Category: Violence

Man jailed for crime so heinous it’s an Australian-first.| Mamamia

“The aggravated servitude in the present case involved a regime of extraordinary cruelty and tyranny perpetrated over a lengthy period.”

Under Australian Commonwealth law, servitude, as defined within Division 270 of the Criminal Code, is “criminalised as a slavery-like practice, punishable by imprisonment, and includes the condition of a person who is not free to stop providing services or leave the place where they provide services.”

AAP reports that the man pleaded guilty to the offence in the Victorian Supreme Court, along with two counts of assault, where Justice Jane Dixon sentenced him for up to 12 years in jail.

“As well as being subjected to regular violent assaults, she was deprived of personal freedom and liberty in almost every aspect of her life,” Justice Dixon said during sentencing.

“The aggravated servitude in the present case involved a regime of extraordinary cruelty and tyranny perpetrated over a lengthy period.”

The court heard that since 2020, the husband refused to allow his wife to seek medical care alone, even after she became pregnant. She was not permitted to use the toilet alone or attend university, and was forced to transfer all her money to him. He would leave the house to socialise, but locked his wife and their baby in a room while he did so, forcing her to send him videos to prove she was still imprisoned while he was out.

When she failed to perform domestic duties such as cooking and laundry to her husband’s standards, he beat her with poles, belts and cords. He called this “giving her consequences.”

Source: Man jailed for crime so heinous it’s an Australian-first.

Trans killer’s jail rammy leaves female prison officer injured in women’s wing – Daily Record

Paris Green, who is serving life for murder, was initially charged with assaulting the victim by forcibly pushing a door in August 2023.

A trans killer has admitted culpable and reckless conduct after a female member of staff was injured at the women’s wing of a Scottish prison.

Paris Green, who is serving life for murder, was initially charged with assaulting the victim by forcibly pushing a door in August 2023.

This month, the 33-year-old pled guilty to an amended charge of culpable and reckless conduct at Edinburgh Sheriff Court and was admonished.

Green was born Peter Laing but now identifies as female and is incarcerated in the women’s wing of HMP Edinburgh.

But campaign group For Women Scotland has criticised the Scottish Prison Service’s policy.

Spokeswoman Susan Smith said: “This illustrates the abject idiocy of the notion that violent male prisoners convicted of murdering or assaulting other men will be restrained and gentle towards women.

“Paris Green is clearly a danger to all women in that unit and should have been removed at once.”

Source: Trans killer’s jail rammy leaves female prison officer injured in women’s wing – Daily Record

System failure: Nearly half of NSW homicides were DV-related in 2024

Almost half of all homicides in NSW last year were domestic violence-related, according to new figures today by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

It’s a stark and tragic reminder of the toll of domestic violence in the state, with 45.9 per cent of the 85 murder victims recorded by NSW police being DV-related.

Twenty-six women were murdered in NSW in 2024, along with 13 young people and children. The majority fall into the category of being domestic violence related; others (like the five women killed during the Bondi Junction stabbing attack) had no personal connection to their killer.

Meanwhile, while many categories of major crimes have been trending downwards over the past ten years, domestic and family violence has taken a different path, with domestic violence assaults up 3.1 per cent a year on average (well ahead of the 1.3 per cent per year average in non-domestic assaults). Sexual assault is also up: 8.8 per cent per year on average.

Sadly, it seems that the “national crisis” of male violence against women that was declared in the first half of 2024, as well as the federal government’s commitment to end family and domestic violence “in one generation” has done little in NSW to reduce the figures, according to these latest stats.

Other major crime areas, including recorded robbery, break-and-enter, general stealing, and malicious property damage, are described as being “all much lower” than a decade ago.

Source: System failure: Nearly half of NSW homicides were DV-related in 2024

‘They’re meant to help and did the complete opposite’: many children feel silenced by family courts

My new paper, co-authored with Southern Cross University researchers Eliza Hew, Meaghan Vosz and Helen Walsh and published in the journal Child and Family Social Work, looked at how children felt about their experiences in the family courts.

We interviewed 41 children and young people aged ten to 19 from Queensland, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. Four key themes emerged.

1. Children feel silenced

The children in our study wanted to be heard directly. As Troy, 14, put it:

Talk to us, not about us.

2. Children feel ‘in the dark’

Most children we interviewed felt “in the dark” about family court processes.

3. Some children will vote with their feet

Some children said they’d refused to comply with family court parenting orders. As Ava, 13, put it:

If they can’t listen to me, I’m not going to listen to them.

4. Children feel less able to trust others

Children stressed the importance of family law professionals creating space to build trust. But several children felt they were betrayed by law professionals who’d shared what the children had said with their parents.

Source: ‘They’re meant to help and did the complete opposite’: many children feel silenced by family courts

Prisoners forced to give birth while handcuffed to male officers – LBC | UK

At least two women were made to give birth while handcuffed between 2021 and 2023.

According to an investigation by The Times, both incidents occurred at HMP Bronzefield in Surrey.

The women allege they were handcuffed sometimes during antenatal appointments, vaginal examinations, and during labour.

One female prisoner said she was restrained during antenatal appointments, and for 48 hours while in labour – sometimes handcuffed to male staff.

“Being handcuffed and without any privacy, including being chained to a male prison officer, made me feel humiliated and degraded.

“Yes, I had broken the law, but I was still a pregnant woman. I feel I was treated as less than an animal,” she told The Times.

One woman in HMP Brozefield, speaking to Channel 4, said that she was “doubled over” having contractions, “sobbing” to be released from the handcuffs.

She said she was handcuffed to an officer while showering, sleeping, and using the toilet.

Source: Prisoners forced to give birth while handcuffed to male officers – LBC

Why are women still being sent to prison as ‘a place of safety’? | Eva Wiseman | The Guardian | UK

Typically, this is how it goes: a woman on the street behaves erratically and police pick her up, concerned she might harm herself or others. Perhaps she’ll be held in a police car or cell for a while, charged with disorderly conduct, or perhaps she’ll be taken to hospital. But increasingly a lack of mental health beds means she is then taken to prison “as a place of safety” and there she’ll stay, unsentenced and without specialist care, sometimes lingering in a cell for more than a year.

In 19th-century asylums, women were offered very little mental health provision and patients routinely self-harmed. There are a series of unnerving and moving photos online by society photographer Henry Hering who took portraits of Bethlem patients, including Eliza Josolyne, admitted in 1857 with “overwork”. She “frequently tried to injure herself by knocking her head against doors and walls, and has slept in the padded room on this account”. Perhaps it’s unhelpful to keep returning to the Victorian asylums, but here is where my mind goes, aided in part by pictures of a prison currently housing women as “a place of safety” (the words catch on the tongue) – HMP Styal in Cheshire, which occupies a former “orphanage for destitute children” opened in 1898.

There were 11 suicides at HMP Styal between 2007 and 2024, more than any other women’s jail in England. One was 18-year-old Annelise Sanderson, who had been arrested in 2020 for stealing a pair of trainers and assaulting emergency workers who had intervened. When she was apprehended she poured petrol on herself and tried to drink it; instead of being offered psychiatric treatment, she was sentenced to 12 months at Styal.

Prison is not a place of safety. For women especially, it is a place of chaos and trauma where vulnerable people struggle to maintain their dignity, let alone sanity.

Source: Why are women still being sent to prison as ‘a place of safety’? | Eva Wiseman | The Guardian

Volleyball coach says her home was shot at after speaking out against trans athletes | Daily Mail Online

Former San Jose State volleyball coach Melissa Batie-Smoose claims her home in California was shot at this week – three months after she was suspended in the wake of her complaint about transgender player Blaire Fleming.

Batie-Smoose, who served as an assistant for the Spartans’ women’s volleyball team before receiving her suspension, previously filed a Title IX complaint against the program over Fleming, whose inclusion on the team sparked outrage last year.

She is also a plaintiff in a lawsuit against SJSU and the Mountain West Conference along with 11 players, which includes some of Fleming’s ex-teammates.

Batie-Smoose revealed that the shooting took place while she was discussing the legal battle and the NCAA’s new policy on gender eligibility in a virtual meeting with members of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports.

When asked on Fox News if she thinks the shooting was linked to her lawsuits involving SJSU and Fleming, Batie-Smoose said: ‘I do.’

She then continued: ‘It can’t be a coincidence. I have never had this happen and in our neighborhood I talked to neighbors that have lived there over 10 years and not even a robber in the area, let alone someone shooting at someone in their house.’

Source: Volleyball coach says her home was shot at after speaking out against trans athletes | Daily Mail Online

New report: Gun boom threatens community safety in Australia – Gun Control Australia

Australia is awash with over four million legally owned guns, many of them kept in homes in our metropolitan and suburban areas.

Disturbing new Australia Institute research has found, despite gun reforms after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre, Australia now harbours even more guns than before this tragic event.

A representative poll late last year found 70% of Australians want gun laws to make it much harder to access a gun.

This included most voters for all political parties and people living in metropolitan, regional and rural Australia.

Although Australia has been a global leader in gun control, we cannot afford to be complacent.

Our gun laws are not keeping up with weapon advancements, which is putting our community at increasing risk.

Source: New report: Gun boom threatens community safety in Australia – Gun Control Australia

CALL FOR A GLOBAL ACTION OF SUPPORT FOR UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Ms Reem Alsalem

CALL FOR A GLOBAL ACTION OF SUPPORT FOR UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Ms Reem Alsalem

We would like to express our deepest gratitude for the excellent and path-breaking work carried out by Ms Reem Alsalem, during her current mandate as a Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls. It is utterly important that the position of the Special Rapporteur on a matter as crucial as male violence against women and girls is held by someone with both merits and bravery, and with the highest possible authority and standards of integrity.

Women’s organisations all over the world follow Ms Alsalem’s work and we are deeply concerned by the smear campaigns and unfounded attacks against her and her work that have recently escalated due to Ms Alsalem’s unwavering commitment to women’s human rights and her independent and objective presentations on all forms of violence against women and girls. These campaigns and attacks are only a proof that Ms. Alsalem has exposed the hard truth of the systems that normalise and justify violence against women.

With this letter we want to express our strong support for Reem Alsalem’s extremely important work. We call for a global support action to Ms Reem Alsalem by joining forces with her and supporting her mandate and independent work, sharing her reports and her coverage of critical issues and her recommendations for stopping the ever growing endemic of violence targeting women.

Source: CALL FOR A GLOBAL ACTION OF SUPPORT FOR UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, Ms Reem Alsalem

NORWAY: Trans-Identified Male Convicted of Murdering Female Partner with Baseball Bat Receives Reduced Sentence – Reduxx

A trans-identified male in Norway recently convicted of beating his female partner to death with a baseball bat has had his sentence reduced on appeal. Despite the crime being committed by a male, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), which is subsidized by the government, has described the killer as a “woman.”

On the evening of November 27, 2023, a 22 year-old female who went by the name Oliver Ravn Rønning was beaten to death with a baseball bat at her apartment in Porsgrunn, which she had just moved into days before with her partner after having met via an LGBT dating app that summer. Rønning is a female who identifies as a man, while her partner, who Reduxx will refer to as Jonas, is a 19 year-old male who identifies as a woman.

Source: NORWAY: Trans-Identified Male Convicted of Murdering Female Partner with Baseball Bat Receives Reduced Sentence – Reduxx