Child Neglect
Fraud in Australia’s plan to reduce violence against women
The 2009 Australian project a ‘Time for Action: The National Council’s Plan for Australia to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, 2009-2021′, was approved for implementation by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). The Plan, which is split into several parts, puts forth recommendations for new legislation, changes to judicial processes, requests for funding and ideas for domestic programs targeted at reducing domestic and sexual violence against women. The advisory council has some powers to implement programs through the Office of Women among other agencies, but much of what the government funded program calls for requires approval by Parliament.
The entire premise of the National Plan was underpinned by the belief in this statement:“While a small proportion of men are victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, the majority of people who experience this kind of violence are women in a home, at the hands of men they know.”[27-pg1] But a quick examination of the statistics and data shows a much different picture to the rather sweeping indictment of Australian men the National Council paints.
Pregnant women continue to smoke & drink, study shows
Editor: The relevance of the below article to the topic of this blog, for those who may not see the connection, is to emphasise the unfortunate circumstances in this country where an enormous amount of resources are being targeted against an entire gender (men), in the name of preventing child abuse, while the most prevalent abusers of children (being single mothers, as represented by all Crime Reporting bodies in Australia), are being effectively ignored and in many cases encouraged.
If one was to take a results-based appraisal of all the forms of child abuse in this country, including abortion, paternity fraud, substance abuse during pregnancy, child abductions, child neglect, parental alienation, denial of contact with father, relocation away from father, and all other forms of abuse, then one can only conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with Australia’s action against child abuse, which is selective at best, but at worst is simply an illusion of protection that in truth protects the vast majority of child abuse culprits by ignorance, complicity, and government support.
Take our Poll:
Should it be illegal for pregnant women to drink or smoke?
- Yes, a child's health should be the only consideration (58%, 42 Votes)
- No, a woman has the right to choose herself (32%, 23 Votes)
- I am not certain. Both children and women have equal rights (10%, 8 Votes)
Total Voters: 73
Loading ...Article Start: WEALTHY, older women are most likely to drink during pregnancy while poorer, young mums-to-be have the highest rates of smoking.
Despite repeated health warnings, nearly 40 per cent of pregnant women drink alcohol and 18 per cent light up, an Australian Institute of Family Studies report says.
Tanilla Warwick-Deaves – another child murdered by mother and her boyfriend
THE mother of murdered toddler Tanilla Warwick-Deaves has faced court charged with being an accessory after the fact.
Handcuffed and dressed in a yellow cardigan Donna Deaves faced Gosford Local Court this morning where she did not apply for bail during her brief appearance.
The 27-year-old was arrested about 9am yesterday at Erina on the state’s Central Coast.
Two-year-old Tanilla was found with serious injuries at her mother’s Watanobbi home just before 4am on August 27.
She was taken to Wyong Hospital but pronounced dead a short time later.
Mum pleads guilty in boy-behind-wall case
A US woman who authorities say hid her young son, often in a crawl space, for nearly two years as part of a custody dispute has been ordered to spend two years on probation without more jail time.
Shannon Wilfong, 32, pleaded guilty yesterday to five misdemeanours, including obstructing a police officer.
Wilfong was sentenced to $US1500 ($1470) in fines and 30 days in jail – a judge credited her with time served – on that count and fines of $US100 on each of four counts of unlawful interference with child visitation.
Wilfong’s mother, Diane Dobbs, also pleaded guilty to obstruction and escaped additional jail time when the judge credited her with the 12 days she’d already been behind bars. Dobbs, 53, was fined $US1000.
A prosecutor said the case-closing plea deals came with the blessing of the boy’s father, Michael Chekevdia, Wilfong’s one-time boyfriend.
Child Abuse by Mothers in Australia – A case study
Nobody believed ‘Frank’ when he tried to protect his son from bureaucratic bungling. John Stapleton reports that, nearly 20 years on, Frank has been proved right, even though he lost in court.
The boy was eight weeks old when his father called welfare authorities and pleaded with them to take his son into foster case. He alleged that the mother was being violent towards the child, throwing him against walls and trying to smother him. The authorities ignored him, as they did for years to come, but the father persevered.
Twenty years, 550 days in court and tens of millions of dollars of public funds later, the matter which has just run across the civil, criminal and family law jurisdictions, reached its final chapter this week.
NAPCAN – when protecting children is compromised by ideology
It is that time of the year when NAPCAN (National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect), an organisation founded in 1987 to advocate for the protection of children, is running its annual high profile campaign to raise funds and awareness in its fight against child abuse and neglect in Australia.
A noble cause indeed, and in support of this campaign Fathers4Equality contacted NAPCAN last year and volunteered our assistance during their National Child Protection Week.
Fathers4Equality offered to distribute a child abuse awareness survey to all our members, as well as assist with fund raising, amongst other worthwhile measures in support of this worthy cause.
After an initial positive response from NAPCAN, all correspondence came to an end.
Kiesha Abrahams – a Reminder that Sole Custody Kills
Julia Gillard making child protection more difficult
In case it has escaped people’s attention, the murder of Kiesha Abrahams, since renamed Keisha Weippeart as a mark of respect for the father she was deprived of, was another case of a child being abused and murdered within the highest risk environment for child abuse in this country, the single-mother home.
With all the attention set recently on the newly tabled Family Violence bill, a bill that Prime Minister Julia Gillard has claimed will protect children from child abuse by dismantling Shared Parenting and denying most fathers any form of meaningful contact with their children, one has to question what exactly Julia Gillard was thinking when she came up with such a malicious bill?
Obviously, this bill is in part the legacy of the Darcy Freeman – girl over the bridge murder, an incident that has shocked the nation and will remain in the psyche of this country for years to come.
However, an equal number of mothers also engaged in filicide in this country, being the deliberate murder of their children.
This fact however has not been widely reported. These other murders of children, presumably of less important children because they were killed by their mothers, happened in equal measure to that of fathers, and this is a point conveniently ignored by Julia Gillard, and in particular by her Attorney General, Robert McLelland.
In any event and foccusing on child abuse on its own, the majority of child abuse in this country is at the hands of single mothers, far outweighing the efforts of strangers, neighbours, other family members, other children, and biological fathers, as reported by the Australian Institute of Criminology.
In fact, over 75% of all familial child abuse, according to the Department of Child Protection, is accounted for in households where the single mother co-habitates with the new boyfriend, (who has not fathered the children), a scenario which is very common in this country and becoming more so, and is the precise high risk environment that Kiesha Weippeart found herself in before she was murdered.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in her haste to create the perception that she was doing more to protect children, is in fact doing less, much much less, by sowing the seeds of a new child abuse epidemic.
By removing young children from having any contact with their biological fathers, and exposing them in greater and greater numbers to the ever-present in-home stranger-danger of men with no biological connection to the child, and especially with no other parent to answer to, the ever present risk of child abuse becomes an even greater possibility, given human nature, and as strongly indicated by child abuse statistics.
By ending shared parenting and ensuring that separated children will have little contact with their biological fathers, even less than was the case before the Howard era Shared Parenting laws were enacted, this government is ensuring that child abuse will go behind locked doors, where it can continue unabated and without the knowledge of the other parent, until the imminent end, which all too often is the death of the child.
Whether we like it or not, most biological parents share a common interest in protecting their child against harm. In Shared Parenting arrangements, any lingering mis-trust or tension between the parents works in favour of the best welfare of the children, by creating greater transparency of care between the parents.
Any unaccounted for bruising or scratch, any slight change in behaviour by the child, any suggestive utterance by the child, no matter how subtle, will alert the other parent that something is not right, and will allow greater scrutiny of circumstances. This may in some cases lead to false positives, leading to frustration between the parents, but this questioning is the best form of child protection that can be offered to a child, especially when that child is forced to live with other adults that are not biologically connected to the child.
The primary benefit of shared parenting is Transparency of Care, by way of the inbuilt checks and balances that are part and parcel of a shared parenting arrangement, and it is precidely these safety measures that Julia Gillard is dismantling.
In a country where extended families are on the demise, where separations are on the increase, where re-partnering is a natural extension of separation, and where child protection authorities are over-stretched and losing the battle against child abuse, this transparency is quite possibly the most powerful safeguard a parent can have for their child, but it now looks like it is a further victim of a bungling Julia Gillard who is more obsessed with the perception of doing the right thing, rather than the genuine artifact.
And when it comes to child protection, the difference between the perception and the real is life itself, as was the result for Kiesha Weippeart, and so many other children who will now be forced to live in the highest risk environment for child abuse, by Julia Gillard, a Prime Minister who Australians overwhelmingly believe is out of touch, and out of ideas.
Womens groups push to support new bill (to protect children): Yeah right!
Editor: Before accepting much of the article below at face value, you may want to review the litany of anti-male articles written by this particular journalist.
You would in fact be forgiven for thinking that this was the work of a malicious divorced mother with an axe to grind against her ex-husband, rather than an objective journalist wishing to simply portray the facts on family law reform. Perhaps the above description hits closer to home than Adele Horin is willing to admit, (;-), but this obsessive shrill against shared parenting, which Adele would make you believe equates to sexual abuse of children, is nothing more than a disgraceful attempt to ensure that women maintain sole custody rights of their children, and as a result ‘control’ of their ex-husband, regardless of the genuine needs of children.
Do not be fooled into thinking that this is about protecting children from child abuse. Given that almost 80% of all child abuse happens in single mother households, and the overwhelming perpetrators of child abuse being mothers themselves, then removing the transparency of shared parenting is hardly a solution now, is it?
Whether the likes of Adele Horin will admit it or not, this battle is not about children, it is about women’s rights, above and beyond the equal rights of men, or the best interests of children.
If we were to be fair-dinkum about protecting children, then we would take head of figures from the Institute of Criminology which lists sole custody of the highest risk factor for child abuse in Australia.
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Changes to child custody laws will be put under the spotlight today, writes Adele Horin.
A WOMAN whose ex-husband was jailed for sexually abusing her daughter is resisting Family Court orders to allow him contact visits with their son.
The man was sentenced to three years’ jail and served 18 months for the aggravated indecent assault of a minor – his then 13-year-old stepdaughter. He was freed on a good behaviour bond and has been granted supervised access visits with the younger child. The visits, which were supposed to start last October, were intended to lead to unsupervised access after seven weeks.
Now the mother is fearful she might end up in jail because she is in contravention of court orders. ”The day he molested my daughter he lost his rights as a parent,” she said. ”My son says he’s scared of him and I won’t make him go.”
The executive officer of the NSW Women’s Refuge Movement, Cat Gander, says the case highlights the bind women are in under the Family Law Act.
”State child protection authorities insist women protect their children from danger but Family Court orders insist women facilitate access.”
A rally today outside Federal Parliament will be the first step in a campaign to ensure passage of a new family law bill that seeks to give greater protection to children in access and custody disputes. More than 170 agencies, including Lifeline, the YWCA, the Benevolent Society and Headspace, the youth mental health agency, have formed an unprecedented alliance to push for even stronger protections for children in the proposed legislation.
After several government-commissioned studies into family violence that showed children were insufficiently protected under the 2006 Family Law Act, the federal government proposed a new family violence bill. A public inquiry starts on June 9 in Canberra.
Some men’s groups claim the government’s proposed changes to family law may weaken shared parental responsibility provisions. However, Kylie Temple, project co-ordinator for a mid-north coast domestic violence service, said the 2006 law, in emphasising children’s rights to a relationship with both parents, had compromised children’s safety: ”If this mother complies with the federal court order and leaves her child with a convicted sex offender, under state law I am mandated to report the child to the child welfare department for being at significant risk.”
The new alliance wants the committee to take up the recommendations of the former family court judge Richard Chisholm to drop the presumption of equal shared parenting responsibility and the obligation to consider equal time in favour of treating all cases that come before the court on their merits.
The government has proposed more modest changes that will give greater weight to the protection of children above the benefit of children having a meaningful relationship with both parents where family violence was a concern. As well, it proposes to delete the ”friendly” parent provision which obliged judges to have regard to whether a parent encouraged the child’s relationship with the other parent.
Ms Gander said that at this stage it was unclear whether the proposed changes would have a smooth passage through Parliament.
Adele Horin
Mother playing on Facebook while her one-year old baby drowned in bath
A FORT Lupton, Colorado woman, charged over the death of her one-year-old son who drowned while she was preoccupied by Facebook, appeared in court yesterday.
Shannon Johnson, 34, told police she had left her child in the bathtub while she played Cafe World, shared videos and checked on a friend’s status on Facebook in the living room last September.
Ms Johnson said she had left the child alone for 10 minutes, checking on him once. When she could not hear any noise coming from the bathroom after another three minutes passed, she went to check on him again and found him face-down in the water, according to the arrest affidavit cited by ABC 7 News.
The boy was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead. A final autopsy report January 3 said he had died of anoxic brain injury, cardiac arrest and drowning.
Ms Johnson has been charged with child abuse resulting in death.
Ms Johnson said she had left her one-year old baby alone in the bath because he was “independent” and she did not want him to be a “momma’s boy.”
Ms Johnson – who requested a public defender during the hearing Friday – was being held in lieu of a $100,000 bond, The Denver Post reports.
Mother ordered to immunise child in Family Court proceedings
A SYDNEY mother has been ordered to have her five-year-old daughter immunised in a controversial Family Court decision.
The girls’ father, who remarried and had another child, wanted the girl vaccinated against preventable diseases for her own wellbeing and the health of his other children.
But the girl’s mother said her daughter was healthy and the risk of vaccine-preventable diseases was very small.
The decision shocked paediatric chiropractor and author Dr Warren Sipser.
“It’s a sad situation,” Dr Sipser said outside court.
“I think it’s dangerous to impose [immunisations] on anyone when there are two opposing viewpoints and when there is credible evidence they may do more harm than good,” he said.
The couple, who cannot be named for legal reasons, separated before their daughter was born.
The court heard the father initially consented to the child not being immunised but claimed it was because he was desperate to establish a relationship with her.
The father now wants her vaccinated, producing medical evidence immunisation provided no unacceptable risks for his daughter.
He said if the girl remained un-vaccinated, she would be forced to withdraw from school during outbreaks of some diseases.
She would also be unable to spend time with any new children he had as she was not immunised against whooping cough.
The mother produced opposing evidence that the vaccinations were unnecessary but was criticised in the judgment for submitting evidence from an “immunisation sceptic”, who made what the magistrate described as “outlandish statements unsupported by any empirical evidence”.
Outside the court, National Centre for Immunisation Research & Surveillance research head Professor Robert Booy said immunisations prevented very serious diseases.
He said 97 per cent of parents had their children vaccinated and that immunisations formed a chain of protection around those vulnerable to infection.
“The only way we can protect the vulnerable, and that may be a newborn or someone with an immune deficiency, is to ensure other people are vaccinated,” he said.
Read more:Â http://www.news.com.au/national/ordered-to-have-vaccine/story-e6frfkvr-1225988189972#ixzz1B6kFiR5r
