MENZ Issues: news and discussion about New Zealand men, fathers, family law, divorce, courts, protests, gender politics, and male health.

The McMartin pre-school molestation case in California proved to be the blueprint for dozens of other ’satanic panics’ around the world. Interviewers at the now notorious Children’s Institute International developed considerable expertise at brainwashing small children into making bizarre accusations of ritual sex abuse.

These same techniques were used in NZ to successfully convict Peter Ellis, plus a number of other male pre-school workers around the country who did not attract the same media attention. Children’s Institute International techniques have been promoted in NZ by DSAC Doctors for Sexual Abuse Care, and other feminist groups which work to remove men from contact with children.

In a Los Angeles Times story by Debbie Nathan: McMartin Pre-Schooler: ‘I Lied’ , Kyle Zirpolo, one of the accusing children in the McMartin case apologises and describes how he was coerced into fabricating the evidence used to prosecute the teachers.

We were examined by a doctor. I took my clothes off and lay down on the table. They checked my butt, my penis. There was a room with a lot of toys and stuffed animals and dolls. The dolls were pasty white and had hair where the private parts were. They wanted us to take off their clothes. It was just really weird.

I remember them asking extremely uncomfortable questions about whether Ray touched me and about all the teachers and what they did—and I remember telling them nothing happened to me. I remember them almost giggling and laughing, saying, “Oh, we know these things happened to you. Why don’t you just go ahead and tell us? Use these dolls if you’re scared.”

Anytime I would give them an answer that they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for. It was really obvious what they wanted. I know the types of language they used on me: things like I was smart, or I could help the other kids who were scared.

Researchers have since shown that when children are subjected to the interviewing techniques used by Children’s Institute International, most start to make up bizarre stories within a few minutes. A few excerpts from the transcript of Kyle’s interview by two CII staff members show how blatantly they go about framing-up the teacher Ray:

Interviewer 1: We got a mountain of dolls here. Here’s a little girl. Easy to tell she’s a girl. She has a bow, and her vagina’s underneath…. Kids throw ‘em, beat ‘em up, and everything. You should’ve seen [another child] beating ‘em up. Boy we had a good time—

Interviewer 2: Beating up Mr. Ray doll.

Although these psychologically abusive techniques were used on many thousands of children around the world, few interviewers have ever been held to account, and nothing has been done to address the damage done to children used as cannon-fodder in the gender wars. Most agencies will claim: ‘we don’t do it like that any more’, but while they remain in steadfast denial about the extent of their past abuse, we should be very afraid of allowing our children to fall into their clutches.

Likewise, potential jury members should always be extremely sceptical of a prosecution based on solely ‘disclosures’ to interviewers, or where ‘experts’ like Doctors for Sexual Abuse Care have been involved.

Christchurch Women’s Refuge says employment contracts should have a clause requiring people convicted of domestic violence to be fired from their jobs.

Refuge manager Annette Gillespie said employers needed to get tougher on domestic abusers and send a message that family violence was not acceptable.

“We (Christchurch Women’s Refuge) definitely support employers threatening staff who are convicted of family violence with dismissal,” Gillespie said.

But the national office has a different view, preferring that the men are able to stay employed so they can continue to pay the maximum child support. Their statement suggests that they do not envisage women being the ones fired, and makes it clear that they are not concerned about the welfare of men.

Women’s Refuge chief executive Heather Henare said while her organisation did not yet have a firm position on the issue of whether someone should be fired for family violence-related convictions, such a policy could potentially be harmful to women and children.

“There could be long-term implications for women and children if one of the bread winners lost their job,” she said.

A more positive response to family violence would be for employers to fund courses on how to deal with the issue, she said.

As usual, the answer is increased funding for feminist organisations!

There are some great things happening in the Bay of Plenty around teaching boys to be good men, according to the Bay of Plenty Times top story Bay leads country in making good men, by Anna Bowden.

Western Bay schools are leading the country with innovative strategies to better the education and attitude of our growing boys.

That’s the view of researcher and social commentator Celia Lashlie, who says Bay schools are strong contributors to a generation being taught the value of being good men.

Tauranga schools are uniting in their holistic approach to give boys access to inter-school mentors, tailored classrooms for boys only, help to foster better relationships with parents and ultimately encourage a better future.

Gate Pa School and Tauranga Intermediate have established specialised teaching for ongoing boys-only classrooms – and this week Te Puke High School revealed it was investigating single-sex classes from as early as next year.

Lashlie was in Tauranga launching her book ‘He’ll be Ok – Growing Gorgeous Boys into Good Men‘, which has sold the first print run of 7000 copies in under a week.

Muriel Newman has just posted an article about ‘the fatherless generation‘ on her new NZ Centre for Political Debate website. She notes that despite recent concern over gangs and youth violence, little has been said about the underlying causes of the problem.

Any discussion with police or those who work with troubled youth will quickly identify that the largest proportion of them come from homes where their biological father is absent: children raised in families without a father, where there is inadequate supervision and a lack of socialisation, are far more likely to become involved in anti-social behaviour and crime, than those raised with a dad.

Unfortunately, feminist anti-father policies are something that most politicians are terrified to mention. Even National’s new ‘political-correctness eradicator’ has not yet mentioned anything about the fact that our courts are being misused for this misguided social engineering programme. Muriel has been one of the few consistent voices in Parliament advocating Shared Parenting and the removal of discrimination against fathers.

This is why I am so passionately opposed to public policy and practice that encourages family breakdown and excludes biological fathers. A biological father is a child’s traditional protector. Removing him from the lives of his children leaves them extremely vulnerable to abuse, neglect and failure.

That is not to say that every child being raised without a dad that ends up in trouble, or for that matter that every child raised in a loving two parent household by their biological parents, turn out to be little angels. But, on the balance of probability, children raised without their natural father, will face greater difficulties in life, than children brought up with their dad to love, guide and protect them.

The feminist theory that violence is the product of patriarchy couldn’t be more wrong, and we need women like Muriel to keep pointing this out. It is now clear that most dysfunctional and anti-social youths come from female headed families, and if current policies continue we should expect social breakdown to keep increasing.

Here in New Zealand… driven by a feminist agenda, which seeks to create equality for women by undermining men, society has now reached a sorry state: taxpayers are funding a hundred thousand women and girls to struggle to raise their children on their own, there is an epidemic of tens of thousands of abused children, and there is now an escalation in youth gangs and violence.

A leading Maori health provider has called for tougher penalties for men who beat their wives and children.

Darrin Haimona, chief executive of Waikato-based Ngati Haua Healthcare, told a domestic violence conference in Auckland yesterday that traditional Maori culture was no excuse for Maori men who were violent.

He attacked comments last week by Waitakere Judge Philip Recordon, who said men charged for the first time with domestic violence offences should be encouraged to plead guilty and go on non-violence courses, rather than being jailed.

“We need to be consistent in messages saying that violence is taken seriously,” Mr Haimona said.

“I’m saying use jail more as a deterrent, while at the same time that is a difficult statement for me to say when I understand that there are more Maori people within prisons.

“I’m supporting much stronger penalties. The penalties need to fit the crime.”

Under current law, assaults bring heavy penalties of up to 14 years in jail, but men who breach protection orders by visiting estranged partners or failing to attend non-violence courses face only fines of up to $5000 or six months in jail – or two years if they have already offended at least twice in the previous three years.

Surveys suggest that domestic violence is prevalent among Maori. In 2001, 49 per cent of Maori women, but only between 23 and 25 per cent of European, Pacific and other women, said they had been hit, threatened or frightened by a partner some time.

Mr Haimona said this was the reverse of pre-European Maori society, where the role of women and children was one of “divinity and sanctity”.

When European missionaries opened schools in the Waikato, many Maori families boycotted them because they punished children with violence.

“However, when we look at the statistics today, not only is it in the schools where violence is being perpetrated against our children, but we as Maori men and women are doing the violence towards our own children.

“That is absolutely contrary to our traditional values.”

Menstruating women were seen as tapu (sacred) and were not allowed in the garden because dealing with food would have lowered their status.

Today that status had degenerated to the point where a menstruating woman was often seen as paru (dirty).

“That is not a traditional value base,” he said. “Male violence against women and children is not a traditional aspect. This is something we learned in the schools.”

He acknowledged that warfare was also a feature of traditional Maori society, but he said people who infringed the sanctity of women and children, even in war, were regulated by utu. Utu meant revenge, but it also meant “restoring balance”.

Mr Haimona said the only system that existed to restore “balance” after a transgression today was the justice system.

“I don’t want to see more Maori people going through the police and justice system.

“However, that is the only tool that we can legally use, because our traditional ways of dealing with it might have been a bit too harsh.”

At a meeting between men’s groups and United Future leader Peter Dunne in Birkenhead last year, I listened to him talk about the Families Commission, which he hoped would address some of the concerns we raised about the state-mandated removal of fathers from children’s lives, and the anti-male bias within the courts and the social services.

I asked him what steps United Future had taken to counter the possibility of the commission being subverted by feminist activists, eager to get their hands on new sources of funding.

He replied that they were well aware of this danger, but put their faith in the high calibre and integrity of the people employed to staff the commission.

I know Mr Dunne has a good understanding of how the feminists work, as demonstrated in a March 2004 speech:

“political correctness… is dressed up as a form of tolerance of diversity, but in reality is anything but. It is an ill-disguised, highly intolerant attempt to subvert the way we think, the questions we ask and the positions we hold, in order to change the very nature of our society to fall in line with an agenda of a truly undemocratic elite.
…

It wages war on the family, as the base unit of our or any society; undermining its parameters and chipping away at its building blocks, for no more profound reason than the fact that traditional concepts of family do not fit the perceptions of some of its advocates.”

It should be noted that other politicians did not share Dunne’s optimism about the new Commission. For example, in June 2004 ACT’s Heather Roy said:

“But I predict that the Families Commission will prove to be nothing more than a politically correct talkfest that will help not one single at-risk child or struggling family.”

The news yesterday that the Families Commission was sponsor of the country’s biggest-ever domestic violence conference at Waipuna Lodge over the weekend, shows that Heather Roy’s prediction and my fears have turned out to be correct.
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About 20 people turned out at Waipuna Lodge in Auckland to protest at the Stopping Violence Services 2005 Annual Conference. In an effort to draw attention to the use of Protection Orders as a weapon by some women, the theme of the protest was ‘Revenge is just an allegation away‘.

Several of the fathers I talked to told me their stories of suddenly loosing all contact with their children, even though there was no evidence of abuse presented. Most of them were forced to attend “Living Without Violence” courses, many of which are run by the conference attendees.

As the Union of Fathers bus drove by, one father shouted over the public address system: “If you take our kids away of course we get bloody angry!”

Ben Easton was interviewed at length by a Radio NZ reporter, and the protest was given good coverage on the one o’clock news at least.

Newsreader: In situations of Domestic Violence, blame is too often attached to the man he believes that more complete evidence needs to be collected and presented to the courts about why a violent situation in the home has taken place.

Ben Easton: “This is not to say in any way that any act of domestic violence is promoted by the men out here at all – it’s not. What were saying is that the cause isn’t being looked at and we’re not providing for the damage which is occuring from domestic violence.”

Newsreader: Ben Easton says the damage is done when fathers are unfairly separated from their children.

An unidentified ‘worker’ in family violence was given the last word: “the vast majority of victims are female.”

Listen to streaming audio of the 1.00pm RNZ news here.

For the first time, news of a father’s protest has made it into the (NZ Herald ) – before it has even happened!

Headlined Fathers in kayaks protest at family violence event Simon Collins writes:

Fathers plan to protest in kayaks on Auckland’s Panmure Basin on Saturday to protest against a judge who will be speaking at New Zealand’s biggest-ever conference on family violence.

Waitakere Family Court Judge David Mather is due to speak at the conference at the nearby Waipuna Hotel on that day about Waitakere’s experiment with encouraging men charged with family violence to plead guilty and attend anger management courses.

South Auckland father Paul Catton, 43, said he would be there in his kayak to protest against being convicted of assault and breach of a protection order when his ex-wife and son came to his house a year ago.

With the National Network of Stopping Violence Services Annual Conference under way at Auckland’s Waipuna Lodge, the feminist propaganda machine has kicked into high gear.

The Herald warns that: ‘Faith in protection orders wanes‘. The story by Simon Collins begins with an impressive graph with prominent red arrows pointing upwards under the heading “Male Assaults Female”. There are no reported figures for violence by females to balance this picture.

The second section: “Protection Orders” is not separated by gender, but it shows a dramatic drop in the numbers of Protection Orders both sought and granted since 1999.

The article says that the drop in applications for orders, despite Women’s Refuge efforts to encourage women to seek them, is because they are loosing faith with the justice system:

The services manager of Auckland agency Preventing Violence in the Home, Holly Carrington, said the courts were failing to enforce protection orders when men breached them by contacting their former partners or failing to attend anti-violence programmes.

“Here in Auckland the courts are a major problem in the response to family violence; a major barrier to the safety of victims,” she said.

“Sentencing for family violence offenders is so inconsistent, and much more often than not they are way too lenient. They [offenders] have to practically kill someone to get a prison sentence.”

This is a rather extraordinary claim, and it is given a prominent position in the article. Many reasonable people would be rightly alarmed if this were the case. Unfortunately there is no attempt to check out the facts, or present an alternative viewpoint.

It is indisputable that men’s groups are having an impact, and the domestic violence industry is in damage-control mode, pushing their dishonest spin that it is all about “mens rights”:

A joint submission to MPs by refuges and nine other agencies, quoted in a report last week by the Parliamentarians’ Group on Population and Development, said the Family Court was “increasingly seen to be overriding the safety of women and children in favour of ‘men’s rights’.”

Women’s Refuge chief executive Heather Henare said there had been enormous pressure on judges from the fathers’ rights movement, reflected in comments by Waitakere Judge Philip Recordon last week that men up for their first offence “at the lower end of the scale” should sometimes be discharged without conviction.

Justice Ministry analyst Elizabeth Bartlett suggests that the “underlying incidence of family violence has remained unchanged” which would surely suggest that all the money being poured into Feminist social-engineering schemes is a total waste. But when you are a government and one of your pet projects, run by your sisters, isn’t working what do you do? Yep, you do it more, with increased resources and funding!

The Ministry of Women’s Affairs has commissioned two Waikato University academics, lawyer Ruth Busch and psychologist Neville Robertson, to conduct a year-long study of protection orders, including the barriers preventing women from seeking them.

Us Senate Reauthorizes Feminist Man Hating Bill NewsWithViews.com
by David R. Usher

Last week, the U.S. Senate approved reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (led by Senator Joe Biden of Delaware), amidst a hail of public criticism of the program. A substantial collection of mainstream organizations and scientists oppose VAWA for one basic reason: it funds sexism, not prevention of domestic violence.

VAWA is at best an extremely dubious program. Certainly, we all agree it does help women living in abuse. But we also know that it fails to help or protect men living in abuse. In fact, the program holds male victims of domestic violence responsible for women’s violence, even where the man is a saint.

VAWA: The WMD of divorce

The problems do not stop there. VAWA is the preferred “weapon of mass destruction” used by women’s attorneys in planning and execution of divorces. VAWA is written such that one fax containing a mere statement of fear is all that is necessary to seize full control of family, home, assets, and bank accounts.

Advocates of VAWA point out that courts are overwhelmed and need laws such as VAWA to protect women.

This is the self-fulfilling prophesy of VAWA — judges only have time to hear about 5% of divorce cases. But courts are overwhelmed particularly because spouse abuse allegations are filed in the majority of divorce cases – and judges simply do not have the docket time to hear them. A short hearing, absent of all due process standards required for stripping a citizen of home, property, and family are discarded.

The standard of proof is, in essence, “free-floating fear”. Dr. Stephen Baskerville describes the abject constitutional error of VAWA, in his latest article, “Violence Against the Constitution”, We can no longer allow feminists to steal by overwhelming the court system. Half the husbands in America have been thrown out of their families. No one can possibly believe that most of these guys are violent wife abusers.

From false child abuse, to false spouse abuse allegations.

For the truth, read the full article:
Us Senate Reauthorizes Feminist Man Hating Bill