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The Children's Commissioner's plans for mandatory inspection of young children to see if they are suffering from child abuse is the wrong answer
to the right question. She is right to be concerned that young and vulnerable children are being abused and that this is not being discovered
until it is too late. But mandatory inspection, especially by a state agency like Child,Youth & Family is not the answer. Instead, what we ought
to be doing is empowering voluntary organisations like Plunket to carry out more home visits, and for their assessments of family circumstances to
carry more weight than they do already. Cindy Kiro's solution may not be acceptable, but at least she recognises there is a problem requiring a
solution, a point which seems to have escaped Family First altogether with the "butt out and leave this to parents" approach Bob McCoskrie was
pushing. That is precisely the type of approach that saw the neighbours stand by and do nothing while little Nia Glassie was pegged on the clothes
line next door. Doing nothing, or leaving it all to parents is, sadly, not the way to stop child abuse. Read the full text of this blog post.
