The uncounted: Aotearoa’s child homicide problem
Thursday, 2 November 2023
Coal face workers trying to bring Aotearoa’s child homicide statistics down to zero are relying on media reports and old or vague figures to measure the problem.
The last time official statistics for global child homicide statistics were released by the OECD was in 2013. They showed that New Zealand children were 50% more likely to die by homicide than Australian children.
The October death of Baby Ru, or Ruthless-Empire, in Lower Hutt forced the issue back into the spotlight. Then came the leaked information from Oranga Tamariki that there had been 57 New Zealand child homicides since the child protection agency came into existence in 2017.
Some recent cases include a 3-month-old baby in Porirua killed in 2018 by her father who was on bail at the time and an Upper Hutt 5-month-old, Lincoln, shaken to death by his step-father William Wakefield who told police “I just wanted to hurt him until he wasn’t there”.
In the South Island, recent cases include 10-month-old CJ White, killed by his father in Hokitika in 2019, and twins Maya and Karla, 2, and their older sister Liané, 6, in Timaru in 2021. Their mother, Lauren Dickason, was found guilty of murder by a jury in August and will be sentenced next month.
Stuff’s Homicide Report, the country’s most comprehensive database of New Zealand murders, shows that Baby Ru was at least the 65th New Zealander aged 17 or younger killed since April 2017. Twenty-four of those were aged 12 months or younger.
Police data up to 2020 lists homicide victims in five-year groups and shows under-15 deaths range from one in 2008 to 16 in 2015.
ACT list MP Karen Chhour’s main goal in government will be child wellbeing but she said she struggled to get official, current child homicide figures from government departments.
She called for key performance indicators (KPIs) for Oranga Tamariki top brass, which they could be held accountable for. These would include better data collection and transparency, as well as reducing child homicide and abuse.
Child protection campaigner Dame Lesley Max, founder and board chair of Great Potentials Foundation, collects reports of child homicide, but the only official statistics she had were the 2013 OECD report and this week’s story Stuff story with leaked OT figures.
The lack of publicly available figures, or an inquiry, or media and political interest suggested people were more interested in issues such as ram raids and youth crime than child homicide, she said.
“The conclusion is it is just not important to New Zealanders, and that is shocking,” she said.
Oranga Tamariki chief executive Chappie Te Kani said part of the organisation’s role was to “monitor and assess the effectiveness of services provided to children” by it and others.
“The way that Oranga Tamariki collects and manages data, and the way we report on the children that come to our attention or in our care needs to change and evolve,” he said. OT could not supply full, current child homicide statistics on Wednesday.
The Ministry of Social Development does not collate child homicide data.
New Chief Children’s Commissioner Claire Achmad said the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child this year urged New Zealand to compile quality data on child deaths, which were a “major problem” in Aotearoa.
She said it was good to see OT was committed to improving and she was optimistic that, if the Govenment was committed to it, the rate of child homicide could reach zero.
Former coroner Garry Evans labelled New Zealand’s child violence numbers as a “blight on our land” that the Government had done little to battle.
“In other countries children are protected and loved and cherished by their families and by wider society and child homicide is virtually unknown,” he said.
He hoped the incoming government would take “firm steps to deal with this besetting problem.
“It simply cannot be allowed to continue.”