Child murder rate falls - slightly

'Lillybing' Karatiana-Matiaha was killed in 2000.

New Zealand's child murder rate has improved slightly, but is still the fourth-worst in the developed world.

A long-overdue report by Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS) has found that the number of children under 15 killed by maltreatment fell from 50 in the period 1994-98 to 38 from 1999-2003.

This represented a drop from 1.2 to 0.9 deaths for every 100,000 children, putting New Zealand behind only Mexico, the United States and Hungary out of 27 developed nations.

Maori children died at the rate of 1.5 for every 100,000 and Pakeha children at 0.7 per 100,000, compared with rates of 0.7 in Australia, 0.6 in Japan, 0.4 in Britain and 0.1 in Spain.

The report was originally promised in October 2004, when it was expected to take six to eight months to complete.

Questions were raised about it in Parliament last month after the deaths of 3-month-old twins Chris and Cru Kahui in Mangere.

The final 51-page report is mainly a collection of other published material about factors that put children at risk of maltreatment, and concludes that social work should be targeted at those most at risk.

Babies under a year old are at much higher risk in New Zealand than elsewhere, accounting for 30 per cent of all child deaths from maltreatment here against 24 per cent in other developed countries.

Risk factors for parents are listed as poverty, low education, unemployment, youth, mental illness including drug or alcohol abuse, being the victim of family violence as a child and having a history of offending.

A Dunedin study found that young women who had children before they turned 21 were twice as likely to have been victims of family violence.

Men who fathered children by 21 were more than three times as likely as other men to abuse their partners and the most violent relationships were between young parents.

Another study found that 81 per cent of children killed between 1991 and 2000 were killed by a family member. Of those killed by a parent, 54 per cent were killed by their father or stepfather, 40 per cent by their mother and 6 per cent by both parents.

Mothers were most likely to kill newborn babies. The report comments: "It is likely that their deaths result from a process of 'denial and dissociation', the mothers ... having concealed or not acknowledged their pregnancy."

An Australian study found that 35 per cent of child homicides were in family break-ups where one parent murdered the children and committed suicide. One study found that fathers and mothers were both equally likely to commit murder-suicides, while other studies found that fathers were more likely to commit them.

The report says a new evaluation of the domestic purposes benefit has found that "the most pressing gap" for both children and adults was in mental health services.

"Parents with high health needs such as mental health issues or intellectual or physical disability may require additional support to adequately care for their children," it says. "Currently the extent of these support services is underdeveloped."

National Party associate welfare spokeswoman Anne Tolley said the report was "light on new thinking about strategies to deal with child abuse".

Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia said the report showed that child deaths peaked in the late 1980s and 1990s when unemployment also peaked and benefits were cut.

"It's time for the Government to wake up to the reality of economic violence," she said. "Economic violence is when people are impoverished by being deprived of access to power and resources, putting human dignity at danger."