Mother's Day Rant

Poster's note: Kerre Woodham is one of my favourite New Zealand Journalists. She let rip in our biggest Newspaper today, and I agreed with her so whole heartedly that I wanted to post it on our site.

Kerre Woodham

Kerre Woodham is a Herald on Sunday columnist

Child abuse - I'm over it

By Kerre Woodham
Sunday May 8, 2011

Every Mother's Day the spotlight goes on much-loved mums who will be
pampered today by their gorgeous kids, with the help of doting fathers.
Memories will be made as the children prepare a (mostly inedible)
breakfast on a tray laden with presents that have been agonised over for
days.
Mother's Day is more a day for the children than it is for mums - all
mums with healthy, beautiful children have a mother's day every day that
their children stay safe and happy.
But this year - sorry to be a spoil sport - let's turn the spotlight on
those mothers who are abject failures. All those mothers who haven't got
a clue who their children's sperm donors were. All those mothers who
have children because they get paid to - and, let's face it, they
wouldn't get paid to do anything else. Those mothers who stay with men
who hurt them and their kids because they're so pathetic and useless
that any shag - even when it comes with a biff - is better than being
alone.
This Mother's Day, I would plead that every mother who has had a child
that they don't care about or can't cope with gets the help that they
need. If they can't cope with the children, ring family - or ring the Cyfs helpline if they can't trust their families.

If they're in an abusive relationship where they're being harmed and
their children are being indelibly scarred, again, seek the help of
family and friends or seek the help of the multitude of agencies that
are there for you.
I appreciate that breaking the cycle is difficult if you've always been
the victim, but come to terms with what being a mother is. My
definition, and that of all the mothers I know, is to love your babies
and keep them safe. And yet so many women in this country fail at the
job of being a mother.
How many more beautiful babies will we get to know because they've been killed by those who should have been protecting them?
This week's dead baby is Serenity Scott-Dinnington of Ngaruawahia, but
don't bother committing her name to memory - there'll be another dead
baby's name in the paper soon and Serenity will be just another
statistic.
And don't expect those responsible to be punished. Remember 22-month-old
Hail-Saige McClutchie, who died after being born into a family with a
horrendous history of child abuse? Two years later, no one has been held
responsible. Don't even mention the Kahuis.
Serenity died the most unserene death you can imagine and this week her
little body was released to the family for burial. It seems
incomprehensible that she was released to the family, given it is
possible one of them killed her.
Couldn't she have been released to a couple desperately trying to have
children but who were unable to do so and unable to adopt? Weird
suggestion I know, but at least they'd understand how precious this baby
girl was, as opposed to the family she had the great misfortune to end
up with.
When you look at the hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent by
desperate women going through IVF procedures to become mothers, and the
millions of dollars being spent by the taxpayer because dumb, stupid,
needy, dysfunctional slappers are failing at being mothers, surely even
Christians must wonder if there's a god.
I've been writing columns and banging on on talkback for more than 13
years about this and I am so, so sick of railing against the abomination
that is child abuse in this country.
So this will be my last column on the subject. What I do is utterly futile.
I hope that the Government's initiative to award first-time mums three
extra Plunket visits in the first two months of their babies' lives will
make a difference - but I doubt it.
Only the people who are within that sick little circle of abuse can make a difference, and they won't.
The neighbour of Serenity's family who spoke to police and journalists
about the family had "NARK" painted on her fence, apparently because
amongst these dysfunctional inbreds it's wrong to speak out against a
baby being murdered.
I don't know how the emergency staff and support services keep going.
Maybe because they do make changes in ways we don't, and will never,
hear about.
But for me - all these years, all the words, all this pain and all this anger hasn't made a blind bit of difference.
I'll continue to support the teen-parent units at schools and Shine and
the Hippy programmes - those organisations trying to effect change - in
whatever way I can. But no more words. When it comes to child abuse,
words mean absolutely nothing.

By Kerre Woodham
| Email Kerre
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/kerre-woodham-on-new-zealand/news/article.cfm?c_id=1502870&objectid=10724127

Posters Note: Another New Zealand Journalist telling it like it is
Deborah Coddington

Deborah Coddington is a Herald on Sunday columnist

Stop paying abusers to breed


By Deborah Coddington
5:30 AM Sunday May 29, 2011



Expand

Lisa Kuka failed to protect her daughter, Nia Glassie, from being tortured. Photo / APN

So if we get a Labour government we get a Ministry for Children
instead of a Families Commission. Labour's attempt to stop the killing
fields, the feral "underbelly of intense violence in our community", as
Social Development Minister Paula Bennett calls it.

Even the Minister, with all her experts, has to plead for ideas through a
newspaper column. You tell me what to do, she begged, seemingly bereft
of new material. You can hardly blame her when others who've worked for
years in the field see babies born to names like Cherish and Serenity
get carted home to lives of anything but.

Nonetheless, amid news we're on track for a record-breaking year of 6117
child abuse cases, we're showing new Auckland mothers a DVD
demonstrating the graphic effects of shaken-baby syndrome.

Nice try, but how about dragging some drop-kick boyfriends in, strapping
them to a chair, withholding the methamphetamine for several months and
force-feeding childcare lessons into them too?
I appreciate the good intentions behind the making of this DVD,
and the mothers who watch it will take it on board, but we all know the
main killers of these babies are the next lot of men who swagger into
these women's lives.

I'm not going to dignify them by calling them stepfathers.
Yes, mothers kill too - "slappers" as my colleague, Kerre Woodham,
called them before she was kicked into touch by the activists, poets and
feminist collectivist academics who thought she was picking on all
women.

They missed the point. When you have children, your whole life changes
and you must try to defend your child from harm no matter what. Ross
Brighton and Tove Partington, who responded to Kerre's column, argued
solo mothers "need all our help to protect themselves and their
families".

But they get masses of help. The Kahui twins were born very premature.
Taxpayers spent thousands of dollars saving these tiny babies in
Middlemore's neonatal unit.

The coroner's inquest was told they thrived, despite the parents' rare
visits. Then they were taken home and killed by some person - or people -
who have never paid for it.

Brighton and Partington also claim we have "no right to judge a woman
for falling pregnant and choosing to keep a child if she wishes to".

First, I hate that phrase "falling pregnant" - babies are made by having
sex, not tripping over. Second, when kids are abused - sexually or
physically - we damn well do have the right to cast judgment.

It's precisely that feel-good, wishy-washy attitude towards child
abusers - that if only we gave them the love they'd pass it on to their
children - that's got us to the welfare state we're in.

The scourge of child abuse, they say, can be fought by reassessing "our
attitude towards women and the poor". What an insult to poor parents.

Not all in poverty kill or harm their children and throwing money at
this problem won't fix it. And if All Black losses cause child abuse,
then Brighton and Partington should present empirical evidence before
attacking arguments against welfare.

This will win me no friends, but sensible people know one of the steps
to take: taxpayers have to stop paying repeat abusers to breed. We know
they carry on having kids on the public purse while CYF struggles to
cope.

Take the kids away. Three years ago, former Waitakere mayor Bob Harvey
was right when he said early childhood intervention "should mean taking
serious, drastic and immediate action. When dysfunctional families are
spotted - and they are - in hospitals and birthing rooms, we must act."

Do we want to keep on living in a country where children are put into
clothes driers on high temperature and tortured to death? When I first
wrote features on child abuse, the weapon of choice was a vacuum cleaner
pipe; now it's a machete.

We have couples desperate to adopt and give loving, good homes to
beautiful babies such as the Kahui twins, Nia Glassie, and Serenity, but
they don't get a look-in because they're not close family.

Well, in the worst-case scenarios, these babies should be taken away
from their cruel families. As Harvey said, some newborns just shouldn't
be allowed to go home.

By Deborah Coddington
| Email Deborah

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10728719