Child-abuse forum

Press, 24 April 1979, Page 33

Child-abuse forum

PA Dunedin The National Children’s Health Research Foundation has voted $lO,OOO to its Otago division to hold a national working party on child abuse in September as a contribution to the International Year of the Child. More than 20 leading workers in the field in New Zealand have been invited to attend. The keynote speaker will be Mr Arthur Mildon, Q.C., of London, counsel to the British Government’s committee of inquiry in the case of Maria Colwell which was partly responsible for the passage of the Children Bill, 1975, through Westminster.

Mr lain Galloway, chairman of the Otago regional

council of the foundation, said that the purpose of the working party was to formulate practical recommendations based on current knowledge and experience which would go some way to diminishing the problems of child abuse. Allocation of the project to Otago was a recognition of the expertise available in the region and of the work already accomplished in the field by persons such as Professor Roy Muir, Dr David Geddis, Miss Sheila Monaghan (Queen Mary Hospital), Professor J. G. Mortimer and Emeritus Professor J. M. Watt.

“What is planned is essentially a working party on an issue of considerable social consequence which we all have to better understand and appreciate if the problems are to be tackled and solutions found,” said Mr

Gallaway. Specialists in medical, legal, and social aspects of the problems of child abuse had been invited to participate in the hope that firm statements of principle might emerge and lead to positive action to combat what was a very distressing social ill. Persons who have accepted invitations include the Minister of Health and Social Welfare (Mr Gair);

, Mr Justice Casey, of Christ- : church; Mr T. M. Ross. S.M., of Dunedin, who has a deep interest in family law and . recently visited Canada to ! study its Family Court sys- ’ tem; Professor Watt, who described the condition in New Zealand before Henry Kempe’s paper appeared in i 1962; Professor James Ritchie, of Waikato University, : who is interested in the i multi-cultural aspect of the i problem; Mr David Eason, of • Canterbury University, i author of “The Economics of ' Children”; Dr 1. B. Hassall, . an Auckland pediatrician who ■ is chairman of the voluntary crisis team working in

Auckland; Mr D. R. Lange, the member of Parliament for Mangere, who is the Opposition spokesman in the field; Associate Professor R. C. Muir, the Dunedin child psychiatrist whose research has gained world-wide rec-

ognition and who presented his most recent results at the international congress of child abuse in London; Mr David Ferguson, co-author of “Child Abuse in New Zealand,” and a former research officer in the Departi ment of Social Welfare;Professor Mortimer, professor of paediatrics and child health at Otago University; and the director of medical services for the Plunket Society (Dr David Geddis).