The recent national recruitment campaign to find more CYF caregivers has not succeeded. With children being removed from parents in record numbers, many are being placed with foster parents who are not properly trained, where they get brutally bashed or sexually abused.

It’s a pretty dangerous job in an environment where street-smart kids exploit the fact that there are social workers who think they should “always believe the children”, and that “women and children never lie about abuse”.

Christchurch Family and Foster Care Association chairwoman Pamela Turner said being a foster parent was a “very challenging and stressful job which people needed to think carefully about before becoming involved”.

Turner said caregivers frequently faced allegations from children and young people in their care, which put a lot of stress on the family environment, in addition to dealing with children’s often difficult behaviour.

Even in the Waikato, considered by many to be the spiritual home of radical feminism in NZ, the campaign to find yet more caregivers has been a failure.

At a time when CYF says it is performing better, and therefore finding more children in need of foster care, the support it is getting from the community is not keeping pace.

Hello people! Perhaps if CYF didn’t measure its performance on the basis of how many families it can destroy, this crisis might stop getting bigger. Of course they are loosing support from the community – at least the part of the community who read the newspapers and listen to the news! Likewise, few people with any sense of integrity are able to continue working in an organisation like CYF, based as it is on values and political ideology unsupported by most New Zealanders.

CYF staff has become increasingly dominated by feminist zealots committed to ‘destroying the patriarchy’, backed by a few flunkies who are too ignorant to understand what they are doing, and people unscrupulous enough to think that ten foster kids at $140 a week looks like a good income.

Just like in the days before doctors knew what they were doing, when going to a hospital was one of the biggest risks to health around; being ‘cared for’ by CYF often seems to be one of the most dangerous situations a NZ child can be in.

I accept that there will always be a few situations where a child has to be removed from parents. However, the government then must ensure that enough facilities are available so that they do receive appropriate care, or they are guilty of the same abuse and neglect charges that parents regularly face.

If children were only removed following a ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ conviction of one of the parents, the problem might be somewhat more manageable. While inexperienced, untrained and ideologically motivated CYF workers continue to take children because they believe they have a magical power to predict future abuse, things can only get worse.

Predictably, the feminist response is to demand more money and resources. Brenda Pilott, a Woman’s Refuge activist who was a Dept of Social Welfare executive before moving on to her current position as Public Service Association National Secretary, says social workers need to be “properly supported”:

“… politicians, the media and others currently commenting on it need to be open to the possibility that inadequate systems and processes are just as likely to be at fault as poor social work practice.”