I was going to comment on this article, but basically it's not worth responding to. A mish-mash of rehashed rubbish, referencing a report from Bagshaw et al which is so flawed as to be almost fraudulent, designed to justify and enhance the capacity of women to make false allegations of violence while facing no punitive consequences at all. This is McInnes's standard puff piece, no doubt trotted out as part of the propaganda effort around the proposed changes to the FLAct.

Those changes will lead to greater and greater conflict, more police being called to domestics, more DVOs, more complaints from McInnes et al that "something must be done", more kids being estranged from loving fathers.

As long as people like the author and ChazP and the rest of the Women's Entitlements lobby continue to fan the flames of Family Law conflict there can be no solution to the problems such conflict causes.

They have nothing to be proud of.

Ritz,
As soon as a university accepts feminism, it has no interest in science.

It means that the university will accept advocacy research, qualitative research with no quantitative research, hiding of information, giving out misleading information, discrimination and denigration of a gender.

This article is an example from the first sentence, where the author selectively states that a father threw his daughter off a bridge (true), but fails to mention that a mother jumped off the same bridge carrying a child earlier that year.

Such selectivity of information is a universal characteristic of feminism, and the decline in science right through the education system is now the consequence of the acceptance of feminism throughout the education system.

As I have also previously stated, the author has not once said one good thing about fathers in any article written, and everything said about fathers has been negative.

That is not science. That is denigration.

"How can the deaths of over 70 mothers and 20 children per year as a direct consequence of domestic violence be construed as `misleading evidence’.?"

It's not the whole story but as an example of the way perceptions about protecting children from fathers is misused by the maternal bias crowd I'd suggest that those genuinely interested in the topic read through the section titled "2.1 Description of the 2009 fatal assaults" (page 126) in the http://kids.nsw.gov.au/uploads/documents/NSW_CDRT_2009.pdf I'm pretty confident that that report and it's predecessors are not artifacts of the men's rights movement. Feel free to read the whole report for additional context.

There are certainly cases where the fathers are responsible for childrens deaths but in the years I've looked at for the child death review reports the natural fathers have not generally been the biggest risk. We don't ever see that aspect highlighted by the maternal bias crowd.

Nor do we see the impacts of their preferred adversarial approach to family law raised as an issue of concern when it comes to comes to reducing violence either against women or against children. I strongly believe that the the levels of violence post family breakdown are heavily impacted by the very adversarial system Elspeth, ChazP and others are so fond of promoting.

R0bert

I think YEBIGA has it nailed.

Chaz,

'Your attitude that children are mere “spoils’...'

If you've read anything of r0berts posting you'd know that is nothing remotely close to his attitude. You're being ridiculous.

I'm not really emotionally invested in this at all, actually I try not to sound too smug as people's lives can change quickly. But you lot all have so much bias and you all want what's best for kids I'm sure, but I think YEBIGA has explained it all very well as to why the system is a mess.

'The bias in the FLA system is therefore towards such fathers having a rebuttable presumption of such rights'

So it's bias that all kids have a right to see their fathers unless their fathers are *proven* to be paedophiles? I think that's a logical stance for mothers and fathers.

'The proposed amendments seek to correct this situation.'

Well, I must have missed the amendments that mean all accusations are to be investigated in a timely manner by police.

I think you should be careful what you wish for. As a kid my family went through some bad times when one of my parents behaved quite badly with mental health issues, but even though it was damaging, on the whole I am happy that I had the opportunity to see both parents and would have been far more damaged from denied access.

Families need support even when they are fractured, I fail to see how a temporary weakness by either parent under the stress of relationship breakdown and often financial stress should result in them losing all contact with their kids until they reach adulthood.

The circumstances must be *proven* to be extremely risky for this to ever happen.

Families have good and bad times and I think it's the opposite of helping a family to split it up by force due to a temporary stress, especially when the resolution of the divorce could mean the family is on the cusp of resolving a major stress?

R0bert: “Part of what's happening is a battle of perceptions, the proponents of a genderised family law system have created perceptions based on the use of selected statistics about family violence and child abuse.

The groups wanting a system where parents are judged on their parenting rather than gender have tried to change those perceptions.”

Are there groups doing that somewhere? I’ve only seen the HS/SS (He says-said / She says-said) groups here and the odd good post I've read smothered by them.

Is it possible to change a court so much, and the way it does things, that nothing is based on any previous commonly held perceptions? We don’t want a court telling any parent to keep abuse under their hat or they will be seen as being obstructive to the relationship of the other parent with the children. Of course they are trying to obstruct contact, it is their duty.

Be nice to have proper and timely investigations of alleged abuse and only chronic PA acknowledged and proof taking a priority mostly – when did proof stop being important to courts?

Any matter involving the Best Interests of a Child, I feel, all court expenses should be paid for by government. They were talking somewhere about having a “Sexual Abuse court” - which seemed a little too focused. Why not a separate “Child Abuse Court” where the only job it does is to identify if abuse did happen then send the case back to Family Court once that has been proven or not?

This country does weird things YEBIGA, it will take and keep children in foster care without proof and charges never being laid and no evidence of a criminal act on a child having ever appeared in court. Perhaps a Child Abuse Court would sort it, accused parent exits innocent or guilty.

"As soon as a university accepts feminism, it has no interest in science.

It means that the university will accept advocacy research, qualitative research with no quantitative research, hiding of information, giving out misleading information, discrimination and denigration of a gender."

I think you'll find that pretty much every uni in the country has a feminist or two on staff. According to your ludicrous hypothesis, all scientific research in this country should have ground to a halt.

Strangely enough, we still have scientists who get published in prestigious journals, and scientists who are regarded as leaders in their field, and scientists who win Nobel prizes. Graduates can still apply for jobs with fine organisations like the CSIRO, and not be rejected on the grounds that their science degree is not worth the paper it's printed on just 'coz the university in question employed a few feminists in the arts faculty. This evidence would suggest that you're talking a load of rubbish.

"Such selectivity of information is a universal characteristic of feminism, and the decline in science right through the education system is now the consequence of the acceptance of feminism throughout the education system."
-vanna

What decline in science? Science is still taught, and taught very well, right through the education system - from kindergarten to PhD.

I'm fairly certain there are no feminists who believe that withholding information about, say, pi-bonding in organic compounds is going to lead to greater gender equality. They'd have to be at least as crazy as you to believe that two fields as unrelated as chemistry and sociology have any bearing whatsoever on each other. Chemical compounds have properties like valency and pH - they do not have gender, and are entirely irrelevant to any and all feminist theories.

"That is not science. That is denigration."
-vanna

Yes, and it's extremely unscientific of you to denigrate the science faculty of every university in this country without producing a single scrap of evidence to support your far-fetched hypothesis that feminists are leading a nefarious conspiracy to destroy science.