When you get an epidemic among a vulnerable group, an effective approach is to inoculate everyone. For the past decade we have had an epidemic of child abuse in New Zealand. One approach we could use is to provide everyone with across-the-board availability of parenting courses.
Currently everyone is offered  registration with a Well Health provider such as Plunket for newborns.  Not everyone takes this up. The good parents tend to meet appointments. The parents of those at risk isolate. I would suggest that anyone who has not met an appointment with Plunket in the first six months of a child’s life gets a couple of mandatory visits from CYFS. No real change here as most infants are seen by Plunket, apart from scooping everybody up in the same net.
Visits from social workers who know the signs of drugs and won’t be fobbed off by bullshit artists. If you have ever dealt with psychopaths or addicts you can “smell” the signs and it is these variety we need to be employing not well meaning “unicorns”, who poop rainbows and farm children out to adults in the same cycle of violence.
Additionally, we need to provide parenting courses for everyone. Enrollment for everyone who has their first child, and link ups for those who fall into the CYF visit check category. We need to be providing ways to make links for mothers in the community; healthy communities are the only solution for our child abuse epidemic. I will post my green paper submission I have been pushing out to the pollies since 2006, ever since I was gutted by the death of the Kahui twins, and before that Coral Burrows. I swore to never let the matter die until I had made my contribution to the welfare of all children in New Zealand.
Thanks for reading.
