Criminalising parenting through the omissions provisions: An expanding creep

Abstract

This article sets out the law governing when parental failures to act might result in criminal charges. It documents the New Zealand cases on the public record over the last 30 years in which parents have been criminalised for omissions in relation to their children, noting a trend over time to increasingly criminalise parenting mistakes in New Zealand. Whilst deliberate assaults on children and sustained patterns of parental neglect have always been prosecuted, it was not the case traditionally that mistakes by parents that are better categorised as isolated instances of supervisory neglect rather than child abuse received a criminal justice response. Indeed, the heavy costs of such a response and the possibility of other less damaging mechanisms for accountability suggest that we may have expanded the criminal scrutiny of parenting decisions too far.