Social problems at a high
p. 54 · Read in the full issue
Opinion
Social problems at a high among islanders in NZ
I’m sorry, but this column is going to be about sub jects Pacific Island people would rather not discuss.
They are, in fact, subjects most people probably don’t like to talk about, but it does not help anyone to sweep them under the table - least of all New Zealand’s 200,000-odd Pacific Island community.
They, more than most, need to face up to them, bring them out into the open and thereby see if they can do something about the awful problems facing their people.
I’m talking about abortion, car crashes and suicide, and it’s a regrettable fact that these three topics affect Pacific Island folk in New Zealand more than other sector of society. Two reports pub lished here late last year highlighted the situation.
One revealed that statistically every Pacific Island woman in this country has at least one abortion in her lifetime. That’s a sta tistical average.
Not all women have abortions, but some have two, three or even more, which skews the average and casts a cloud over every one. The other report disclosed that car crashes and suicides are to blame for the deaths of most young Pacific people here.
Two out of three island youths aged between 15 and 24 die tragically in this way. Both documents indicate that the Pacific Island population’s general state of health is poor and much needs to be done to lift it to a par with the rest of the New Zealand soci ety. The government is hoping to do that with its “Strategic Initiatives for the Health of Pacific People in New Zealand”, the first such strategy exclusively directed at the community. But island people themselves bear the main responsibility for dealing with the abortion problem. It is not exclusive to them - the num ber of legal operations performed in New Zealand reached a record 14,805 last year and the abortion rate at 17.7 for every 1000 women aged 15 to 44 was the fourth highest in the Western world, after the United States, Australia and Sweden.
But the rate for Pacific Island women was 32 per 1000, com pared with 18.8 for Maori and 12.6 for Pakeha. About 6 per cent of island women aged 20-24 had an abortion, compared with 2.7 percent of Europeans. Among the 25-39 age group, the island rate was nearly three times that of the Europeans.
This shows that the island community has a particular problem in this area - and the underlying reason according to experts here
is precisely because people don’t want to talk about it.
Island people, they say, have a traditional reluctance to discuss sex. Young people are afraid to talk about it with their parents and other authority figures and the young and old alike are reluctant to go to doctors and family planning clinics for help with contracep tion.
It-is not a result of traditional Pacific Island culture, which used'to be very open about sex, some say. They put it down more to the Puritanism introduced by early missionaries and a failure of society to adapt to a more modem outlook.
The Abortion Supervisory Committee’s annual report noted (not only of Pacific Island people): “Most New Zealand parents have difficulty dealing with health and sexuality.” Many, it said, did not have the confidence, knowledge or skills to teach their children. The answer, it argued, not unreasonably, lie with educa tion.
It said double standards of the past, when reproductive health was “closeted and separated off from the main curriculum” hadled to confusion, guilt and an unrealistic approach to children’s natu ral curiosity and desire to learn. “This lack of openness about sex ual matters in New Zealand society is reflected in the increasing abortion rate,” the committee said. “Too many young adults leave school with an inadequate knowledge of relationships and meth ods of contraception.”
Ideally, it said, teaching should begin at primary school before children become sexually active. But at present, only 50 per cent of secondary schools have sexual health education class es, let alone the junior level. Abortion is always controversial, raising passions on bothsides, and publication of the latest figures, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the contraception, The Sterilisation and Abortion Act, inevitably revived demands from the religiously biased for changes to the law. But if a safe abortion service is not provided, there will be illegal abortions and people would die, the committee said.
Which brings us back to the other report, which noted that sui cide among Pacific Island youths was rising at a faster rate than any other ethnic group. But it is not just a matter of young people
dying in tragic circumstances.
Pacific Island people have the highest rates of rheumatic fever, heart disease, dietary disease and obesity in the country. They are 10 times more likely to get tuberculosis while the hospitalisation rate for infants is nearly 40 per cent higher than the national rate.
There are many reasons for all this, including low incomes, inadequate housing and a low level of education. The govern ment’s move to devise a strategy specifically for Pacific islanders’ health is a step in the right direction, if long overdue. But I cannot help thinking that positive signs of determination by the island community to tackle its own problems is also long overdue.
Discussing some of those subjects they don’t like talking about would be a good start. ■
David Barber