Child abuse scapegoat.

Saw this online

Social work lecturer Raema Merchant said focusing on Maori parents diverts attention away from the fact Pakeha harm children too. When you come across child abuse in the media it is always presented in a way that portrays Maori as synonymous with child abuse while the mainstream have no mention or stigma that ties them to child abuse in any way. The media have created a norm of that type casts Maori as the 'bad guys' always abusing their children and it is these kinds of norms that facilitates further misrepresentation and oppression for Maori. Perhaps stories that involve child deaths or abuse in relation to Maori are like gold to a news gatekeepers as these are the types of stories that maintain primetime ratings so that viewers will stay glued to the tube in facination with advertising during hour, but also with repulsion towards Maori. So armed with an education of child abuse supplied by audio visual media such as television and news papers the mainstream use this as a further means to maintain their dominance.

Merchant stated "I'm not denying it's a problem for Maori, but if we're just focusing on Maori we're ignoring the Pakeha side," she said.

"It's almost as though Pakeha are putting their heads in the sand and saying there is no Pakeha child abuse." This sounds fairly accurate as many cases of child abuse conducted by the mainstream slip benneath the radar which extends the one-sided approach that the media adopt when dealing with child abuse stories.

Merchants master's thesis at Massey University found about half of the children killed in New Zealand died at the hands of a Pakeha abuser. Almost 9000 children were victims of physical abuse between 2000 and 2008, yet only 21 became "household names"' in the media, she said.
Just one-third of child deaths were reported in the press, and they were predominantly Maori cases. Finally someone has gone out and done the hard yards to literally prove that the attrocious stereotypes that the media have cast on to Maori are simply garbage.

Merchant urged the public and media to focus on real problems of child abuse, rather than making Maori the "face of abuse".

"The real danger I have seen from a social worker point of view is that there are a lot of children being abused but as far as the public are concerned they only seem to know about the ones that are Maori. "Child abuse is a problem for all people, not just for Maori."
Merchant is already planning her next thesis, which will look at a bigger issue: whether focusing on Maori child abuse victims leads to skewed views by health professionals and the public. Just noticing that the Nia Glasssie case was on the News recently in relation to a policy named after Glassie which proposes the state to set up authorities to inspect homes or families to search for signs of child abuse. Using a child with a Maori background as the face for a policy such as this shows that even the state is not immune to utilizing labels so the question is 'where does the abuse of Maori by both the media and the state end?'