These are the news items we feel should be right on the radar:
DNA tests to cut courtroom battles – DNA tests in family courts will be provided across England from later this year says Justice Minister Simon Hughes. The new measure will for the first time, allow family judges to order DNA tests to establish a child’s parentage.
Child abuse goes back hundreds of years, says John Allen care home victim – will the priority be uncovering the extent of the abuse in England throughout history or offering surviving victims of child sexual abuse justice?
Child abuse protections not filtering through to frontline – yet again, practice does not make perfect, despite all the guidelines…..
Researching Reform 
Reblogged this on World4Justice : NOW! Lobby Forum..
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RE: “Child abuse goes back hundreds of years . . . . ” Didn’t I make the same point last week ?
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An interesting his story of child abuse is to be found here.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/07/13/1313194/-The-Power-to-Protect
“For illustrative purposes I am borrowing from Louise Armstrong’s “Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics”, an excellent analysis of Court Licensed Abuse. Armstrong divided history into the “Age of Permitted Abuse”, which went on for thousands of years until the 1800’s, and the “Age of Denied Abuse”, which went on until the 1980’s. The “Age of Concealed Abuse”, from the ‘80’s to present day will be added here.
For thousands of years, during the long, dark Age of PERMITTED Abuse, children were considered chattel and men had absolute power to use and abuse them at will. Children could be bartered, sold, battered, mutilated, starved or raped without recourse. Men were permitted sexual access to their own and to marginalized children but had to stay away from each other’s. Women had no legal right to their children and no power to protect them; they had been made completely dependent on men.
By the late 1800’s, child abuse stopped being openly permitted and the Age of DENIED Abuse began. It was at this point mental health professionals became important in helping to shift the blame away from perpetrators. Sigmund Freud, who had discovered that sexual abuse by fathers was common, extremely damaging and the cause of serious mental illness, was pressured greatly by the Power Elite to drop this valid theory. He capitulated and his new theories shifted blame to children for the next 100 years, claiming their reports of abuse were fantasies. This helped maintain male entitlement for another hundred years. In the 1950’s, Alfred Kinsey reinforced this position with his invalid findings that children enjoyed sex from birth and that incest (child rape) can be a positive experience for the child.
For a short time during this Age there was supposedly a maternal “presumption” of custody during the tender years, but this did not mean women had the power to keep their children. If men wanted it, they usually still got it. During this period, most men did not want custody during the younger years when kids were high maintenance and little to be gotten from them. During this age there was no child support enforcement so there was no penalty for walking away and no financial benefit to wresting custody of infants and young children away from their primary bonds.
In the 1980’s the Old Boys encountered vexing new challenges. New research had discredited Freud and made clear children cannot consent to or imagine sexual abuse, and that it is very psychologically damaging. So it was not possible to continue to place the blame on them. Also, women were becoming educated and financially independent and could walk out on husbands who were abusive to their children or them. This loss of control inspired an intense backlash by the Power Elite consisting of clever and varied strategies with which to maintain historical male prerogative.
The main strategy employed to retain the last great patriarchal perk was to cover up the abuse, ushering in the Age of CONCEALED Abuse.”
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Gov’t to implement in Sept ‘DNA tests to cut courtroom battles’. This is very welcome news for fathers, firstly, because it will give fathers an opportunity to challenge and prove (when it is needed) whether or not they are the father of the child in question, and secondly, it will cut down on ‘child abuse’ my mothers. The devastating, even scarring, news screamed at a child when nerves are frayed that “He’s not your father anyway” will soon be a thing of the past.
It should be added that at the Gov’t URL bearing this news ( i.e. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dna-tests-to-cut-courtroom-battles ) the link to”evaluation of the pilot can be viewed at” foes not work or at least takes the enquirer to an irrelevant page. So how the pilot was orgnaised nd run is not clear to the public.
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It will be like USA then and fathers may not be so supportive when the child support is taken from their wages.
Just to balance things out here .
How many times do we hear fathers say “I never wanted you anyway.” to their own child, especially if its a girl?
How many male abusers use the paternity issue to get back at their victims? Research shows a distinct pattern in this in USA, UK, Ireland,Australia where abusers are advised to pretend to care for the children to deflect from the violence. Also go for custody and get the family home – many times hers before the marriage.Thus leaving the victims homeless.
In USA over 85 % of abusers get custody and in UK its about 70% because no mother was ever entitled to custody under patriarchal laws.
The mother is nothing but a vessel under maritime law, a breeder under Roman law.
This is only my experience after 20 years doing cases.
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What’s the buzz, now, Natasha:
— that there are nearly 10,000 signatures on the petition I launched on https://www.change.org/p/the-rt-hon-theresa-may-mp-return-whistleblowerkids-and-abusesurvivors-of-london-school-to-their-russian-family to return the children to their Russian mother in whose care they have always been?
— that Ian Josephs has always been advising mothers NOT to report the crimes of abusive fathers, for they’d lose their children? http://mckenzie-friends.co.uk/2015/01/02/why-ian-josephs-advises-mothers-not-to-report-the-crimes-of-abusive-fathers-you-lose-your-children/
— that there is a warrant for arrest out for me and the mother, because the abusive father and school feel ‘harassed’ by the allegations of his children?
DEEP sighs!
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DNA Testing
Move over Jeremy Kyle and Jerry Springer, MOJ & Cafcass are the new kids on the block!
Finding out your father is not your biological father would be devastating for a child going through the already traumatic care proceedings. If the father has always accepted the child as his own and wants the relationship to continue there should be no reason to complicate the issue further by DNA testing. The child may not be ready to know until much older. There are men that do want to take responsibility for a child they believe is their own and even if this was found not to be the case they may not want to be confronted with the truth as their relationship with “their” child would be undermined.
If the father was not found to be the biological father, would this mean all contact would be stopped with the child?
I only see this working right from the birth of a child not after relationships have been formed. I can see the need to know if there is a dispute but it can create further upsets and the consequences may not just be those expected.
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Australia’s History of Forced Adoption and Apology and Southern Irelands apology and compensation for their abuses to children by the Church bring shame on the UK Government! The UK government has never accepted responsibility for the part they played. The abuses carried out before the kids even got to Australia! The UK also had faith institutions that meted out dreadful punishments, just as they did in Southern Ireland! There has been no investigations, no apologies! We are still waiting!
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