Dita on child abuse
Two useful columns by Dita De Boni on child abuse. Earlier in December she blogged:
… after reading that a Whanganui man that kicked a two year old to death was found guilty of the boy’s murder in Tuesday’s paper, I could think about nothing else all day.
As I read with a resigned horror of this crime – and let’s be honest, it hardly seems spectacular or outstanding any more for young Kiwi children to die violently at the hands of their caregivers – there was a fact about it that really stuck in my head.
On the day he died, the young boy woke up from a sleep on the couch and found he had wet it. He was trying to rub the wet patch away when discovered, grabbed by the scruff of the neck and struck against a coffee table.
When the boy then had the temerity to emerge from the toilet 10 minutes later with toilet paper in his hand, he was “round-house” kicked across the room, and died of internal injuries. …
As awful as that is, the horrible thought that haunted me all day was this: a normal two year old doesn’t care, much less notice, when the inevitable toilet training accident occurs.
I have a two year old, and I can testify that if she ever woke up wet from a sleep – say, if we’d forgotten to put a nappy on her – she’d hardly miss a beat, let alone be frantically rubbing away a wet patch.
The only child that would do this is one that is terrified of the consequences. At the age of two, that is a pretty precocious terror.
Sadly true. Of the many things you want a two year old to know, terror of parents is not one of them.
But I also believe strongly that part of the problem is one of short term vision by a succession of policy makers, where funding to preschoolers is effectively seen as “nice-to-have”, but not essential.
For example, in my years as a volunteer for Plunket we have had to raise funds for heaters, measuring tables and clerical help for our nurses, who are already overburdened with work.
It’s a mystery why this service, which actually goes into the homes of babies and toddlers and can see firsthand the conditions in which a child is being raised, is so underfunded by our tax dollars.
I agree that early childhood education is worthy of greater investment. But I would dispute that investment in it is decreasing. It is hard to get exact numbers, but one ECE provider told me they estimate that some children may get up to $60,000 spent on them before they enter primary school.
And today Dita writes:
Over the weekend we were once more treated to a story that reminds us that some (many?) children live in abject misery in this country. No Merry Christmas for them.
In this case, a nine-year-old Waitakere girl was beaten, starved and neglected over a period of two years and finally found hiding in a cupboard earlier this year.
She was taken into hospital shortly afterwards suffering starvation and dehydration. Her parents are in court facing 36 charges related to her care. …
We know social workers are overworked and underpaid – it is fruitless blaming them for this disaster. I am prepared to bet that the problem is one of a general policy that CYF has of “reuniting families” – even when this is in the worst interests of the child.
Linked to this, is the policy that if one can’t keep them with their parents, then they go to a member of the extended family – and this can also be a highly dysfunctional environment.
It might be true that the policy of returning kids to their families stands because there are not enough foster parents out there. But there are good reasons people do not take up fostering, and one of the main ones I have heard from people considering this option is that they know that the same families that spat out these unloved, neglected children have the right to see them and take them back, seemingly on a whim.
There is no way a normal person would put themselves through fostering a child, only to see it return to its abusers – or the abuser’s wider, also dysfunctional, family.
I’m not sure it is on a whim, but there has to be a stage at which the rights of the parents are limited.