Editorial - Tuesday March 19, 2013

It's parents who count

IT IS most gratifying that some good appears to be coming from the horrors inflicted upon the Kaitaia community by convicted paedophile James Parker. The movement that has begun in Kaitaia, and has now been taken up by kindred spirits in Whangarei, Auckland and Hastings, is looking to galvanise the community into proactively protecting its children from harm such as that inflicted by the former deputy school principal, but it will have some barriers to clear before good intentions become good results.

The cynic might say that we've been here before. Not Kaitaia specifically, perhaps, but New Zealanders have collectively vowed to do more to protect kids from harm on many occasions in the past, generally in response to one of the more horrific cases of child abuse that have brought shame upon us all over recent years.

One of the problems facing the organisers of Kaitaia's hikoi is that fear and outrage have limited life spans. People forget. They might not forget James Parker in these parts in a hurry, but increasingly he will be seen as an aberration, which hopefully he is, and life will return to normal. Maintaining the emotions that were expressed across the stream from the Kaitaia courthouse last week will not be easy. Finding a receptive audience will be even more difficult.

Another problem is that those who wish to advance the interests of children, in whatever field, generally find themselves preaching to the converted. None of the many children who took part in last week's hikoi and the gathering that followed are ever likely to find themselves in harm's way as a result of acts of omission or commission by those upon whom they depend. The challenge is not to draw people with similar values together to talk about what the community must do, but to find a means of getting to parents who need support (to be charitable), advice or some more compelling inducement to do for their children what should come naturally, but sadly, sometimes does not.

After all, if Kaitaia is to do a better job of nurturing its children this is not simply a matter of protecting them from the depredations of a paedophile. That is important, of course, and one would hope that James Parker has taught Kaitaia a lesson or two in that regard, but that's akin to letting children swim in a rip while fretting about their chances of being struck by lightning. The greater damage that is being done to children, in terms of scale, is being done by adults much closer to home than the local sex offender, and that is where the real change must be made if change is to occur at all.

Unfortunately, the reality seems to be that it is a lack of basic parenting that is at the heart of many of Kaitaia's juvenile woes, although it's by no means a Far North phenomenon. Don't be fooled into thinking that the young tearaways who disrupt law-abiding people's lives are unique to Kaitaia, or no more than a handful of criminals in the making. It is no doubt true, as any police officer will tell you, that the bulk of criminal offending by young people can be attributed to a very small number of individuals, but the signs of slack parenting go beyond those who have discovered early that crime can indeed pay.

A recent incident in Kaitaia's main street provided a good example of that. According to the police, who already had enough names to know what they were talking about, a group of 14- and 15-year-old kids confronted a group of adults, two of them teachers who knew them well, at 11.30 a couple of Friday nights ago. One asked the adults for money, another taking a swing, which apparently connected, with one of the victims.

Apart from calling into question the intelligence of anyone, of whatever age, who would behave like that towards adults who knew them by name, the major question would be what on Earth were they doing in the street at that hour? One is entitled to make assumptions about the effectiveness of their parents, and the likely response they received when they got home.

To be fair, there have been heartening signs of late from parents and grandparents who have delivered wayward youngsters to the Kaitaia police station to receive their just desserts, but they are a tiny minority. The more common response from parents these days is to shield their children from the law, to those children's future cost, no doubt, and certainly to the community's, now and into the future.

There is no suggestion that any of the children involved in the Kaitaia incident will turn into burglars or thugs, but the point is that a town that is ripe for its parents and grandparents to instigate a new level of caring for and protecting children from harm does not let kids behave like this. There is, however, no denying the need.

While some parents let their kids run amok, others display a more alarming philosophy of not only letting them do as they like, at great risk to themselves and others, but come out swinging when any others supposedly fail to meet their needs.

The father of a 15-year-old boy who was injured in an early Sunday morning car crash near Tauranga earlier this month slammed the St John crew who attended the crash, and who didn't diagnose the boy's head injury until he was in the ambulance. They initially thought the teenager, who had been a passenger in the car, was drunk.

Aggrieved dad suggested that maybe the emergency services were suffering teenage accident fatigue, and just didn't care any more. He also lambasted the "rank hypocrisy" of those who criticised such teenage behaviour as led to the crash. Everyone had done it when they were kids, he said, and he did not feel he had the right to take these kids to task, "especially living in a world where it's generally deemed to be cool to be tooling around in fast cars and drinking flash beer." His son's 16-year-old mates, incidentally, both with more than the legal driving limit's worth of alcohol aboard, amused themselves by telling police they couldn't remember who had been driving.

Everyone, whatever their age, deserves the right to the best care emergency services can provide, and this precious 15-year-old apparently had no grounds for complaint on that score. That aside, to defend the right of a juvenile boy to drink flash beer and tool around in fast cars at 3.30am (or any other time) betrays an attitude that has become all too common, and again suggests that some of us might not quite be ready to reassess how we nurture our children and protect them from harm as we guide them towards adulthood.

All power to the arms of those who are trying to do something in Kaitaia though. If they stick to their guns they might well do this community an enormous service, as long as they realise, as they surely do, that change must come from within.

There is very little that any government or its agencies can do to improve the lot of Kiwi kids without the co-operation of their parents, and the same goes for well-intentioned people who are responding to a need that they, rightly, choose not to ignore.

Hopefully they will succeed, one family at a time.