Mother must share cost of child visits with man who raped her | News | The Times

A rape victim is to appeal against a family court ruling which found that she must share the cost for the rapist, a former partner, to have contact with their child at a centre.

Claire Waxman, London’s independent victims’ commissioner, raised concern in January about a “pro-contact” culture. “The family courts system is letting down children and survivors of abuse,” she said in a statement.

“I am deeply worried by the severe lack of understanding of domestic abuse and trauma in the courts, and the fact that courts persist in prioritising contact between a parent and child — even when there are cases of domestic and sexual abuse. Survivors and children are being put at risk due to this pro-contact culture.” She added: “Pro-contact culture also means allegations of domestic abuse are being minimised and treated as irrelevant.”

Charlotte Proudman, a family law barrister, said that contact decisions were often made against the wishes of children “vehemently opposed” to contact.

.In a statement released through Waxman, she said: “Unfortunately, the family courts still take an approach that dates back to the 1970s where children are seen as unreliable witnesses of abuse or that they are being influenced by one parent to make allegations about the other parent, when more recent empirical evidence has proved this isn’t the case, and our understanding of the signs of abuse has improved.

The Women’s Aid charity said last year that a bias towards contact, even in cases of abuse, was leading to “a culture of routinely minimising and ignoring allegations of domestic abuse”. Women’s Aid found that 19 children had died between 2005 and 2015 in circumstances related to unsafe contact.

Polly Neate, the group’s chief executive at the time and now head of the housing charity Shelter, said: “The knowledge that severe abuse has taken place does not stop this relentless push to maintain as close a bond between father and child as possible. A father who has abused his child(ren)’s mother is routinely seen as a ‘good enough’ dad.”

Source: Mother must share cost of child visits with man who raped her | News | The Times

Breastfeeding counsellors accused of bullying for using term ‘mother’ – Kidspot

Breastfeeding counsellors claim to be accused of bullying for using the word  ‘mother’.

Source: Breastfeeding counsellors accused of bullying for using term ‘mother’ – Kidspot

Thirteen years after ‘Sorry’, too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are still being removed from their homes

The Apology represented a formal acknowledgement that the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children was based on racist policies that caused unspeakable harm to our communities.

Children were forced off their lands. They were disconnected from their kin, Country, traditional languages and culture.

Today on Sorry Day, 13 years since the Apology, our Elders, families and communities still grieve these losses. And many families are being repeatedly traumatised by contemporary child removal practices. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are nearly 10 times more likely than non-Indigenous children to be in out-of-home care.

What the Elders call for resonates with the concept of responsive regulation. This means that regulators — in this case the child protection authority — need to take into account the cultures, behaviours and environments of the people they are regulating.

Principles of responsive regulation and those developed by the Elders offer a counter-balance to the current formalistic approaches of child protection services, such as mandatory reporting, forensic investigations, court hearings, timelines for termination of parental rights, and the adoption of children in care.

Source: Thirteen years after ‘Sorry’, too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are still being removed from their homes

Breastfeeding association defends creation of ‘chestfeeding’ booklet

The Australian newspaper reported on Saturday that the Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA) had developed a booklet about chestfeeding, which triggered outrage on talkback radio.

Rainbow Families, the peak body supporting LGBTIQ+ parents, paid the ABA $20,000 to create an educational booklet about lactating and chestfeeding for its community.

“ABA is not changing our use of mother-to-mother language,” the organisation said in a Facebook post.

“We will not be erasing gendered language such as ‘mother’ or ‘mum’ or ‘mothering’ from our vocabulary, and we have no future plans to adopt the use of language such as ‘chestfeeding’ rather than ‘breastfeeding’ more generally within the Association.”

Labor’s spokeswoman for women Tanya Plibersek hosed down talk of changing the language around breastfeeding.

“I’m not sure that there’s a huge demand for this from the Australian public,” she told radio station 2GB on Tuesday night.

“For me, it’s going to be breastfeeding. I’m not changing what I call it.”

Source: Breastfeeding association defends creation of ‘chestfeeding’ booklet

Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity | Erin Brockovich | The Guardian

The end of humankind? It may be coming sooner than we think, thanks to hormone-disrupting chemicals that are decimating fertility at an alarming rate around the globe. A new book called Countdown, by Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, finds that sperm counts have dropped almost 60% since 1973. Following the trajectory we are on, Swan’s research suggests sperm counts could reach zero by 2045. Zero. Let that sink in. That would mean no babies. No reproduction. No more humans. Forgive me for asking: why isn’t the UN calling an emergency meeting on this right now?

The chemicals to blame for this crisis are found in everything from plastic containers and food wrapping, to waterproof clothes and fragrances in cleaning products, to soaps and shampoos, to electronics and carpeting. Some of them, called PFAS, are known as “forever chemicals”, because they don’t breakdown in the environment or the human body. They just accumulate and accumulate – doing more and more damage, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Now, it seems, humanity is reaching a breaking point.

As if this wasn’t terrifying enough, Swan’s research finds that these chemicals aren’t just dramatically reducing semen quality, they are also shrinking penis size and volume of the testes. This is nothing short of a full-scale emergency for humanity.

Given everything we know about these chemicals, why isn’t more being done? Right now, there is a paltry patchwork of inadequate legislation responding to this threat. Laws and regulations vary from country to country, region to region, and, in the United States, state to state. The European Union, for example, has restricted several phthalates in toys and sets limits on phthalates considered “reprotoxic” – meaning they harm the human reproductive capacities – in food production.

In the United States, a scientific study found phthalate exposure “widespread” in infants, and that the chemicals were found in the urine of babies who came into contact with baby shampoos, lotions and powders. Still, aggressive regulation is lacking, not least because of lobbying by chemical industry giants.

Source: Plummeting sperm counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity | Erin Brockovich | The Guardian

First protests against gender clinic ‘medicalisation’ of youth

Australia has seen its first demonstrations against gender clinics to raise awareness about medicalisation of young people.

Source: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/first-protests-against-gender-clinic-medicalisation-of-youth/news-story/7e5f6a9e9fa4cb80590fbd1c3d36ad16

‘I was told to live with it’: women tell of doctors dismissing their pain | Women’s health | The Guardian

Data from the NHS Business Services Authority, which deals with prescription services in England, shows a large disparity in the number of women being given these drugs compared with men, with 761,641 women receiving painkiller prescriptions compared with 443,414 men, or 1.7 times, and the pattern is similar across broad age categories.

The women who reached out said they felt that they were often “fobbed off” with painkillers when their problems required medical investigation.

Source: ‘I was told to live with it’: women tell of doctors dismissing their pain | Women’s health | The Guardian

Trans lobby ‘buries’ defence of hormone drugs

The gender clinicians lobby has quietly buried its past defence of the treatment guideline justifying trans hormones for minors.

Source: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/trans-lobby-buries-defence-of-hormone-drugs/news-story/749eaac1f0f9f8d8acce4d07db2a6abeTrans