I am an old social worker. I worked in direct practice in the messy world of child protection in Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ) for 20 years before beginning work as an academic in 2005.
I have spent much of my time since then trying to teach students something about the communication skills needed to do this challenging work well. In more recent years my attention has turned to the social and political context within which modern child protection systems have been constructed.
In ANZ, notifications to the child protection system, entry into state care (and the complex Monopoly game variables in between) are marked by class, race and gender. My forthcoming book, A Political History of Child Protection – Lessons for Reform from Aotearoa-New Zealand examines the history of inequality and the social Darwinist echoes within the modern child protection project. Efforts to classify and categorise the threatening poor as targets for rehabilitation or exclusion can be traced back to the work of Charles Booth and his sprawling study of poverty in Victorian London.
The colonial experience of Aotearoa adds a unique dimension to this narrative. For Māori, colonisation has meant the imposition of the liberal tradition of private property and individual responsibility upon a communal people. This process has encountered continuous and complex resistance. The fraught field of child welfare is no exception.
There is an extensive history of attempts to forge state-Māori alliances for service delivery (for example O’Malley, 1998 and Harris, 2007). Ultimate authority is routinely retained by the state in such arrangements, and Māori ways of approaching and understanding care roles, responsibilities and obligations tend to be selectively appropriated and grafted on to existing Pākehā ‘professional’ systems of knowledge and procedure, as and when they are seen to be useful. It is unsurprising that the long-run track record of these hybrid models is less than ideal. It is also unsurprising that Māori continue to call for autonomous service development.
While approximately 20–25 per cent of the current child population in ANZ are of Māori ethnicity, the percentage of Māori children in state care is around 60 per cent. Race- and class-centred disproportionality is a problem for Anglophone systems across the world – removing indigenous children and the children of the poor into state care. It is a problem that has been magnified by the neoliberal dismantling of support and services to low-income families for the past 30 years.
The statutory child protection system in Aotearoa has delivered graphically biased outcomes for Māori since the mid-20th century. The socially and culturally damaging practice of these times corresponds to the oppressive interventions applied to indigenous populations in Canada, Australia and the US. ‘As noted with the earlier forced removal of babies from unmarried teenage mothers, both Canada and Australia had parallel experiences, in their case with an intense focus on placing indigenous children with European parents. In Canada this is referred to as the “Sixties Scoop”, and in Australia “the Stolen Generation”.’
Harm caused by the state care system has been a significant driver for essentially ineffective reform for over three decades. The 1980s saw a protracted dispute between the rising voice of Māori protest and a medical professional lobby concerned with the establishment of a multidisciplinary legal structure for child protection practice. The groundbreaking Puao te Ata Tu (Daybreak) report and the family-centric approach which it spawned carried the day with the passage of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act, 1989 (now Oranga Tamariki Act). In an early review of this legislation, Judge Ken Mason delivered the following portentous message:
‘If the Act is not generously supported in terms of personnel and funding, it will fail. Resourcing the Act is an expensive business but the consequences of not doing so will be even more expensive. In human, social, and economic terms our New Zealand community, long-term, will reap the rewards of generosity of spirit and pocket.’
The 1989 Act was derailed by ‘revolution from above’ – the storm of neoliberal managerialist reform that gathered unstoppable momentum through the 1990s. Extended families (whānau) were asked to take greater responsibility for the care of kin in a climate of economic austerity and within a minimalist business production model of statutory social work practice. The bitter fruits of this orientation continue to be reaped in the present.
My book critically examines the eugenic roots of the social investment policy prescription developed and pursued by recent National-led (Conservative) governments from 2008 to 2017. Child protection policy predicated on the belief that social disadvantage (and unconscionable cost to the state) is reproduced within an identifiable group of underclass families led, inevitably, to a spike in the forced removal of new-born Māori babies. A backlash against this draconian policy turn is currently driving a conflicted process of policy reform.
Current issues pivot on the amount of independent power and authority which Māori social, cultural and political interests are – or should be – entitled to in the settler state of Aotearoa. The current centre-left Labour government continues to classify poverty as a function of an unproductive economy as opposed to an inevitable function of capitalism. The struggle for a socially just society – and a socially just child protection system – continues to burn.
In the light of recent practice, crisis and review, the final chapter of this text explores the political solutions needed to address the failings of the contemporary detect, fix and/or rescue child protection model. Radical political reform is needed to address the widespread inequality endemic to neoliberal capitalism. In ANZ the pressure of history points to the need for an aggressive process of decolonisation and for the ongoing re-empowerment of Māori self-governance as promised by the 1834 Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Ian Kelvin Hyslop is Senior Lecturer in Counselling, Human Services and Social Work at the University of Auckland.
A Political History of Child Protection: Lessons for Reform from Aotearoa New Zealand by Ian Kelvin Hyslop is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £19.99.
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