OK Whānau, Let's See How You Get On With Baby and Parents
Martin van Beynen
Stuff
During the Christchurch satanic panic of the early 90s, that led to the travesty of the Christchurch Civic Creche case, I saw the Child, Youth and Family service at work and was left with some grave doubts. So I watched Newsroom's documentary about the attempt by Hawke's Bay Oranga Tamariki staff to take a seven-day-old baby from its 19-year-old mother with that in mind.
I also thought about Donna Catherine Parangi, 54, the grandmother of a baby boy who died after being left in a hot car for hours while she smoked synthetic cannabis and passed out in her Rūātoki home. In March a jury found her guilty of his manslaughter .
Most people would agree the Hawke's Bay hospital uplift, even allowing for a bit of media beat-up, was an appalling debacle and completely unnecessary.
What on earth was the hurry? The baby was safe, the mother was safe and the whānau were behaving themselves. The programme revealed a litany of confusion, poor communication, incompetence and deceit. Mind you, how would any of us look if our actions were filmed in such circumstances?
The doco raised a lot of issues deeper than a bungled uplift. The first was whether this was typical of the current process followed by Oranga Tamariki in taking the ultimate step of removing babies from their parents. Was this just an outlier or was it representative of such uplifts all around the country? On the programme Hawke's Bay midwife Jean Te Huia suggested these cruel, bungled uplifts happened all the time but I'm skeptical.
Three inquiries are under way and hopefully they will come up with answers.
The next question is whether Māori are unjustifiably picked on.
Clearly most of the babies taken from their families are Māori or Polynesian but given that those groups are significantly over-represented in social dysfunction statistics, including drug-taking and domestic violence, that should not be surprising.
It could be said the establishment is imposing its cultural beliefs and prejudices on Māori but something like a third of social workers are Māori or Polynesian, and the proportion is probably much higher in areas where there are larger Māori populations. Oranga Tamariki is working hard at being a Māori-focused organisation, as a quick flick through its annual report shows.
However it seems quite possible that Māori and Polynesian families are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt and that some behaviours will be misconstrued. Overzealous child protection workers could be a problem.
That brings us to the third major issue, which is whether the system has ingrained rules, written or unwritten, that have discriminated against Māori parents for generations and led to large numbers of children being taken from parents without real cause.
The expression "stolen generation" has been irresponsibly bandied about. The phrase was coined by an Australian academic to describe the thousands of mostly mixed-race children taken from Aboriginal families in state-sanctioned and legislated programmes between 1910 and 1970. Some of the programmes were well-intentioned, some not. Some required a court process, others did not.
The use of the term to describe what has happened in New Zealand sensationalises the problem and detracts from the severity of the outrage in Australia.
Then comes another issue raised by Te Huia, who suggested the only outcome if Oranga Tamariki took the baby was a life of abuse and neglect for him. While it's undoubtedly true that many state wards - again the majority appear to have been Māori - were badly let down by authorities, those days surely have gone. About 30 per cent of Oranga Tamariki caregivers are now Māori.
Then we have the other side of the story. I know the Newsroom programme was about the way the uplift was conducted rather than whether it was warranted, but the reasons for Oranga Tamariki's involvement were always central.
Many questions would have occurred to viewers of the doco including about the risk posed to the baby by domestic violence and drug-taking and the whānau's ability to support the mother. The public is being asked to condemn Oranga Tamariki but given material about the parents and wider family cannot be published, some skepticism is warranted.
The programme and whānau put Oranga Tamariki under the spotlight. Fair enough and but I wonder how willing the whānau would be to open their lives to scrutiny. What always strikes me about these sort of stories is how willing the whānau is to rally around when it's too late.
This week a family lawyer made some good points. "Every day I spend my 8.30 till 5 – but usually longer – dealing with the effects that drugs and alcohol, child abuse, domestic violence, neglect and poor choices have on our tamariki," the unnamed lawyer wrote.
The decision to uplift, the lawyer pointed out, was never made by one person acting alone, or without professional consultation. It was never made without genuine care and protection concerns. It was always the last resort. Families who did not engage with Oranga Tamariki left it with little choice. "Someone has to take the decision if children are at risk. Sometimes tragically, those decisions will be wrong but the process seems robust." And that is really the issue.
The state takes responsibility for the safety of babies and children and gets the blame if it goes wrong. What happens if the Hawke's Bay parents fail and the baby suffers harm? Will the whānau take the blame?
Finally everyone is too sensitive to make this point so I will do it. Why is a damaged 17-year-old boy fathering a child to a mother who also has a troubled history herself?
Who thought this was a good idea? The much-maligned state will be funding this family for a long time.
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