Editorial: Uncomfortable visits

OPINION: Social workers armed with brochures. Right there you have an easy target for ridicule, writes The Southland Times in an editorial.

And when it's all hooked up to visits following the anti-smacking law, the wider reaction may turn to sour derision.

News that 20,000 Child, Youth and Family booklets entitled When We Visit have been sent out for social workers to disseminate does raise what many will find the discomforting thought of 20,000 visits on 20,000 doorsteps, effectively prompted "because someone has told us they are concerned about your child".

How might you feel if you were one of the parents? Upset, scared and angry, we're guessing.

But this isn't a witch-hunt, nor a Big Brother/Nanny State hybrid. It is part of a necessary recalibration of the pretty poor way we have been facing up, collectively, to many of the problems arising from the enormous stresses of parenthood.

The CYF staff aren't going to be showing up because they've got all these brochures to get rid of somehow. They will be following up concerns. We are entitled to expect them to do this carefully and professionally. In most cases their intervention won't be needed. Nor, perhaps, even their advice.

A lot of what's in the brochure is about the rights of the visited parents. This is fair reaction to the conclusion from the review team headed by psychologist Nigel Latta that official communications with parents should be improved, to better ensure they know their rights.

The brochure states that if social workers show up it's "usually" because someone has raised concerns about your child. "We'll talk through these worries with you, listen to you, and see if there is anything we need to do to support your family."

All the comforting language in the world isn't going to take away the concerns, or even the sense of mortification, that will in so many cases arise for the parents. That doesn't mean the authorities shouldn't be there in the first place.

It seems to be a limited comfort to a still-edgy community that, as the legislation's initial architect Sue Bradford points out, we aren't seeing thousands of parents being prosecuted for trivial acts of physical discipline.

Nor hundreds. Nor scores. Police deputy commissioner Rob Pope asserts that when people are being prosecuted, it's not for smacking, it's for assault. The sorts of assault that would have been prosecuted before the 2007 law.

Police attended 367 child-assault calls in the second six months of last year. That is about 100 more than the recent average for those periods, and it's attributed to an "improved culture" of reporting.

Those who might prefer to cast this as an oppressive climate of anonymous dobbing in should reflect on the figures that only 11 of those assault calls involved smacking, and 39 involved minor acts of physical discipline. The rest – the large majority – were more serious assaults.

The latest case where "smacking" itself led to prosecution was one where the victim had a red welt on their backside for three days. The parent admitted to stress and frustration for what they admitted might have been excessive force.

Family First's Bob McCrostie laments that police are "still wasting time" on smacking and minor acts of physical discipline.

But neither he nor we can have it both ways, complaining about intervention at the lower end of potential offending, and then (rather more ardently) looking back with reproach after serious harm has been done and asking why authorities hadn't acted earlier.

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