White Paper commendable toolbox

Imagine what 150,000 notifications of concern about child abuse looks like sitting in a pile. That gets investigated down to 21,000 cases of confirmed child abuse. In our country, which we call Godzone, that's a group of young people equal to half the population of Wanganui who are abused and neglected each year.

Those of us who have encountered child abuse in our professional capacities all have the faces of children that appear before us when we start thinking of or discussing child abuse. Of the six or so children that come readily to my mind, whom I knew personally and tried to help, three are deceased.

The Privacy Act means that I will never know their outcomes, leaving the most nagging concerns and unanswered questions for any investigator. It is the residue of a career in the social policy, where the most substantive qualification for employment is to be nosy enough to notice and care enough to intervene in people's lives.

Although the individual case histories may escape, the lessons learned do not. The willingness to continue to make it better never fades. And as much as we have tried and tried in the past, and experienced some successes, we have failed to make this country safe. With the White Paper on Vulnerable Children we are trying again.

Under the determined steerage of Paula Bennett there was an intensive consultation process which canvassed communities, including a concentrated trawl of the ideas and comments of professionals. There were 9985 submissions leading to 30 proposed initiatives; I'll mention some of them.

A Vulnerable Kids Information System will be a database for at-risk children to be monitored. Agencies will refer about 30,000 children to become the focus of attention. Incredibly, a register such as this has not existed before.

There will be a "Child Protect" line, a one-stop contact point for the public, in whatever capacity they meet these children, to pass their concerns to professionals who will take the matter up from there.

There will be a risk protector tool, being developed by Auckland University, to evaluate and consider information, to clarify concerns and to target intervention.

In all of this we have recognised that the number of government agencies have not in the past worked well enough together to achieve safety for vulnerable children. Different motivations have skewed their focus away but joint accountabilities across agencies will put all on the same page. Child Teams will focus the work regionally and will apportion the work, set plans, and monitor the implementation of each plan for each vulnerable child to ensure the work is done in a timely and effective manner. The most at-risk children are those in state care who live where placed by Child, Youth and Family and they are all our kids. The agency watches over them on behalf of you, the community. These children have the greatest risk of hurting themselves and others into the future.

We are throwing much more at these, the most at risk or the most vulnerable.

Each month in this most beautiful country, our people murder about one child under two years of age.

We must care enough as a country to change this most appalling statistic.