Wins, losses in child-care feud

Pro-smacking Swedish lawyer Ruby Harrold-Claesson. Picture / Sarah Ivey

Sweden - a model for the world, or a nation that is destroying the family?

Supporters and opponents of Sweden's ban on corporal punishment have been firing claims and counter-claims since pro-smacking Swedish lawyer Ruby Harrold-Claesson arrived in New Zealand this week.

"New Zealanders are being lied to," declared ex-Radio Rhema talkshow host Bob McCoskrie, whose Family First lobby group helped bring Mrs Harrold-Claesson here.

He objected to statements by Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro and Green MP Sue Bradford that "only four children died in the following 20 years" after Sweden banned corporal punishment in 1979, and that child deaths in Sweden averaged "something like one every four years".

But former Children's Commissioner Ian Hassall, speaking for a coalition supporting Ms Bradford's bill to remove a legal defence allowing parents to use "reasonable force" to discipline their children, said figures on children placed in state care in Sweden, published in the Herald interview with Mrs Harrold-Claesson on Thursday, were also wrong.

As usual, the truth is complex because many different sets of figures report on different things.

Dr Kiro's claim that only four children died in the 20 years after 1979 comes from a study by Canadian academic Joan Durrant in 2000, which found that no Swedish child died as a result of "child abuse" in the 1980s, four died between 1990 and 1996, and none between then and 2000.

But these figures ignored deaths from other forms of neglect and maltreatment.

A 2003 Unicef study covering all forms of neglect and maltreatment found that 53 Swedish children died from these causes in a five-year period in the 1990s, an average of 10.6 a year.

This placed Sweden seventh out of 27 countries in the study. New Zealand came 22nd, or sixth-from-worst, with an average of 11 deaths a year in a population about half that of Sweden.

Mr McCoskrie cited Swedish news reports of four child deaths this year.

In May, Swedish Health Minister Morgan Johansson set up a commission to investigate child deaths, saying: "Each year, eight to 10, sometimes as many as 12, children die in Sweden due to violence."

This is a lot more than "one every four years". But it gives Sweden a child death-rate, according to Unicef, of half New Zealand's - 0.65 deaths for every 100,000 children a year, compared with 1.24 in New Zealand.

The figures on children in state care suggest that Sweden achieves this good record by being more willing than New Zealand to take children away from risky parents.

Figures in Thursday's Herald, obtained from the Swedish Ombudsman's office, were misinterpreted by this reporter.

Dr Hassall has provided official Swedish statistics showing that in 2004, 20,200 children were taken into state care and protection under the age of 18, or into state care for youth justice issues under the age of 21.

This was 1 per cent of all Swedish children under 18, compared with 0.5 per cent of children who were in the care of Child, Youth and Family Services in New Zealand last year.

"In continental Europe, including Sweden, there is a sense that the state is there as the expression of people's interests and enables them to do better if they are unable to fulfil their obligations as parents, whereas in the English-speaking countries we tend to see the state as a force external to ourselves that has to be resisted," Dr Hassall said.

"If we were heading in the right direction, we would recognise that everybody raising children needs help, and that sometimes that help is not forthcoming ... from family, friends and acquaintances, and there is a need then for more intervention by state-directed agencies."