{"id":596,"date":"2007-07-30T00:00:10","date_gmt":"2007-07-30T00:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=596"},"modified":"2007-07-30T00:00:10","modified_gmt":"2007-07-30T00:00:10","slug":"nia-glassie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=596","title":{"rendered":"Nia Glassie"},"content":{"rendered":"

One year on from the sad story of the abused and murdered infant Kahui twins<\/a>, New Zealand’s news headlines are covered with another story of sickening abuse of a defenceless child, this time three-year old Nia Glassie<\/a> who was, among other atrocities, apparently put in a clothes dryer and hung on a clothesline for the amusement of her teenage minders.
\nAnd 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.)
\nAgain, 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.
\nHorrible 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.
\nIt won’t be pretty. Again.
\n—
\nEDIT (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<\/a> and this post<\/a>, both from a few days later, for more on Nia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Nia Glassie<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mediawatch"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-9C","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}