HE WERO (A CHALLENGE)

Amber Lundy, Britney Abbott, Alice Perkins, Maria Perkins, Cherie Perkins, Cameron Fielding, Krystal Fielding, Coral Burrows.

In this week’s NZ Listener there’s a challenge from well-known New Zealand children’s author, Jenny Hessell. “Try naming,” she writes, “some Pakeha children who have died as a result of child abuse”. Can you think of one? I couldn’t. Yet, of the 88 children killed in New Zealand between 2001 and 2006 by their whanau or caregivers, 48 were Pakeha, 28 were Maori and 12 were some other ethnicity.

Even when I very deliberately went looking for the dead Pakeha children’s names in the New Zealand Herald’s online search engine, all I could find were these eight – Amber, Britney, Alice, Maria, Cherie, Cameron, Krystal and Coral. And after I found their names, I still could not readily recall the faces or the circumstances behind the deaths of these Pakeha children.

Yet I’ll bet, like me, you could chant the names and case histories of many of the Maori dead at the drop of a hat. Try it.

The reason for this is simple. We have all been very deliberately exposed over and over again by the media in this country to a mantra of Maori names while Pakeha names have just as deliberately been ignored.

I’m not excusing or minimising the deaths of Maori children. I am challenging the inherent, unhelpful and unacknowledged racism of those who choose to portray child abuse as a “failure of ethnicity” rather than a “failure of humanity”. And I am joining Ms Hessell’s call for a radical media experiment over the next 12 months, starting with the writers and contributors to this publication, and comprising four simple actions:

1. Every time you publish an article, write an opinion or letter, or broadcast an item on child abuse, remind the public that about twice as many Pakeha as Maori children die each year at the hands of those who are meant to care for them.
2. If you must recite a list of names, take them only from the larger, Pakeha group of victims.
3. Let’s have investigative journalism that asks what it is about European culture that results in them killing their children.
4. Let’s have panels of Pakeha leaders interviewed about what they are doing to address this problem within their own cultural community.

Amber, Britney, Alice, Maria, Cherie, Cameron, Krystal, Coral and at least 40 other Pakeha children deserve that much at least.

Kanui tena i tenei take!

A reminder: this Friday is the last day for candidate nominations to all local bodies and I am hoping like mad that Maori candidates won’t repeat the mistake of standing against each other in the Far North District Council Wards. Hei konei. Hei kona.