Measuring child protection inequalities for Pasifika children in NZ

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-09-26 02:00

New Zealand; Pacific

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Not much is known about the rates of how Pasifika children interact with Aotearoa’s child protection system. A team of researchers looked at data from almost 800,000 Pasifika and non-Māori, non-Pasifika children and found, for example, that Pasifika children were 25% more likely to enter care. However, they say the findings dispute the assumptions that Pasifika children are uniformly overrepresented in the child protection system. Instead, there were many nuances including higher and lower rates than non-Māori, non-Pasifika children for some outcomes and at different levels of socio-economic deprivation. They say more work is needed to untangle these different rates of contact with NZ’s child protection system.