In the name of child abuse?
Schools call cops 40 times a week
NZ Herald Mar 02, 2009
Police are being called to schools about 40 times every week of the academic year to deal with behaviour teachers say they cannot handle. Figures issued under the Official Information Act and obtained by Family First NZ show officers were called out an average of 1531 times each year from 1998 to deal with violence, drugs or sex offences. Last year, they were called 1658 times. The number of calls over violent offences jumped 27 per cent in the past decade – from 869 to 1064. The union representing more than 48,000 primary and early childhood teachers and staff, said schoolchildren had become more violent in recent years .
…Bob McCoskrie, national director of the Family First lobby group, said it was time for action to protect students and teachers. “We have forgotten about the rights of law-abiding kids to feel safe, to not have disruption in the classroom, not be intimidated and be free of violence and bullying in the workplace .” Mr McCoskrie said he was concerned schools were discouraged from suspending or standing down their students but encouraged to bring in police officers fulltime . MORE
READ full statistics obtained from the police by Family First NZ under the Official Information Act
READ Family First Media Release from last November, “Schools Failing to Tackle Violence”
See also:
Caning pupils ‘can be effective behaviour control’ (UK)
UK Telegraph 26 February 2009
Behaviour among children has got worse since the cane was abolished, according to UK parents . Government research showed some mothers and fathers believed corporal punishment was an “effective method of control” when they were at school. They said the decision to outlaw physical chastisement contributed to a decline in discipline . The comments – in a study backed by the Department for Children, Schools and Families – come just months after a fifth of teachers called for the cane to be reintroduced to restore order in the classroom. READ MORE
CYF finds fewer cases of abuse
Nelson Mail 02 March 2009
A drop in the number of child abuse cases discovered by Child Youth and Family in Nelson has come as a surprise to Nelson Women’s and Children’s Refuge, but could be a sign that campaigns are having an effect, some agencies say. Statistics released to The Nelson Mail under the Official Information Act show that while CYF is being contacted more often by people or organisations with concerns for children or young people, the agency is uncovering fewer cases of abuse .
Family First Comment : But we’re not surprised!
READ Family First Media Release December 2008 “Explosion in CYF Notifications But Missing Abuse”
When the rate goes up , it’s because of the campaign to stop abuse. When the rate goes down , it’s because of the campaign to stop abuse!!!!
You can’t have it both ways.
The problem is that the rate of notifications is exploding (30% increase in the past year) but the actual child abuse found is decreasing!! The reason? – we have confused the definition of child abuse by including non-abusive smacking. As a result, we are wasting huge amounts of time investigating non-abusive parents and have been distracted from focusing on actual child abuse and dysfunctional homes. And the rate of child abuse deaths continues – tragically.
Interesting that in reporting the steady increase in police call-outs to schools our media appear to avoid mentioning the banning of corporal punishment. In the UK it has taken parents to state the obvious, while the “experts” who led us into the current beautiful new way of living have yet to show some humility in acknowledging their error. Instead, most of them called to extend their failed ideology in the hope that would magically make it successful, when they supported Bradford’s bill illegalising all force by adults in disciplining children. (What most people don’t understand is that now they are breaking the law even by physically forcing an unwilling child to a time-out room; those parents are then at the mercy of police choice to prosecute and/or a judge’s choice to see it as a trivial example.)
When corporal punishment was used, it was very rare for police to be called by schools, while suspensions/expulsions were also quite rare. Of course, other factors are also probably at play in deteriorating school behaviour, such as US gangster fashion and exposure to violent videos and video games. However, our real-life experiment in banning school corporal punishment has failed dismally to support the hypothesis that our children will become less violent if adults stop “modelling violence” through corporal punishment. This evidence of course was carefully avoided by the Bradford bill supporters, among their numerous omissions and lies.
The result of banning school corporal punishment has been to increase demands on police to intervene in our schools and in managing our children’s behaviour. The same is happening now in society generally since parents were disempowered by Bradford. For the current approach to work (i.e. to manage and discipline children’s behaviour effectively) would require impossible increases in police numbers, but perhaps this is the ulterior motive of power-hungry governments who have colluded with the anti-punishment lobby.
Another matter ignored by the anti-punishment lobby is that the alternative coping responses available to schools, i.e. suspensions and expulsions, are much more violent than corporal punishment was. To remove a child from his/her peers and secure routines, and to define a child as too unacceptable to remain within a normal social process, is likely to cause much more profound damage to that child’s self-view, confidence and sense of social belonging than brief corporal punishment ever did. Schools previously were able to keep unruly pupils in the fold through the threat of corporal punishment, now they have to reject such pupils in great numbers.
Comment by Hans Laven — Sun 8th March 2009 @ 10:59 am
300,000 de~fathered kids.
A culture which normalizes such by using the oxymoronic term solo parent family.
The criminalizing of corporal punishment.
It’s no wonder so many school kids are going off the rails.
Bunker down NZ.
It’s recession time.
Parents will be even more preoccupied and rendered ineffective.
Here comes the next wave of Juvenile criminality.
Comment by skeptik — Sun 8th March 2009 @ 2:24 pm
The fatherless generation creates a cycle of negative outcomes. My view is that NZ has the society it has fostered. Any time I read a discussion about delinquent children and similar ills of society I check to see if there is any mention of fathering. In 99.999% of cases there is not. In other words there is no effort to even create the dots let alone connect them together. The result of this blindness is that the issues of fatherlessness almost never get discussed.
$100 says over 80% of the police calls to schools are due to the behaiour of a fatherless child. I base that figure on longditudinal studies of outcomes for children so I can expect it to be accurate enough for my money to be safe.
Do you think anyone tracks this statistic?
If police are called to a school to deal with a child surely that child is heading off the rails? Shouldn’t kown risk factors of a child obviously going off the rails be at least recorded for statistical reasons?
Instead in NZ what we have is a law making smacking a crime.
Comment by Dave — Tue 10th March 2009 @ 5:15 pm