DEEMED UNFIT: Authorities have taken Oriwa Kemp's three children. PHOTO/FILE
In a world so hypersensitive about rights, the state's right to take a baby from its mother just hours after birth makes me uneasy.
Oriwa Kemp is apparently unfit to be a mother because seven years ago, when she was 16, she was one in a group of vicious fools who tormented Rotorua toddler Nia Glassie to death.
Kemp has since given birth to three children, all taken from her. She says she wants to have more, in which case the gloomy scenario will probably be repeated. Are we comfortable with this?
Kemp is not alone. In the 2012-13 year 470 babies were taken into care either at birth, or before they were six months old. There will be good reasons. Their mothers may be hopelessly drug and/or alcohol-addled, mad, living with violent partners, or the babies may be victims of abuse. But we need to know more about cases like Kemp's, surely, because the practice is disquieting, and we won't get to, because CYF will cite privacy law. So who is CYF accountable to, and who challenges their decisions?
It's a safe bet that Kemp won't. The retired judge who freed her from jail has described a tragic family background that gave her only the dimmest chance of growing up unscathed.
Barry Lovegrove was convenor of the parole board panel that freed Kemp. He admits she's bound to fall back into her "awful" family background because it's all she knows, but he draws the line at sterilizing women (never men, I've noticed) like her. That's the solution Garth McVicar of the Sensible Sentencing Trust has suggested. To sweeten the pill he says she could be paid to have the operation.
We do this with pets, after all, so why is a woman any different? That's where the trust is heading with this reasoning. And who's next: the mentally impaired, the incurably mad, physically disabled people, inconvenient rebels? Talk is cheap, and history tells us it easily leads to evils even greater than torturing a small child. No wonder former Women's Refuge head Merepeka Raukawa-Tait, like the ex-judge, wants no part of it.
"I really don't want to live in a country that goes around sterilising people, I'd far rather we did as much as possible to change attitudes," Lovegrove says. And there things get interesting, not necessarily in a good way, because attitudes are hard to change, though babies are easily uplifted.
In 2008, after CYF was criticised for its handling of a string of child abuse deaths, and in the wake of the deaths of the Kahui twins in 2006, it more than doubled the number of babies it took from mothers in the next twelve months.
Rather than attributing this to the public outcry at the time, or even possible political interference, CYF said the sudden rise was due to more druggie parents having kids, and better cooperation with police. An expectant mother seen as unfit is now twice as likely to be reported than in 2008, which may be a good thing for CYF statistics, but we need to know what process is involved, and if parents, who may turn their lives around, can ever get them back.
Kemp's case evokes the unmarried mothers of the past, forced to give up babies for adoption at a time when single mothers were nastily stigmatised. They often bore another child within a year or two, presumably out of grief.
As for our new values, in Porirua a solo father was recently charged with smacking his son, and hitting him around the legs with a wooden spoon. He got five months' home detention and 200 hours of community work for doing no more than my mother and others regularly did, with impunity. Would foster parents, or a nice church-run children's home, have been any gentler? The threat of Child Welfare taking us away hung over our naughty heads in those dark days, and we now know there were more ingenious ways to traumatise defenceless kids.
Rosemary McLeod is a New Zealand writer, journalist, cartoonist and columnist.