The sin bin

It shouldn’t come as any great surprise that New Zealand is one of the leading nations on a table of shame for instances of child abuse.

It seems there is hardly a day goes by when we don’t hear another report of a child who has been abused sexually or physically or neglected to a criminally callous degree. So why is this the case? Is it that we are a nation of lowlifes and scumbags?

I don’t believe we are. Without wanting to appear smug, I think the average Kiwi citizen is a pretty decent sort of person. However as a nation we have a growing problem of family dysfunction that began its growth spurt about three or four generations ago. It has begun to evolve into a very nasty canker that has the potential to blight and seriously damage our nation. When the seriously dysfunctional grow up and breed they spread the bad seed and unfortunately in most cases, their offspring will be just that much worse than their parents. However it is important to remember this is not a problem that resides among only the poor or immigrants or Maori. It knows no boundaries of race, economics or religion.

 So how did this come about and why are we not managing to slow it down?

In answer to the first question, I’d have to honestly say, I really don’t know, other than I think a shift in our society towards a more selfish type of human being could be a big part of it. And when I say selfish, I mean that in its broadest sense. To me selfishness is the state where people decide they will do what they want irrespective of how it might impact upon others. Greed is a subset of selfishness and as most of us would readily acknowledge, there is an awful lot of that about these days. Furthermore it is epidemic among our so-called leaders and that includes industry leaders as well as political ones.

A climate of selfishness has been created that has been made worse by a general drop in the standards of behaviour people have come to accept and a widening gap between the obscenely wealthy and the pitifully poor. This has led to a lot of very damaged people of varying sub-types. Some think they have a divine right to power and wealth, some feel continually frustrated by their apparent lack of power and/or wealth and both have been brought up by parents whose attitude was similar if not quite as extreme as their own. Kids run undisciplined all over the show and rather naturally are puzzled when they grow up and find they cannot always have their own way and then of course there are the disgraceful failures by those whose job it is to keep our kids safe. Fixing such a mess will take a strong and focussed team, unlike that which is currently on the field.

To take a rugby analogy the front row of this current team of dropkicks is filled with useless parents. Among these are the bitch who was jailed last year for assaulting her 9-year-old daughter with a machete and a hammer, kicking her in the crotch while wearing steel-capped workboots, tearing off her toenail and pouring salt and boiling water on the wound, and writing abusive words on her body; Lisa Kuka and her disgusting family who were jailed for torturing poor little Nia Glassie before ultimately causing her death, and the Kahuis, whose twins were killed (certainly by family members) yet nobody has been convicted over their deaths.

In the second row you will find hopeless wankers working in schools, crèches, churches and anywhere else where kids might gather, who are too lazy/stupid to check the references of people they will leave in charge of the kids. These include the educated idiots who hired the man with ten aliases and a record of paedophilia to work in their schools, and whose real name nobody is yet allowed to know; and the churchmen who for so many years simply shifted child abusers in their ranks to different locations where a whole new basket of ‘goodies’ awaited them.

On the side of this scrum of horrors hang the dimwits from CYF, the courts and the probation service who seem unable to adequately deal with the scumbags that come to their notice. The ore recent notable examples of these ‘loosies’ would be the cretins at CYF and 24 other so-called child welfare agencies who despite their involvement with the family were too dim-witted to keep safe that 9-year-old girl in my earlier paragraph and the judges who routinely suppress the names of such lowlifes..

And then at the back of the scrum is a feeble government that covers the arses of their useless ministries and continues to propagate policies that serve only to increase the social problems. Worse still these wallies show no signs of having any idea how bad the problem is. The 9-year-old girl had allegedly been sexually abused while in care and so some genius decided to send her back to the very home she had been uplifted from because of abuse there. The ‘mother’ subsequently wrote (or got someone who knew joined up writing to write) to Jianqi telling him her kid was out of control and asking for help. Jianqi passed on the letter to Paula Bumfat Minister of Retarded Development replied with some no doubt brilliant advice to get her into sport and signed off another 6 counselling sessions for her. It would seem the idea of actually sending someone around unexpectedly to see what the fuck was going on did not occur to them. FAIL.

So it would seem our forwards really aren’t fit and most of them should be red-carded off the field. It would seem it is up to us backs to try and bring about a change. We’re not as big as the forwards, but hopefully we have a much larger bench to draw from. All we can do is spread the word and dob in the scumbags. So keep your eyes peeled for a lowlife near you; and don’t leave the reporting to someone else. Teachers, doctors, social workers and all the rest of us owe it these kids, because if you think our current crop of so-called leaders are a motley crew; wait until the next generation grows up.