Paula Bennett down the wrong track with regards to child abuse [UPDATE]

The National Government is now looking at mandatory reporting of child abuse, where professionals such as doctors, teachers and nurses will have to report suspected child abuse to the Government. This is just horrendous. Every bruise, scratch or other injury will now be looked at as if it might be abuse and reported. How to slide into totalitarianism with the best of intentions.

She says one of the issues being looked at is how to get the right services into households where there are vulnerable children.

"One needs to think about what are other New Zealanders willing to give up so that more resources go into those those sorts of families and into children who need it most. And should we be looking into mandatory reporting of child abuse," she says.

Ms Bennett says another question is how do you track at-risk children.

Child abuse can never be stopped by Government intervention. Going down the road of mandatory reporting, decreased privacy will only increase Government power through services directed at easy targets. The nice middle class family down the road who smack their children will have their lives done over while the single mother with yet another live in boyfriend who bashes the two year old when she makes too much noise will be left well alone. Thus unecessarily traumatising innocent children and their parents while leaving the really at risk to their fates.

The children being born to young women who get pregnant because of sexual promiscuity and exposed to her mulitiple boyfriends along the way are the most at risk, followed by the women who live with uncommitted natural fathers who never expected to be a parent. That's your way of tracking at risk children, that's where Government should be thinking of how they can encourage young people to hold off sex until they find the right person they want to have a family with.

If Government was serious about reducing child abuse, they need to stop enabling it. Make a distinction between married and unmarried parents. Stop funding young women with children to live semi-single lives where uncommitted males temporarily insert themselves into the family. UPDATED to add - And stop killing unborn babies in our nation's hospitals - this is the ultimate in child abuse and the Government is directly involved here. Until sexual libertinism and it's results is tackled, child abuse will continue to get worse, no matter how many Government "services" are deployed into households.

Related link: Reporting child abuse under Govt discussion ~ News Talk ZB