Thursday, August 25, 2011

Checks on sole parents have happened before

The Coroner in the Nia Glassie case is one Wallace Bain. Apparently Dr Bain wants spot checks on all children and...

Dr Bain is also calling for all solo parents on a benefit to be monitored and overseen to ensure the safety of children in their care.


Dr Bain wants a return to the past.

The Child Welfare Act 1925 introduced mandatory inquiries into the living circumstances of all children born outside marriage.


But decades later:

.... the Status of Children Act 1969, [which] ended discrimination between children born within and outside registered marriage and removed the term "illegitimate" from the statute books. This legislation reflected a desire to reduce some of the stigma associated with ex-nuptial birth that New Zealand inherited from English family law and brought the judicial system into line with the much more liberal concepts of Māori (Cameron 1967, 1969, Quin and O'Neill 1984).


And didn't that create a much kinder world? One where children are routinely loved and cared for?

Unfortunately not.

1 comment:

Andrei said...

This legislation reflected a desire to reduce some of the stigma associated with ex-nuptial birth that New Zealand inherited from English family law

The thing about stigma is that it serves to provide an incentive to avoid being on the receiving end of it by avoiding the situation that will attract it.

This is of course how any social construct works and the left in particular are masters at attaching stigma to those things they deem undesirable e.g. eating chocolate made with "unsustainable" palm oil instead of slave produced coca butter