Garth George: We are reaping a bitter harvest

While the Government's green paper on vulnerable children remains open to submissions until the end of next month, another child has died in suspicious circumstances - this time 2-month-old Wanganui triplet Hinekawa Topia.

She is only one of 11 defenceless infants under 5 who have died violently in the past 17 months.

Every one of them brings a raft of emotional hand-wringing and renewed calls for action, but the fact is that child abuse, sometimes fatal, is here to stay.

The same goes for violence against women.

We have brought it on ourselves. We have bowed to the attractions of liberalism, immorality, materialism and hedonism and have put aside most of the moral and ethical rules which for centuries held societies together and kept them from self-destruction.

We have for decades allowed the gradual unravelling of the fabric of our nation through the breakdown of the traditional family unit upon which community cohesion has always depended.

And we have allowed the essential and wondrous differences between men and women to become so blurred that we no longer know whether we're Eve or Steve.

So now we are paying the price. No matter what we try to do, the price will get ever steeper in misery, pain, terror and despair for the victims, and frustration, anger and shame for the nation.

I firmly believe that the number one cause of abuse against women and children is abortion, which we decriminalised 30-odd years ago. The late Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose views are held by hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders and whose logic is indisputable, said this: "The greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion because it is a war against the child - a direct killing of the innocent child - murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?

"The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.

"It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts - a child - as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience.

"Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want ... It is a very great poverty to decide that a child must die that you might live as you wish."

The second major cause of violence against women and children is the belief that women should not just be equal to men, but in all but physical appearance are the same.

This is an illusion: men and women are different not just physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually. And no amount of mind-bending or wishful thinking will ever change the fact that men and women are genetically programmed for different roles.

The assumption by many women of the roles traditionally exclusive to men has left many men in confusion, frustration and anxiety, and more and more are angrily lashing out because they feel under threat.

I find that dreadfully sad.

You can call me a sexist until you're blue in the face, but I believe that God left creating woman until last because he wanted to make sure he got it right. The result was the most perfect and wonderful creature in the world.

There are other reasons for the violence that riddles our society - multiculturalism, greed generating poverty and a growing deprived underclass, television and the internet, for instance. They, too, present insoluble problems.

But the fact is that we are simply reaping what we have sown.

garth.george@hotmail.com