Press Release: Judy Turner scorns hospital child abuse questions
13 August 2007

United Future deputy leader Judy Turner has poured scorn on the proposal for hospitals to ask all women, ‘Have you ever been asked to do anything sexual that you didn’t want to do?’

"This is a lazy extension of the flawed approach to family violence," she said.

“Child Youth and Family admitted to me in written questions that they have not been bothering to collate information about the perpetrator, including gender and relationship to the child or young person. However, the information is recorded on the individual client records so could easily be centrally collated, allowing patterns and information about child abusers to be studied,” said Mrs Turner.

“This is not good enough. How can you expect to make inroads into child abuse rates when you haven’t even bothered to find out who the perpetrators are? The Government continues with approaches that ignore current research, and assumes contrary to evidence that only men commit violence. The fact is that children are more often abused by their mother than their father,” said Mrs Turner.

“What is the Government hoping to achieve by quizzing every women with appendicitis or ingrown toe-nail about child abuse and family violence? You may as well train checkout operators to question people through the supermarket checkouts.

This is an idea born out of ignorance of how and who to target in the battle against child abuse,” said Mrs Turner.