SOCIAL progressives on both sides of politics may not like the message or the messenger, but Cory Bernardi had a point about the benefits of the traditional family.

Decades of social science data has shown that children, on average, do better in life on measures of health, education and social outcomes when raised in two-parent married families.

The risks to children associated with family breakdown disprove the fashionable idea that marriage, divorce, and sole parenting don’t matter for children.

The importance of marriage to children’s wellbeing is especially relevant to one of the most important child welfare issues facing the nation – child sexual abuse.

The vast majority of child sexual abuse occurs within the family setting. However, the fact that in 70-80 per cent of cases the perpetrator is found to have a “familial relationship” with the abused child obscures a more significant truth.

Numerous studies have found that children who do not live with both biological parents, irrespective of socio-economic status, are far more likely to be sexually abused than their peers in traditional families. Girls living in non-traditional families are found to have been sexually abused by their “stepfathers”, either the married, cohabiting, or casual partner of a divorced or single mother, at many times the rate that girls are sexually abused by their biological fathers in traditional families.

The 2010 US Fourth National Incidence Study of Abuse and Neglect found that compared to peers living in married two-biological-parent families, children living with a single parent who had a partner in the home were 20 times more likely to be sexually abused. Children living with a single parent with no cohabiting partner, and children living in a stepfamily (with married biological and non-biological parents), were five times and between eight and nine times more likely to be sexually abused, respectively.

Step and single-parent families accounted for only one-third of all children in the US (33 per cent) but accounted for more than two-thirds (66.8 per cent) of all children who experienced child sexual abuse.

Child sexual abuse statistics in Australia are far less comprehensive and meaningful. Data publicly available here does not provide specific information about family structure, the identity of the perpetrator, and their relationship with the abused child.

This is symptomatic of the deeper silences in the national conversation about child sexual abuse.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been widely applauded for finally “breaking the silence” surrounding child sexual abuse.

The commission’s inquiry into the ways that churches, schools and other institutions have mishandled child sexual abuse is crucial. However, we should still question the extent to which the commission’s findings will ensure children are better protected from sexual abuse in the future when the well-established but under-publicised links between family structure and child sexual abuse are not being investigated.

When the Australian Christian Lobby released a major report on child welfare in 2011 detailing the evidence demonstrating that family breakdown is a major risk factor for child sexual abuse, the facts were neither disputed nor acknowledged in the little public discussion that ensued. They simply washed in and out of the public domain and left no trace on community attitudes.

The issues are not fully and frankly discussed in this country because the public discourse is self-censored, in effect, by politicians, academics, social service organisations, and the media in compliance with politically correct attitudes towards “family diversity”, the socially “progressive” and “non-judgmental” fiction that says the traditional family is just one among many, and equally worthy, family forms.

In hindsight, we are justifiably critical of the silences that in earlier times kept child sexual abuse a hidden problem. Yet a comparable silence exists today.

Greater community awareness is needed of the potentially harmful impact the relationship and reproductive choices of adults can have on children. This could be achieved by a government-commissioned, anti-child sexual abuse public information campaign. The campaign should emphasise that the traditional family is a protective factor that prevents child sexual abuse. It should also publicise how divorce and single-parenthood increases the risk of sexual abuse for the more than one in four Australian children who do not live with both biological parents.

This is not as radical as it sounds. In New York and Chicago, public information campaigns are encouraging marriage before having children and discouraging teen pregnancy. Barack Obama has also endorsed the need for “strong stable families” to reduce poverty in America.

Australian governments already conduct advertising campaigns such as anti-smoking and anti-drink driving campaigns to educate citizens, promote certain values, and change attitudes and behaviours. A public information campaign that advertised the risks to children posed by family breakdown would end the new silence that hides the culturally unfashionable truth.

Jeremy Sammut is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. His report, The New Silence: Family Breakdown and Child Sexual Abuse, is released today.

Children Of Divorces ‘Safer With Their Dads’
By Phil Bartsch
The Courier-Mail
9-5-3

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why not we are the largest army the world has ever seen

http://fathersaustralia.com/

Too few men leads to youth violence, University of Michigan study finds

By Eric Schulzke, Deseret News National Edition

Published: Sun, Dec. 29 11:35 a.m. MST

Youth violence shoots up when males are missing from the neighborhood, concluded researchers at the University of Michigan in a new study released last week.

The study centered on Flint, Mich., the former auto manufacturing center that is now one of the most impoverished and violent cities in the country. Researchers broke the city down by zip codes, comparing the number of males in the area to the number of assaults committed by young men.

The results were striking. Researchers found an enormous chunk of the difference between a neighborhood with lots of youth assaults and one with relatively fewer could be explained by “male scarcity.” While a difference of 3 to 5 percent would have been significant, Daniel Kruger of Michigan’s Public Health Department and one of the study’s authors, found that 36 percent of the difference was explained by lack of adult males in the neighborhood. Add one other mammoth variable — high school graduation rates — and you get 69 percent of the variation in assaults committed by young men.

In Flint, Kruger said, the absence of males can be traced to three factors: men who left to look for jobs; young men who have died in gang violence; and men who are incarcerated.

“When we don’t have men as positive role models, we get much higher rates of violence,” Kruger said.

It’s a vicious circle, the authors say. When young men get caught up in crime, they are more likely to end up incarcerated, which results in fewer adult males in the community, which leads to more dysfunction.

Sex ratio problems

“It’s classic economics,” Kruger said, “supply and demand,” combined with the historic role that women play in civilizing men. When there are fewer women compared to men, the women have more leverage to get men to commit to stable relationships. “Men think to themselves, ‘If I don’t take her, someone else is going to snap her up, and I’d better treat her well,’” Kruger said.

But when men are scarce, those who remain behind often leverage their own scarcity for shorter term relationships. The early life phase of “mating effort” (characterized by raging hormones) gets frozen in place, and the normal maturation to “parenting effort” (caring for a family) gets delayed or derailed. Men then refuse to commit, seek out additional partners and favor shorter term relationships, Kruger said.

The social maladies of skewed sex ratios are well-documented and not limited to America’s urban centers, said Valerie Hudson, who teaches public policy and international relations at Texas A&M University. Her co-authored 2004 book “Bare Branches” studied how China’s one-child policy, combined with cultural chauvinism, produced drastic female scarcity there.

Skewed sex ratios in either direction produce bad outcomes, Hudson said. When men are scarce, they don’t mature from finding sexual or romantic partners to actually being a parent. The resulting hormonal “arrested development,” Hudson said, involves more than family relations. It also includes other anti-social behavior, risk-taking, battles between men over honor, face and respect: “Then a lot of them end up in jail, which further depresses the sex ratios, putting all of this on steroids,” Hudson said.

Too many males is not good for women either, Hudson added, pointing to China, but for very different reasons. Families now jealously guard their girls, the marriage age comes down and a chattel market for brides develops along with high suicide rates among young women.

“Meanwhile, only best connected men get married, leaving an underclass of bare branches. Boys are then stuck in the mating profile, with antisocial behavior,” Hudson said.

Wide social impact

Male scarcity reaches far beyond personal relationships to the well-being of infants and the health of communities, said Kruger, who has a long-standing interest in evolutionary psychology and male scarcity. Earlier this year he published data demonstrating a link between male scarcity, on the one hand, and premature births and low birth weight on the other.

Kruger cited multiple studies demonstrating that where males are scarce there are more out-of-wedlock births, more single mother households, higher rates of teenage pregnancy, and lower expectation of paternal child care.

While there are many risk factors involving out-of-wedlock births and poverty, the researchers in this case were able to isolate male scarcity in a community as a clear risk factor in its own right.

Speaking in evolutionary terms, fathers and other men in a community help provide food and shelter, train youth in life skills, and help defend against threats: “All of these improve the children’s prospects for survival and reproduction,” Kruger wrote.

What gets lost

Fathers matter but so do other men in the neighborhood, said Cleopatra Caldwell, a colleague of Kruger at Michigan’s School of Public Health and a coauthor of the male scarcity study. For more than a decade Caldwell has worked on the streets of Flint with the Fathers and Sons Project, which is developing a training program to help integrate fathers into the lives of their children.

“The impact of males in a community reaches beyond the roles of father and provider,” she said. They also serve as role models, mentors, and forces for social control. When a dad takes a kid to the ball game, he often takes other kids along, she said.

Having men in the neighborhood has a balancing, normalizing effect on how kids see the world, Caldwell said. “And if you are not present, not visible, that’s a deficit.”

Caldwell is now pursuing another study in Flint, she said, which combines fathers and “father figures” to measure the impact of other males in the community on a child’s life: “How does a child learn to be a male?” she asks.

Policy implications

The largest struggle for men in Flint is finding jobs, Kruger said. Flint was once a company town tied heavily to General Motors. When the auto industry collapsed in the 1980s, the city never recovered.

And it was disproportionately the women who stayed behind.

“Women more likely to have kids or greater connections with extended family,” Kruger said. “If you take a small-time drug dealer and send them to prison, you are basically sending them to criminal training school,” Kruger said.

While job-seeking flight and youth mortality both play a key role in Flint’s struggles, Caldwell also focuses most intently on the heavy toll high incarceration levels play in African American communities in creating male scarcity.

The U.S. incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country, and African American communities are hit the hardest — six times the national average, Caldwell said, with many serving long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses.

Flint and cities like it desperately need economic revitalization, Kruger said.

“That’s the foundation for everything we are dealing with,” Kruger said.

Equally important, he argues, is that the criminal justice system needs to shift from a “punitive model to a harm reduction model,” citing, like Caldwell, the enormous increase in U.S. prison populations since the 1980s.

While Flint is struggling, Caldwell sees grounds of optimism. Having spent more than a decade on the ground there, she said, the city is far from hopeless.

“There are citizens fighting for the city, and a beautiful population of children whose future is bright,” Caldwell said. “I would not call it a bleak city.”

Email: eschulzke@desnews.com

One of England’s most senior judges has pledged to expose family courts to the “glare   of publicity” to avoid miscarriages of justice and restore public   confidence

Sir James Mumby, president of the Family Division of the High Court, says family courts must be open to the ‘glare of publicity’ Photo: BRIAN SMITH FOR THE TELEGRAPH

By Steven Swinford, Senior Political Correspondent

One of England’s most senior judges has pledged to expose family courts to the   “glare of publicity” to avoid miscarriages of justice and restore public   confidence.

MAILONLINE

• Canadian scientists believe growing up in a fatherless household could have a greater impact on daughters than on sons
• They said growing up without a father could permanently alter the structure of the brain and produce children who are more aggressive
• Dr Gabriella Gobbi of McGill University in Canada said that the main impacts were seen in the prefrontal cortex

By  Ben Spencer

PUBLISHED: 18:20 GMT, 4 December 2013 |  UPDATED: 01:04 GMT, 5 December 2013

Growing up without a father could permanently alter the structure of the brain and produce children who are more aggressive and angry, scientists have warned.

Children brought up only by a single mother have a higher risk of developing ‘deviant behaviour’, including drug abuse, new research suggests.

It is also feared that growing up in a fatherless household could have a greater impact on daughters than on sons.

More than one million children in the UK currently have no contact with their father while they are growing up, a figure that is growing by 20,000 a year

More than 1million children in the UK currently have no contact with their father while they are growing up, a figure that is growing by 20,000 a year.

Dr Gabriella Gobbi, who carried out the research with colleagues at the medical faculty at McGill University in Canada, said: ‘This is the first time research findings have shown that paternal deprivation during development affects the neurobiology of the offspring.’

The research, which was carried out on mice, compared the social behaviour and brain anatomy of youngsters with two parents to those growing up with mothers alone.

The team said the findings had direct relevance to human society.

They used California mice, which, like humans, are monogamous and raise their offspring together.

Francis Bambico, of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, who also worked on the project, said: ‘Because we can control their environment, we can equalise factors that differ between them.

Children brought up only by a single mother have a higher risk of developing ‘deviant behaviour’, including drug abuse (pictured) new research suggests. Previous studies have said girls in particular have been shown to be at risk for substance abuse

‘Mice studies in the laboratory may therefore be clearer to interpret than human ones, where it is impossible to control all the influences during development.’

The brains of the fatherless mice developed differently, Dr Gobbi said, with the main impacts seen in the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain which controls social and cognitive activity.

The study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, found that those mice raised without a father displayed signs of ‘abnormal social interactions’ and were far more aggressive than mice raised with both parents.

The difference was far more pronounced in daughters than in sons and females raised without fathers also had a greater sensitivity to the stimulant drug amphetamine.

Growing up without a father could permanently alter the structure of the brain and produce children who are more aggressive and angry, scientists said

Dr Gobbi said: ‘The behavioural deficits we observed are consistent with human studies of children raised without a father.

‘These children have been shown to have an increased risk for deviant behaviour and in particular, girls have been shown to be at risk for substance abuse.

‘This suggests that these mice are a good model for understanding how these effects arise in humans.’ The report said the behaviour of the mice was ‘consistent with studies in children raised without a father, highlighting an increased risk for deviant behaviour and criminal activity, substance abuse, impoverished educational performance and mental illness’.

It added: ‘Our results emphasise the importance of the father during critical neurodevelopmental periods, and that father absence induces impairments in social behaviour that persist to adulthood.’ Dr Gobbi said the results suggested both parents are vital for children’s mental health development and hoped the findings would spur researchers to look more deeply into the role of fathers.

A separate report by the Centre for Social Justice, published in June this year, found that more than 1million British children currently live without a father and have no adult male role model, a figure that is rising by 20,000 a year.

Some of the poorest parts of the country are becoming ‘men deserts’, the report found, because there are so few visible male role models for children.
In the Manor Castle ward of Sheffield 75 per cent of households are headed by a single parent, most commonly a woman.

Hi to Everyone.

This is one more candidate than what we had in the previous 2010 Federal Election

1. Wayne Hartman – Throsby (NSW).

Please click onto Wayne Hartman for details about the NCPP(EP) candidate for the  Federal Electorate of Throsby, NSW.

If slow to download, please click onto a pdf copy of the above details and a photo of Wayne (without the above wording) which can also be downloaded

2. John Flanagan – Cunningham (NSW).

Please click onto John Flanagan for details about the NCPP(EP) candidate for the  Federal Electorate of Cunningham, NSW.

Again if slow to download, a pdf copy of the above details and a photo of John (without the above wording) can also be downloaded.

3. John Zabaneh – Flinders (Victoria)

Please click onto John Zabaneh for details of the NCPP(EP) candidate for the  Federal Electorate of Flinders, Victoria.

Alternatively a pdf copy of the above details can also be downloaded.

4 and 5. Andy Thompson and Josh Thompson – Senate candidates for NSW.

Please vote [1] in Box “AN” (box 40 out of 44 on the NSW Senate ballot paper).

Andy Thompson

Josh Thompson

Please click onto Andy Thompson and JoshThompson for details about the two (2) NCPP(EP) candidates for the NSW Senate.

If slow to download, a  pdf copy of the above details and a photo of Andrew Thompson and a photo of Josh Thompson can also be downloaded by clicking onto the respective blue highlighted items

Regards

John Flanagan

http://www.equalparenting.org.au/

Yes thats right shared parenting is as much an issue for women as it is for men (or mothers as it is for fathers). Why? Because children suffer incalculable harm when one of their parents is vilified and excluded by the Family Court process (usually involving abuse allegations against the father).
The harm done to children when one of their parents usually the father is estimated as follows;

• 63% of youth suicides are     from fatherless homes (Source: U.S. D.H.H.S., Bureau of the Census
• 90% of all homeless and     runaway children are from fatherless homes
• 85% of all children that     exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes (Source: Center     for Disease Control)
• 80% of rapists motivated     with displaced anger come from fatherless homes (Source: Criminal Justice     & Behavior, Vol 14, p. 403-26, 1978.)
• 71% of all high school     dropouts come from fatherless homes (Source: National Principals     Association Report on the State of High       Schools.)
• 75% of all adolescent     patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes (Source:     Rainbows for all Gods Children.)
• 70% of juveniles in     state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes (Source: U.S. Dept.     of Justice, Special Report, Sept 1988)
• 85% of all youths sitting     in prisons grew up in a fatherless home (Source: Fulton Co. Georgia jail     populations, Texas Dept. of Corrections 1992)
• And 85% of child abuse     victims are from single parents homes.

And this isn’t just boys. Girls are thought to suffer even more than boys when their relationship with their father is denied.
So when the ‘numbers men’ tell you how to campaign at the next elections and you are told to do everything to capture the female vote – bear in mind that government funded “NGOs” who oppose shared parenting don’t represent women’s interests as they claim to.
Children are the most important thing to most people. Don’t let them suffer in the mistaken belief that you are empowering women by compromising their interests.
Huge money is made from denying children contact with one of their parents after separation or divorce. Not just by the lawyers but by the practitioners as well – the psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, not to mention the vitally important government funding for groups claiming to represent women and children and fighting Family Violence by denying fathers access to their children.
If you want to win the next election stand up for children and you get more votes regardless of gender.
Regards Simon Hunt
See also http://www.familylawwebguide.com.au/video/index.php?page=galleries&wide=1&type=video&root=root&id=20.

Hi to Everyone

If you are available on Father’s Day – Sunday, 1 September and you can be in Sydney on that day, the following is recommended.

There is to be a family law protest that has been organised in Hyde Park, Sydney.

These are the protest details:

Date: Sunday, 1 September 2013.

Time: Between 10.00 and 12.00 noon.

Location: The mid-eastern side of Hyde Park (at the corner of College and Park Streets Sydney – just opposite the Australian Museum).

It is organised by Shannon from Newcastle.

The flyer and Mission Statement are provided below.

If available, you can RSVP to Shannon on her Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/papasaustralia or just come along.

Regards

John Flanagan

Flyer

This is the flyer for the protest.

Mission Statement

Shannon’s Mission Statement below has also provided more detail:

People Against Parental Alienations –

Mission Statement

The Family Law system is besieged with political violence, false allegations of violence, child abuse or substance abuse, incongruous policing, insufficient counselling, a bureaucratic Child Support Agency and an out-dated perception of domestic violence. This results in an unprecedented number of children being wrongly alienated from a parent, with a very high likelihood that the father will be the alienated parent, who becomes overly vulnerable to depression and suicide.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 2009-10, there were over one million children (aged 0-17) who had a natural parent living elsewhere. Of these, only 31% have daily or weekly face-to-face contact with their other parent i.e. meaningful contact. Almost half never stayed overnight with that parent. A quarter saw their parent less than once per year, or never. In nearly all cases the father is the parent living elsewhere, sometimes by choice but frequently not, so according to the Government’s own figures over 300,000 children are alienated from their fathers.

These grim statistics show that family unit, the cornerstone of Australian life, is becoming a relic of the past and the current systems are only worsening this downfall by driving the wedge deeper between children and their fathers.

The failings start with the police who process Apprehended Domestic Violence Orders (ADVO) on the basis of personal statements, even without

any evidence to support the statement. The courts then hear the application several months later, removing any responsibility from the police. This policy decision was made to rid the police of liability if they do not action an ADVO and then violence subsequently occurs, but serves only to rid a child of their father. This is because the defendant, usually being the father, often has no right to see their child whilst waiting for the hearing – the start of common trend.

These strict conditions regarding ADVO’s were initiated to counter the terrible problems stemming from domestic violence, but are inherently unfair. The Australian Institute of Family Studies found that 26% of mothers and 17% of fathers reported being physically hurt by their partners. A further 39% of mothers and 36% of fathers reported emotional abuse. However despite such similar proportions of both female and male victims the police, Family Law professionals and counselling providers perpetuate the myth that it is females and children who are almost exclusively victims of these awful crimes, contributing to systematic persecution of fathers, who are almost as likely to be the victims.

In situations where the ADVO applicant also has a case before the Family Court, judges consider all allegations of family violence, whether true,

false or unheard. This violates the right of every citizen to be innocent until proven guilty and encourages behaviour that intentionally alienates a father from their child by making allegations which are acted upon by the police and the Family Court.

The retiring Family Court judge, Justice David Collier, recently said he sees unprecedented hostility infiltrating the Family Court, and a willingness by parents to use their children to damage one another. The worst are those mothers who direct false allegations of abuse against former partners; specifically allegations of child sexual abuse are being increasingly invented by mothers to stop fathers from seeing their children.