Legislation Favoured For Handling Problem Families

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28523, 28 February 1958, Page 10

Legislation Favoured For Handling Problem Families

“Just as we have legislative control for certain infectious diseases, so must we have effective legislation to support our actions to rehabilitate the problem families and powerful enough to control even the very worst, resistant types,” said Mr A. P. Millthorpe, chief inspector of the Christchurch City Council, in a paper to yesterday’s session of the conference of the New Zealand branch of the Royal Society of Health.

A remnant of the “submerged tenth” existed in towns and cities like a hidden sore, said Mr Millthorpe, describing a problem family. Poor, crude in its habits, the family was an intolerable and degrading burden to decent people forced to neighbour with it. Always on the edge of pauperism and crime, riddled with mental and physical defect, in and out of the courts for various reasons, it was a menace to the social standard of the community, the gravity being out of all proportion to the numbers. “Which is it to be? The harsh or the sympathetic approach?” he asked, after describing the background of a problem family and the social evil caused, and giving details of experience and remedial and recovery work carried out elsewhere. Schemes similar to the Dutch scheme of segregation, special housing, and daily supervision, had not been received with favour in Britain, said Mr Millthorpe. It was too easy to raise an outcry against them on the ground that they interfered with the liberty of the subject. “I wonder if the people who resist some form of control realise the beastliness of the conditions which these problem families make for themselves, their children, and their unhappy neighbours,’* he said. “Surely we should be in favour of educative control of families who live like beasts, no matter what their social grade, subject to the usual legal safeguards of the courts and rights of appeal.”

Or should the families go to special homes for training, or should family service units be advocated here? Were the schemes as expensive as they appeared to be on the surface? Surely in terms of an investment in the health of the community the cost of rehabilitation of problem families was well worth while.

“Should we not accept the fact that, just as much as the training and education in hygiene of the food handler are a public health responsibility, so also are the training and education of problem families in environmental hygiene?” asked Mr Millthorpe. “Ft cannot just be brushed off as a concern of welfare organisations.” Mr Millthorpe considered that the recruitment of public-health trained officers, with a knowledge of social science, for employment as area rehabilitation officers would admirably suit the situation Some co-ordination had to be obtained between any central “problem family” committee and housihg allocation committees to adapt existing houses and services.