Cry The Beloved Children

Close to Blasphemy

Proverbial wisdom says that when there is an elephant in the room, few want to talk about it.  And so it has come to pass with the damning report into New Zealand's child-care agency, Child, Youth and Family service ("CYF").  The report charged that while CYF are "great" at intervention--by which is meant taking children away from parents--they are pretty much hopeless thereafter:

[Children's Commissioner, Dr Wills] said CYF was focused on "front-end" investigations, rather than long-term care.  "Where CYF has focused on assessing immediate risk of abuse and neglect, they do it well, and we need to maintain that," he said.  But the agency did not provide enough ongoing supervision and support to foster carers and staff looking after 5133 children in state care. [NZ Herald]

Intervention and removal of children is the easy part: its a relatively facile transaction.  Ensuring that the removed child gets nurtured in a (substitute) loving home and family is the hard part.  And so we are faced with the shocking reality that plenty of kids in "state care" end up being abused and horribly treated--117 last year alone.  And then there are the cases of kids who have been transferred around the bazaars with over fifty successive caregivers.  State care at work.
What's the elephant in the room?  It is failing to see that the State is a lousy parent.  It always will be.  It is lousy at picking decent parents and homes in which to place people.  Yet because statism is part of our established religion, it is hard to admit that the god is unfit for task.  Yet everything the state turns its hand to in this regard ends up creating worse problems.  It has been a fairly constant result over centuries.  The Victorians and Edwardians were big on institutional orphanages. Now the state is big on whanau and extended family as replacement parents.  These are opposite ends of a spectrum.  Failure and abuse has been the one constant throughout.

Secondly, many of the more helpful solutions are at present off the table.  Statist ideology has removed them as possibilities.  Loving families manifest firm, kind, consistent discipline, in order to train and nurture children.  The State has criminalised the use of a smack for disciplining and training children.  The State would never make a child placement in such a family.  Moreover, the State prefers that fostering is done in extended family homes--by people related to the abusive family from which the child is removed.  This has cultural and racial overtones which can have devastating outcomes.

Maori make up a growing share of all children in care, up from 52 per cent in 2010 to 58 per cent, including 68 per cent of young people in the nine CYF residences, compared with 24 per cent of all children under 15. Dr Wills recommended prioritising Maori cultural capability and iwi links. "To get better outcomes for children and young people in care, we have to do much better for Maori."

The reality is that often entire extended families are dysfunctional and degenerate.  Prioritising placement amongst relatives can lead (and often does) to just passing the child from one abusive adult to another.

Thirdly, there is a stupid over-reliance upon social workers.  These are people who have got a degree of some kind and are supposed experts thereby.  But they are just glorified bureaucrats, applying superficial, fatuous policies--controlled by mechanistic decision pathways.  Great for machinery; inappropriate and inadequate for human beings.  They are all too often not parents--without successful experience in raising children.  They would not know a successful family if they ran into it by mistake.

Fourthly, there is a misplaced, unrealistic messianic zeal which wants to create a world in which there is no abuse or dysfunction whatsoever anywhere in the country.  It just ain't going to happen because of the universality of human sinfulness.  The superficiality of believing that government policies and programmes can redeem people from sin and make them live holy lives is beyond mockery.  Sadly, it reduces the problem to one solution, and one solution only--more tax-extracted money thrown at the problem will fix all.

Whatever the appropriate solutions are, they will be piecemeal and gradual.  They will be small and incremental.  They will be bottom-up, rather than top-down.  They will empower already demonstrably successful parents to adopt and foster at-risk children.  Placements will be colour blind and selected not by bureaucrats with a social work degree but by experienced parents who have raised children successfully and know decent parents and a healthy family when they see one.

None of these solutions will entirely remove the problem of children being abused.  But they sure would help.  Nevertheless we have a low expectation that such approaches will be adopted.  The god of state worship would not honoured by such things.  Such an approach would get uncomfortably close to blasphemy in the mind of  the secular statist.