A South Island father gets referred to a child safety programme after police are called to a domestic incident. He attends the first session. Maybe the second. Then he stops showing up. No follow-up. No consequence. He's now a statistic in a dataset that should alarm everyone talking tough on family violence.

This is the story behind the numbers (as reported by RNZ, February 2026) — while New Zealand unveils its first national infrastructure plan and politicians argue about retail crime, a different kind of system failure is happening in plain sight.

Just 1,385 people completed child safety programmes in 2024/2025, down from 1,880 the year before. That's a 26% drop in completions — nearly 500 people who started but didn't finish the intervention designed to keep children safe (Source: Ministry of Justice, family-violence — 3.Child safety programmes).

Here's what makes this worse: at the same time completions collapsed, referrals stayed high. Around 3,800 people were sent to these programmes. Which means roughly two-thirds of people referred never complete them. They're identified as risks. They're told to attend. Then they vanish from the system.

This isn't about funding cuts or programme availability. The referrals are happening. People are showing up for initial assessments. Something is failing in the middle — the part where attendance becomes completion, where intervention becomes actual behaviour change.

Child safety programmes exist for one reason: to reduce the risk of harm to children in households where violence has already occurred. When someone doesn't complete, that risk doesn't go away. It just becomes invisible to the system.

The political debate around crime focuses on what's visible — retail theft, youth offending, gang activity. Those make headlines. They get mentioned in budget announcements and infrastructure plans. But this? A 26% drop in people completing programmes designed to protect the most vulnerable New Zealanders? That's a crisis happening in silence.

Every one of those 500 people who didn't complete represents a household where risk was identified but not addressed. Where a child is living with someone the system flagged, intervened with, then lost track of.

You can build all the infrastructure you want. You can debate retail crime statistics until you're hoarse. But if nearly 500 more families this year are living with unresolved violence risk because we can't get people through a safety programme, we're failing at something far more fundamental than roads or shoplifting.

The Christchurch father who stopped showing up? He's still out there. So are 499 others like him. And the children in those households are still waiting for the intervention that was supposed to happen.