Violence comes from both sides

WE ARE approaching the time of the year when the government- sponsored White Ribbon Campaign will be seeking to have only men swear an oath to be non-violent toward only women.

Should not, however, every Australian swear to be non-violent to all others, regardless of sex or any other discriminator?

The White Ribbon Cam­paign has stooped to a new low  this  year  by  releasing just  before  Father’s Day a discussion paper titled Fathers, Fathering  and  Pre­ venting Violence Against Women which disparagingly targets fatherhood and mass­ culinary, claiming  they  are redundant  concepts.

According to the White Ribbon Paper, the most impotent cause of violence against women is gendered power inequalities. Further, it says that the widespread belief among men that we make a unique contribution to parenting says a lot about us, our sense of entitlement, and our desire to feel impotent.

But a large and growing body of research evidence shows reciprocal or bidirectional violence to be far more common than violence perpetrated solely by one partner.

This is especially true in studies of dating partner violence in young people.

Using a broad definition of physical violence in the Australian National Crime Prevention Study, dating violence was common, with one in three males and females reporting they had experienced at least one type of physically violent behavior from a boyfriend or girl friend.

This  finding has  been confirmed  across nations and cultures by  pre-eminent violence researcher Murray Straus, whose 2007 paper concluded that dominance by the female partner was as strongly related  to partner violence as dominance by the male partner, and  that prevention and treatment of partner violence could  be­ come more effective  if the programs recognized  that most partner violence was bidirectional and act on the high rate of perpetration by women.

The paradox of White Ribbon is that it claims gender inequality as the root cause of violence against women, but adopts a single-gender approach to the problem of family  violence, despite the contemporary understanding that men and women are both deeply entrenched in its causation, as are multiple biological, psychological and social factors.

My alternate to the White Ribbon pledge:

To family violence,

Australia says no.

This is regardless of the sex of the victim or perpetrator or their relation­ ship!

Dr. GREG CANNING, Hermit Park

Dark Blue: Child Abuse Prevention

Child abuse is the physical, sexual or emotional mistreatment or neglect of a child or children.^[1] In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department for Children And Families (DCF) define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or other caregiver that results in harm, potential for harm, or threat of harm to a child.^[2] Child abuse can occur in a child’s home, or in the organizations, schools or communities the child interacts with. There are four major categories of child abuse: neglect, physical abuse, psychological/emotional abuse, and child sexual abuse.

Different jurisdictions have developed their own definitions of what constitutes child abuse for the purposes of removing a child from his/her family and/or prosecuting a criminal charge. According to the Journal of Child Abuse and Neglect, child abuse is “any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation, an act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm”.^.

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