STATISTICS

120 cases of child abuse every day? Pull the other one

If 120 children are the victims of genuine child abuse every day of the year in New Zealand, I'll eat my hat. And if one in 10 New Zealand high school children indulges in self-mutilation, then I'll eat my shoes as well. I am heartily sick of being belaboured with figures day in and day out, often designated “new research” and prepared by so-called “experts”, which are bereft of any detailed explanation and thus of any means of verification.

In the case of the child abuse figures trumpeted last week — 43,414 cases in the past 12 months — the operative word seems to be “suspected”, as in “the number of suspected child abuse cases has soared to a new high ... ”

And that's simply not good enough. In fact, it's probably downright dishonest.

What, for instance, constitutes a “suspected child abuse” complaint. Is it a call to Child, Youth and Family from a disaffected child whose father or mother has just delivered a swift belt on the backside or cuff on the ear? Or who has been grounded for persistent disobedience?
Is it a call from a nosy anti-smacking neighbour who has just seen a parent next door whack a kid for doing something dangerous and against which he or she has been warned?

In view of CYF backlogs, how many are repeat calls?

Is it a call from a man or a woman involved in a bitter matrimonial dispute who is doing his or her damnedest to punish the former partner by using children as a weapon?
To what extent are these figures being created and used to justify the incompetence of CYF and its long waiting lists and obtain for it even more staff and funding?
Just how many of these complaints relate to physical, mental or emotional mistreatment causing a degree of trauma to a child which a reasonable New Zealander would consider constitutes child abuse?

What staggers me is that no one asks these questions, particularly the journalists who write the articles which inform us of these apparently horrendous blots on the escutcheon of our nation. They seem to take as gospel that which they are fed by politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, academics, health professionals, social workers, educationists and even lobby groups - all of whom generally have some sort of axe to grind — without insisting that the purveyors of all these so-called facts and figures justify them in meticulous detail.
We are entitled to that, surely, and it is certainly the job of the media — our eyes and ears — to provide it for us.

But these figures, and others like them, seem to be accepted at face value by just about everyone. Our front-page lead last Thursday, under big, black headlines and complete with big, red figures, reported the reaction of politicians of all stripes — and not one of them questioned the veracity of the child abuse statistics provided.

Do we really believe that this fair country of ours is one of the worst in the world for reported child abuse? That we have a child death rate 13 times greater than the best rate — that of Spain? That we are one of only four countries in the world in which child death rates from maltreatment have increased since the 1970s?

I don't — and nor will I until I see information which gives us in specific detail the nature of this so-called abuse, the means by which (and by whom) complaints were communicated to authorities, the action which had to be taken to deal with it, and the final outcome of such intervention.

A day earlier we were treated to an article which quoted an “expert” as saying that one in 10 high school students deliberately mutilated their bodies. Yet later in the article we are told that the Christchurch medical psychologist who had come up with this figure based it on the fact that 20 per cent of 195 patients being treated for depression in the past 10 years reported having mutilated themselves. Quite how that translates to one in 10 high school students, most of whom I'm sure don't suffer from clinical depression, I can't quite figure.

Nor, it seems, can Professor Peter Joyce. “We know very little about it, about why it happens or doesn't happen,” he said.

However, in this case we do get an idea of what constitutes self-mutilation, which is injuring oneself without suicidal intent. It includes skin-cutting, head-banging, self-burning and biting and inserting and swallowing sharp objects. How many high school kids do you know who do any of those things? I presume the professor's one in 10 does not include those teenagers who indulge in ear rings, eyebrow rings, nose rings, lip rings, navel rings, penis rings, vaginal rings et al, all of which could be construed as self-mutilation. But you can't blame teens for that. Reports this week indicate that adults are into self-mutilation in a big way since plastic surgeons are buying bigger wallets as they report waiting lists getting longer and longer for breast enlargements and reductions, nose jobs and all sorts of other nips and tucks intended to change (with a knife) what genes provided.

Now that's really self-mutilation. Just take a look a Michael Jackson.

Garth George
23 July 2004

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3579597&thesection=news&thesubsection=dialogue

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