The Southland Times
July 2 2007

A couple more children
Editorial

IF practice makes perfect, the public investigations into the deaths of two children, not 24 hours apart, will be nothing if not diligent. We must be getting good at such sorrowful inquiries by now. The upside of having amassed such a sizeable body of child corpses is that we have a substantial body of expertise, or at least experience, when it comes to the sorrowful task of investigation.

Perhaps we could get more organised and designate a specialist government department to co-ordinate the activities of the most seasoned coroners, cops, lawyers, judges and pathologists. Child murder inquiry as a career speciality certainly has its downsides, but at least it's a growth industry.

By the mid-1970s we had the ninth lowest child homicide rate in the OECD, but between 1980 and 2003 we rose to third highest, on the backs of 69 children.

Anyone game to say how many since then? Start with the easy ones. Kahui times two. Two-year-old Jhia Te Tua, of Wanganui, who would be alive today if only the Mongrel Mob wasn't quite so tough. (A lesson to 2-year-olds everywhere). Charlene Makaza, who was sexually violated first. And what of that tyke up Tauranga way who was savagely beaten with a roll of wallpaper and fed dog faeces first ... no, hang on, he survived his savage, degrading torments. Lucky lad.

The list is so long that dead children -- or at least the ones without memorable names -- are becoming anonymous. You may vividly recall the case of Chris and Cru, Lillybing and Delcilia Witika, but what of James Whakaruru or Craig Manukau? The weekend's additions to the list of cases needing inquiry are the woman who faces a murder charge after the discovery of a newborn baby in Lower Hutt, and the death in hospital of a Tokoroa toddler, hideously burned on Thursday night, was not taken to the medics until the next day. There she died in circumstances so distressing that the medical staff are distraught.

Often the people convicted after child deaths are monstrous and depraved. Not always.

Consider the shy but intelligent Pacific Island student who, fearful of the reproach from her unwed pregnancy while she was on a prestigious scholarship at Otago University, gave birth in a hall of residence toilet and threw her dead baby in a plastic bag from a window in Studholme hall. She was convicted of infanticide, not murder, the distinction being an acceptance by prosecutors that she was so disturbed by childbirth that she could not be held fully responsible. Her conviction will not formally be entered until November, when she is due to complete her degree, and is not expected to be a custodial sentence.

A Child Youth and Family review into our child homicide rate was ordered in 2004. It came out in July last year, by which time the issue had been re-energised by the Kahui killings. It revealed Maori children were most at risk. It also revealed 62 of the 69 children were killed by a parent or person in the position of a parent. It didn't reveal what we should do.

Does the problem, perhaps, have something to do with a generation of inadequate, angry parents who were themselves raised by inadequate, angry parents. How fixable is that? Getting angry at them seems, somehow, inadequate.