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August 28, 2015
CYFs are failing children and many are Maori kids
Waatea Team
Posted On August 28, 2015
CYFs are failing children and many are Maori kids
MARTYN BRADBURY
The latest report into the nightmare of CYFs have shown that many children are being abused in state care and that there is no evidence that they are safer inside State care than outside it.
Social Development Minister Anne Tolley says, "If the state takes them into their care then they have the responsibility to make sure those kids live better lives and I don't see the evidence and the Children's Commissioner report doesn't see the evidence that this is happening,"
How on earth, after the billions pumped into CYFs has this been allowed to happen? For children to be no better off than when they are left alone in abuse is an indictment of the worst kind.
So why has this been allowed to happen?
Maori are half the total families transacted through CYF care and protection processes yet there is very little to suggest the Government takes on board the wider social factors that degrade Maori families and communities.
Poverty and a lack of political muscle or voice means those who are worst damaged by these factors are not listened to. Government's are more focused on listening to voters with property values than those who have little. If this type of state interaction was occurring to the middle class, all hell would be breaking loose, because it's focused on the weakest members of society, we get little in terms of genuine reform.
The truly terrible part of this is that National will use this underfunded and broken system to argue for privatisation of social services. We can see inside the mutated situation within Serco how profit warps responsibilities.
This meltdown in CYFs requires more than privatisation, it requires an agency who are more focused on supporting the family the child is being damaged in and a properly funded downstream service that can protect the child being removed.
What we have now is an agency that is deeply mistrusted by many it is supposed to be helping that has no ability to protect the children it does remove.
Martyn Bradbury
Editor – TheDailyBlog.co.nz
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