Plight of our children a national disgrace

My reference last week to the dreadful plight of many thousands of our children who live lives of abuse, neglect and poverty struck a chord with many readers.

As one put it: "Child abuse is something we don't talk about enough; it is our dirty little secret. But what we need to understand is that there is not just the immediate damage it causes, but also the damage it does in the future.

"It is baggage we as a nation carry with us year in and year out so that the sins of today's fathers (and mothers) keep on being visited on the children for generation after generation."

Eight children aged between five weeks and three years died from abuse in the year just ended, which is the average for any year in this country.

As Andrew Laxon wrote in a comprehensive report on a two-day forum of child abuse experts in mid-November, New Zealand has the fourth-worst child murder rate in the OECD at 0.9 deaths for every 100,000 children.

The forum, called by Welfare Minister Paula Bennett, heard that many more end up battered in hospital at the hands of family members and that children under 2 are especially vulnerable - each year 59 are admitted to hospitals for what doctors call "non-accidental head injury".

More than 2000 confirmed cases of child maltreatment come to the attention of Child Youth and Family every year.

And as late as last month, the Minister of Police was raising hell because of reports that police were giving a low priority to, and had a huge backlog of, complaints of child abuse. A comprehensive investigation into this state of affairs by the Police Complaints Authority is under way.

This is simply intolerable. It is a national disgrace. Child poverty, neglect and abuse has to be this nation's Number One social problem and it's long past time we gave it everything we've got.

It is a tragedy that, while thousands of children suffer and too many die, we concern ourselves with frequent and irrelevant diatribes in this newspaper and other media about the activities of the nicotine Nazis and the fat freak-outs.

That is not so say that we shouldn't take a leaf out of the nico-Nazis' book. They've been at it for decades and over the years have had some success in their hopeless quest to have this country declared a smokefree zone.

The campaign against child abuse, neglect and poverty will need the same sort of enthusiasm, imagination and year-on-year commitment.

None of this is to say that hundreds of New Zealanders aren't already deeply involved in trying to fight the downright evil that is causing so many of our defenceless children to be impoverished, ill-clad, ill-shod, sick, hungry, cold, frightened and battered.

Their courageous efforts are obviously not enough because the problem is showing no signs of abating and, if anything, is getting worse.

Rodger McDaniel, a lawyer, church pastor and former state legislator who is deputy director of the Wyoming Department of Health, reckons that whenever there is fast growth in an economy it brings with it a variety of social problems, including drug use, alcohol abuse and child abuse.

That makes sense, for all of those have soared with a vengeance since the economic revolution of the mid-1980s. However, all that theory does is make us aware of a cause; it contributes nothing towards a cure.

And it is a cure we need, not just a series of band-aids. Surely the time has come for a co-ordinated and sustained attack on this atrocity, and to hell with the expense.

Family First has been calling for a royal commission of inquiry into child abuse for years, but I wonder whether that's the way to go. By the time a commission is selected, agendas set, evidence heard and reports written, the public will have lost interest and the tragedy will have become worse.

Prime Minister John Key was quick to call the Job Summit last February to try to dampen the effects of an economic recession.

Perhaps he could jump on his bike and call a child abuse summit as early as next month to bring together all those involved in trying to halt this abomination and allocate, say, $50 million to independent research, particularly into outcomes rather than outputs.

And, perhaps, undo the shocking discrimination instituted by the Clark Government that denies the child-related supplement called the in-work tax credit to the poorest children and has left them further behind and well below the poverty line.

Says Susan St John, of the Campaign Against Child Poverty: "It would cost about $450 million a year to extend the in-work tax credit to all low-income children. They would then be treated the same as others regardless of the source of their parents' income - as they do in Australia.

"Money is not everything but it is a very important basic foundation. Society deliberately denies the poorest children adequate financial support and then blames them when their children become social costs."

Certainly money isn't everything, but for God's sake let us start somewhere - and soon.