Third World charity will aid abused children here

Save the Children and Women's Refuge unite to fight an evil. CATHERINE MASTERS reports.

Save the Children usually conjures up heartbreaking images of skeletal Third World children wasting away from disease, famine and drought - a long way away from our doorstep.

Now the organisation is stepping in close to home, to help to stop the child abuse plague affecting New Zealand children.

In the first venture of its kind, Save the Children New Zealand and the National Collective of Women's Refuges have banded together to help break the cycle of abuse.

Save the Children will dip into the money it raises from its annual appeal, which begins next Tuesday, to pay to enhance the training of refuge workers to identify at-risk children and to make sure they receive the support and care they need.

Save the Children's executive director, John Bowis, said that until the past decade the organisation had targeted children mostly overseas - and that would not change - but the needs of the country's own also had to be catered for.

"I guess the needs of children everywhere are important to us, but sometimes you have to make choices about where you are going to put your effort."

The women's refuges take in about 10,000 children a year and most, if not all, of those children experienced or witnessed violence or abuse.

About $150,000 over two years will go towards training many of the refuges' 444 volunteers and 152 staff.

Mr Bowis said that once at-risk children had been identified, they would be referred to appropriate services, even if services were already strained. "Even if it does overload services, that identifies that the services are even more hopelessly incapable of addressing the need.

"I don't make any excuse for that because I think that if we're going to deal with this child abuse problem we do have to know how big it is.

"If we say we don't have the services to deal with the problem, therefore let's not identify the problem, then I think that's back to front."

Women's Refuge chief executive Merepeka Raukawa-Tait said the venture was exciting.

While the refuge organisation was not expert in dealing with child abuse, it had plenty of experience with beaten women.

"In well over 90 per cent of cases where child abuse is in a family, domestic violence is occurring at the same time and you can't separate the two out."

The Commissioner for Children, Roger McClay, said the venture was great news.

"This sort of initiative is the positive extension of the horror being expressed about child abuse and neglect by New Zealand society now."

More, similar initiatives would occur as adults became as outraged about child abuse as the victims of child abuse had a right to be.

Herald Online feature: violence at home

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