Broken Lives Broken Minds

With special guest:

• Pamela Roche

The attitude of politicians towards International Parental Child Abduction seems to be “It ain’t broke and I ain’t gonna fix it.”; Our guest today is Pamela Roche who tells us how the system is broken and we need to get the word out to politicians, judges, lawyers and professional therapists.

When the father of her children breached English Family Court orders and refused to return them after a visit to the USA Pamela expected that she could rely on the legal system and the various institutions to restore order. She discovered that the USA is a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Parental Child Abduction. This is a multilateral treaty developed by the Hague Conference on Private International Law that provides an expeditious method to return a child internationally abducted by a parent from one member country to another. Pamela naively believed that with the USA being a first world country and part of the Hague Convention this should have been straightforward once she established the facts and got local advice.

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Year of the Dad

With special guest:

• Nick Thorpe

A special program to celebrate National Families Week

Our guest today is Nick Thorpe who is used to taking on big challenges. One such challenge was to voyage to Easter Island on a raft of reeds. Now he is working on making Scotland the best place in the world for children to grow up and as part of that campaign he is promoting 2016 as the Year of the Dad. This is part of the campaign organised by the Fathers Network Scotland with support from the Scottish Government.

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Parents Acting Badly

With special guest:

• Dr Jennifer Harman

Why is it that we never see young animals rejecting a caring parent in the way we see some children acting? The behaviour of the other parent may be the cause and this strange behaviour may be due to Parental Alienation.

Our guest today is Associate Professor Jennifer Harman who tells us that the problem of Parental Alienation is all too common and getting worse around the world yet it is still decried by some as “junk science”.

Jennifer tells us that the scientific analysis of Parental Alienation is still at a beginning stage. The research is still focussing on the description of Parental Alienation because we have not yet reached the predictive stage. This is the normal scientific approach to research and can be compared with where we are up to with the topic du jour, domestic violence. However no-one denies the existence of domestic violence in the way they once did.

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Genital Autonomy

With special guest:

• Paul Mason

Worldwide Day of Genital Autonomy is May 7

We ask all the questions that others don’t dare! In today’s program we explore a topic that makes some people want to cross their legs and most people look the other way. And yet everyone has a definite opinion on it.

Our topic is the genital cutting of healthy boys and girls where it has been consented to by their parents. The practice is given a different name for boys, circumcision, whereas for girls in Australia it is usually called for what it is, namely genital mutilation.

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