KEY POINTS:
Dr Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) was in New Zealand recently to promote greater personal accountability, particularly to those who embark on a chosen life of crime; with more meaningful sentences to reinforce that accountability. Fewer excuses about background and more emphasis on the personal choices people have made.
I don't substantially disagree. But his emphasis, it seems to me, was on "secondary prevention". What I believe we should be concentrating on is primary prevention - while not ignoring the secondary.
The Brainwave Trust (www.brainwave.org.nz) has for some years now been promulgating research that indicates the vital importance of the first three years of a child's life in terms of brain development. That is when the brain gets "wired", when up to 85 per cent of the vital connections between the neurones (brain cells) are made.
If the brain is not adequately wired - from positive parenting, good nurturing, stimulation and encouragement - then windows of opportunity can be lost. Those opportunities relate to the ability to form sound relationships, to acquire social skills, to develop empathy and consideration for others, to acquire the beginnings of an understanding between right and wrong.
If one accepts the research disseminated by the Brainwave Trust, we should be putting much more of our resources into ensuring a positive start for every child.
We must identify, right from the outset, those at most significant risk and target resources to their parents and caregivers. We can all do with better parenting support and assistance but inevitably some more than others: those historically disadvantaged, often from the bottom of the socio-economic spectrum, with early childhood experiences of domestic violence, abuse, household alcohol and drug dependency, poor parenting and educational disadvantage.
Most of these parents and care-givers are able to be uplifted and given new hope and new directions. Few want for their children what they themselves have experienced. They would like the inter-generational cycle broken; but few are able to break it unaided.
There are community organisations out there to provide the necessary help and assistance. But are they getting to those most in need before it's too late?
A number of parents don't access a well-child service provider at all. We must go to them. My own experience tells me that most of our interventions are much too late, much too haphazard and occur when the problem is much more difficult (and more costly) to fix.
I consider we need a universal welfare and needs assessment for every child at birth, with follow-up health and wellness assessments at ages 1, 3 and 5 in particular, but with follow-ups also at ages 8, 11 and 14. They obviously need to be as objective as possible but would readily align with the existing work of Plunket nurses, some public health nurses, many family-oriented general practitioners and of paediatricians.
Providing the requisite assistance and support will require additional funding. The amount is difficult to quantify but should this be a reason for proposing and doing nothing? Generally, the earlier action is taken the less expensive it is in the longer term. Reasonably quick offset savings should occur for specialist education services and in numbers of later Child Youth and Family Service interventions.
There needs to be a stocktake of the community-based organisations out there (some already contracted to provide family-start assistance). There would need to be regional co-ordinators.
The approach needs more than empathy and rapport. In addition to parenting information and budgeting assistance, there also needs to be the ability to assist in confronting power and control issues, drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence. There should be side benefits from that. Moreover, if we provide significant and meaningful support and assistance for the early years we can indeed expect greater accountability - both of parents and from our young people.
There is much more to a comprehensive and integrated children's policy than this, but we surely need one. A VIP for VIPs - a vulnerable infant programme for very important people.
Each child is precious, is a child of the community as well as of its birth parents.
The costs of doing nothing are huge - estimated, by analogy with a reasonably comprehensive Australian study, at NZ$1.25 billion a year.
It is a simple matter of social justice. If, in addition, one accepts that "the worst enemy of human rights is crime" (Dr Barney Pityana, former chair of the South African Human Rights Commission) then it is in our own interests as well.
This is a call to all political parties to formulate and implement a constructive children's policy - ideally as a joint initiative.
It has often been said that the true test of a democracy is the way it treats its minorities and the disadvantaged. The under-3s are assuredly among the least able to advocate for themselves. We need children's policies now, announced well before the next election.
* Graeme MacCormick is a former Human Rights Commissioner and a retired Family Court judge.
