THREE things struck me after landing at Hawke's Bay airport yesterday at the end of a week's family holiday.
1: Air New Zealand had left our luggage in Auckland.
2: There were new carpark ticket machines in the terminal and they were refusing to accept tickets.
3: The headline on page one of
Hawke's Bay Today read "Baby girl hurt as parents battle".
Welcome home?
Well points one and two were aberrations (the luggage arrived on the next flight, thanks Air New Zealand, and the carpark attendant opened the gate for us without any fuss).
Point three, the injuring of another Hawke's Bay child through violence in the home, is, however, no aberration. It was indeed welcome home to a familiar story.
Later, I had the chance to read the story as a newspaper subscriber, rather than an editor involved in putting the page together.
In addition to outlining the fact that a 9-month-old Flaxmere girl was in hospital with serious injuries sustained during a fight between her parents, a sidebar to the article outlined the sorry recent history of deaths and injuries to children in Hawke's Bay.
Beginning with the discovery of the body of 5-year-old Sahara Baker-Koro in her bed in Napier on December 21, 2010, and the death from internal injuries of 5-month-old Mikara Reti, of Flaxmere, at Hawke's Bay Hospital in January, the article also detailed recent instances of domestic assault on children.
It was tough stuff to come home to but it somehow seems futile to write yet more editorials urging families to speak up about violence in the home. The problem continues.
Should we, then, even be publishing reports of these distressing events on our front page?
Disturbing as they are to read, the answer is still 'yes' for surely we are not yet a community so desensitised to attacks on children that we would rather see such reports as a brief in page 3 rather than the page one lead?
Violence against our children leads the news because we remain truly scared, appalled and concerned by it.
