Commentary
Father Placed on Child Protection Register for Marrying Young
Lyn and Neville Cox were childhood sweethearts who had grown up in the same street. They were very much in love. When she became pregnant at 15, Lyn’s father was furious and reported 16-year-old Neville to police, who charged the boy with carnal knowledge.
The half-hour court hearing that followed seemed inconsequential, but more than 40 years later it revealed its lasting legacy, branding Mr Cox a child sex offender who should not be around children.
The couple married soon after his conviction, with nothing but a cup of tea and Vegemite sandwich with Mr Cox’s family to celebrate.
They moved away and had two more children, both of whom became police officers, and are respected members of the community in Wagga Wagga.
Mr Cox’s only brush with the law since has been two speeding fines.
Over the years he didn’t give his juvenile record any thought.
”I just presumed that when I turned 18 it was all over red rover,” he said.
It was not until a few years ago he learnt it wasn’t.
Why women marry the wrong men
“Did you know you were making a mistake as you were walking down the aisle?” This was the question Jennifer Gauvain and Anne Milford asked 1000 women as research for their book How Not to Marry the Wrong Man.
A staggering 30 per cent of respondents said ‘yes’ they did know. But, they did it anyway.
Gauvain, a licensed clinical social worker, wrote about it in this blog for the Huffington Post. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given divorce rates in the US are around 40 per cent – versus about one third in Australia – it caused an uproar.
Of the thousand-odd comments on the article, some that captured the general mood included this:
“Marriage is for idots and poor people. Divorce is too easy for women. It’s not hard for a woman to navigate a divorce. The only thing she’s navigating is how much of this man’s hard earned money she’s going to take from him for the rest of his life.”
And this:
Youth To Pay For Sexual Contradictions
I have just had the privilege of taking my 9 year old son and 7 year old nephew to a carnival in Sydney, Australia.
The boys are on Easter holiday break and always look forward to their annual visit to the Easter show, and going together, given their proximity in age, makes this enjoyable event all the more special for them.
With all the rides, show bags, walking and carrying, along with the sometimes chaotic behaviour of excitable boys, I am typically ‘spent’ by the end of the day, although with a quiet sense of satisfaction that I have been able to give the boys another positive little memory, hopefully one more small piece in a happy and fulfilling childhood.
However this evening I did not feel this typical sense of satisfaction, in large measure I suspect because of what I and the boys were so noticeably confronted with as we mingled with the tens of thousands of other Australians while at the carnival.
To my utter despair, on a very cold autumn day in Sydney which required winter clothing for me and the boys, one of the earliest sites we saw while waiting in the queue for our tickets was countless young girls, aged between eight years up to their mid-teens, with skimpy-sized, ‘Daisy Duke’ cut-off jeans, not only exposing the length of their legs, but their buttocks too…
written by Ash Patil
Read the full original article as published on Ezine4Males.com
Read the full edited article as published on Sunshine Coast Daily
Read a related editorial as published on Sunshine Coast Daily
Aussie PM in denial as her support amongst Males drops to all time low
Australia’s Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has responded to news of the collapse of her support amongst Australia’s voting public with an air of denial that has even stunned her harshest critics.
With news today that Labor’s support has fallen to 28 per cent, just one percent shy of the figure that has decimated the Queensland Labor party only a few days ago, with a loss of over 40 seats, fears are now growing that Gillard is simply too detached from reality to meet the herculian challenge that is facing Labor at a federal level.
Many critics have identified two key policies that have wedged hard-core Labor supporters away from Labor and into the fold of the Coalition.
A policy that has received little news media coverage but has caused significant grass roots upheaval has been the recent 2011 Family Law amendments, which have effectively dismantled Australia’s popular and broadly successful shared parenting laws, and replaced them with what is largely perceived to be anti-male, anti-fatherhood policies, many seeing this as Gillard cowering to feminist ideologues.
Read full article on Ezine4Males.com
DIVORCE LAWS: Family Court loathed for the vast harm it does
The Americans have a well-known saying for politicians, “It’s the economy, stupid!” — meaning that what matters most for people are economic issues. It’s false.
What matters most to people, and most affects their well-being, are close relationships, and above all family relationships. These are areas where politicians and bureaucrats can do only limited good but almost limitless harm, and huge harm is being done.
Here are some facts regarding Australia today. If there’s a marriage or relationship break-up involving children, and custody or access is in dispute, the parties must submit to an inquisition by Family Court social-workers or the latters’ pet psychologists regarding their past behaviour towards and in the presence of the children.
A major purpose of the exercise is to identify “family violence” by the male, with this being defined as any behaviour “actual or threatened” which causes any member of the family “to fear for, or reasonably to be apprehensive about, his or her personal well-being or safety”.
The term “well-being” is infinitely elastic, and meant to be, as are the other catch-all Family Court categories of “family violence”, such as “psychological violence/abuse”, “emotional violence/abuse”, and “controlling behaviours”.
What about the men? White Ribbon, men and violence
What about the men? White Ribbon, men and violence: A response to Dr Michael Flood by Men’s Health Australia
The White Ribbon Foundation is an organisation that works to prevent male violence towards women – a goal that is extremely worthy and worth supporting. The White Ribbon website states that “all forms of violence are unacceptable,” however in 2009 the organisation issued a document to it’s male Ambassadors which used erroneous ‘facts and statistics’ to downplay, diminish and report incorrectly about male victims of violence. These Ambassadors use federal government funding to take the White Ribbon message into regional, rural and remote communities. These significant errors could have led the Ambassadors, and through them the general public via federal funding, to be misled about the nature and dynamics of interpersonal violence in Australia.
Couple lose court battle to contact grandchildren
GRANDPARENTS who resorted to litigation to see their beloved grandchildren after their son and his wife cut off all relations have lost a court fight to regain contact.
In what a federal magistrate said was an ”unusual” and ”tragic” case, the grandparents sought court orders to re-establish contact with the two boys, aged 10 and six.
Failing agreement with the parents about seeing the children, the grandparents wanted court orders that included the grandchildren being able to contact them, as well as times set for meeting at Christmas and birthdays.
The relationship between the adults began to slide when the grandmother made a catty comment at the hairdresser’s about her daughter-in-law.
The comment got back, sparking tensions that drew in other members of the extended family.
You can have a friendly divorce
DIVORCE does not have to be nasty and perceptions that amicable separations are impossible are off the mark, experts say.
While disputes are almost always inevitable when a marriage comes to an end, Queensland University of Technology family law expert Donna Cooper says an abundance of research showing the negative effect family conflict can have on children is finally sinking in with separating parents.
“There’s always been a lot of research saying that arguing, conflict, isn’t good for the children – in the last few years it has exploded,” Ms Cooper said.
“The main thing we’ve noticed in family law is that people are listening.”
Adolescent psychologist Dr Darryl Cross said reassuring children that they did not cause a break-up might seem a straightforward recommendation, but was often forgotten.
“You’d be surprised at the number of kids who don’t actually ask if they caused the split, but in their head they’re upset and put a lot of pressure on themselves because they think they’re behind the break-up,” he said.
IVF – Where governments provide funding for fatherless families
Fathers’ rights and shared parenting campaigners have for decades been fighting for the rights of children from separated families to be in the loving presence of both their biological parents.
It has been a hard fought battle which has seen only minor inroads being made, given the ferocious resistance from government funded women’s’ groups, who ironically had been set up in the first place to promote policies of equality amongst the sexes.
As many would know, Australia’s record on human rights had a significant setback last November 2011, when Australia’s world renowned Shared Parenting laws were watered down by the Australian Labor government, being replaced by a set of laws heavily laced with anti-fatherhood dogma, designed primarily to entrench a sole-mother, fatherless family unit post-divorce, regardless of the needs of the children or the qualities of the father.
Having said that, Shared Parenting is not out of the question, and a growing number of divorced mothers are ignoring the sexist overtures of the Gillard Labor government and opting for Shared Parenting arrangements post-divorce.
However, while Shared Parenting advocates continue to knock on the doors of open minded politicians lobbying for genuinely gender-neutral family laws in this country, an insidious, almost silent development has been occurring behind the scenes, a development that no-one ever voted for, and a development that has never been assessed in terms of whether it is in the best interests of the child.
Rugby League – Abusing the truth in its fight against Domestic Abuse
The NRL and the NSW government have recently launched an educational DVD to teach young rugby league players and male students across Australia about the negative impact of violence against women.
This campaign, although well-meaning, has been slammed by many domestic violence experts as a mis-representation of the true nature of domestic violence in this country. Many argue that such a simplistic portrayal of domestic violence will only encourage further abuse, especially amongst the young, because the whole campaign is based on the falsehood.
Although it is fairly well documented that domestic violence is a relationship dynamic, with both parties contributing to the violence and abuse over an extended period of the life of the relationship, Australian sporting codes are unfortunately ‘buying in’ to the myth that domestic abuse and violence is a unilateral phenomenon, and can somehow be stopped by simply vilifying men.
Most domestic violence has a backdrop of abuse tactics from both the male and female in the relationship, dating back many years before the authorities may be involved.
