KEY POINTS:
Spinning a toddler in a tumble drier is a new low but the script of abuse is old and tired. Dr Ian Hassall has seen it, read it, heard it before.
In 40 years of diagnosing, treating, researching and lobbying on child abuse, the paediatrician turned child advocate,
and now children and public policy lecturer, long ago moved through the stages many of us still go through every time there is a horror story about the latest child to be beaten and tortured.
He thinks he has some answers, most of them common sense. But he says a commitment is needed from everyone, from the pro-smackers who think they are great parents, and many of whom may well be, to the politicians who fund bits and pieces but are not committed to a whole picture.
Hassall sits in his office at the Auckland University of Technology, his bookshelves brimming with reports on children. His answers are lengthy and considered.
'You know what I'm like," smiles the grandfather of five who was the country's first Commissioner for Children. "I'm a fanatic basically, an evangelist."
He is also, despite the horror of Nia Glassie's case, cautiously optimistic.
The first stage you go through when confronted with such abuse, he says, is disbelief. Next comes anger then often a disowning of the problem. This is distancing of yourself from the abuse, saying that it happened because the perpetrators are poor, or because they're Maori.
A fourth stage is a feeling that you can't do anything so you might as well forget about it. But then you break through to a stage where you start thinking about what can be done.
Not just individuals but societies go through these levels, Hassall believes. There are plenty who are still at the disowning stage but what heartens Hassall about the current debate is that this time society is focusing more on what can be done.
It isn't easy to address the complex issues that have led to so many New Zealand children being beaten to death, or almost to death.
Hassall has been at the "how do you stop this" stage since the 1970s. As a specialist paediatrician he learnt to distinguish the signs of child abuse: the broken femurs, the duodenal tears, the liver lacerations, the pattern burns, punch marks and cigarette burns.
He went through the disbelief and anger stages and while many of us now grapple with what can be done, Hassall says we already know.
On a broad level we need, and Hassall has been saying so for many years, to improve the status of children in New Zealand so they are taken as seriously as a policy issue as are the economy or agriculture.
On a practical and immediate level, more money and support needs to be invested in the community programmes that teach people how to parent. He calls this a "reinstatement of parenthood," and it must done in such a way the people at the bottom of the heap are reached.
This is the common sense. But Hassall says it is also time to look more deeply at what lies beneath the abuse. What is it, he asks, that makes us different from countries who do not bash and beat, maim and murder their children?
"I think I've got to the point where I can see it as a whole culture issue. It's not about services and programmes. It's about our behaviour, our attitudes, how we see things."
Despite some optimism he has a deep concern for the parts of society and the people he describes as "outliers."
There is a new emerging callousness or indifference across society, he believes, and not just among some Maori who figure disproportionately in abuse statistics.
Pakeha, too, abuse and are guilty of the casual denigration of children, talking about a child needing a "boot up the bum".
On the other hand, he says, we are not as bad as we are sometimes painted. He goes to a bookcase and pulls out a Unicef report from 2003. The report contains a table of child abuse deaths in rich nations and New Zealand fared badly. We were sixth to bottom out of 27 countries, scraping in above Hungary, France, America, Mexico and Portugal.
At the top, killing the fewest children, were Spain, Greece, Italy, Ireland and Norway.
In five years, we have improved. Our rate has fallen from 1.3 maltreatment deaths for every 100,000 children to 0.9 per 100,000. This brings us to the middle of the table, similar to Germany, Denmark and Australia.
But that's still around 10 children a year and does not count those who do not die.
We need to figure out - with as much gusto as we would to find out what drives the economy - why the top five countries have a better child-rearing culture than ours, says Hassall.
He thinks the top countries have cultures more oriented toward family responsibility. Children go through apprenticeships, he says; they learn to be adults from those around them.
But the transmission of that apprenticeship has been interrupted in New Zealand. We live in small, isolated, mobile families instead of the once larger groups where care of the young was shared.
"All I'm saying is there have been these profound changes in the way family life is organised and you could say some of this mayhem that goes on at the moment is a lack of adaptation to that."
There is no longer a blueprint for how to be parents. When children are put in driers and hung on washing lines, a dehumanisation has occurred. People have become unfamiliar with how to relate to children, regarding them as objects rather than human beings.
But there are other reasons, too, for such disturbing behaviour, and this lies in the field of neurodevelopment.
Research over 20 years clearly shows you develop compassion the same way you develop the ability to walk or talk, says Hassall.
Babies learn by reciprocation of emotion and responses with their caregiver, usually their mother. When she smiles, you smile. You cry and she feeds and comforts you.
"If you get disruption of that, if you get harsh treatment or more importantly, more seriously, neglect, so there's a failure of response, then you fail to develop that model other person, and that stays with you."
The result is not being able to feel for others. Most of us would look at the photo of Nia Glassie and think, "what a cutie". Those without that key neurodevelopment look through blank eyes and see her as an object or a plaything.
Hassall says he is not making excuses but it is important to understand all the reasons. One of the things that protects him - to some extent - against the anger and outrage is realising that often the people who perpetrate abuse were 20 years earlier in the same position. They are the abused child grown up.
"And it makes it a bit of a self-indulgence to lay it all on them and say that's the problem because that then becomes part of the distancing process which is really just a protection rather than a reality."
We need to focus less on endless evaluations of intervention programmes, which we know work, and look more at what underpins abuse, he says.
"We say 'why are we like that?' [after publications such as the Unicef report] and there's only one way of finding that out and that's to say 'what are the different conditions' and directly answer that question.
"We get immersed in our world as if it was the whole world and when something like that publication comes up we say, 'oh my goodness, what are we doing wrong here?' But we don't join the dots."
Who is Ian Hassall?
* As a paediatrician in the 1970s Hassall was a key force behind the setting up of the Child Abuse Prevention Society.
* In 1978 he joined Plunket as a medical director and went on to become involved in the reform of the Child Welfare Act.
* In 1989 he became the country's first Commissioner for Children.
Through the 1990s he was a founder of child advocacy groups, including one called Children's Agenda which 10 years ago called for children to be given the same importance in policy as agriculture or the economy.
* This century, as part of the Every Child Counts campaign, a coalition formed by Barnardos, Plunket, Unicef, Save the Children, and the Institute of Public Policy at AUT, he again called for children and families to be put at the centre of policy and planning.
* He is now a senior lecturer in children and public policy at the Institute of Public Policy at Auckland University of Technology.
