UNICEF on Nia Glassie

Rounding out what has become a short series on how the Nia Glassie abuse case has been reported in the Dom Post, today’s (Thursday’s) paper carried a piece by Barbara Lambourn of UNICEF NZ. It’s good stuff.
First, as I was first moved to comment by Michael Laws’ comments about the ethnic (Maori) angle to the story, I can quote with satisfaction Lambourn’s paragraph on the subject:

Maori whanau feature disproportionately in child abuse and the experience of other indigenous cultures around the world shows a link to the underlying causes – dysfunction related to poverty, alienation and deprivation, not ethnicity.

Exactly. And, fittingly, Lambourn doesn’t feel she needs to say any more about that and gets into the meat of things. She has two main themes:
(1) the horrible and shameful prevalence in NZ of violence towards children inflicted within the family gives us a collective responsibility to engage with our community. “Simple, old-fashioned neighbourly concern can do wonders – like an offer of help to a stressed parent, or a suggestion about community support… How to ask the right questions at the right time in a supportive way is something we all need to learn.”
(2) the NZ government has a similar responsibility – to get past political point-scoring and settle on a cross-party commitment to resource communities adequately and pursue actions and strategies that we know can help matters.
She makes it sound simple, and in some ways it is, but in others it isn’t. Deeply dysfunctional families can be completely resistant to any amount of neighbourly concern, for example. That said, the society that would result from fully enacting just these two suggestions would make such deeply dysfunctional families less likely to develop in the first place.
Nevertheless, it’s the best piece of writing I’ve seen about this deeply sickening trail of events. I hope people in the Beehive were reading their Dom Post this morning.
(Additional point of note: Lambourn’s article refers to the repeal of Section 59 of the crimes act, the so-called “anti-smacking bill”, a “triumph for child protection”. Hear, hear.)
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Friday linky of note: the return of the greatest anthology comic of them all, Dark Horse Presents, as a MySpace page featuring fresh new comics free every month. First issue includes a strip written by your friend and mine Mr Joss Whedon, and to make old DHP-heads like me feel at home there’s even a Rick Geary two-pager.
Did I say it was free? It’s free. Skive off work for ten minutes and read some comics.
(No idea yet what kind of revenue model Dark Horse are on for this. The big comics companies have been stressing for the last year about the inevitable big move to digital delivery, because they haven’t yet worked out how to make money from it. This launch just makes things more confusing in that regard.)
Other Friday linky: the truth about man’s intuition (the little known counterpart to woman’s intuition); the AV Club interviews Bret from the Conchords; Monbiot attacks the false comforts of Green consumerism; and Andrew Rilstone devotes an entire blog entry to dig deep into the question, Is J.K. Rowling actually any good.

Whatever happened to Arbor Day?

June 5 is when NZ marks Arbor Day.
I remember very clearly that as a child this was an important day in the calendar. Arbor Day! The day on which some people plant trees!
My question, then: has Arbor Day faded in prominence, or is it just that Arbor Day is a schoolkid thing?
(And if it has faded in prominence, isn’t it about time it was unfaded?)
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I am marking assignments. Michelle today accused me of being a teacher. My protests sounded hollow even to me. And for the record, I am kinda ashamed about not seeing any film fest movies. It has not been a good movie-going month for me.

Flem Fistival Reviews

Well, the wonderful Wellington Film Festival is in full swing here, with enormous numbers of incredible films drawn from all around the world. So here are my reviews of the two I’ve seen, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and Knocked Up.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was a British film (with American funding) about a troubled young wizard and his struggles against a repressive regime at his wizard school. For about ten minutes. Then it was about something else. Then it was about something else. The film never settled down into one narrative, constantly rushing off to the next plot-sequence in a way that never quite added up. There were wonderful bits aplenty, but the comings and goings of so many minor characters made it difficult to settle into the film. Adapting a lengthy and incident-driven novel into a film is a challenge, and this effort didn’t quite manage it. Still, like that other Festival mainstay Michael Apted’s Up series, there is pleasure to be garnered simply from watching the actors grow up on screen across the series of films.
Knocked Up was a shaggy comedy from the USA, about an overgrown layabout and a bright young thing with a career who find themselves facing adulthood when she falls pregnant to him after a one-night-stand. It’s a sincere and engaging film, although it loses many points for a startling lack of chemistry between the two leads (both of whom are very good, but there is no spark between them at all). Lighter on the laughs than I was expecting but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.
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The Nia Glassie abuse coverage took a turn for the unexpected today. The Dom Post made it eight paragraphs past its “SHAME” headline before it mentioned the word Maori, showing a restraint that surprised me.
Likewise, the Dom Post editorial took a useful tone saying that even though recent high-profile child abuse incidents have involved Maori, “child abuse is not a Maori-only problem”.
Of course, it squandered my goodwill a couple lines later by saying “For all the talk of the caring nature and superiority of the whanau approach over the supposed sterility of the Pakeha nuclear family, abuse is higher among Maori”, which implied an unlikely causality between family structure and abuse, and did so by inventing a cultural competition of which Pakeha are the winners.
And of course, down in the list of solutions to end the editorial was that old reliable: “What is needed is… the Government to accept that, for some, welfare payments are not the whole answer…”

My First Lecture

Today I gave my first lecture. It was to a class of about 150 students, on the social psychology of groups, with a particular focus on the fairly well-known Robbers Cave experiment.
The lecture was not of my design – I was delivering one of Jim’s, but I had the opportunity to make it my own beforehand, and did so, making many significant changes to the powerpoint slides and building my own presentation around them. It helped that it’s quite a fun lecture – the Robbers Cave study involved rambunctious 12-year old boys raiding each others’ campsites and fighting snakes, so it holds the attention well.
It went fine. I was a bit nervy at the start but settled down pretty fast, and was completely comfortable by the second half. Somehow or other I got it to run exactly to time, as well, which was quite remarkable.
So, how about that. If you’d told me this time last year I would be giving a lecture now, I would have thought it quite unlikely. Just goes to show how much I know where I’m going with my life, what what?
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Headline, page 3 of the Dom Post Monday: “Maori shame at abuse of toddler”. Highlighted quote: Maori have turned into “the most ugliest (sic) and violent people ever”. (That noted, I was surprised to find myself agreeing with the director of NZ’s Family First organisation, who called for “a non-political commission of inquiry into child abuse, increased support for parenting groups and community organisations working with at-risk families”.)

Nia Glassie

One year on from the sad story of the abused and murdered infant Kahui twins, New Zealand’s news headlines are covered with another story of sickening abuse of a defenceless child, this time three-year old Nia Glassie who was, among other atrocities, apparently put in a clothes dryer and hung on a clothesline for the amusement of her teenage minders.
And yes, again a Maori family is involved. Michael Laws in his column asked why no-one had to guess the ethnicity of the family when the basic facts first hit the news, to which I can only reply that I certainly hadn’t assumed anything of the sort. But, it must be conceded, Laws’ assumptions were proved correct. Once again, all Maori find themselves on trial. Once again, the talkback radio waves will be full of deeply unpleasant condemnations of the “sickness inside Maori culture”, and accusations that this sickness is “sheltered by the political correctness of our liberal society”. (Both quotes are paraphrases from memory of Laws’ column.)
Again, Pita Sharples of the Maori party will have his work cut out for him as the token Voice Of The Maori People in the media, trying to put this in context. Again, it will be hard to get his points about structures of deprivation across in a soundbite media talking to a population unaccustomed to such analysis.
Horrible acts have been committed, and the more I find out about them the more bewildered I become – how could a mother allow her daughter to be treated so? How could any of these teenagers be so persistently violent and callous? – but I fear these questions will be lost in the coming storm of blame at the Maori minority group.
It won’t be pretty. Again.
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EDIT (14 August): this post continues to pull a lot of traffic, including from a lot of schoolkids who are concerned about what happened to Nia. I should make clear that in this post I tried to say that blame should not be put on Maori people. I disagree very strongly with Michael Laws. You might want to look also at this post and this post, both from a few days later, for more on Nia.

Daffydmas

I can feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes
Daffydmas is all around me, And so the feeling grows…
It’s that time of year again… Today, 29 July, is the traditional date on which members of the Church of Daffyd celebrate the birth of Daffyd.
This year I have chosen to mark the celebration by sitting at home with a cold, and watching Bill Nighy kick ass in Love Actually with Cal.
Keep rocking until the break of dawn, oh mighty one. Happy goddamn birthday.
And if you really love Daffydmas, come on and let it snow…
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[David is the originator and host of the additiverich blog collective as well as being a deity]

Workers Win

It is with great satisfaction that I note the success of the hospital cleaner’s action in the face of a lockout. They have won a wage increase to a starting wage of $14.75 an hour, which is much more fair for their hard and essential work. It’s an enormous increase, $3, which only shows how much these vulnerable workers have been allowed to lag behind.
More promising still is the expected flow-on increases to pay rates for other low-wage employment. This all makes me much happier. While we are not a wealthy society, we are certainly not a poor one, and the number of people scraping by at the bottom of the wage scale has always been troubling.
Well done to all those involved!
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Just got a text from Cal, who is en route back to Wellington. This makes me very happy indeed. Hurrah.

Losses All Over

NZ vs Aussie netball: loss.
NZ vs Venezuala basketball: loss.
My team vs. some other team basketball: loss.
Not that I’m downhearted, but it would have been nice to get one of those three in the W column…

My Bloglings

D3vo likes to refer to his network of online scribblers as his “bloglings”. Well, neat. Here are some of my bloglings getting some long-overdue shouting-outing:

And I’d link to more bloglings but it is time for basketball! Gotta run…