Posts Tagged ‘Abuse’
Saturday, December 5th, 2009
Michael McKenna; 5/12/09
Police who investigated an alleged cover-up of child sexual abuse at a Queensland Catholic primary school had close ties with teachers and the principal. At least three police officers involved in the investigation last year of a teacher, later charged with the rape and abuse of 13 young girls, had children at the school or spouses on staff at the close-knit Toowoomba school, west of Brisbane. Police previously said all officers with any involvement at the school were taken off the case at the start of the investigation. The initial abuse complaint was made by a nine-year-old girl and her father to the school principal in September, 2007.Police were not told and the veteran teacher, 60, remained at the school for another 14 months, during which time he is alleged to have abused another 12 girls, resulting in him now facing 46 charges of rape and indecent treatment. He faces court next year.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Australia, Children, Christianity
Posted in Australia, Christianity, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
David Sharrock; 28/11/09
The Catholic Church in Ireland connived with the authorities in a cover-up spanning decades to shield pedophile priests from prosecution. Hundreds of crimes against children were not reported as the four archbishops of the Archdiocese of Dublin remained wedded to the “maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets”, an official report concluded yesterday. Instead, the church hierarchy shuffled the sex offenders from parish to parish, allowing them to continue to prey on victims. In some cases, pedophile priests were even promoted. The 750-page report by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse on the Dublin archdiocese – the second significant inquiry this year to expose appalling levels of sexual abuse of minors in Ireland under the aegis of the Catholic Church – said it had uncovered a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy throughout the period it investigated, between 1975 and 2004.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Children, Christianity, Ireland
Posted in Christianity, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Friday, November 27th, 2009
27/11/09
An Irish Catholic religious order heavily criticised in a report on child abuse will provide a E161 million ($263m) package of measures as reparation. The Christian Brothers said the offer followed its “acceptance, shame and sorrow” about the findings made by the landmark Ryan report in May, and recognised “our moral obligation to survivors of abuse”. The brothers said E34m in cash would be used to help victims of abuse, whose plight was identified in the Ryan government report. One victims’ group described the move as “smoke and mirrors”. The Ryan report chronicled cases of tens of thousands of children who suffered systematic sexual, physical and mental abuse over decades at residential homes run by 18 congregations.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Children, Christianity, Ireland
Posted in Christianity, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
David Sharrock; 23/10/09
Raped and infected with gonorrhoea when she was eight, then soon afterwards seized and sentenced to eight years in a children’s institute run by sadistic nuns, Kathleen O’Malley has spent most of her life hiding from herself. But having emerged stronger from her horrific childhood she has set herself a new challenge: to find the sister who suffered with her. The facts of O’Malley’s life would probably not have been believed 10 years ago, not before the dam finally burst on the Catholic Church in Ireland. A long-awaited report into clerical abuse in the diocese of Dublin is expected to be published soon and Catholic bishops are bracing themselves for another round of public anger.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Christianity, Ireland
Posted in Christianity, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Saturday, October 10th, 2009
10/10/09
A survivor of child sexual abuse tells Scott Giles why her experience makes her willing and able to help the most vulnerable members of cassowary country. Signs on the way to Sue Curtis’s home advertise avocados at $2 a bag, oppose abortion with pictures of a foetus, declare that ”bruises heal but hearts don’t” and say domestic violence kills. Along the way you pass dairy cows that are ankle deep in mud, you get the feeling that much is hidden out here. In March Curtis, 58, was appointed co-ordinator of the Wuchopperen child protection service at Atherton, the Tablelands township an hour west of Cairns where the former Queensland premier Peter Beattie spent his formative years. Her small team of five is one of 29 across Queensland that provide advice on indigenous child protection to the state’s Child Safety Department. The Tablelands are wide and lush with rainforest. Clouds hang like the breath of God around volcanic peaks; crater lakes are deep and clear. And the area is home to the cassowary and Lumholtz’s tree-kangaroo. Red-hot in summer and foggy cold in winter, it is perfect for fruit and corn.
(more…)
Tags: Aboriginal, Abuse, Australia, Children, health
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Jamie Walker; 2/10/09
Catholic Education has moved against staff caught up in a sex scandal at a Toowoomba primary school in southern Queensland, after the principal became the first in the country to be prosecuted for failing to report suspected child abuse to police. The Bishop of Toowoomba, William Morris, wrote to parents this week expressing how “deeply distressed and saddened” he was by allegations that one of the school’s teachers had raped a number of young girls. The local Catholic Education Office has been under fire over its handling of the affair, with the school’s principal charged with failing to inform police of a 2007 complaint of sexual abuse against the male teacher by a nine-year-old girl and her parents. The teacher was later charged with multiple rape counts, with police alleging that he continued to abuse the girl and her classmates for another 14 months.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Australia, Children, Christianity
Posted in Australia, Christianity, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Friday, August 14th, 2009
Stephen Lunn; 14/8/09
Clothing company Cotton On has admitted it “crossed the line” and today vowed to withdraw a range of offensive children’s t-shirts, including one making light of child abuse, after a consumers threatened a boycott. A t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “They Shake Me” was the last straw for many angry parents, who sent emails and Twitter messages to the company this morning expressing their disgust and an intention to vote with their feet. Last month Cotton On had stuck by its range of shirts, which included slogans such as “I’m a tits man” and “I’m living proof my mum is easy”, saying there was a place in the market for their “edgy” humour that pushed the boundaries. But today, as anger spread through the social networking sites, Cotton On finally cottoned on to their customers’ feelings, offering a contrite apology and a promise to withdraw the offending items from sale.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Australia, Childrens Rights, Trade, Womens Rights
Posted in Aid / Trade, Australia, Health & Children, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009
Nick McKenzie; 11/8/09
Melbourne Catholic Archbishop Denis Hart told a woman who had been sexually abused by a priest to “go to hell, bitch” in conduct labelled appalling by a Victorian magistrate. Archbishop Hart later apologised to the woman in the Melbourne Magistrates Court for what magistrate Anne Goldsborough described as ”appalling words of abuse”. But last night Archbishop Hart repeatedly claimed that he ”did not recall” his comments or the magistrate’s rebuke in mid-2004. ”It was a number of years ago, I don’t recall precisely,” he told The Age. When put to him that he would surely recall the comment because it had become an issue in court, he again said: ”I don’t recall.”
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Australia, Christianity, Womens Rights
Posted in Australia, Christianity, Human Rights, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
Justine Ferrari; 3/7/09 ; (3 Items)
Literacy and numeracy skills among indigenous students have not improved over the past 10 years, with government programs and school interventions failing to narrow the gap in performance between indigenous and non-indigenous students. The Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage report, released yesterday, shows that while more indigenous students are staying at school longer and completing Year 12, the proportion failing to meet national minimum standards in reading, writing and maths remains significantly lower than with other students, and has not changed since 1999. The Council of Australian Governments agreed yesterday to develop a national indigenous education action plan to co-ordinate strategies agreed by the states and territories and committing to meet COAG targets. These include halving the gap in literacy and numeracy rates between indigenous and non-indigenous stu-dents by 2017.
(more…)
Tags: Aboriginal, Abuse, Australia, Children, Education, health
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Health & Children, Human Rights, Racism | No Comments »
Friday, June 12th, 2009
Saad Al-Dosary; 12/6/09
A recent study of 10,000 students in elementary schools aged between 8 and 12 in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam has revealed shocking information. Some 35 percent of the students have been physically abused by their parents, 50 percent of them were verbally abused and 2 percent suffered sexual abuse. If we look carefully at these numbers, we see that the study has dangerous implications. One of them is that high numbers of our children are subjected to physical, verbal and sexual abuse. Why is this happening? What is the main reason behind it? Could it be that these parents were not brought up the correct way by their parents and so they are unable to bring up their children without abusing them? Is the culture we have based on abuse? Did these parents not receive a good education in schools and universitie?
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Children, Saudi Arabia
Posted in Asia, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Monday, June 8th, 2009
Habib Toumi; 8/6/09
Around 91 per cent of women in Bahrain who are victims of domestic violence are battered after they give birth, compared to six per cent who are abused before they become mothers, a study shows. Sex-related problems between husbands and wives constitute a major reason for the violence, said 80 per cent of the women covered by a survey commissioned by the Bahrain Women’s Union. “The number of Bahraini women who were abused in the last ten years was 2,628. The figure includes 74 cases of violence against fiancées,” the report said.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Bahrain, Womens Rights
Posted in Asia, Human Rights, Womens Rights | No Comments »
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
Anthony Klan;30/4/09; (2 Items)
The sex-abuse scandal engulfing Sydney’s exclusive Knox Grammar school has widened with a fifth teacher charged over allegations of abusing children. NSW police yesterday arrested a 66-year-old former Knox teacher at Port Macquarie, on the state’s mid-north coast, in relation to the alleged indecent assault of a student in the 1970s. Police charged the man with two counts of indecency and one count of assault. The offences are alleged to have taken place while he was a teacher at the school in 1976 and 1977. The former teacher is the fifth man to be arrested since February on allegations of abusing students at the school.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Australia, Children, Christianity
Posted in Australia, Christianity, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Monday, April 6th, 2009
Ofra Edelman and Tomer Zarchin; 6/4/09
“I’m a naive woman. I pretty much believe everything.” This was how M., a 39-year-old woman from Jerusalem, explained her decision to hand over her eight children to the abusive hands of Elior Chen, an ultra-Orthodox man who called himself “rabbi” and who claimed that the children were in need of “correction”. The mother’s statements to police, a portion of which were released on Sunday to the press, revealed a disturbing picture depicting a parent sitting quietly by while her two-year-old son is severely beaten. It shows how a mother turned her back on her infant son who was screaming for help.”Many times I thought that what they were doing to my children is like in the Holocaust, that this was certainly how the Nazis would torture the Jews, for no reason… that this was how people looked in the Holocaust. But I thought that from these cases of torture, from the pain and the sorrow, the children will become righteous,” M. told her investigators.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Children, Israel, Religion
Posted in Health & Children, Human Rights, Israel & Palestine, Religion | No Comments »
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Paul Toohey; 28/3/09; (9 Items)
Stung by criticism that West Australian police had a far better clear-up rate for indigenous child-sex abuse, members of the Northern Territory’s Child Abuse Taskforce insist they are making serious headway on the issue, having conducted 842 child-sex investigations since 2006.Last week, The Weekend Australian reported police in the Kimberley region had charged 132 people with child-sex offences since April 2007, an astounding result that raised questions as to why the NT has not had similar success, especially given that fears of mass underreporting of child-sex abuse gave rise to the federal intervention in June 2007. The taskforce predates the intervention and arose largely out of comments made to the ABC’s Lateline by Alice Springs prosecutor Nanette Rogers about several cases that had been through the courts. Colleen Gwynne, commander, Crime and Special Support Command, heads the CAT and says it has become linked to the intervention by default.
(more…)
Tags: Aboriginal, Abuse, Australia, Children, Drugs
Posted in Aboriginal, Aid / Trade, Australia, Drugs, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Caroline Overington; 25/11/08; (6 Items)
The Wood report into child welfare has identified the huge number of Aboriginal children in foster care as one of the chief problems of the overloaded system. As foreshadowed by The Australian today, the report, officially released at 12:30, says there are thousands of Aboriginal children in care, having been removed for reasons of neglect. It says there is a lack of “culturally appropriate interventions for Aboriginal children” and there are too few programs to help children and young people at risk.
(more…)
Tags: Aboriginal, Abuse, Australia, Children
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Gender & Marriage, Health & Children, Human Rights, Womens Rights | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
Gina Maka’a; 13/8/08
It has been estimated that in the Solomon Islands, almost 85%-90% of sexual assault cases of adults and children alike have not been reported to the local police or authorities. Solomon Times took the time to talk to Family Support Center’s Counselor, Lovelyn Kwaoga. The Family Support Centre, is a Non-Government Organization that supports victims of domestic violence, rape, prostitution and sexual abuse. Ms. Kwaoga states that common cases of sexual assault are often from single mothers and young girls. It has also been noted that most sexual assault cases are results of domestic violence and alcohol.
(more…)
Tags: Abuse, Drugs, Sex Trade, Solomon Islands
Posted in Drugs, Gender & Marriage, Health & Children, Human Rights, Sex Trade, Solomon Islands, Womens Rights | No Comments »
