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

From the Dompost :

A woman who fatally stabbed her partner in the chest with a kitchen knife has been sentenced to just eight years in jail.

Jacqueline Elaine Wihongi, 33, “self-medicated” with alcohol after a tragic “history of victimhood”, a court was told yesterday. She is believed to be just the second person to receive less than a life sentence for murder.

Wihongi was found guilty in June of murdering her partner of 17 years, Vivian Hirini. But in the High Court at Napier yesterday, Justice John Wild said it would be manifestly unjust to sentence the mother-of-six to life imprisonment.

Women’s Refuge has hailed the decision as “brave and right”, and the justice minister says there are no plans to review the law that allowed the sentence……

Police were often called to attend to their altercations, which were often physical. Mr Hirini had been stabbed by her previously and had lost an eye when she hit him with a bottle….

Crown lawyer Steve Manning said this was not a case of “battered woman syndrome” and Wihongi had directed significant violence toward Mr Hirini in the years leading up to the murder….

Women’s Refuge spokeswoman Kiri Hannifin praised the judge for considering the “appalling violence” Wihongi had suffered.

“Given the horrendous life she has led, we believe that it was valid to weigh up whether it would be manifestly unjust to impose the presumption of life and come to the conclusion it was not.

“It was brave and right to impose a finite sentence…

We keep on being bombarded with the “its not OK’ campaign that shows men beating women and children.

I say again – its not OK for a woman to be repeatedley violent to a man and get off in the justice system with a slap with a wet bus ticket!

Women’s Refuge clearly supports the position that domestic violence against men is OK and that it can be mitigated by women perpetrator playing the victim card.

This is a shocking sentence and this violent woman has been treated very differently than a man is in the same circumstances.

Either its not OK to be violent to your partner and justice is meted out equally or it is OK if you can play the victim.

Women’s Refuge -all I can say to you is Shame on you!

Please note this is just what a quick search brought up reported in the news today. There is nothing special about today.

Mother jailed for ‘cruel, horrible’ abuse
A Brisbane mother has been jailed for the “cruel, disgraceful and horrible” abuse of her baby son.

The 34-year-old woman, who cannot be named, was this morning sentenced to 16 months’ jail after she pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm and six counts of assaulting her son.

Brisbane District Court was told the mother digitally penetrated the boy a number of times during a 14-month period between 2005 and 2006, causing bleeding, for which she would later take him to a hospital.

She continued the acts while her son was in a hospital bed.
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I came across a couple of interesting short videos on the net that echo the message men give through writing on this site and thought “Hey, cool”.

This one (below) is about men choosing surrogacy to become fathers rather than risk losing their children when a mother is involved.
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There’s an article in the NZHerald about killer Gay Oakes finding a new love and planning to marry. She was convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to life imprisonment after lacing her de facto partner Doug Gardner’s coffee with sleeping pills and burying his body in the back yard of their home in Sydenham, Christchurch back in 1994. She was released eight years later when the Parole Board accepted battered women’s syndrome could be used as a defence.

The concept of battered woman syndrome was invented by Lenore Walker in 1979. She formulated a theory of excuse that would later become an accepted excusing condition. She hypothesised that women living in violent relationships suffer a cycle of violence and experience learned helplessness which prevents them from leaving the relationship. The theory is based on the observations of this sole researcher and today it’s used to excuse women from becoming criminals for abusive behaviour including murder. The weird part is that the law makes reference to battered women syndrome as a mental condition that doesn’t exist in the medical profession.
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Car bonnet murder case appeal backed

A Taranaki woman who killed her ex-partner by crashing her car while he was clinging to the bonnet has been given a last chance to appeal against her murder conviction.

What is the appeal based on?
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An interesting case before the High Court in Auckland that is certainly worth monitoring.  I am trying to locate the Lexis Nexis or Brooker’s legal references. Read on…
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Have you ever wondered why we don’t have men’s rights and yet we have women’s rights, children’s rights, animal’s rights, even rights for plants? You might say it’s because of feminism and you would be right to a large degree. It’s not helpful for men when there exists a man-hate movement. But could there be a bit more to it?

If you’ve ever wondered, like I have, you’ll enjoy this interesting 10 minute presentation by manwomanmyth.com with guest speakers Angry Harry, a well known and well respected Men’s Rights Advocate and Activist alongside Erin Pizzy, author and international speaker of domestic violence who made the world’s first women’s refuge and Stephen Fitzgerald, director of Mankind Men’s charity.

French men who seem likely to be violent towards their wives and female partners will be tagged and monitored under new feminist law.

The proposed measure means men who have received court orders to stay away from their partners will wear an electronic bracelet and if they break the order, police are alerted.

Parliament is also considering outlawing psychological violence. This new creation of crime has many outside parliament worried on how this will work. Supporters of the law say psychological violence turns into physical violence while lawyers and professionals in the field are nervous saying it will be impossible to say at what point verbal abuse – for instance in an argument – suddenly becomes a criminal offence.

Critics argue the psychological violence clause is unlikely to make any practical improvement to the lives of women who suffer domestic violence.

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A Queensland mother has been sentenced to life behind bars for the gassing murders of her two children and the attempted murder of her teenage son.

The woman, who cannot be named, was found guilty in the Brisbane Supreme Court on Friday night of two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder after jurors deliberated on the case for six hours.

This afternoon she sobbed as Justice Philip McMurdo described her actions as “horrible”.

“The prime motivation was to avenge what you regarded as the wrong done to you by your ex-husband, the children’s father,” he said.

“On no rational view could this begin to justify an attack on the children, let alone the killing of them.”

She will not be eligible for parole until she has served 20 years.

At the time of the killings she had been angry that her ex-husband had won a Family Court order to have the children for the first half of the 2002-2003 school holidays, which included Christmas.

A leading men’s health organisation in Australia claims that the Minister for the Status of Women, Hon Gail Gago MLC, misled Parliament by maintaining that false statistics on the Government’s Don’t Cross the Line anti-violence campaign website are accurate, back in October 2009. The Minister defended the misleading statistics in Parliament, claiming that “the data on the Don’t Cross the Line website is sound.”

MHA (Men’s Health Australia) also lodged an official complaint with the Ombudsman after attempting for five months to draw the Minister’s attention to the major statistical errors on the website.

Spokesman for MHA Greg Andresen said, “The Facts and Stats page of the website is extremely misleading to the public. It clearly inflates statistics about domestic violence against women while understating statistics about domestic violence against men.”

Men’s Health Australia supports efforts to reduce family violence in the community but is concerned that the use of incorrect or misleading ‘statistics’ by Governments unfairly stigmatises men and boys as violent and abusive, while at the same time denies services to male victims of violence.

Another concern for MHA is that the Government’s approach is not in the interests of all children in families where there is abuse or violence because it selectively favours those children in families where violence is perpetrated by the father leaving out support for children who are abused by mothers.

Some of the campaign’s errors alleged by Men’s Health Australia include:
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