I’m a solo Dad. My oldest daughter found herself pregnant. I praise the Almighty she lives in another country because she was not able to cope, was placed in a home for solo Mums, learnt life skills, had a really caring boyfriend (she is now married to) and had the support of their family.

I backed her in laws. They are now doing OK. In Canada, the socail welfare system is PC and bossy, but still functions.

But in NZ she would have got a state house and been shoved into the underclass. We bow overmuch to the family. And we do not have the resources we need.

But, right now, we have children in danger; what about them? We can’t remove all at-risk children, as some suggest, because there just ain’t enough places to remove them to.

As usual, we blame Child Youth and Family (me included) but this time I spoke, off the record, to some social workers.

They’re buggered, to put it mildly. Many of them have 30 families on their caseload, some really violent. Social workers are regularly threatened. How can they protect children in this environment? We need more social workers for starters.

Maori social workers confirm it’s mostly Maori mothers and children in danger, with some being severely sexually abused.

If the Government can find money to restore old wharf sheds, it can find money to pay social workers more and recruit teams – trusted people to help CYF supervise at-risk families. Don’t take the babies away – help the mums and boot out the boyfriends.

This week, I attended a reunion at Porirua’s He Huarahi Tamariki, founded years ago by Susan Baragwanath as a school for teenage mums and dads.

I caught up with Helen, who was a struggling school student with two kids when she was cover girl for the 2001 North & South story I wrote on teenage pregnancies.

She’s still with her partner, completing her science masters and begins her PhD next year.

Short term DPB + education + adult supervision = happy ending.

via Deborah Coddington : Time to wake up to reality of child-bashing shame – Government – NZ Herald News.

Child abuse occurs in a context. People are poor, the girls who get pregnant are generally vulnerable to men who like being exploitative. Dads are generally not on the scene — and this is a consequence of decades of family court work alienating decent dads that no one man can do anything about — and this means that the girl does not get her Dad telling the young mongrel not to come around again. Doing his job. Protecting his daughter.

We can alter the context by insisting on education and adult supervision. It is not complicated to say, but it requires a confidence to act in the interests of children, and not in the interests of the multiculti ideology of this day.

And we now lack that final ingredient.