KEY POINTS:
Mark Loper can't answer the question "what would Nia Glassie have been like had she grown up?"
No one can answer that one, though Loper could probably hazard a better guess than a lot of us.
The detective senior sergeant has some thoughts, but for police reasons he can't share them.
What he does share is this: "We deal with them all the time, grown up. They become the parents, young parents, of other Nias or other babies we have to deal with as well, so the cycles continue."'
As the country grapples yet again to find answers to violence against children in the wake of Nia's murder, Loper's words bring home the reality of how deep-seated the violence is, not just in parts of Rotorua but in pockets all around New Zealand.
Loper was born and bred in Rotorua and now runs the CIB there.
The violence he and his officers come across is both brutal and casual.
When a case like Nia's makes the headlines, it's because a child has died. But mostly, children don't die so the public doesn't get to hear what happened to them.
Loper can't even try to guess at the number of abused children he has known who lived: "There's heaps."
Nia underwent psychological and physical torture and violence - is her case the worst he has seen?
"No."
Is the fact she was tumbled in a clothes drier mind-boggling to him?
"Not really."
The veteran police officer struggles to recall names and places because he has been involved in so many child abuse cases.
But he remembers a little boy from Putaruru, near Rotorua, who was picked up and thrown across the room and who did die.
"From memory, he got punched in the back during a rugby game on the telly, he wouldn't shut up so he got thrown across the room. He'd been in pain from the ruptured spleen from the punch in the back."
Mum stuck by Dad, who was convicted of manslaughter instead of murder.
Often in child abuse cases, the family will put up barriers and decide not to take responsibility for what has happened.
There are so many cases, he says. Some grab the media's attention and some don't.
Here's one who didn't die. A child whose mother tried to shut him up with a hammer to the head.
It was her third conviction of assault with a weapon.
Loper knows of a couple of cases where children ended up in the Starship Children's Hospital in Auckland but instead of dying "they're vegies (brain damaged) basically."
Rotorua has a culture of serious violence and drug and alcohol abuse which has to change, he says.
During the trial of Nia's assailants, a man was shot in the face during an incident of road rage. Just days later, in another apparent road rage incident, three teenagers on their way to a baptism were attacked by gang members.
Rotorua is not all bad, Loper points out. Like anywhere, there are good people but there are pockets which cause significant concern.
"I think there needs to be a social change. In fact, yeah, in some ways New Zealand's got the society it deserves really, because it's quite pathetic about a lot of things.
"Sure, it's big now [Nia's case] but next week it will be something else that's big in the news."
Dr Patrick Kelly is another who has seen it all.
The Starship paediatrician says Nia could have lived but, depending on different scenarios, life would have been grim.
If she had recovered from the state she was in on arrival to Starship - in a coma having been left for 36 hours after the kicks to the head were inflicted - she would have been "profoundly, profoundly brain damaged."
But if she had been taken to hospital the moment her head injury happened, there would have been a very good chance she would have lived and with only mild brain damage.
But what is mild brain damage?
Kelly says international data about brain injury from abuse in children relates mostly to infants and about 20 per cent will die.
Of those who live roughly a third will have a severe disability, which includes not ever being able to walk, perhaps needing to be tube fed and total dependency as an adult.
"Absolutely," there are kids out there in New Zealand who this has happened to. Talk to any paediatrician or rehabilitation provider, such as a physio or occupational therapist, around the country and you will find over time that all have a significant number of children and older clients who have sustained head injuries from abuse.
Another third of the survivors will have moderate brain damage, so they may be independently mobile and able to feed themselves and attend an educational facility, but will have very severe learning and behavioural problems.
They will struggle through the school system and will struggle to take part in sports and society.
They may have problems with attention and impulse control and an inability to learn "and are condemned probably to a greater or lesser degree to being educational failures because of their head injury".
And then there are the mild brain injured, such as Nia could have been. She may have become one of the abused children who function reasonably well and who may seem completely normal.
"But the problem with that group is that probably if you follow them long enough there may well be subtle issues with concentration or learning or impulse control even in that group."
Most studies have not followed this group more than five or six years at most from the time of their head injury, but if you are brain injured at say six months old, the full extent of your learning issues may only become apparent when you get to intermediate or secondary school.
"The question that has been raised repeatedly in the medical literature is how many adults out there with learning difficulties and behavioural and emotional problems are actually manifesting the consequences of head injuries sustained in infancy or childhood."
But that's not all. This is the physical damage. There is also the emotional and psychological damage.
Increasingly good evidence exists to suggest that in the first three years of life your brain is wired to respond to the way your environment is structured, and though this can be changed later in life it becomes more difficult.
"So you know, someone like Nia, let's just say they didn't kick her in the head that day and she was subjected to ongoing cruelty and emotional abuse and her brain learned that you sit in the corner of the room and not draw attention to yourself and you see people beating each other up all the time, what does that do to the way your brain functions?"
And given that neighbours who saw and heard some of Nia's abuse failed to report it because abuse was so normal to them, "how many kids are being brought up brutalised and what impact is that having on the generation that will follow them?"
HOW THE HEALING COULD BEGIN
Dr Patrick Kelly's great wish is for the huge pool of health professionals around the country to be trained and supported to take a lot more responsibility in picking up child abuse.
The Starship paediatrician argues that a cultural change has to take place in the community but much more could also be done within the health system.
Despite years of reports into child deaths, a mentality still exists that child abuse is a Child, Youth and Family or police problem.
But health has a huge workforce compared to CYFS, says Kelly.
There are around 980 frontline social care and protection social workers in New Zealand, compared to roughly 11,000 child and adolescent health professionals.
"So you've got 11,000 highly trained professionals referring all their complex child protection cases to less than 1000 care and protection social workers and saying 'you sort it out.'
"If we properly trained and supported that health workforce we could turn it into a child protection workforce [too.]
"If we were to start having a properly resourced network of people who work in health but are dedicated to child protection, then you can begin to do the research on how often these kids are coming in, you can do long-term research on what their outcomes are, you can begin to feed that back into policy and you begin to produce a culture of change."
The Starship Children's Hospital is the only hospital with a multi-disciplinary child abuse unit in the whole country and Kelly says, of course, there are resource implications to bring such units into district health boards nationwide.
"But I think the cost of the bad outcomes these children suffer is such the money would be well spent. And we're not talking mega-millions either.
"I'm not wanting 20 paediatricians in every district health board. It could be as small as half a paediatrician, a nurse specialist, a dedicated social worker and a psychologist."
