Social workers whose task it is to rescue children from violent or abusive homes have an invidious responsibility. To take a child from the only home it has can be as traumatic as the treatment received at the hands of those who are making the child's life hell. When the wrong decision is made and the consequences are fatal, it is too easy to criticise in hindsight. And too easy to divert blame to social workers when in most cases the real villains are those wretched parents, or so-called caregivers, who batter or abuse a defenceless child.
It is not to excuse those people that reports such as we publish today focus on the failings of the Child, Youth and Family Service. It is, as the service should realise, because the real villains are impervious to appeals. Against their cruelty the community can only cry that somebody must "do something" and CYFS has been set up to do it. Yet the last time the service was criticised in this column, its chief social worker, Mike Doolan, complained that it could not be held responsible for the death of children it has had contact with unless its practices had contributed to the child's fate.
It seems an unfortunate semantic distinction to be raised on a subject such as this. If a child comes to the attention of Mr Doolan's people and they leave it in circumstances where it is killed, its practices in every case ought to be questioned. No doubt Mr Doolan and his senior staff do so in each case. They ought to be even harder upon themselves than the public might be. Each death should bring a critical reappraisal from the service of its decisions and procedure.
In the year to last July there were at least five children known to CYFS who died in violent and probably preventable circumstances. Three were killed by their parents, another by two women, a fifth was stabbed by a teenage friend. CYFS had had responsibility for their care and protection at some stage in the two years before their deaths. There were another 29 deaths, by accident or suicide, of young people who had been at some stage under the eye of CYFS. It was actively involved with 23 at the time they died. It is a sorry toll, and questions must be asked.
Why, for example, did the service fail to rescue little Lisa Hope from the custody of a psychotic father when it had been advised of his deteriorating state and the risk he posed to his children? The service had three months to act on the warning about Ian Hope, who had recently been in a Christchurch psychiatric hospital. He stabbed his daughter the night before she was to return to her mother's care. Mr Doolan has never given a satisfactory public explanation for the failure of his service to act faster.
Then there was the case of Benny Haerewa, who hammered his stepson to death last year because the boy would not call him "Daddy." No wonder he would not. Haerewa had already served a prison term for assaulting him when the child was two years old. At least Mr Doolan concedes in this case that the service could have found out that Haerewa had resumed his relationship with the boy's mother on his release from prison.
Social workers attend to a side of life that most people would rather avoid. But when there are children in these predicaments, common humanity cries out for their rescue. The Child Youth and Family Service is letting too many down.
<i>Editorial</i> - Too many helpless children are dying
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