Commissioner fears violence against kids increasing

3.00pm - By MAGGIE TAIT

Violence against children seems to be increasing as the number of notifications to Child Youth and Family continues to grow, Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro said today.

Dr Kiro, speaking at a Parliamentary inquiry into factors contributing to poor outcomes for children, said notifications to CYF had been increasing beyond expectation -- with about 40,000 predicted for this year, "a dramatic increase on last year".

"I think even more worrying than that figure, is that... those notifications seem to cover all of the categories. From the highest risk to the lowest risk."

She said a high level of publicity around child abuse may have prompted some new notifications but she expected that would mainly be for less severe cases, but that was not the case.

"As I understand it the notifications seem to uniformly fit the same pattern of current notifications... I find that incredibly worrying."

"What that suggests to me is that there seems to be within society an underlying increase in violence against children," she said, but qualified this by saying she did not have the research to back it up.

Despite reports in the high profile cases, such as that of Saliel Aplin and Olympia Jetson, murdered in Masterton by stepfather Bruce Thomas Howse in December 2001, the message was not getting through.

"New Zealand has a long way to go to seriously turn around the kind of violence that vulnerable children are experiencing in this country."

She said New Zealanders had an ideal that this country was a great place to grow up.

"The truth is, the reality is, that we fall far short of that as an ideal."

Dr Kiro pointed to a Unicef report released last year which found New Zealand had one of the worst levels of maltreatment of children in rich countries.

"This is about how much hurt and how much violence we inflict on our children."

Other concerns presented to the inquiry included the high rate of unintentional deaths by accidental and avoidable deaths.

Data from the last Census showed 23 per cent of the population was aged 0-15 years, and a third of homes had children under 18. Nearly 23,000 homes had no heating which related to New Zealand's high rates of childhood pneumonia and rheumatic fever.

The inquiry was told many homes were not able to provide children with a clean dry towel every day, which led to the spread of skin infections.

Dr Kiro said it was a concern how many people who were poor were raising children. Census figures showed 16 per cent of households earning less than $20,000 had children. Of households earning less than $20,000, 61 per cent were headed by one adult. Five per cent of homes with children lacked a phone.

"It underscores the fact that amongst the households responsible for raising children are the poorest households."

Poverty meant children missed out of a range of things, from breakfast through to school trips or having a school uniform.

Dr Kiro said parents needed adequate support and the Government needed to invest in children. She suggested quality childcare be made more available and work environments be made more child friendly.

Trish Grant, advocacy manager in the office of the Children's Commissioner, said many communities were unsafe and raised concerns about how much violence was shown on television.

Statistics of child sexual abuse and suspensions were worrying she said.

She told the inquiry that children's rights, as set out under a UN convention, were often ignored or provided as a charity rather than a certainty.

"As New Zealand has an ambivalent, I would suggest, attitude with children's safety we do also have that same ambivalence about upholding their rights.

"We tend to think their rights to protection, to provision of services and for them to participate meaningfully in the decisions that affect them, we sometimes afford them those rights and sometimes not."

She said such rights should be considered by the inquiry.

- NZPA