Mission & Justice

Mohammad Ghazal; 2/7/08

Intensive dialogue is called for between concerned authorities in the Kingdom to come up with recommendations to address the issue of abandoned children which is a social problem in Jordan, a report released by the Amman Centre for Human Rights Studies (ACHRS) indicated on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Public Security Department (PSD) Spokesperson Major Mohammad Khatib reiterated yesterday that the issue of abandoned children is not a phenomenon in Jordan. “This is alien to our community and the main reason behind it is not Jordanians but foreigners,” he told The Jordan Times. A recent PSD study, which compared the number of abandoned children over the past five years and the ratio against the total population, said the incidents did not constitute a trend and were individual cases.

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Maria Hawthorne; 29/6/08
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called for a national child protection system following disturbing cases of abuse and neglect. State and territory leaders are likely to discuss the plan at this week’s Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting in Sydney.

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Tony Koch; 30/6/08

The federal intervention into the Northern Territory indigenous communities has spread in part to Queensland, with an Australian Crime Commission taskforce taking over the investigation of alleged child abuse and neglect. A preliminary, unannounced visit to 17 communities on Cape York last month by members of the National Indigenous Violence and Child Abuse Intelligence Taskforce resulted in 130 reports being compiled and 15 referrals to state police for possible prosecution. The NIITF was established last year under the auspices of the ACC to run the policing and criminal investigation arm of thefederal government’s intervention into 73 Northern Territory communities. Serious physical and sexual abuse of children has been rife in many Cape York communities for decades, and neglect of the basic health needs of youngsters has become a paramount issue.

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Ewin Hannan; 26/6/08

An entrenched and misplaced “culture of optimism” among child welfare agencies has exacerbated the failure of state governments to tackle child neglect, with thousands of non-indigenous children living in squalor throughout suburban Australia. Child welfare experts said revelations about the living conditions at two Adelaide houses highlighted the urgent need for a national reporting system and how state authorities prematurely closed neglect cases in the mistaken belief that chronic offenders could be reformed. As the Rudd Government works on a new national child protection framework, child experts renewed calls for a national database that used agencies such as Centrelink to track the movement of at-risk children from state to state.

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Leo Shanahan; 25/6/08
It is one of our most troubling national issues: the gap between the health of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Now, after decades of debate on how to fix it, researchers have discovered a confronting reality — the gap is getting wider. A snapshot of the nation’s health has revealed that while Australians overall now enjoy the second-highest life expectancy rates in the world, Aborigines remain mired in Third World rankings on almost every relevant measure of health. The study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that a baby born in Australian today can expect, on average, to live to 81.4 years — second only to Japan at 82.2.
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Paul Maley; 24/6/07

Weekend protests over the Northern Territory intervention into indigenous communities have been dismissed by prominent Aboriginal leader Warren Mundine as the work of white middle-class liberals and the same generation of indigenous leaders who let the problems develop in the first place. Speaking two days after a national day of action to protest against the federal Government’s intervention on its one-year anniversary, Mr Mundine, a former ALP president, called onthe public to ignore the demonstrations. He said those responsible had become “totally disconnected” from the plight of Aboriginals living in the affected areas. “Quite frankly, I think some of these people are just locked up in their eastern suburbs homes and don’t have a bloody clue what’s going on,” Mr Mundine told The Australian.

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Catherine Lumby, 22/6/08;Professor Catharine Lumby is director of the journalism and media research centre at the University of NSW.
A male friend of mine was at a dance class with his three-year-old daughter. The kids were twirling around, having a ball. A typical proud father, he took out his video camera to record the moment. He knew the class allowed parents to film the kids. A woman approached him and asked him to put the camera away. She was suspicious because he was a man filming young children.He complied. Thinking about it later, he was enraged. I felt for him. Our sons play together and he’s a wonderful father - exactly the kind of man we want involved in our children’s lives.

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22/6/08

The number of girls to boys in India has hit a record low, British charity ActionAid said Saturday as it urged the government in New Delhi to take “sustained action” to prevent a lost generation of women. “In a country with a long history of discrimination against women, the preference for sons over daughters has led to the number of girls under the age of six hitting an all-time low,” said ActionAid in a report. Ratios of boys to girls aged 0-6 in sites in four out of five states it studied in north and northwest India were now lower than at the time of the last nationwide census in 2001 - and the gap was widening, the report said. Both rural and urban areas showed similar declines and the phenomenon cut across class and wealth lines, added the report, which is titled “Disappearing Daughters”.

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Susan Maushart 21/6/08;

“Gay! Gay!” shriek the children like some baleful Greek chorus, their kohl-rimmed eyes ablaze with pity. I cover the receiver. “Gay, straight, or scallop-edged, I’m making this phone call,” I hiss. (These days, the word “gay” has nothing to do with sexuality, they insist. Now it just means “loser”. Phew. For a moment there I was worried 40 years of civil rights activism had been in vain.) Teenagers hate it when parents confer about their social arrangements, but in my experience there is strength in collective paranoia.

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Ruth Ostrow; 21/6/08; ostrowr@theaustralian.com.au
Sitting in a cold hospital room in a children’s ward almost two years ago was the longest night of my life. We were waiting to find out how severe our daughter’s pneumonia was, and what sort of bug it was that had caused the collapse of one lung. I don’t remember too much of that night, so I can’t be specific. But one prognosis was going to be far more serious than the other. So tests were done, and results were pending; meanwhile the clock ticked on, ever so slowly.

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