KEY POINTS:
Family First's Bob McCoskrie has devoted much energy to fighting the Section 59 law change which removed the defence of reasonable force for parents who "discipline" their children. As well as scary, emotive full-page newspaper ads, he's gathered 295,000 signatures from people who want to scrap the law.
One of his signatories must surely have been Canterbury woman Barbara Bishop, whom McCoskrie has publicly, loudly supported. Unfortunately for McCoskrie, Bishop was sentenced in the Timaru District Court last Friday to nine months' jail after a jury found her guilty of assaulting her teenage son.
The judge said Bishop and her husband used "unjustified, excessive and brutal force" when they threw Bishop's son over a drawbar, hit and kicked him and hog-tied his arms and legs together with tape.
I imagine most reasonable people would agree with him, but Bishop showed no remorse. In interviews, the Bible-quoting, quietly spoken woman, who displays absolutely no insight into her own behaviour, had come across as a reasonable, caring parent. She has claimed with utter conviction it was her right as a good parent to discipline her children.
I'd guess the 295,000 signatories on that petition would agree wholeheartedly with that, but whether or not they'd define "discipline" or "child correction" as hog-tying and kicking and beating children is another matter.
This is not, by the way, an attack on McCoskrie and Family First, because I happen to like a lot of what McCoskrie and his organisation stand for. Who could argue with their stated mission of "strong families and safe communities"?
I just wish he would move on from what is beginning to look like an obsession. Defending parents' rights to hit their children isn't a battle worth fighting, not in a society which is seeing increasing levels of violence, not just among our demonised youth, but across all age groups. (For example, since 1997, violent crime among the plus-31s has increased at a higher rate annually than crime among 14- to 16-year-olds, and 17- to 20-year-olds.)
If Family First is serious about strengthening families and communities, and I believe it is, it should be putting its energies where it could make a real difference, calling for a more equitable society, and campaigning, as a moral issue, for a living wage to be paid to our lowest-paid workers.
What difference might it make to communities around the country if more parents could afford to put their children before their work? I don't have to imagine, having seen first-hand how easily even the best kids can go astray when both parents in a low-income household work long hours out of economic necessity.
I've no doubt that we'd have fewer un-engaged, marginalised, and straight-out bored kids "lost" to education (as we euphemistically refer to the growing number of young people shut out of schools), and open to antisocial and criminal activity. We'd have less need of policemen and social workers in our poorest schools. And we'd get far less tagging.
I'm with Bob McCoskrie when he says the lack of active parental supervision is a key factor in young people developing a career in tagging. How else are so many youngsters able to spend hours wandering the streets, often in the middle of the night, tagging fences (including my fence, on a couple of occasions)?
McCoskrie quotes American and British studies of adolescent health which found that the active supervision of parents at key times during the day substantially decreased the likelihood that the child would get into at-risk or antisocial behaviour. As a mother who's been lucky enough to work almost entirely from home since my children were born, this makes perfect sense to me.
It's simple really and, yes, it's complex too. Countless studies have been devoted to getting to the root of the tagging problem. Yes, it reflects exclusion from mainstream social participation and a lack of meaningful engagement in communities. But it's also an adolescent rite of passage for some, a form of anti-authoritarian rebellion which would find its expression elsewhere if tagging didn't exist.
For some, it's about identity. Achieving notoriety and relevance in a world which doesn't seem to take much notice. It can be artistic endeavour or political protest against, for example, the kind of urban pollution presented by pokie machines and suburban liquor outlets, which proliferate in cities like Manukau. Some revel in its unlawful and subversive nature, others do it spontaneously with little thought of the consequences. Some grow out of it; others tag into their 20s and 30s.
Which means the anti-tagging measures announced by Helen Clark last week, while they will make a lot of people feel "something" is being done, will be as ineffective as research suggests other punitive legislative changes have been internationally. Should we ban permanent markers, too? It treats the symptom, not the cause, which seems to be our preferred approach to crime.
