Solution must be to break the cycle of dysfunction 2 All-round First Edition

• Published in: Weekend Australian
• Main Author: Wieland, Lara
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Canberra, A.C.T News Limited 16.02.2008

There is little concept of what we would understand as "good parenting" in most households. Families who feed their child like this would be genuinely hurt at any suggestion that they are neglecting their child. Skinny, malnourished kids have become so commonplace that locals sometimes tell me it's the climate that keeps them thin and small because they "eat normally" -- if normal is one meal a day. How else do they explain that the kids that go out to boarding school or foster care, come back "fat" (read: normal weight)? Nothing to do with getting three meals a day for the first time in their lives? Boys raping younger boys becomes just boys "playing gay" -- to be "told off". Yes, young boys do often engage in explorative sexual play but that is completely different to non-consensual acts where pre-pubescent boys sodomise little kids with objects while they scream out "no", or where older teenagers or adults watch as they make younger teenagers rape little kids, who then have nightmares. That is no longer "playing" and often suggests the children involved have been molested themselves. When reading about the NT intervention, I was struck by Aboriginal magistrate Sue Gordon's experience of talking "door to door' with women about the issues and how so many of them wanted to do something once they realised what was going on was not acceptable, that they could get help from the law, and and so on. How important that simple step of breaking the silence and "de- normalising' abuse and dysfunction is.