Tapu Misa: Interfering busybodies may become society's salvation

It's hard to disagree with the Maori Party MP Hone Harawira when he rails against foul-minded state snooping and ethnic targeting gone mad, especially when he puts it in such forceful terms.

Indeed, what right-thinking liberal wouldn't be allergic to the idea of at-risk children being identified at birth, so they could be tracked through their formative years by snooping, interfering government agencies?

On the face of it, researcher Kaye McLaren's idea of identifying potential criminals at birth does sound very Minority Report (the movie in which would-be criminals are arrested before they've committed their crimes).

In a paper called 35 Steps to Reducing Prison Populations, presented last month to a taskforce set up by the Minister of Justice to reduce crime and our burgeoning prison population, McLaren suggests new mothers be surveyed in hospital, and those identified as at risk should go on a database, where they would be singled out for attention from government departments. The idea is that they and their children would be targeted for help before they get into trouble.

But Harawira characterises this form of state intervention as spying and racial profiling. "Maori are already over-represented in arrest, court and prison statistics," he says, "so you can guarantee they are the ones that will be targeted by this big-brother plan."

There'd be "more snooping, and more invasion of already over-snooped Maori homes. Maori families will be stigmatised, Maori parents will react badly to the presence of more social police, and Maori mums will do a runner rather than put up with this foul-minded state snooping".

"Can't anyone see that the snoop tactics don't work?"

Put like that, I can see how wrong it would be for the state, or anyone else, to butt into the affairs of people whose profiles might scream: "Help me, please." God forbid we should interfere in the lives of people who plainly need it most.

Maybe I have been in the company of too many do-gooders and social workers who are interfering busybodies by nature that I've been inclined to see the often desperate and helpless people they help as strangely eager, even grateful, for their interference.

Or maybe, because I know how good it feels to get a helping hand, I think McLaren's suggestion deserves more than a knee-jerk dismissal.

What she's suggesting is a mechanism to track the small group who, countless studies have shown, are most at risk of having children who end up in prison. They're poor, minimally educated, have drug and alcohol problems, perhaps mental illness, and a history of childhood neglect or abuse.

Their children are the ones most at risk of not making it past their childhood. Many of those who survive their childhoods grow up to be prime candidates for serious criminal offending.

McLaren's idea aims to keep them out of prison by providing "the most effective prevention or treatment possible at the earliest stage possible". Her suggestion is not far removed from the database proposed by Childrens Commissioner Cindy Kiro, in which every child born would be tracked from birth to adulthood.

Is this too interfering? Harawira isn't the only one who thinks so, but for most social workers, this isn't an academic question. Every time a child dies under CYF's watch, we blame them for not interfering enough.

It isn't easy to keep a respectful distance and still be close enough to help.

Poor families need the connection to other people more than they might need a telephone. In an ideal world, they'd get that connection from extended family and friends and neighbours. In the world they inhabit, that precious link falls to the overworked social worker with the impossible caseload.

A small window of opportunity can make a difference to a child's life. Timing is everything, says child expert Dr Bruce Perry, a senior fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy in the United States. By the age of 3, when the human brain has developed to 90 per cent of adult size, most of the systems "responsible for all future emotional, behavioural, social and physiological functioning during the rest of life" are already in place.

Studies show that children who come from environments of early and chronic neglect have smaller brains than those of the average child. By age 2, neglected children are angrier, easily frustrated, and less capable of problem solving. By age 4, they demonstrate decreased impulse control, decreased problem-solving and lower self-esteem. By the teenage years, many are on a trajectory leading directly to prison.

Children need more people in their lives. Perry says children living in hunter-gatherer bands or extended families or close-knit communities are more able to be empathetic, to share, to invest in the welfare of their community.

And it's safer than the isolation of a dysfunctional nuclear unit. The Pacific Island Families study (PIF) which looks at the childhood experiences of Pacific Island mothers, notes that the dispersed pattern of childraising in traditional Pacific societies, where the child was a product of the village and the responsibility of all the community, is thought to have acted as a safety valve to physical punishment. Other community members intervened if there was a danger of over-hitting, and erring children could stay with other family members until their parents anger had subsided.

In his series, Warriors Still, Herald reporter Simon Collins found that many of our poorest people inhabit narrow worlds with limited horizons.

It takes a fair bit of interference to get them on track, from do-gooders like Lesley Max, of Great Potentials Foundation, who have no qualms about wading in where others fear to tread. Max's HIPPY programme teaches socially disconnected parents skills that the well-connected take for granted, then encourages them to share their knowledge with others.

If she's an interfering busybody, more power to her.