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6
July 2008
Restoring
Fatherhood
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“10,000
march against violent crime”. “Mayor wants gangs crushed
by army”. “75 percent of children bullied at school”.
“Toddler in Starship Hospital with critical head
injuries”. These recent newspaper headlines highlight the
deep-seated social crisis New Zealand is facing.
It
is the ugly side of our country: children being brutilised and
killed by adults who should be protecting them; escalating
levels of bullying in schools; hordes of disorderly youths
causing mayhem on the streets; gangs in control of a lucrative
drug trade that has infiltrated deep into communities all
around the country. These are problems that are now so serious
they cannot be ignored.
The
reality is that increasing violence is destroying lives on a
daily basis. Hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’
money is being spent on mopping up the damage with massive
human resources needed for front-line crisis work. Endless
minds are engaged in devising strategies to deal with the
problems, but while many well-meaning people come up with many
well-meaning ‘solutions’, few – if any – are prepared
to deal with the real root cause of this social crisis.
The
fact is that endless studies show that
virtually every major social pathology we face can be linked
back to the breakdown of the family: violent crime, drugs and
alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide,
psychological disorders – these all correlate more strongly
to the absence of a biological married father in the home than
with any other single factor.
The
majority of prisoners, juvenile detention inmates, high school
dropouts, pregnant teenagers, adolescent murderers, and
rapists come from fatherless homes. The connection between
single-parent households and crime is so strong that
controlling for this factor erases the relationship between
race and crime as well as between low income and crime.
New Zealand’s Principal Youth Court
Judge, Andrew Becroft, recently released figures from a study
of youth crime that confirms that the majority of serious
youth offenders – a staggering 82 percent - have lost
contact with their father: only 12
percent of the offenders who came through the court were
living with both parents, 28 percent were living with one
parent (usually their mother) and 60 percent were not living
with either their mother or their father. [1]
That
is clearly not to say that every child being raised without a
dad ends up in trouble, or that every child raised by a
married couple does well, but on the balance of probability,
children raised without their natural father, will face
greater difficulties in life, than children brought up with
their dad to love, guide and protect them.
Fathers
play a vital role in bringing up their children. From the
rough and tumble play with toddlers, to the crucial task of
setting boundaries, enforcing discipline and challenging
children to accept responsibilities and become more
independent, a father’s influence is crucial. It is
especially the case in the socialisation of teenage children,
where a father will provide a role model of what men are
supposed to be like on the job, in the home, with women, and
with children.
Judge
Becroft has described the deep-seated need that boys have for
a father figure in this way: “14, 15, and 16 year-old boys
seek out role models like ‘heat seeking missiles’. It’s
either the leader of the Mongrel Mob or it’s a sports coach
or it’s Dad. But an overwhelming majority of boys who I see
in the Youth Court have lost contact with their father.
…What I’m saying is that I’m dealing in the Youth Court
with boys for whom their Dad is simply not there, never has
been, gone, vanished and disappeared”.
It
is this collapse of fatherhood that is at the heart of New
Zealand’s social crisis. There are now hundreds of thousands
of New Zealand children growing up in fatherless homes. Too
many live in crime-ridden neighborhoods where violence is the
norm, where alcohol and drug abuse are commonplace, and where
disaffected dropouts roam the streets instead of being
meaningfully engaged in school.
According
to Judge Becroft an astonishing 80
percent of teenage offenders who go through the youth court
have drug or alcohol problems and a staggering 70 percent
aren’t enrolled in any form of education! [2]
This
crisis is of the government’s own making. While the seeds of
family disintegration were sown by the Labour Government in
the seventies - with policies designed to progress the
feminists’ agenda of independence for women - successive
National governments allowed the situation to get worse.
At
the core of the problem is the Domestic Purposes Benefit.
Labour introduced the DPB in order to provide unhappy mothers
with an alternative to a husband. The DPB gave an
unconditional state guaranteed welfare benefit to any woman
who wanted to raise a child on her own. Over the years the DPB
has become a way of life for hundreds of thousands of women
and their children. Many of these are now caught up in a cycle
of intergenerational welfare dependency to become part of New
Zealand’s growing dysfunctional underclass.
This
week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator is renowned author and
commentator Bob Jones. In his opinion piece Homo
Degeneratus,
Bob describes - in his forthright way - how a “welfare-sated
under-class … is now thriving in New Zealand; slobbering,
tattooed, illiterate, pig-ignorant, prolific breeding,
drug-infested, alcoholic, welfare dependent, murdering and
robbing, barbaric filth and it is all traceable solely to
welfare excess and the DPB in particular.
I for one have had enough.
Disproportionately Maori, their existence is a
disgrace, not to Maoridom but to the human race”.
Bob
echoes the despair of many New Zealanders when he states: “I
sense and personally feel, a widespread sense of hopelessness
about the current state of affairs. The solution lies with our
politicians but what odds on a set of political circumstances
which would throw up another Douglas to embark on a radical
social reform as Roger did on the economic front?
He
explains, “Ironically, when I write that the solution lies
with politicians I could just as easily say that the problem
stems from them. Primarily
motivated by the pursuit of power, once in office the record
shows that politicians driving modus operandi is not to rock
the boat”. To read Homo Degeneratus, click
>>>
Bob
is right, of course. It is difficult to find any political
will to reform the welfare system in general and the DPB in
particular - even though the politicians are well aware that
children are the major victims of a system that is supposed to
protect them.
No
other country has a benefit payment that is as unconstrained
as New Zealand’s Domestic Purposes Benefit. As Bob Jones
mentions in his article, when the US realised the damage to
children – and society - that was being caused by their
equivalent of the DPB, President Clinton abolished it. He
replaced it with a system that prioritised getting mothers off
benefits and back into the workforce. Independence from the
state was seen as the key goal. And in spite of a plethora of
dire predictions about the consequences, the results have been
very positive for all concerned.
New
Zealand desperately needs politicians with the courage to do
what is right for the country and replace the DPB with a
system of temporary support based on work - similar to that
found in many other developed countries. Hardship payments
should be available for deserted or mistreated spouses, and
the parents of teenagers should realise that the
responsibility for supporting their teenager to have children
of their own, will largely fall on their shoulders.
Most
importantly, it should be signalled loud and clear that it is
simply no longer acceptable to bear children if they are not
going to be properly raised and supported. Children need a
mother and a father who will love, nurture and support them,
if they are to have the best opportunity at leading a
successful and fulfilling life. That means encouraging
marriage, since, despite its intrinsic faults, marriage still
remains the bedrock institution of civil society providing the
glue that binds mothers and fathers together for the common
purpose of raising their children well.
Of
course, much more needs to be done to support those parents
with children who are presently running amuck: special schools
with live-in facilities to give these children the routines
and boundaries that they will be missing in their home-life may
have a place. More than anything, the priority must be to
connect these children to the education system, because
no matter how bad a child’s home-life may be, an education
can provide a life-line to a better future.
There
is also much that needs to be done to fight the growing crime
and violence within our society – but that is another
subject for another day.
While
none of this is simple, what we categorically know is that if
we carry on as we have in the past, we will end up with a
future that is far more violent and problematic that the one
we face today. Doing nothing is not an option.
New
Zealand urgently needs political leadership in the area of
welfare reform. The DPB needs to be replaced as a priority and
fatherhood needs to be restored. It is time the political
parties stepped up to this challenge.
This
week’s poll
asks: Do
you believe that fatherlessness is a problem in New
Zealand; if so, what do you think should be done about it?
Go
to Poll >>>
If you
would like to comment on this issue please click
>>>
FOOTNOTES
[1]
Youth Crime study link
>>>
[2]
Herald, Alarming Figures on teenage crime http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10508994
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