Hard News: Feckless Solutions
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Daniel: re step-parenting, read the rest of the paragraph of mine after the bit you quoted. I'm not up to endlessly repeating myself here: just reading this thread has been tough enough.
A comparison of the incentives of the two policies actually would be really helpful.
That, at least, is easy. Neither policy incentivises anyone to have more children than they've already got solely for the money. If you want to argue with that, produce an example of someone who baby-farms, or an opinion from someone who's at least MET a beneficiary. Or you could ask yourself, for what sum of money would I have and raise a child I didn't want? Call it a thought experiment.
The last time I saw the figures, which was back in the nineties, just over half of DPB recipients were single mothers, and a third were men.
The Domestic Purposes Benefit can help meet your living costs if you are a:
- sole parent or
- caregiver of someone sick or infirm or
- an older woman living aloneCourtesy Ministry of Social Development. I do get tired of people talking about the DPB as if those last two categories didn't exist.
I totally agree, but at least doing something about the former is not a catch 22. If internal family factors perpetuate violence, external factors need not add fuel to the fire.
Unless the end result of 'something must be done!' is 'we banned video games' and then everyone wipes their hands and goes home feeling vindicated. Given domestic violence predates video games, I don't really see how it would help at all.
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Well, let's say that for some bizarre reason you'd decided step-parenthood causes abuse in and of itself. What you'd want to do is make sure solo mothers didn't feel financially pressured to enter new relationships. You'd want to provide them with some sort of Benefit. For Domestic Purposes, perhaps.
Certainly you wouldn't want to trap them in relationships with their previous violent partner because you have some sort of irrational believe that a solo parent is worse than an abusive relationship.
But if we're talking about radical solutions you could follow the system being trialled in some parts of Britain, where solo mothers can get the police to check up on potential partners (which I think stinks, but hey, if we're proposing radical solutions like "reducing women escaping from bad relationships to poverty", we could give that one a go, too).
I did see, in the 90s, a government-comissioned report on dometic abuse that claimed that much abuse was an 80:20 problem, not just with the majority of abuse being perpetrated by a core of abusers, but also that a surprising amount of reported abuse came from the same people. If that's true (and I know one person who used to work with Rape Crises told me they reckoned the report was rubbish), then perhaps one problem we have is that people who get into abusive relationships need help to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
The thing about 'community' is that sometimes it reinforces some pretty appalling behaviours.
Quite. I've never quite understood the assumption that CYFS are directed to lbour under, that children removed from abusive immediate family should be placed with extended family. While I know bad bastards can come from good families and vice versa, I would tend to expect the people most likely to teach abusive parents how to be abusive are... the parents' family!
Anyway, the interesting thing about this sort of problem is that, like the question, "Why did Rome fall?" it excells at telling you more about the hobby-horses of correspondents than much of anything useful.
I suggest they do some research and see how approving they are of Te Rauparaha's activities.
Oh lord, the time some whiny self-hating leftie white boy at a party told me what a hero of the Maori people Te Raupraha was. Mind you, he started arguing that 6 year olds could, in theory, give consent to sex, which is when I told him he could leave.
we will know that this nation is ready to do something about the appalling violence wreaked on children when an All Black donates his player of the match award to a campaign to stop child abuse.
Nah, more like when one performs a John Kirwin (who fronts for depression awareness), and shows up on TV ads saying, "My Mum/Dad belted me with the wooden spoon/belt/whatever, it was lousy then, it's lousy now, cut that shit out."
The simple truth is if a kid goes off the rails it's the parents fault (yes, as an individual the child bears responsibility as well). [...] People always shy away from this conclusion because its a difficult truth
Yes, genetics, the influence of schools, peer groups, and so on, are irrelevant. This explains why kids from the same family always turn out identical.
- can one foul at Judo
Oh, yes. There's an exhaustive list. I'm allowed to put an opponent in an arm lock that'll break or dislocate your elbow if you don't give up, but I'll get disqualified if I punch 'em in the face 8)
What is "just" or "warranted" is not dependant on the opinion of the crowd.
Indeed. When I'm at Judo I expect to be grabbed, thrown, pinned, strangled, or arm barred. I don't expect, even in the most vigourous shiai (tournament) to get elbows to the groin or kicked in the head. Them's the rules. Breaking them isn't a bit of a giggle. Apparently, in rugby in New Zealand, it often is.
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Tim:
>I guess the question is, do we care enough about the kids to 'incentivise' the breaking up of all non-biological families?Whew! Radical...;-)
Seriously tho, I suppose like the seatbelt thing, if you really wanted to stop kids dyiing in car accidents you'd ban all cars and close all roads. Obviously that's not going to happen. However, you can make smaller calls that can make things better or worse.
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Anyway, the interesting thing about this sort of problem is that, like the question, "Why did Rome fall?" it excells at telling you more about the hobby-horses of correspondents than much of anything useful.
Absolutely. The reason there's no magic bullet solution is that every abuser is different. It's not Maori, it's not step-parents, it's not beneficiaries, it's not rugby fans, it's not drugs, it's abuse. And yet every potential solution seems to be directed at targeting a group because there's a corelation (heh, which is not causation) between that group and abuse, rather than at targeting abuse.
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Stephen:
>No, you go first. You're the one who brought this up as a potential cause of child abuse, I think the onus is on you to demonstrate that.Oh, well I thought I'd already confessed several times over my relative ignorance of all but the bare bones of the policy, and was lamenting from a completely non-expert perspective what seemed to me to be a lack of specific policy discussion in general. But apparently such a thing is old hat and tired anyway, so I apologise for not being sufficiently up to speed.
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I wrote:
"..specific policy discussion in general"Heh. Sorry about that...;-)
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Oh well... here's something else for the feckless mob to move on to:
Prime Minister Helen Clark says dangerous dogs give her the "creeps" and she is personally in favour of tougher dog laws.
There have been calls for tighter dog control after two-year-old Aotea Coxon was savaged by a dog in a Christchurch park on Sunday, requiring 290 stitches and a plate inserted in a broken jaw.
Miss Clark said she was "repulsed" by the attack.
"It gives you the creeps to think of dangerous dogs strolling around ready to pounce on innocent people. That is why I am more than happy to keep looking at how the law can be improved and how enforcement can be improved," Miss Clark said.
Anyone else seeing a pattern here?
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I dunno, but if something gives the Prime Minister 'the creeps' then of course there should be a law against it.
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Hold on tight, Craig. That election's still a way out so it's going to get even worse...
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Emma:
>As for the effect of sporting or gaming violence, I suspect it's much weaker than the observed effect of real-life violence.Incidentally, I agree with Emma on this point. I recall the poet Kevin Ireland talked about the abusive generation of post WW2 veterans ritually beating their families as he did his paper round as a kid, and Karl Popper made a similar observation about post WW1 vets he encountered. Difference here is obviously we don't have such wars to attribute such large scale psychological effects too, so maybe this is where the mass media effects come in. Animals are imitative. Ever see that program where Robert Winston demonstrates the influence of television on a guppie? Quite an eye opener.
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Hold on tight, Craig. That election's still a way out so it's going to get even worse...
You do know how to cheer a boy up, don't you Stephen? :) I just don't know how much deja vu all over again I can handle - wring hands, polish your carefully calibrated soundbites, pass a stupid law that has less substance than your average press release, rinse hands of any consequences when nothing changes, repeat... over and over and over again.
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Lest I be thought churlish, Daniel, here is some background reading:
The Impact of Changes in Family Assistance on Partnering and Women’s Employment in New Zealand: A Preliminary Look (warning, chunky Word doc)
Evaluating the Feb 1999 Domestic Purposes Benefit & Widows Benefit ReformsNote a consistent theme: going back to work improves outcomes for women and children, and the barrier to going back to work is childcare.
So my thought experiment is to propose an earlier poster's solution: what would happen if there were universal free quality daycare?
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(While googling those up, I was surprised to discover that there is an official Work and Income NZ cookbook... )
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Thanks Stephen, I was already looking over St John and Rankin's most recent update here:
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The gene that was mentioned waaaaaaay further up the discussion was MAO (Mono-Amine Oxidase - nothing to do with that guy that killed a whole bunch of yellow dudes). What the paper from the Poulton group suggested was that if you were a carrier of a certain polymorphism in the gene AND were exposed to anti-social behavious as a child (a scientist's euphemism for being beaten) then you would be more likely to dish out some punishment to your own children. These children are also likely to inherit the gene (genetics and all) so the cycle continues.
The MAO polymorphism is found to be over-represented in Maori populations - this lead to some hoohah last year as it was called the ' Warrior' gene.
Personally, I think that genetics is only one factor, and not necessarily a strong one. But there is some science there, and it's certainly fairly interesting, if controversial.
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The Irish have the Warrior gene too.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/109926298/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
But this time it causes ADHD.
This explains perfectly how my Grandfather was Golden Gloves in the Army during WWII.
Oh and the alcoholism as self medicating for associated depression.
(I feel like I'm trawling through his old medical dictionaries again)
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Does any race not have the Warrior gene? Seems unlikely to me.
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Does any race not have the Warrior gene? Seems unlikely to me.
Well, no. It's a relatively common polymorphism of a gene that every human has. Therefore, it's possible for any human to have it. It just happens that some races have higher frequencies of the gene than others.
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Ah yes the myth of race.
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Ah yes the myth of race
I'm not saying any of this to give people reasons to stoke their own prejudices, I just saw that someone mentioned it in one of the posts above, and thought that I would share a little more information on the genetics side of things, which is something I have an interest in.
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I say yes to babysitting for stressed parents, yes to keeping an eye on children in your community, yes to more Plunket nurses, yes to thinking about what kind of society we want to live in and yes to serious policy discussions. None of these things are mutually exclusive.
yes and yes to all the above. And I've got a few things of my own to say about all this. I wanted to say, firstly, how much appreciation I have that Mikaere posted about what his/her family is going through in order to address their issues. Kia ora Mikaere. There are no easy solutions to the problems we have here in NZ of killing of, and injuring, our children at an astonishing and alarming rate. And I think that a number of you have put forward some really well thought out arguments for measures that may provide helpful. Universal free childcare? I'm not sure about that one, but only because there are far too many people already abdicating the responsibility of parenthood by dumping wee babies into daycare that they pay very dearly for. If it were to be free? Hmm. Certainly early childhood education needs to be free. As some may know, I work in the public kindergarten sector as a teacher, and while it's not free, it near as damn it is. And still we don't see children from homes like that of the wee Glassie girl. I've worked in Otara, Owairaka and Mangere for 12 years and it is very rare to see kids who come from highly abusive homes. A large proportion of the parents of the children I have taught over the last years have been young Mums on the DPB (and a few solo dads too). But these are not abusive homes. I have taught children who are living with their grandparents because they have come from abuse or neglect - all related to drugs and alcohol - but these children were taken out of those situations fairly early. Plunket definitively needs to be far better funded, and I don't see why questions in hospitals to all women about the presence of domestic violence in their lives won't work for at least some. You have to understand, though, that the people who do this to their children are largely hidden - by choice, or because people look the other way. They tend to move alot and that transience, as one poster said, means that sometimes children get lost in the system. You can't know where all the kids are all the time. These families are often not only on the margins but so far off the grid that they are invisible to all except their teachers at primary school. Because that is when education becomes compulsory, and sometimes is the only way some of these kids can be tracked. What about the kids before they go to school? What about the babies? That's the question policy makers, and society, have to think about. As I said before, it's about disconnection and disempowerment. If we all were a little more connected with what our neighbours and whanau were up to, I suspect things may be a bit different. Notice things. I do it for a living, but everyone can do it. You just have to open those eyes.
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Well, no. It's a relatively common polymorphism of a gene that every human has. Therefore, it's possible for any human to have it. It just happens that some races have higher frequencies of the gene than others.
What kind of factor are we talking? 10 times more frequent? Or 1% more frequent? What is the average frequency? 1 in 2? 1 in a million?
I'm curious.
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Ed - a cheap shot on my behalf.
Just thought I'ld add this before this twist of the thread goes too far.
Parihaka
http://www.historic.org.nz/magazinefeatures/2000aug/2000_08c_single.html -
What about the kids before they go to school? What about the babies?
The research is mounting up that it's precisely those years, the preschool years, where the most damage is done to your sense of empathy and whatever faculties eventually become your conscience. Not sure how the state would get in there though...
too many people already abdicating the responsibility of parenthood by dumping wee babies into daycare that they pay very dearly for.
Dumping? Some people would call that getting precious respite in the adult world before you go insane :)
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Ben: 60% of Maori men vs 30% of Pakeha.
The (Pakeha) guy who did some of the most recent research was vilified by some in the press as a racist, but he was careful to stress that he was the father of Maori boys, that many Pakeha have it too, and that the critical factor is early childhood environment - in other words, it's nurture, not nature that dictates how that inheritance will manifest.
It's good for society to have plenty of slightly reckless men around if they were brought up well and the risk-taking/aggression channelled into something beneficial like firefighting.
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