Garth George: We need to end child abuse

Week after week we are confronted in our newspapers with reports of cases or examples of child abuse or neglect, of tens of thousands of kids living in poverty, and every other week we read articles giving advice to parents on what they should do to give their kids a good upbringing.

It's been going on for years and years. There have been green papers and white papers, various consultations, law changes (anti-smacking, for example), sterling efforts by government and small and large private helping agencies - yet nothing has changed.

In fact, poverty, child abuse and neglect and poor parenting are all getting worse with every year that passes if figures published from time to time are any indication. And it's no wonder.

Our uncontrolled economic system has so far done little but make the rich richer and the poor poorer - and sorely afflicted the middle-classes, to which most of us belong, as we are squeezed almost out of existence to pay for both the rich to keep their exorbitant profits up and the poor to be kept alive.

But worst of all it early on created a low-wage economy and thus a society in which both parents have to work to keep afloat. That, more than anything else, has created the problems of child neglect, the results of which we see almost every day.

Parents are so tied up with their jobs in an employers' market that many find it impossible to give their children the physical presence, the guidance, the emotional support that they crave - and desperately need.

As family life has become devalued, child neglect and abuse have, unfortunately, become problems which are now beyond anyone's ability to solve.

Because children who were abused or neglected by their parents are becoming parents themselves - in some sectors of our society a generation is down to 15 years with 30-year-old grandmothers - so the culture of abuse and neglect is all set to pass down through generations to come.

Meanwhile, almost everyone seems to have an opinion on the cause of and answers to this grievous human tragedy - newspaper opinion pieces, radio talkback and letters to the editor columns testify to that.

But it is rare to see or hear anyone put his or her finger on the real cause.

Yet that is quite simple: the cause of the evil of child abuse and neglect, and almost all the other appalling deficiencies our society faces, is immorality.

It is the loosening of the moral strictures that for centuries kept the nuclear family as the principal unit of power in society that have led to its disintegration and thus to all the social problems that were an inevitable result.

The assault on the family began with the loosening of the sanctions against divorce, was given a huge fillip with the arrival of the Pill and took another giant leap forward with the rise of radical feminism.

It deteriorated further with the decriminalisation of abortion and homosexuality - and all that followed and still follows from those decisions - and was dealt a near-fatal blow with the domestic purposes benefit.

Society is in disarray because it is morally bankrupt, and it is morally bankrupt because the power of the family has been virtually destroyed.

And don't think I'm pushing my Christian barrow here. Centuries before Christ was born a Confucian sage wrote these words: "If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world."

I rest my case.