KEY POINTS:
In a week of grim news, one story provided a glimmer of hope.
A former senior social worker has analysed police data from the past 20 years to show that the number of children being murdered by their families dropped in the first five years of this decade.
Mike Doolan, now a senior fellow at Canterbury University, produced his study that showed the rate of children killed rose from 0.94 per 100,000 children in the 1980s to 1.07 per 100,000 in the 1990s but since 2000, that figure has fallen to 0.79.
The rate of Maori children killed, compared to that of the rest of the population, remains almost double.
The United Future leader, Peter Dunne, yesterday called on Maori leaders to find ways to end the abuse of Maori children.
Labour MP Shane Jones described the minority of families who abuse their kids as suffering from a poverty of spirit and an impoverished morality.
And I'm in complete agreement with Jones that their children should be removed from them in a rapid and ruthless intervention.
Keeping those kids in a toxic environment will turn them into time bombs and we'll pay for our laissez-faire attitude for generations to come, unless we take a tougher stand against the worst offenders.
However, Doolan warns against focusing on race just because that is the most obvious common factor.
He says international experience shows that economic conditions are closely associated with levels of child abuse, and any group that suffers more from social and economic changes are found to be over represented in child abuse and other antisocial statistics.
The effects of the economic reforms of the 1990s can be seen in the higher rate of child killings during that decade. The lower death rate between 2000 and 2005 can be partially attributed to low unemployment levels and much greater prosperity, he says.
The release of the study ties in with the call from the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services for political parties to produce policies that will help the most vulnerable in our society.
The council wants, as a minimum, a commitment from parties that the impact of policy-making decisions be measured in terms of the quality of life of those who are most affected by poverty in New Zealand.
However, political parties have to be elected.
And traditionally, it's the middle classes who vote.
The most poor and the most vulnerable do not comprise a large enough constituency to make them attractive to political parties.
Therefore any policies designed to assist the needy will have to be attractive to the large group of mainly middle-class swing voters.
It seems from Doolan's study that being in meaningful work and enjoying a reasonable standard of living is way and above the best way to keep children safe.
So, presumably, growing the economy will have the much vaunted trickle-down effect, trumpeted by those who subscribed to the Roger Douglas/Ruth Richardson school of economic reform pushed by earlier governments.
We didn't see much in the way of trickle-down during the 1990s, which according to Douglas, is because we didn't go far enough.
We lost our nerve and chickened out and as a result, people suffered more than they should have.
Whether that's true or not is anyone's guess, but certainly a prosperous New Zealand makes for healthier and much safer communities.
