Victims of crime should be provided with legal representation, Victorian inquiry finds | Victoria | The Guardian

Most sexual assault survivors and other victims feel ‘silenced and sidelined’ by the justice system, landmark report says.

“When victims report a crime, they expect to play a part in the justice process but in reality, most felt they were silenced and sidelined,” said the commissioner, Fiona McCormack.

Once their case reached the court, almost 75% of the victims surveyed by the VOCC expressed concerns for their safety, mostly due to fear of having to interact with their perpetrator or their families.

One parent told the inquiry she had to sit beside her son’s alleged killer in a court foyer “because there were no separate spaces for victims and their families”.

The inquiry said sexual assault victims faced “some of the most invasive and traumatic aspects of our adversarial trial process”, including cross-examination, applications to access their phone or medical records, and to introduce their sexual history into evidence.

McCormack recommended sexual assault victims be provided with state-funded legal representation during some proceedings, to play a “protective role” for the victim that prosecutors don’t.

Source: Victims of crime should be provided with legal representation, Victorian inquiry finds | Victoria | The Guardian

WA First Nations child removal complaint filed in H… | NIT

Western Australia has become the second state to be subject to an Australian Human Rights Commission complaint for the discriminatory removal of First Nations children from their families.

n one case, Lisa* was allegedly removed from her family by Communities at age seven and taken 600 km from her home. She was placed in ten different foster homes, suffering sexual and physical abuse, all of which was allegedly reported to Communities who did not follow up the complaints.

In another case, Heather*, had her children removed by Communities, despite suffering abuse at the hands of her partner and father of her kids. They were placed with a non-Indigenous family, allegedly disconnected from their family, culture and community. When she became pregnant again, Communities removed her child shortly after birth.

Both women continue to suffer from long-term trauma and depression as a result of these actions.

The complaint is the second filed by Shine Lawyers to the AHRC concerning a child protection department unlawfully removing Indigenous children, which may lead to a class action for concerned families.

The first complaint was lodged against the NSW Department of Communities and Justice in January.

Class actions special counsel, Caitlin Wilson, said Indigenous families across the country had been “torn apart in this modern-day Stolen Generation”.

“We hope that each claim in each State will set us on the path to file class actions for these marginalised families who will never know a life without the weight of this trauma.”

Source: WA First Nations child removal complaint filed in H… | NIT

High Court battle set to begin over liability of Catholic Church for 1971 child sexual abuse in regional Victoria – ABC News

The offences happened in the boy’s home at Port Fairy soon after he had started school.

Father Bryan Coffey is accused of molesting the boy on two occasions during family social gatherings when the assistant priest was visiting.

Father Coffey was later convicted in the Ballarat County Court in February 1999 of multiple counts of sexual abuse against other children, and was given a three-year suspended sentence.

He died in 2013.

In 2021, 50 years after the events, the victim took his case to the Victorian Supreme Court and won, with the court finding the Diocese was vicariously liable for the damage caused by the assistant priest.

The man was awarded more than $200,000 in damages.

The church appealed against the finding that it was vicariously liable, but lost, prompting the High Court challenge today.

It was accepted in the lower courts that the abuse had happened on the balance of probabilities.

But the church says it is only vicariously liable if there was an employee-employer relationship.

Source: High Court battle set to begin over liability of Catholic Church for 1971 child sexual abuse in regional Victoria – ABC News

Dozens of children strip-searched by police over summer | SMH

NSW police strip-searched more than two dozen children, including a 12-year-old, in the four months to mid-February, despite a Minns government promise to review the controversial practice.

A freedom-of-information request filed by the Herald suggested that NSW Police continued strip-searching children at the same rate as before the government review was announced.

Strip-searching children, in which police direct children to remove their clothes and sometimes to lift their genitals, usually without a parent or guardian present, has been criticised by health experts for causing serious long-term trauma and harm to children’s development.

Redfern Legal Centre senior solicitor Samantha Lee said there should be a pause on all strip-searches of children while the review was ongoing.

Lee said that when she met clients who had been strip-searched as children, there was a deep level of shame and trauma that was similar to speaking to a survivor of sexual assault. Often the child never told their parents about it.

Greens justice spokeswoman Sue Higginson said strip-searching children was a policing method that did not work, given that most of the time nothing was found.

“We know that [strip-]searching is a terribly degrading exercise and a genuine violation of somebody’s dignity, and the reality is the threshold for a police officer to have the power to do that is very, very low,” Higginson said.

The FOI figures suggest police are disproportionately searching Aboriginal children. In the October-February timeframe, seven of the 26 children were Aboriginal. The 2021 census shows only one in 16 children in NSW is Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

Source: 12ft

How A Handful Of Billionaires Created The Transgender “Movement”

Bilek spent her life on the Left, but now she says that she is in the “political wilderness,” reporting on the biggest cultural story of our day while progressives ignore it or cover it up.

Bilek is doing something that journalists used to do instinctively: following the money. What she has uncovered is a bombshell that reveals the extent to which the transgender phenomenon has been created by super-wealthy LGBT donors who have a dark and sinister agenda. Her journalism supplies the missing pieces needed to complete the picture of how and why the transgender movement so swiftly achieved cultural dominance. Bilek kindly agreed to an interview in which she shared what she has uncovered thus far.

To what extent are the cultural shifts we’ve seen in the past few years astroturfed by big donors?

The cultural shifts we see today regarding gender identity are largely influenced by huge capital inflows from governments, philanthropists, corporations, and investment management and accounting firms like Blackrock and Ernst & Young.

Both the money and the ideology come out of the medical-tech sector, which is itself being integrated into culture through a philanthropic structure that has been attached to the LGBT civil rights political apparatus.

[Discussion of Pritzker family, Jon Stryker and Arcus Foundation, Gill Foundation, tech giants and mainstream media.]

How has big money impacted the trajectory and influence of the transgender movement?

I prefer to characterize this phenomenon as an industry rather than a movement. The focus lies on the creation of synthetic simulacrums of human reproductive characteristics, marketed for profit and human engineering. Contrary to a genuine human rights movement for the marginalized, synthetic sex characteristics are a corporate illusion.

What are the primary goals and motives of those pouring their money into LGBT organizations?

The strategic linking of an agenda aimed at deconstructing reproductive sex with a civil rights movement centered on same-sex attraction was pure genius—a metaphorical fox in the henhouse, but dressed as a hen.

With the development of injections capable of altering our DNA, there is apparent potential for profitability in treating the human body, fetuses, and women’s reproductive organs as canvases for technological interventions. The tech reproduction industry seems like a harbinger of a future in which reproduction without copulation or gestation may be the norm. The gender identity narrative serves these marketing ventures as it reduces our wholly sexed humanity to commodities.

Who are some of the most significant contributors to the transgender movement?

Gilead Sciences emerges as a leading supporter of LGBT issues, with other notable contributors including George Soros’ Open Society, Gill, Arcus, Ford, Astraea, Tides, Evelyn and Walter Haas, David Bohnett, Wells Fargo, and Pride Foundations. These entities are prominent funders of the agenda to deconstruct human reproductive sex.

Martine Rothblatt stands as another influential figure in this societal transformation. . . . Describing himself as ‘transhuman,’ Rothblatt advocates for human augmentation that challenges traditional concepts of sex. This includes advocating for the melding of humans with AI, virtual reality, tech reproduction, and other transformative technologies.

With LGBT organizations receiving enormous infusions of cash from financial backers, how can small, grassroots groups push back?

By reframing the narrative away from human rights for the marginalized towards rights for those attempting to disown their humanity, we can offer a fresh perspective. Gender rights, in this context, serve as the political groundwork for the burgeoning rights discourse surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) or cyborgs in their early stages.

Source: How A Handful Of Billionaires Created The Transgender “Movement”

Amie’s Story | Cruel & Unusual Punishment | Independent Women’s Forum

When California’s “Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act”—Senate Bill 132—was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021, it set the stage for male prisoners to be housed with female prisoners. The male prisoners do not have to be in the process of “gender-affirming” treatment.

Amie Ichikawa, 42, now free after serving nearly five years at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, said that some male prisoners claim non-male identities because female prisons are, as a general rule, less violent than men’s prisons. “There was a male prisoner who had single-cell status in his all-male prison because he assaulted his bunkmates,” Ichikawa said. “He had been isolated in the male prison but they put him directly into the general population here in a room with seven ladies right off the bus.

When former California inmate Amie Ichikawa returned to the free world, she began sounding the alarms about women being harmed as a result of males gaining access to female prison. Her desperate pleas for help, however, were met with the cold-shoulder by organizations that traditionally serve as advocates for female inmates.

These advocates dismissed her concerns and instead told her to “be careful” and “learn the language.” But Ichikawa doesn’t view what’s happening to female inmates under new prison “transgender” policies as political; to her, it’s a human rights issue, and she’s refusing to be silent.

Source: Amie’s Story | Cruel & Unusual Punishment | Independent Women’s Forum

Former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner opens up about trans women in professional sport | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site

Caitlyn Jenner, widely considered the world’s most well known transgender woman, has given her take on the debate over trans people and professional sport.

The 74-year-old won a gold medal in the decathlon at the 1976 Olympic Games competing as Bruce Jenner before transitioning to Caitlyn in 2015.

Now in a wide-ranging interview alongside former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies with The Telegraph in the UK, Jenner has given strong views about trans women and sport.

Earlier this month, trans golfer Hailey Davidson was banned from the professional NXXT Women’s Pro Tour after the competition changed its eligibility rules

The Tour released a statement announcing any competitor that was not “a biological female at birth” was ineligible to participate.

Jenner strongly agrees with that sentiment, declaring hormone therapy does not make for a level playing field between females and transgender women.

“(I’m) someone who went through a complete change and I can still hit a golf ball 280 yards (256 metres),” she said.

“I know the effects of (female) hormones on the body, it does have a little bit of an effect but it’s not a major effect, and certainly not enough to make it even.

“I have been pushing here to go back to chromosome tests. If they continue down this road it will be pretty much the end of women’s sport as we know it.”

Davies, who competed against the East German doping regime when winning silver in the pool at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, is also concerned for the future of women’s sport.

”We have such a small piece of the cake,” Davies said, referencing the differences in sponsorship between men and women in sport.

”And now we’re supposed to move over for what in most cases is mediocre male athletes who are identifying as females who just think that they have the right to take our opportunities away.”

Source: Former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner opens up about trans women in professional sport | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site

Keep a close eye’: The industry selling spyware to jealous spouses | SMH

Days before Simon Gittany threw his partner Lisa Harnum to her death from the balcony of their 15th-floor Sydney apartment in 2011, he had been reading her text messages using spyware. Unlike family locator apps, which allow parents to check where their children are, “stalkerware” promises the chance to secretly look inside another person’s device – and even record their surroundings.

in Australia today, spyware vendors can sell products designed for customers to surveil a target without their consent, despite alarm among domestic violence and security experts. While police say the use of spyware may be criminal, a series of private investigation businesses are promoting the software, sometimes to jealous spouses. They promise services such as viewing call logs and “real-time tracking of their whereabouts”, enabling surveillance “until you have the evidence you need to come forward”. In some cases, the promise is as blunt as: “Do you want to spy on your husband, wife, partner?” One site sells the software for $130 a month.

Stalking, coercive control and obsessive behaviour have been identified as “pathways to homicide”, and Bridget Harris, director of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, says the use of spyware displays all three. Criminologists, support workers and other private investigators, who say the danger is extremely high for domestic violence victims, are now calling for action to stop spyware vendors. “There’s no legitimate reason that that technology should exist,” Harris says.

Source: https://www.smh.com.au/national/keep-a-close-eye-on-your-partner-the-industry-selling-spyware-to-jealous-spouses-20240314-p5fcjv.html?

Bernard Lane: Gender medical experiment is hurting our kids | The Australian

Get ready for bluster. Our gender clinicians will be busy protesting the irrelevance of the historic decision by England’s National Health Service to end routine use of puberty blocker drugs. It won’t wash.

The decision has international implications and Australia is no exception. Gender clinics in our state children’s hospitals – and in stand-alone facilities such as Maple Leaf House in NSW – are doing the same thing as the London-based NHS Tavistock clinic. They have been authorising off-label hormone suppression drugs – approved to treat other conditions such as hormone-driven cancers and precocious (premature) puberty – to stop naturally timed sexual development.

We’re told blockers save “trans kids” from suicide. But there may be many reasons a young person is in distress, and there is no good evidence that blockers bring more benefit than harm. That is why the NHS decided these drugs would be given only within a future clinical trial, reflecting their experimental nature.

Yet here in Australia we still offer blockers as routine treatment to minors, as young as age 10, who self-identify as transgender or non-binary and who often have a host of other things going on – such as autism, awkward same-sex attraction, depression or a history of abuse. International data suggests the vast majority begun on blockers will proceed to cross-sex hormones, with risks including sterilisation and sexual dysfunction. How can there be informed consent? How many of these troubled young people really needed mainstream mental health treatment?

England is ahead of Australia in gender clinic reform partly because its politics and media have been better informed and more intellectually robust. British ministers ignored advice from captured officials, met young detransitioners who regret gender medicalisation, and empowered Cass’s independent inquiry.

Our counterpart program, the ABC’s Four Corners, has uncritically promoted the gender-affirming treatment approach. ABC audiences are given the false impression that concern about gender clinics is a conservative culture war. They have been told next to nothing about the drivers of Europe’s shift to greater caution, which is particularly pronounced in liberal Nordic countries.

Source: Bernard Lane: Gender medical experiment is hurting our kids | The Australian