Deborah Coddington: Most shocking fact about abuse - yet help is at hand

A support programme developed by Canon Hone Kaa could be a saviour for children. Photo / NZ Herald

Elder abuse is shocking. Last year, the Office for Senior Citizens received complaints that nearly 125,000 old people had been abused or neglected by their families. That's the population of Dunedin.

They won't have been given breakfast and/or lunch. Some will have been sexually abused. All will have been mentally abused, spoken to in far worse language than I'm permitted here.

Before coming to the office's notice, they would have learned to make themselves invisible, not grizzle or complain, because that would draw attention to them and attract more hidings from their families, who were supposed to love and care for them.

More than 6000 of these old people were so badly injured that police are considering prosecuting. However, they're so overloaded with elder abuse that some 2500 cases have languished for 12 months or more.

Does this make your blood boil? How dare adults, who should know better, inflict violence and torture - physical and mental - on vulnerable people who can't defend themselves?

Or, do you think, poor caregivers? They just had a tough upbringing themselves. They mean well, they're just under financial pressure. They don't have the right tools to look after their elderly parents. Let's have a hui, commission a report, join some dots.

You realise that I made up the above? I didn't fabricate the statistics - they are true - but CYFS figures show they relate to child abuse, not elder abuse.

I guarantee if it was our elderly who were being treated like this there would be an outcry. We won't tolerate substandard food and nursing care being meted out in rest homes, and fair enough, too.

So why are we so focused on the parents when it comes to the abuse of children? We've reached a dangerous level of child abuse fatigue in this country. I call it the car alarm syndrome. When we hear a car alarm go off, we don't investigate to see if someone is pinching the car, we just wish someone would turn the blimming thing off.

Same when people see obvious and recidivist signs of child abuse. The parents are excused because of drug and alcohol problems, financial problems, relationship problems.

We don't save children when we excuse parents who harm them.

And we don't save children with endless reports and studies and "scientific" best practice gobbledygook assessments.

But now I'm going to shock you and say I believe a child support programme, Te Kahui Mana Ririki, might be a saviour for our children. It's the child advocacy programme which made headlines last week with media hype stating it was supposed to make us white colonists feel guilty for the high rate of Maori child abuse. It does nothing of the sort.

Ririki was established in 2007, by Canon Hone Kaa, after Nia Glassie's death. He was bold enough to come out and say too many Maori children were being abused - 1-year-old boys are most at risk of being bashed to death by a parent. With director Anton Blank, Ririki has established 22 workshops from Whangarei to Invercargill which teach - so-called tough and staunch men, mostly - that traditional Maori parenting was non-violent. Children are tapu, special and sacred. Babies are perfect, the face of God.

What's so wrong with repeatedly informing people they don't need to whack their children to stop them crying? To stop, think, walk away, distract, not sweat the small stuff?

The programme is turning parents away from violence and this week Hamilton Plunket announced a partnership with Ririki.

In Ririki's research there's no blaming the European for Maori child abuse. Ririki's literature states the opposite. "We don't blame colonisation. We take responsibility for our situation."

I am confident Hone Kaa will ensure his workshops deliver results, and he will brook no excuses for bad behaviour, because I know him well. When I was a troubled teenager growing up near Porangahau, he was our vicar. He has a soft heart but a hard head and he can spot bullshit even when it's trying to hide down the back of the church in the farthest pew.

So can't we readjust our thinking, stop making excuses for parents who hurt their babies? If it's totally unthinkable for our grandparents to be unloved, whacked, unfed, and have medical treatment withheld, it's not okay for our children.