The other day an article popped up on my Facebook Wall promoting research done in 2012 by Raema Merchant, a social work lecturer at the Eastern Institute of Technology. She stated that Maori are unfairly branded as the face of child abuse in New Zealand, yet in less than one minute of reading, I saw the flaw in her argument.
Raema Merchant concluded in her masters thesis at Massey University that around half of the children killed in New Zealand died at the hands of Pakeha, yet despite that, Pakeha child abuse is largely ignored leading to the issue being perceived as a Maori problem. She states:
Pakeha kill just as many children as Maori do, despite Maori being the “face of abuse” in the media, according to a researcher.
“Where are they getting it from? Child abuse is not a cultural issue.”
Okay so Pakeha supposedly make up 50% of this horrid statistic and yet Maori are the face of child abuse in New Zealand. She then asked for the data to prove that this is mostly a Maori issue?
The answer is very simple and yet was ignored completely in her thesis. She states that the ethnicity of those convicted of assaulting children are as follows:
- Maori 48%,
- European 28%,
- Pacific Islander 19%.
Thus if you add all non-Maori (which we will call Pakeha), you arrive at approximately Maori 50% non-Maori 50%. I am sure you can see where this going as I will be making an obvious point that many would have thought about by now despite not being researchers themselves. This so-called researcher ignores the total population figures of these groups. Let’s look at total population stats for children or to be precise, under 14s. It breaks down as follows:
- 21% Maori,
- 58% European,
- 11% Pacific Islander,
- 9% Asian.
So non-Maori children make up around 78% of the population of under 14s. Yet around half of the abuse figures are from Maori. If half the victims are Maori but they comprise 21% of the population, then the outcome is Maori are 4.8 times that of Europeans to abuse their kids. For Pacific Islanders that is 3.4 times. The comparative rate of all three, is Maori 4.8, Pacific Islander 1.4, & European 1.0.
Some then argue that it is still not a Maori issue, rather a poverty issue. Yes it is true that poverty is a huge factor. But the truth is again staring us in the face. Pacific Islanders face poverty as much as Maori, yet there is still a huge difference in child abuse figures between both these Polynesian populations. To repeat, ‘Maori abuse children 3.4 times more than Pacific Islanders’, yet both face the same levels of poverty and both are Polynesian, thus proving that there is a cultural problem with Maori.
While Raema Merchant may have set out to try and dispel the notion that Maori shouldn’t be the face of child abuse in New Zealand, but all she has really done is forced some to look into the claims and reveal the true statistics. The result is an opposite conclusion to what this researcher set out to prove. Statistics do not lie, child abuse is still mostly a Maori issue and something not to be ignored. Of course this is still an issue for all people groups in New Zealand, but percentage wise, child abuse by Maori is extremely high compared to other people groups and it is no surprise that they have become the face of child abuse. Solutions to this problem need to take this into consideration. It doesn’t help if we all pretend otherwise for the sake of political correctness and idealism. Sometimes we have to face the cold hard facts if we want to tackle an issue properly.
Sources:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/6555668/Perceptions-clash-with-facts-over-abuse