The focus on children being abused whilst important, ignores that fact that the vast majority are not abused.

There a multiple of factors that tend to get lost when people wholely and solely focus on the abuse of children.

Even in an intact household children will go through periods of disliking a parent, for many reason.

Children in an intact household will also play one parent against another at times, sometimes parents throught their own actions encourage this sort of behaviour.

Casting fathers in a bad light, creates a huge prejudice consciously or unconsciously.

There has been more that 40 years of focusing on domestic violence, yet we appear to be further away from being able to deal effectively this issue

Oh, I see Elspeth and Barbara and the rest have found themselves anew self-promotion vehicle, no doubt paid for with a generous grant from the taxpayer.

If you're going to ride on a bandwagon, you may as well demand it's comfortable, eh?

As for the article, nothing to see but a mish-mash of anecdota and emotional claptrap. not a substantive fact in sight. If this is what passes for expert testimony then goawd help the children.

I recommend the author to my thread on professorial integrity.

A sense of dejavu anybody.

Another article dismissing the Howard reforms on the basis that sometimes they don't work without any evidence of how scrapping them will actually improve child safety and once again with no-mention of the profiling going into DV legislation designed to nominate males as the guilty party.

The proponents of scrapping the shared care changes don't seem interested in any analysis of the drop in substantiated child abuse which has occurred during the period those changes have been in place.

They will point out that PAS is technically not a syndrome while pretend that parents are unable to impact on the attitudes of children.

They don't seem to want to talk about the impacts on children on increasing the opportunity for adversaial behaviour in family law.

They don't seem to want to talk about any safeguards to prevent abuse via false claims.

The onus on those wanting to dismantle the shared care reforms is to demonstrate that what they propose will work better most of the time than what is there now. So far they have completely failed to do so.

R0bert

Well put Robert.

Not a statistic in sight in the article, which was obviously done so as to appeal to the emotions rather than the senses.

One statistic blatantly missing is the amount of child abuse occuring in single parent families, which is not mentioned by the author.

Must not step on any feminist toes.

The Shared Parenting Act was a good thing in that it acknowledges the raising of children as a joint parental responsibility even if those two parents are living apart. This should be the beginning point even if circumstances eventually lead to different arrangements. There is no one size fits all and children are invdividuals with different needs.

For example depending on age of children breastfeeding might be a factor, distance and work responsibilities (travel, shiftwork) and finances. Or it may come down to an amicable agreement between the two parents that sees one parent with higher custodial care for various reasons.

To say that the new arrangements lead to children being put into the care of an abuser is just as wrong as assuming that a mother's parental rights are greater than a father's (ignoring the fact the mother or her new partner may be the abuser).

However, given all that, accusations of abuse should be considered as paramount. Children should have much more say in providing evidence to Judges in private with an impartial custodian (social worker) present.

Those that accuse some parents (mainly mothers) of fabricating claims of abuse and 'coaching' children please try and be evenhanded on this issue. It is too important to become just another angry gender attack.

The gender approach is flawed on both sides. For every possibility of a false claim of abuse there is equal possibility of a false claim of 'coaching'. One would hardly expect a mother or father accused of abuse to admit it in a judicial setting particularly if they seek access or partial custody of their children.

The major goal should be preventing children from being in abusive situations - as difficult as that might be to ascertain with conflicting evidence.

Pelican I agree with the points that you are making.
Having said that it's been quite clear that the goal of these changes is to dismantle the shared care provisions.

Did you have a look at the article last week on the inclusion of comments about males and DV into some state DV legislation and the push to put into a broader range of legislation?

Put into context with the focus on DV made by a number of supporters of the proposed changes it alters the dynamics significantly.

There should be mechanisms to investigate claims of abuse but there should also be mechanisms to avoid any long term harm from false claims (eg stopping people from using false claims to establish patterns of care which impact on future residency or hindering access to funds needed to get legal representation etc).

There should be some detailed analysis of the changes to patterns of substantiated abuse and child fatalities across Australia over recent years before any rollback of the shared care reforms are made.

The shared care changes were not perfect and if some of the annecdotal claims are correct there should be refinements made.

I don't think that is the agenda behind what's happening here.

R0bert