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.