Amanda O’Brien; 18/11/09; (3 Items)
West Australian jails are at breaking point, with the mentally ill, the poor and Aborigines crammed in “like sardines”, forcing numbers to explode by almost 900 in just one year. The new figures were obtained by The Australian as Western Australia Police withdrew a charge against a 12-year-old Aboriginal boy from Northam, 100km east of Perth, who was accused of accepting a stolen 70c Freddo frog and a $4 novelty sign. After a community backlash, police yesterday withdrew the charge and instead referred the boy to a juvenile justice team. The state opposition accused Premier Colin Barnett and Attorney-General Christian Porter of conning the public into believing it was cracking down on hardened criminals when all it was doing was locking up vulnerable people.
Home is where the hate is
Natasha Robinson; 18/11/09
Standing in a Darwin police station, Tiffany Paterson might as well have been invisible. The threats had been unequivocal. Her former partner, a one-time champion footballer who had throttled her on more than one occasion, was coming for her and this time he meant to kill. It was a humid Sunday morning last year, a few days before Christmas, a season of escalating humidity sometimes known in the Top End as “suicide season”. As the terrified mother of two reported her former partner’s latest breach of a domestic violence restraining order, police were far from alarmed. “This is bigger than Ben-Hur,” Paterson heard an officer mutter as she exited the Palmerston police station. The following day, Paterson’s six-year-old son watched as his mother’s face was sliced open with a kitchen knife.
See: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/home-is-where-the-hate-is/story-e6frg6z6-1225799009545
Some kids really need to be rescued
Jeremy Sammut;1811/09
As a researcher your gut always churns when you are about to release a new report, but when the Centre for Independent Studies published my report on child protection earlier this year, it was something else again. This report argued that child protection authorities should be removing more children from the custody of their dysfunctional parents because our research found that present child protection policies, which emphasise the importance of family preservation, are jeopardising the futures of thousands of children in Australia’s growing underclass of welfare-dependent families. It isn’t pleasant advocating greater state intervention to break the parental bonds that are elemental to who we are. What also induced gut-churning was anticipating the reaction. Would I be accused of wanting a return to the days when social workers ripped newborn babies from the arms of single mothers?
See: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/some-kids-really-need-to-be-rescued/story-e6frg6zo-1225799013329; Melbourne Uni says sorry for trials on orphans; Bridie Smith; http://www.theage.com.au/national/melbourne-uni-says-sorry-for-trials-on-orphans-20091117-ikc9.html; Sorry state of abused children; Mark Metherell & Adele Horin; 18/11/09; http://www.smh.com.au/national/sorry-state-of-abused-children-20091117-iker.html
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Children, Domestic Abuse, health, Human Rights, Legal