The voice of youth wins forum hearts and minds

The conference on child abuse and neglect is brought down to earth with a sobering youthful message. CARROLL du CHATEAU sets the scene.

It could have been the usual dreary conference dominated by middle-aged experts talking to one another in their own jargon.

It could have been hijacked by politically correct thinkers and people pushing Government-friendly theories. Instead the 12th International Congress on Child Abuse and Neglect did the bold thing.

After a couple of early morning breakfast sessions and the opening speech from Druis Barrett, president of the Maori Women's Welfare League, it actually asked the people the conference is all about -- the youngsters -- to take the floor and tell the assembled audience of 1200-plus high-powered international experts what it was like to be young at the turn of the 21st Century.

To a background of hip-hop borrowed from rap musician Che Fu,
Come break our chains,
Come help us out
Youth in this country
Ain't so bad,
young people representing all sides of the race spectrum that is New Zealand in the late 1990s took over the stage, and the minds and hearts of the audience.

"What do we want?" asked group leader Kyle Popham, leader of the talented Youth Trek group hastily put together from a specially convened youth forum.

"Politicians need to know that attitude filters down from the top. They're role models for us.

"At the moment there's not a lot of cooperation in Government, just a lot of bickering. And that's unsettling. You notice that with young people." When the young people left the stage the audience broke into huge applause. There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

From day one the conference tackled the tough issues head on. Alongside the usual rants against Government policy there is a new mood, particularly among Maori groups, to take responsibility for shocking child abuse statistics.

Labour list MP Nanaia Mahuta opened discussion over croissants, coffee and muesli when she talked about "the reality of the enduring Once Were Warriors lifestyle" and the "code of silence" in Maori homes that allowed kids to grow up abused and thinking this was just a part of life. "This is not acceptable," she said. "At whatever level, we have to start making the changes."

Later, she told the audience what a little child had told her she wished for more than anything else in the world: "I wish my mummy and daddy would stop drinking and smoking, 'cause when they do they always end up fighting.

"And I wish they'd spend our money more wisely, because what I really wish for is that we could have a happy family."

Nanaia Mahuta's ideas were reiterated by Druis Barrett in her opening address when she called for Maori women to refuse to sing waiata on the marae for Maori men convicted of physical or sexual abuse. "They must be stripped of their kaumatua status."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the opening day of the conference was notable for the relative absence of Maori men and the extremely strong presence of Maori women -- both in the audience and on the speakers' rostrums.

None of which was letting the Government off the hook.

Somehow, the sumptuous setting of the $700-a-delegate conference, which spread throughout the Aotea Centre, Auckland Town Hall and Carlton Hotel, made economic statistics for Maori in the age of new-right politics even more harrowing.

As Massey University researcher Cindy Kiro pointed out, while unemployment has averaged 6 per cent for Pakeha over the past decade, for Maori it has peaked at 25 per cent -- with major flow-on effects for children (57,000 Maori under 17 are being brought up in one-parent households).

Professor Bruce Perry, an American expert on child psychiatry, suggested that maybe the answer to the problems of child abuse and neglect lay with the same groups that were enduring the worst side of the problem.

"Ironically enough, many answers about how to help kids will come from looking back and somehow rediscovering the concept of community that these ethnic cultures can teach us about."


Copyright © New Zealand Herald