Deborah Coddington: Stop paying abusers to breed

Lisa Kuka failed to protect her daughter, Nia Glassie, from being tortured. Photo / APN

So if we get a Labour government we get a Ministry for Children instead of a Families Commission. Labour's attempt to stop the killing fields, the feral "underbelly of intense violence in our community", as Social Development Minister Paula Bennett calls it.

Even the Minister, with all her experts, has to plead for ideas through a newspaper column. You tell me what to do, she begged, seemingly bereft of new material. You can hardly blame her when others who've worked for years in the field see babies born to names like Cherish and Serenity get carted home to lives of anything but.

Nonetheless, amid news we're on track for a record-breaking year of 6117 child abuse cases, we're showing new Auckland mothers a DVD demonstrating the graphic effects of shaken-baby syndrome.

Nice try, but how about dragging some drop-kick boyfriends in, strapping them to a chair, withholding the methamphetamine for several months and force-feeding childcare lessons into them too?

I appreciate the good intentions behind the making of this DVD, and the mothers who watch it will take it on board, but we all know the main killers of these babies are the next lot of men who swagger into these women's lives. I'm not going to dignify them by calling them stepfathers.

Yes, mothers kill too - "slappers" as my colleague, Kerre Woodham, called them before she was kicked into touch by the activists, poets and feminist collectivist academics who thought she was picking on all women.

They missed the point. When you have children, your whole life changes and you must try to defend your child from harm no matter what. Ross Brighton and Tove Partington, who responded to Kerre's column, argued solo mothers "need all our help to protect themselves and their families".

But they get masses of help. The Kahui twins were born very premature. Taxpayers spent thousands of dollars saving these tiny babies in Middlemore's neonatal unit.

The coroner's inquest was told they thrived, despite the parents' rare visits. Then they were taken home and killed by some person - or people - who have never paid for it.

Brighton and Partington also claim we have "no right to judge a woman for falling pregnant and choosing to keep a child if she wishes to".

First, I hate that phrase "falling pregnant" - babies are made by having sex, not tripping over. Second, when kids are abused - sexually or physically - we damn well do have the right to cast judgment.

It's precisely that feel-good, wishy-washy attitude towards child abusers - that if only we gave them the love they'd pass it on to their children - that's got us to the welfare state we're in.

The scourge of child abuse, they say, can be fought by reassessing "our attitude towards women and the poor". What an insult to poor parents.

Not all in poverty kill or harm their children and throwing money at this problem won't fix it. And if All Black losses cause child abuse, then Brighton and Partington should present empirical evidence before attacking arguments against welfare.

This will win me no friends, but sensible people know one of the steps to take: taxpayers have to stop paying repeat abusers to breed. We know they carry on having kids on the public purse while CYF struggles to cope.

Take the kids away. Three years ago, former Waitakere mayor Bob Harvey was right when he said early childhood intervention "should mean taking serious, drastic and immediate action. When dysfunctional families are spotted - and they are - in hospitals and birthing rooms, we must act."

Do we want to keep on living in a country where children are put into clothes driers on high temperature and tortured to death? When I first wrote features on child abuse, the weapon of choice was a vacuum cleaner pipe; now it's a machete.

We have couples desperate to adopt and give loving, good homes to beautiful babies such as the Kahui twins, Nia Glassie, and Serenity, but they don't get a look-in because they're not close family.

Well, in the worst-case scenarios, these babies should be taken away from their cruel families. As Harvey said, some newborns just shouldn't be allowed to go home.