MENZ Issues: news and discussion about New Zealand men, fathers, family law, divorce, courts, protests, gender politics, and male health.

Have I missed something lately? Perusing today’s Stuff.co.nz headlines, it appears that we truly do have an epidemic of domestic violence / child abuse, with some 20 out of 56 national headlines this morning being basically about domestic violence! Having nothing better to do, I thought I would read some of them, and summarise them for you …

Much domestic violence due to repeat offenders

Police report that they attend some 63,000 domestic violence incidents annually, a third of which “we are likely to be going back to the same place we have been dealing with previously”. That means some 42,000 individual cases of domestic violence per annum. But wait! Further down we read “Of concern was that only an estimated 10 per cent of all incidents were reported to police”. Make that some 420,000 cases! 420,000 potential criminal offenders! Bear in mind that Police are only likely to attend incidents that involve real violence – that is physical violence, rather than cases involving woolly femi-nazi definitions of psychological, spiritual, or economic abuse.

[Clearly Police mathematics isn’t up to much, given if circa 42,000 call-outs are to new situations, against an annual influx of roughly 27,500 women into our population each year, more than just a third must be repeats! Alternatively, a good chunk of their DV call-outs must involve male victims - except they don't exist, do they! And if the true figure of DV incidents is some 630,000 a year, then clearly the vast majority of these potential call-outs must be repeats, as otherwise they’d have attended every household in NZ in just two or three years!]
In the first instance, surely we can reduce the 200,000 plus repeat incidents, by locking up the offenders for a long time? Oh look: an article calling for tougher sentences!

Call for tougher sentences after abuse of Southland baby

(Don’t get me wrong – I am happy to see people who violently assault children locked up for a very long time!) However, most of the DV police refer to must be against adults, as “Child Youth and Family Services … “dealt with 1010 cases of physical abuse involving Maori children for 2005, compared with 613 Pakeha cases and 451 Pacific Island cases”, or a little over 2,000 cases of (physical) child abuse last year.

Maori babies most at risk, say figures

Either that (i.e. most victims are adult), or CYFs is seriously lacking something if they have yet to tap into that vast resource of physically abused children that logic tells us must surely make up a substantial chunk of the Police’s estimated 630,000 annual incidents of DV.
Now we all know that prevention is better than cure, and we have all heard about the ‘cycle of violence’, whereby if you smack a child, they will grow up to be violent. [That is, if you hit a male child, he will grow up to be a wife-beater, because evidently women are not violent, even though surely girls also are periodically smacked as babies].

So what are we doing to break the cycle? Well first we must undertake a study. This is fundamental to any good socialist government, whereby we can pay some poor down and out (feminist) organisation to document what commonsense already tells us anyway! This is already in hand, with plans afoot to study adults who were abused as children. [Here’s my bet – they all suffer from self esteem problems that can only be resolved through free counselling, and lump sum ACC payouts].

Abused children studied as adults

Once we ‘know’ the long-term effect of violence on child victims (the anti-smacking lobby already know the effect – they grow up violent!), we can focus on those who are still children, watching them for the earliest signs of violent tendencies, so that we can ‘cure’ them.

Catch criminals before they’re 10 – academic

“A leading educator believes you can spot the country’s future criminals at five years of age and is helping teachers pick them out in classrooms”. “Dr John Church, of Canterbury University’s School of Education, said the best crime prevention strategy was targeting children with antisocial behaviour when they were as young as five“. “Antisocial behaviour in young children included disobeying requests, continuing with naughty behaviour after being reprimanded, blaming others, tantrums, sulking, insulting others, exaggerating and violent behaviour”. [Hands up parents who have ever had a child refuse to do anything; blame others; sulk; tantrum; insult; exaggerate, etc. You are now officially raising the antisocial criminals of tomorrow!]

But how to identify these infant pre-criminals? Surely us violent parents ourselves can’t be trusted to monitor and report anti-social symptoms in their own children; it has to be an external agency. But CYFs can’t respond until there is a report of violence. Who then? I know! Early child-care teachers!

Boost to get qualified early childhood teachers

OK; this article doesn’t suggest teacher-monitoring just yet; but give it time – it will happen. After all, who better to monitor our children, given so many now spend more ‘awake’ time in childcare than they do with their own families? There was a report last week that something like 1 in 8 or 9 children are in pretty-well full-time child-care by the age of 1. [Actually, there was a nice photo under the ‘Education’ section, a primary-school teacher with her arm clearly around one, possibly two, young female pupils. What if the teacher was male?]

However this may not be sufficient; we also need incentives for our kindly neighbours to earn a free fish and chip meal by dobbing us child abusers in every time our children refuse to do anything; blame others; sulk; tantrum; insult; exaggerate, etc.

Dob in abusers, get a reward

“Hamilton child advocacy agency Parentline may offer rewards to encourage people to report child abuse, according to chief executive Maxine Hodgson“. “Ms Hodgson suggested “a fish and chip voucher” may make the difference in encouraging people who know of abuse to come forward.

I could go on, but you see it is all so simple. The Sisterhood ‘know’ we (men) are all violent. The Police ‘know’ only 10% of DV incidents are attended. Academics ‘know’ our children are anti-socialites in waiting. They just haven’t caught us yet!

But they can catch us with ‘dob in a neighbour’ schemes (‘Hello – is that CYFs? The girl next door just insulted me – I think her father is abusing her!’) Through the maternal vigilance of our pre-school teachers, they can not only identify our pre-criminal anti-social children, but also through them, further knobble us violent fathers (‘Hello – is that CYFs? Little Janey is sulking – I think her father is abusing her!’) Bring on the Section 59 repeal – a single smack will confirm you’re violent!

This article is very brief; as you know, I could go on, but I have elected to keep this one brief. Any vacancies in Korea, Stephen?