Posts by Russell Brown
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The second, and perhaps most important, is that violence has virtually no consequences. This meme is constantly reinforced by our popular media.
Agreed. And that's really the only way the sort of consistent abuse we're talking about could happen.
Thanks for coming by Mikaere, and my sincere best wishes for the task ahead of your whanau.
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Maybe you need to go back to the last discussion here and take a take a good, long, hard look at child fatalities presented in UN reports on the topic. New Zealand has dropped massively in the last 30 years. Contrary to your "kids today" hysteria, the fact is "the kids today" kill fewer of their children than their parents.
That's all child deaths by injury. Our infant mortality stats have improved a lot too -- just not as much as the countries we compare ourselves to. But child homicide rates (kids are killed by their parents in the very large majority of cases) haven't shifted significantly. That's bad.
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Further, I haven't looked, but if it's anything like other crime stats, then the racial component of one's offending risk - as opposed to other factors like economic status and history and so on - will be small enough not to bother with.
That's true. But it doesn't change the fact that, for whatever reason, the situation has become worse among Maori in the past three decades, while it has improved among non-Maori. That's a problem for all of us.
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And I'm still loving Studio 60
I liked the political jokes last night. Very hip.
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There must be some way of linking the welfare, education and child intervention systems to compulsory parental classes and additional oversight and assistance for at risk families. If this is linked to welfare payments so be it.
Sure. And you might even find the degree of coercion required is quite low.
Seriously, what kind of a terrorist puts a baby in a tumble drier.
One who sees violence as a normal part of life, I think.
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OK then, what's the answer to the problem Russell ?
I read the post expecting the ending to lay out your solution to the problem.
I did say I was trying not to pretend I know more than I do, but I think my point was that there isn't "a solution" in the sense offered by those columnists. This isn't a new problem, and it's foolish to declare a quick fix. I'm not going to slime the people at the coalface like Jim Hopkins did.
The trial of the hospital admissions screening programme -- which aims to pick up all kinds of family violence -- seems to show promise. Cindy Kiro keeps saying she's seeing a sea-change in public attitudes over these cases -- people contacting her office for information, or looking to help. I hope she's right.
I've participated in a major anti family-violence campaign that will launch soon - it was delayed so additional support could be arranged around it. I hope that will play its part.
I also hope the autism support site I'm launching tonight will help some kids. People born ASD are more vulnerable, and more likely to end up hurt or in prison than many others.
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This has caused murmurings of displeasure amongst Doctor Who nerds on the intertubes, who find Ms Tate a little caustic and not quite the same calibre of hottie as Billie Piper and Freema Agyeman.
Well, quite. But Freema will be back midway through the series, so that's alright.
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The Ascot apartments were a pretty strange place in the mid-1980s, when my mate Paul and I took up residence there. Big trucks graunched up Newton Road through the night, a youth worker who lived there was hauled out one day on child sex charges, and we fancied that at least one female resident was paying the rent in kind.
And then there was Gummy. Gummy always announced himself as the caretaker, but he actually wasn't. Nonetheless, he succeeded in exercising some authority over the place simply by asserting it. He had a weirdly persuasive nature: he got people to do things they didn't really want to do. I once loaned him my car so he could tow his one from out by the Bombay Hills where it had broken down. He cracked an indicator light and patched it up with spray paint and insulation tape and stuck a fraudulently obtained WOF on the windscreen.
We thought that he was also the Phantom Sweeper. On Sunday nights, during the Sunday horrors after Radio With Pictures, we would often hear someone downstairs scratching away furiously with a broom. No one ever felt like going down to suss it out.
One night, I came back from a trip to Wellington, Paul wasn't there and I was locked out. Gummy spied me and insisted that I come over and sleep on the couch at the flat opposite, where his lived with his wife, Lorraine. We'd heard that the pair of them had been under-Grafton-Bridge-type alcoholics, but the flat was tidy enough. I'm pretty sure I ate with them. I didn't hang around long in the morning.
Eventually, the darkness and the road noise took its toll on my friendship with Paul. I moved out (whereupon we resumed our status as the best of mates), and the next time I saw Gummy was more than 10 years later, on the national news.
It took a little while before I could really be sure about it, but when I saw Lorraine on TV, that settled it.
He was Stewart Murray Wilson, aka 'The Beast of Blenheim', the bullying brute who drugged and raped a Danish hitchhiker, terrorised his family, intimidated welfare staff and was eventually sentenced to 21 years in prison after being convicted of sexual offences against 16 women.
Our weird neighbour, Gummy, was weirder and scarier that we could have dreamed. And one night, I slept on his fucking couch.
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Nico's solo albums are some of the finest ever made. Yes, they are bleak and difficult, but also incredibly beautiful and rewarding to listen to.
I'd forgotten, but in the story I make very prominent notice of the quality of her singing live. She always had the reputation of not being a real singer, but she was really impressive in performance.
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Nothing like a well-timed romantic utterance from a hot young blonde. Is it art? I like to think so.
She was 47, not skinny and not blonde. Just cool.
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