Dissident Voices

Christina Hoff Sommers

With special guests:

• Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys interviewed at the Boys and the Boy Crisis conference in Washington DC
• Independent MP Ann Bressington from South Australia who is calling on the Federal Government to take action to protect children from being caught in the middle of divorce and separation disputes
• The Hon Philip Ruddock MP, Australia’s Attorney General, answering questions from dads at the recent Lone Fathers National Conference in Canberra.

As always there’s been plenty going on at Dads On The Air.

First up, don’t miss the redesign and relaunch of our website, coming up soon. And whatever you do, don’t miss our fascinating interview this week with Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys. Hoff Sommers’ books have been key works in the debate on gender and it’s been a dream of this program ever since it began seven years ago this month to have Christina on the show. The interview was conducted in Washington DC by our researcher and producer Greg Andresen at the Boys and the Boys Crisis Conference in July. Here is a short excerpt from her conference presentation:

“The US Department of Education released a report called Trends in Educational Equity… [They] said ‘There is evidence that the female advantage in school performance is real and persistent’ and among their key findings was, yes, boys outnumber girls in sports. Girls outnumber boys in just about everything else: student government, school newspapers, enrollment in advanced placement classes, honors society, etc. Males do slightly better than females on the national math and science test. Females do vastly better than males on reading and writing…

“It turns out that the average 17 year old American boy has the writing skills of a 14 year old girl. He is three years behind on average. This is significant! This is a gap that should have been of concern. The math gap and science gap [for girls] were tiny compared to the reading and writing gap [for boys] and we haven’t even talked about the engagement gap: how much more girls care…

“Judith Kleinfeld is a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska - some may know of her wonderful website www.boysproject.net - and she’s done a thorough analysis of the reading skills of white males from college educated families. This is the group that we’re not supposed to worry about. She used department of education data. She shows that at the end of high school, 23% of white sons of college educated parents scored below basic in reading. For girls it was 7%. That means one in four boys who have college educated parents can’t read a newspaper with understanding. Gender is the constant.”

Also on this week’s show we talk with Independent MP Ann Bressington from South Australia who is calling on the Federal Government to take action to protect children from being caught in the middle of divorce and separation disputes. These children deserve the care and protection of the government just as much as the indigenous children in the Northern Territory. The Richard Hillman Foundation has lobbied for years for 3 basic changes to family law:

1. Zero tolerance of false allegations.
2. Rebuttable and negotiable shared parenting.
3. Abolishing case law in family law matters.

“We have families that are being torn apart through an adversarial system that encourages separated parents to literally go for the jugular in order to win custody of their children” says Ann Bressington. “No matter what changes are made to the process of mediation many parents will be tempted to make false allegations in order to secure full custody of their children.”

“Many fathers are being wrongly accused of sexual abuse and mothers are often having to hand children over to abusive fathers. One mother has spent 2 x 30 day stints in jail because she refused to hand over her child on advice from police. The magistrate claimed that she was in breech of a court order even though the young child disclosed that daddy was touching her. I have also seen fathers who have lived with the devastation and stigma of being accused of sexual abuse who have tried to fight the system for years” says Ann Bressington.

“We have seen that the Federal government is capable of radical intervention where indigenous communities are concerned, and rightly so. Still over 1500 men commit suicide every year because of the unfair and unjust family law that we have in this country. This is another problem that has been ignored by the very government that claims “it is all about the welfare of children.”

The family court is a win/lose situation and even with mediation having to be undertaken before any matter can appear before the court this will not stop the false allegations made against men or the fact that mothers will be forced to hand their children over to unfit fathers. Unless the law is changed by the Federal government the needs of families will be left wanting. As sad as it is the needs of indigenous communities cannot take precedence over other marginalized and desperate groups in our community.

Also keep an eye out in future weeks for Matt O’Connor, founder of the UK’s Fathers 4 Justice and subject of an upcoming feature film expected to have a profound impact on public debate world wide. You will also be hearing from Mark Harris, author of Family Court Hell. Most famously, Harris is the father jailed for waving at his daughters as they drove past in the family car. Hard to believe, but some people say the British Family Court system is even worse than Australia’s. Allowing injustice to thrive as common practice, the UK Family Courts are completely and totally secret. This is the first book ever published that reveals exactly what happens inside them.

Two new shows have gone up on our website this week.

Due to technical difficulties our 31st July 2007 program titled Welfare, Debt, Credit, Bureaucracy and Betrayal: the Howard Years could not be put up within 24 hours, as has been our practice since we went to our new website www.dadsontheair.net a year ago. This was a particularly good show, so don’t miss it. Special guests included Peter Saunders, senior researcher with the Centre for Independent Studies, and Scott Garman, from the New Hampshire Commission on the Status of Men, the only such organisation in the world and a pointer to how the Australian Government could address its chronically institutionalised anti-male bias.

As well Julie Owens, the Labor MP for Parramatta, talks knowledgeably about why the so-called Howard battlers have turned so viciously against the government. Just like separated dads, the battlers feel utterly betrayed by the Howard government. They were encouraged by the government’s rhetoric and the $7,000 first home buyers grant to get into a mortgage and now find themselves drowning in debt and living on credit. The claim that interest rates would be kept low has turned out to be as hollow as much of the government’s other rhetoric.

As well we have a brief call from Tony Miller from Dads in Distress, a self-help organisation with meetings around the country which continues to do a marvellous job saving the lives of distraught men and mopping up the mess of our family law and child support systems. Tony is pleased to announce that at the last minute his organisation has been given funding sufficient for it to survive over the next four years through the actions of the Minister for Families Mal Brough.

And this week’s program for Tuesday 14th August 2007 is also now up on line. It features the much talked about presentation by Dads On The Air at the Lone Fathers Conference in Canberra. The conference asked the question: Are the Howard Government’s family law amendments the turning point? The language of defeat says it all, and we answered strongly in the negative. The Howard government has silenced most of the men’s movement by either funding them or marginalising them; and it smugly thinks it has neutered dads and family law reform as an election issue.

What the government was too stupid to realise was that a significant body of votes, enough to keep it in government, went with the dads and their numerous supporters in the community. Instead, as we have said so often, “the liars, the lawyers, the bureaucrats and the social engineers won the day”. Mainstream women, who love the men in their lives and believe in equality for men and women, are poorly representing by the screeching anti-male feminist hate groups which the government funds. This funding of extreme anti-father groups distorts the public debate and distorts the government’s own perception of reality. It gives credence to elite liberal opinion which pretends that fathers don’t count in their children’s lives. But in the end, the great unwashed will have their say.

Included in the show on the 14th is a grab from the Attorney General Phillip Ruddock and Shadow Attorney General Joe Ludwig as well as the entire speech of Senator Steve Fielding, one of the only politicians in Canberra with any integrity on the family law debate. Fielding’s ten sensible amendments were ignored as the “shared responsibility” legislation betraying fathers was passed through the parliament literally in the middle of the night; under the cloak of darkness and well past the media’s deadlines for the day. Ironically, with the government now facing annihilation in the polls, these amendments, including a rebutable presumption of joint custody, could have saved the Howard government’s backside.

Instead Ruddock has been running around claiming his government has introduced the most significant changes to family law in 30 years - claims unbacked by any actions within the despised Family Court itself, the court remaining as immune to criticism or to reform as ever. Ruddock couldn’t even answer the simplest of questions put to him: what was the overwhelming evidence it used to rebut the popular notion of joint custody as the norm post divorce? He couldn’t answer the question - mumbling feebly that it was in a report by a committee. In other words he’s prepared to perpetrate massive harm on the country’s children because a bureaucrat told him. Make no mistake about it, the government’s failure to reform family law and to heed the calls not just of the fathers’ groups but of the community at large has been a savage failure of democracy itself.

We also run the excellent speech by ALP member Anthony Byrne, a single dad himself and one of the few in his party to acknowledge the human rights abuses being visited on fathers and their children in this country.

As well John Flanigan from the Equal Parenting Party and head of Lone Fathers and organiser of the conference Barry Williams make brief appearances on the show, summing up what they believe the conference achieved.

And we also hear from the head of the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention, Professor Diego De Leo (Griffith University), who is seeking to discover why the death toll amongst separated men is so high.

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