Mission & Justice

Padraic Murphy; 29/10/08

Expectant indigenous mothers on Cape York will receive $1000 baby packs as part of a groundbreaking campaign to improve prenatal and postnatal care in remote communities. Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said yesterday the packs would drastically increase the health of the 300 babies born across Cape York every year, and their mothers. “Over the next two months, the baby baskets will be rolled out in at least four priority communities in Cape York, giving mothers vital education and tools to help them through pregnancy and the birth of their babies,” Ms Bligh said. The Australian revealed in July that the Queensland Government had been urged to consider the move by doctors Lara Wieland and Richard Heazlewood, who had forged their careers in indigenous health. The doctors told a Cairns medical conference that early childhood care in remote communities needed to be overhauled, as not only was the baby bonus often squandered, but it was a trigger for domestic assault.

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28/10/08

Sunni Islam’s highest authority has approved a woman’s right to fight back if her husband uses violence against her. The declaration by Sheikh Abdel Hamid al-Atrash, who heads the Al-Azhar University committee for fatwas or religious rulings, comes after similar rulings by religious leaders in Saudi Arabia and Turkey,  Egypt’s Al-Masry al-Youm newspaper has reported. “A wife has the legitimate right to hit her husband in order to defend herself,” Atrash said. “Everyone has the right to defend themselves, whether they are a man or a woman … because all human beings are equal before God,” he said. Over the last few days, Saudi Sheikh Abdel Mohsen al-Abyakan stressed the fact that a wife should resort to “the same kind of violence” as her husband used against her, whether it be with a leather strap or a wire cable, the paper said.

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Hayat Al-Ghamdi; 22/10/08; (3 Items)

A Saudi father has been preventing his four daughters from continuing their education and leaving their home ever since he divorced their mother four years ago, the mother charged yesterday. The man has also denied the woman visitation rights granted by the court. “I have not seen my daughters for three years now,” Amina, the mother, told Arab News. “Despite the existence of human rights organizations in the Kingdom, my daughters have been prevented from continuing their education, which is a God-given right. I was also deprived of my legal right to see them,” she said. The father, an employee of the Ministry of Defense and Aviation, has been in jail in Khamis Mushayt since the beginning of September for refusing to implement a court verdict which granted his divorced wife the right to see their daughters during the summer break.

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Pia Akerman; 23/10/08

Eunice Aston says she has done her bit. A representative of South Australia’s Aboriginal women at a national level for years, she has listened and taken up their issues, particularly the need for safe houses where women can take refuge from domestic violence in remote areas. While she will still serve on the Premier’s Council for Women, she is now planning to spend more time with her grandchildren, passing the flame to eager young women keen to be the voice of their communities. Two such women are Irene Peters, 22, and Sophia Gibson, 21, both youth workers from Yalata community, 1000km northwest of Adelaide. Described by colleagues as a “driving force” for Yalata youth, the two women work to make sure others stay on the straight and narrow. “We go bush with them, cook barbecues, help them stay out of trouble,” Ms Peters said.

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Irfan Yusuf; 22/10/08

A Muslim proverb says that a child’s first university is her or his mother’s lap. Young children at this age are like soft clay and can be moulded into more or less a permanent shape that will prove difficult to change in later years. It’s a process that might be called education by osmosis. I graduated from the university of my Indian mother’s lap with a fear of the prayers of others, especially those I have wronged. The word for oppression in both Arabic and Urdu (my mother’s North Indian dialect) is zulm. An oppressor is zaalim and the oppressed is muzloom. Mum’s Urdu formula was fairly straight forward. Zulm na karo. Kiyun kar Allah Ta’ala muzloom ka dua hamesha soontahey, chahe muzloom kaafir ho aur zaalim musalman. Literally this means: ‘Do not oppress. Because God Almighty always hears and responds to the prayers of the oppressed, even where the oppressed refuse to acknowledge Him and the oppressor believes in Him.’

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13/10/08

Authorities are currently questioning a man who is suspected of having tortured his teenage daughter, who is now fighting for her life. “Layla, 14, is in extremely critical condition and is struggling for her life at an intensive care ward,” according to a source at Taif’s King Faisal Hospital. The hospital source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the father of the girl brought her to the hospital on Friday. She was in a coma and was covered with bruises and had first-degree burns on her body.“No part of her body is free from some injuries or marks of beating or other forms of torture,” the source said.

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Leslie Cannold; 5/10/08

In the early 1990s I worked as a researcher for an organisation dedicated to finding accommodation for young, homeless women. Many of these women were escaping violent homes and, even if they were lucky enough to get a bed in a refuge, they often found more violence there. My female co-workers thought they had the answer single-sex accommodation. The only problem was that the actual and threatened assaults the young women told me about were not just from angry young men, but hardened young women who had been on the streets for years.
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Vered Lee; 31/10/08 (2 Items)

Owners of “massage parlors” (a euphemism for brothels) forbid prostitutes working in them to use condoms because in a police raid they would be evidence that the establishment is for paid sex. A Health Ministry spokeswoman says that an increase in sexually transmitted diseases has been registered recently among prostitutes and their clients. “Massage parlors are nothing else but brothels, and pimps who operate them are denying the prostitutes basic protection for their lives and health,” she says. Everyone knows this, yet the police refrain from closing these places down, she says.

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Colleen Schirmer; 1/10/08

Colleen Schirmer is a teacher/library technician and writer. She lives in Geelong.

She was only small, but the fox terrier bared its teeth and growled menacingly at us. Its milk-swollen underbelly and protruding teats let us know it had a litter nearby. We kept a wary distance and spoke soothingly to the little mother. She lunged at our ankles, snapping and snarling. As we approached she backed away slowly, keeping up a barrage of barking and growling, her dark eyes blazing. We were at the old farmhouse, revisiting the place where it had all happened. I had been a teenager then and it had been spring. Now, as then, the wind gusted and howled, rattling the loose iron panels on the walls of the farm sheds. The iron flapped and creaked, metal scraping harshly against metal. Tall spring grasses whipped back and forth, the wind drying the moist stalks and leaves, the fragrance of the grass saturating the morning air.

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Padraic Murphy; 25/9/08

The suicide of a 12-year-old boy in Kowanyama has exposed the child safety crisis in remote indigenous communities in Queensland. The case has prompted authorities to admit that 40 per cent of notifications are not dealt with and staff on the ground are inexperienced, under-resourced and unable to cope with the misery played out daily in Cape York communities. Queensland Coroner Michael Barnes has criticised the state’s police, child protection system and even his own office over how authorities handled the suicide of the 12-year-old. Mr Barnes delivered a stinging rebuke to the state Government by recommending a review of funding and training to ensure child safety workers can “discharge their functions within the mandated time frames”.

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