Why the violence?
NEW Zealand is, by some measures, an unusually violent and brutal society, the Commissioner for Children, Dr lan Hassall, said earlier this year. “Our rates of youth suicide, of imprisonment, of child homicide, of road crash injuries, of crimes of violence, are higher than those of most other Western countries.”
Official figures published recently showed he was not exaggerating. The police said the number of violent offences reported in the year ending June 30 was up 13.7 per cent on the previous 12 months.
The number of sexual attacks rose 25 per cent.
The Minsitry of Youth Affairs reported that New Zealand ranked third in the Western World for road deaths in the 15-24 year age group. After vehicle crashes, the second highest cause of death among young
people is suicide. The prisons are full to overflowing, the majority of their inmates youths. A quarter of all New Zealand families with children is now headed by a solo parent. One in four teenagers is out of work.
With every country dependent on its youngsters for its future, New Zealand’s outlook certainly looks less than bright. It’s an even darker prospect for the nation’s young Polynesian people. They figure disproportionately in the crime and prison statistics. They trail pakeha and immigrant Asian children badly in educational attain ment and are being expelled or suspended from schools faster than any other racial group.
The unemployment rate for Maori teenagers is more than 40 per cent and in some regions six out of 10 Maori and Pacific island youngsters are idle. They are much more likely to be killed in a road accident than their white fellow countrymen. No less than 40 per cent of Maori families have a single parent, and on current trends those families will soon be in the majority.
The degree to which the high incidence of unemployment is related to the rate of violent offending is a debate which I don’t intend to get into now. But what is clear from this scenario is that New Zealand has a serious problem with its young people, expecially Maori and Pacific islanders and statistically, at least, it threatens to get worse.
The reason being that the Maori and Pacific island communities are growing at a faster rate than the total New Zealand population. According to Statistics New Zealand, the Pacific island population will increase by about 2 per cent a year and Maori numbers by 1.1 per cent against 0.7 per cent for the total population.
The number of Pacific island children under 14 will rise by 67 per cent over the next 10 years until they comprise one in nine of all New Zealand youngsters.
Now to get back to Dr Hassall. He says violence breeds violence. Smacking, caning and strapping have been used to bring up generations of New Zealanders, and perhaps this is the problem.
“There is every reason to believe that violence as a way of life and its use to deal with interpersonal and other problems is learned and reinforced during childhood.
“Officially sanctioned physical
punishment conveys the messages that society approves of violence deliberately inflicted by one person upon another at least in some circum stances,” he says.
Children learn how to behave from adults, Dr Hassall says and by using physical force parents are teaching their youngsters it is OK to use violence to solve an argument, show anger or influence others.
“When violence is endemic it is difficult to change. It is regarded as the norm.”
Although corporal punishment was
outlawed in schools three years ago, the law still allows parents to use “reasonable force” to discipline their kids. Dr Hassall says the law should be changed because hitting children is
unjust and there are better ways of teaching them to behave.
His call was inevitably controversial, provoking an outcry from some Christians who hold to the Biblical injunction that to spare the rod was to spoil the child and parents who claimed a good whacking “never did me any harm”.
It revived memories of last year’s row when Social Welfare Minister Jenny Shipley said Maori and Pacific island people featured disproportionately in the growing number of child abuse cases throughout the country. She was accused of naked racism and even Pacific Island Affairs Minister Don McKinnon was moved to intervene, saying the island peoples were traditionally strong disciplinarians who might choose to define abuse differently from pakeha.
In calling for a law change Dr Hassall revealed that a survey showed a tendency for both Maori and Pacific island families to endorse the use of hitting and thrashing of kids more often than pakeha.
But he added “The difference was not significant. There is no evidence in this study to support the notion of major cultural differences in the use of physical punishment among the main ethnic groups living in New Zealand.”
About the same time, however, Shipley was launching a pilot programme called the ‘Samoan Stop Abuse Project’, which had stemmed directly from her remarks a year later.
Significantly, it had the full backing and cooperation of the Samoan community which had acknowledged that, despite last year’s furore, there was a problem.
The next day, McKinnon was launching a six-language resource book on family violence for the entire Pacific island community which acknowledged the wider problem, saying “Our families are the essence of our culture, our language, our history and our nationhood. With family violence we violate all those aspects of ourselves,”
We can only hail this as a promising start in the fight to improve the lot of children in at least one section of the community. □