This is a graph (nicked from the Herald) plotting the presentations of non-accidental injury (child abuse) at Starship hospital. Normal people would almost certainly view this as good evidence that the problem is getting worse. Unfortunately, self-serving, butt-covering bureaucrats see things differently. Here’s one: “The way I interpret this is that the numbers are good [...]

As New Zealand added another child murder victim to it’s long list, over the past week, and the case of the tortured nine-year-old is still reverberating around the media, there have been many blog posts on the subject of child abuse on this blog and many others. For the most part, they have one thing [...]

A couple of days ago, I posed some questions about the responsibility of CYSF in the case of the nine-year-old girl who was tortured in her own home. I took the view that CYFS had made some bad calls and should have made more of an effort to monitor the child after they had returned [...]

You have to have a pretty strong stomach not to want to hurl when you read this story of two creatures who literally tortured a nine-year-old girl and kept her locked in a cupboard. When I read the article, I loudly proclaimed that these two “parents” were animals. My cat looked extremely affronted. The cat [...]

I’m betting that the left (when they find the article) will have something derisive to say about Muriel Newman’s point that children are not protected from overt educationallly-driven political indoctrination in New Zealand. She cites Al Gore’s strangely acclaimed powerpoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth as an example. Personally, I think Gore’s movie is nowhere near [...]

In September 2008 I wrote this: Unfortunately, what this [the repeal of section 59] does to parents is place them in a position of having no clear idea what is an acceptable smack. Worse still, it allows children to threaten their parents, thereby seriously reducing their authority, even if the child has no intention of [...]

The Herald reports today that 39 “minor acts of physical discipline” were brought to the attention of police, resulting in one prosecution and  37 warnings. The article goes on to say: Deputy Police Commissioner Rob Pope said the figures showed police continued to apply discretion in handling “anti-smacking” cases. Sadly, Mr. Pope completely misses the [...]

BBC News reports on a fascinating study that demonstrates that victims of child abuse may have accelerated aging. Telomeres are relatively short sections of specialised DNA that sit at the ends of all our chromosomes.They have been compared to the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces that prevent the laces from unravelling. Each time [...]

Fancy an emetic? The Herald is running a series of articles on child abuse today. Here is a nauseating recitation from a single article: An average of eight children are killed each year, and many more end up battered in hospital at the hands of family members. Children under two are especially vulnerable; each year 59 [...]

Has anybody noticed that the review of changes to section 59 of the Crimes Act has missed the point entirely? The review tries to make out that the police are not using the law to persecute parents who lightly smack their children. This is probably true (though I should add “at the moment” here because [...]