Williams Poto: Vulnerable Children Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Vulnerable Children Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 17 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18599. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East):I want to get back to the heart of the Vulnerable Children Bill which is vulnerability. I recall when work was first commenced that there was a lot of discussion in the community about the definition of vulnerability and what it actually meant. Some of the paperwork that came out from the Minister for Social Development and from the Ministry of Social Development at the time talked about every child thriving and surviving. It talked about a broad-based approach to supporting our children through the most difficult times in their lives.As community groups and social sector providers we struggled with the idea of what vulnerability was. I can recall questions going back to Child Youth and Family to ask what the definition of vulnerability was. In those very first pieces of work there was no definition of vulnerability and you can understand why because you can be vulnerable based on your life circumstances or you can be vulnerable based on simply how old you are. You can be vulnerable at age 5 and then at age 6 be no longer vulnerable depending on whether you are able to go to school or the income of your family. There are many many different definitions of vulnerability. One of the difficult things about this bill is that there is no definition of what a vulnerable child actually is. We are left to make the assumption that vulnerability is about children who we are presuming are from low-income families from families where alcohol and drugs perhaps are issues but there is no clear definition of vulnerability and that is where this bill comes unstuck from the very beginning.I want to go back to Paul Nixon who is the chief social worker and to what he says in lots of his public addresses about vulnerability and what he claims is the unholy trinity of vulnerability for children. He defines that as being when your parents are mentally unwell when there is problematic substance abuse and when there is family violence. That is the definition that Child Youth and Family use for vulnerability and one would think that that would be the automatic threshold at which children enter the Child Youth and Family system. Well I can tell you categorically that it is not. That is where I have a real difficulty because having sat on a community panel supporting Child Youth and Family social workers who were dealing with children who had some difficulties in their lives those were all flags for us as community people in terms of Child Youth and Family intervening.Despite the fact that Child Youth and Family is a relatively large organisation we are talking about huge numbers of children who experience difficulties when their parents have got mental illness problematic substance abuse and family violence. We know about the overwhelming statistics of family violence. They have been highlighted to us this week by the People’s Report from the Glenn Inquiry. Yet family violence is not a mechanism that would trigger an investigation into these children from Child Youth and Family. We might be talking about the Vulnerable Children Bill but that is definitely a misnomer because it does not pick up our most vulnerable children. In fact it seems to carve out a section of those children and define them as vulnerable and to leave out in the cold all these other children who are equally vulnerable.Part of this bill looks at how to keep kids safe through professionals being screened as being safe to work with children. We have heard many of the folk who have spoken before on this bill say that there is an inherent flaw in this in that it is not just people who are paid to work with children who should be screened. There is a whole group of people with whom issues have occurred and where children have been abused in their care and those people are not paid professionals. Here we are talking about sports clubs coaches and people who are engaged in recreational activities with children. So where we may be looking at keeping children safe in a professional sense—