SHOULD REPORTING CHILD ABUSE BE MANDATORY IN NZ? - 1

 There are some experiences one can never get used to, regardless of how many times one has gone through that experience. Listening to a patient describing their harrowing story of being abused in childhood is one such experience I have never gotten used to despite being in the business of listening to such stories for just under three decades now. I still feel as if someone has taken my heart into their hands and is squeezing and crushing it. More than once I have become tearful when listening to these stories. As a human being how can one not be affected when someone tells you that their father and brothers repeatedly abused them for over a decade, or in another case they offered themselves for being abused because they wanted to protect their younger sibling from the same trauma? I had read somewhere that alligators can eat their children but had not read anywhere that they rape them too. It seems like human beings can be far more cruel than the most vicious of animals.