Garth George: Suffering of the young ones is a national disgrace

When I picked up the Herald on Sunday the rest of my day was ruined. "Who killed my girl? Distraught father speaks out" roared the front-page headline - and I felt sick.

For the story told me that yet another little one had been brutally murdered in this so-called civilised country of ours.

Why? Why? Why? I screamed in my mind as I read of the gruesome and agonising death of little Aaliyah Morrissey, just 2 years old, who died in Starship hospital after suffering extensive head injuries at the hands of some depraved creature near her home in Tauranga.

And of the unfathomable grief of her father, Brad, who cried: "She was her daddy's girl. I loved her very, very much and she loved me ... She was only 2 years old. She wasn't given a chance. If I didn't have a guardian angel before, I have one now ... "

New Zealand has the third highest rate of child murder among 27 OECD countries. Which says nothing of the hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny tots who suffer daily from neglect, hunger and abuse, both physical and mental, and whose lives are irreparably scarred.

This is a national disgrace, a national shame, for which every single one of us must take some responsibility. It is long past time that this country devoted as much time, effort and money to the eradicating the abomination of child murder and abuse as is necessary.

It is not good enough for the likes of Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro to tell us that she has few clues why "the problem" is so bad.

Or for Child, Youth and Family Minister Ruth Dyson to acknowledge that the child murder and abuse statistics are "depressing" and to say that "a lot of our parents don't have the parenting skills and find bringing up a child is just too much to cope with".

To Mrs Kiro I say that it's long past time she started looking for some clues, because that's what she's paid for. She's our Children's Commissioner, for God's sake.

She should scream blue murder at her employer, the Government, and keep on screaming until no expense is spared in gathering a team of people from all walks of life to delve deeply into the matter and to find all the clues.

To Ruth Dyson I say get over the depression and get to work to address the lack of parenting skills in the community and to hell with the expense.

Heaven knows there are enough clues lying around but we seem as a society to have been programmed to studiously ignore them, just as neighbours we studiously ignore family abuses going on right under our noses.

One clue is that the epidemic of child murder and abuse infecting this country has grown progressively worse since decriminalisation of abortion in the late 1970s.

I am persuaded - and I have said this before - that there is a direct link between open-slather abortion, which we have but which was never intended, and child murder and abuse.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it succinctly when she said: " ... I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?

" ... The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.

"It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts - a child - as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience ...

"Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want ... It is a very great poverty to decide that a child must die that you might live as you wish."

Another clue is to be found in the changed emphasis on the genders and the blurring of the differences between men and women, which I have celebrated since I was old enough to become aware of them as the most wonderful thing in the world.

We have made the fatal mistake of equating equality with sameness and thus have created a series of social problems, among the worst of which is the denigration of, and resultant suppression of, manliness.

Then there is the clue of the obsession with sex which seems to permeate our society like the miasma of a busy brothel on pay night. All the time and everywhere our senses are assaulted by sexual imagery.

We see it and hear it in movies, on television and in advertisements; in newspapers and magazines; in vast roadside billboards; and even in supermarkets, where that inefficient and inconvenient prophylactic, the condom, is prominently on display.

As for the internet, you can sit at your computer for 24 hours at a stretch looking at pornography for no charge and not see the same picture twice.

So Mrs Kiro and Ms Dyson, there's a start. Dozens more clues are to be found in, for instance, poverty, ignorance and the unravelling of the traditional family structure. For the sake of civilisation as we know it, please get off your backsides and do something. The lives of our little ones depend on it.