children are said to be Maori, as was the previous case of child abuse in vivid public memory, the Kahui twins. Nothing is solved by denying this.
A doctor at the Starship, the Auckland children's hospital that receives the worst cases from all parts of the country, calls New Zealand's level of child abuse a national scandal. That it is, and no less so for being particularly rife among one national group. New Zealand's child abuse statistics overall stand comparisons with other countries' but the Maori rate is more than twice the rate overall. Why is this?
Maori leaders such as Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples caution against ethnic explanations, preferring to see it as a "subculture of dysfunction". He is undoubtedly right. Racial explanations have no scientific respectability; nothing has been discovered in genetics that predisposes any ethnic group to child abuse or any other pathological behaviour. If a problem is particularly rife in any group, the explanation has to lie in its common predicament and it is vital to find it.
Dr Sharples attributes the Maori rate of child abuse to poverty and underachievement since Maori figure disproportionately among the poor and undereducated. If that is so, then the solution lies in generalised efforts to alleviate poverty and educational failure, not in particular Maori initiatives that Dr Sharples' party might have been expected to espouse.
But a generalised explanation should not be proffered simply to spare a group's feelings or to absolve other groups from the need to tackle the problem. The Maori rate of child abuse is no less a national scandal if statistics show that the Maori rate cannot stand comparison to the overall figure for even the lowest family income bracket. No decent society can ignore this sort of problem in any component of its population.
And if the most practical solution lies in distinct, ethnically directed programmes, everyone should support them. The rate of child abuse in young, low-income Maori households suggests such programmes are needed. The problem would not have occurred in any such scale when Maori lived in close-knit family communities where errant young parents could readily receive correction and help.
It is probably no longer possible to restore those connections for the children at greatest risk. They may be now several generations removed from the ancestral bonds that are being reinforced by modern Treaty of Waitangi claim settlements. But some sort of urban, non-tribal network of support could be organised. If anyone calls it separatist, let them. If it might give these lost, drug-riddled, directionless young child-bashers a sense of identity and pride, some reason to raise their children properly, it would be worth it.
If it gave them nothing more than a network of mature, responsible adults, the "aunties" of legend, to keep an eye on their children's welfare, it would be worth it. General social policy has entertained the idea of restoring the kind of surveillance once provided by the Plunket Society but it seems not to be happening.
Every baby born in this country receives a great deal of care and attention at public expense. It must be obvious to the providers when a young mother or father, or both, are likely to lack the will, the ability or the resources to look after the child. This country needs to take a stronger hand in the care of those children, a dedicated Maori hand if that will help. For those children are ours.
