The release of the White Paper, outlining government plans for protecting vulnerable children has much to commend and lament. Many of the initiatives mentioned already have parallels and much of what is proposed has been talked about for years but never acted on. There are blind spots in the paper that show opportunities missed.
Having worked on the development of a national network of multi-disciplinary mortality review groups (there is now one in every DHB) that examine the circumstances around the deaths of children and young people, it is clear that joining the dots is critical to reducing violence and abuse. Mortality review is hindsight mixed with learning for the future. One of the key frustrations of working in this field was when systems failed to recognise risks, then missed opportunities to work together. The mortality review process gathers an overview of the factors. One organisation might know issue A, B and C. Another might have concerns about issues F and G with a third agency knowing about X, Y and Z. Once this background has been brought together, it is possible to join the dots.
If a regional review process can look at death events why not apply the same multi-disciplinary information gathering to those children and young people while they are still alive? The skills and passion already exist within the local Child and Youth Mortality Review Groups.
The notion of a national data base that flags at-risk children and young people has been talked about for years. Every child and young person has an NHI, a unique common identifier within health. Organisations outside health, such as police, CYF, Work and Income, emergency services and Justice use other methods for identifying individuals, usually based on known name and address. This can be confounded by different spellings or families moving to another region. It would seem logical to set up the proposed risk data base using NHI numbers as this is given at birth, for life.
The risk of violence and abuse between peers has been overlooked in the White Paper but surveys of young people show this is a major concern for them. Bullying remains a day-to-day matter for many young people. A few high schools have taken this issue on. Moves have been made to introduce restorative processes where perpetrators face their victims but this can mean that those reporting bullying become targeted and further threatened as "narks".
