Child Protection: Policies for Vulnerable Children in New Zealand

This chapter looks critically at current and past developments in child protection in New Zealand, in the light of their implications for children’s rights and well-being. I look critically at whether children are being pro- tected appropriately by current policy directions, and how other directions for reforms could improve their protection. Child protection is a policy area where there are massive problems in many countries, and I make no claim to having answers to the many questions that perplex the field. This is not a particularly positive story, as described by Professor Dorothy Scott:

Most child protection services in countries such as Australia and New Zealand have become demoralised, investigation-driven bureaucracies which trawl through escalating numbers of low-income families to find a small minority of cases in which statutory intervention is necessary and justifiable, leaving enormous damage in their wake. The point has been reached in many places where we are exceeding the use of the State’s coercive power to protect children without causing them further harm. (Scott, 2006, p. 1)