Ideas@TheCentre
Culturally deaf to causes of child abuse
In an Australian first, the Victorian government announced this week that a parliamentary inquiry will be conducted into the handling of child sexual abuse cases by the Catholic and other churches.
It is impossible not to sympathise with victims who feel they will finally get the chance to hold their abusers to account. Giving people the chance to tell their stories can have a cleansing effect.
Child abuse often occurs when those in positions of authority remain silent or fail to listen to children who complain about it. Ending the silence provides an opportunity to learn lessons and make sure the same mistakes are never repeated.
Premier Ted Baillieu expressed this sentiment when he said, ‘We regard child abuse as abhorrent and we will endeavour to do whatever we can to prevent it from happening.’
But having worked in this field for a number of years, I am increasingly sceptical about our willingness to openly address very contentious issues that are highly relevant to the welfare of children.
Some big silences remain in the debate about child protection. Contemporary society would prefer not to talk about key problems, such as the fact that single-mother households are over-represented in cases of child abuse and neglect.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, ‘a relatively high proportion of substantiations [of reported child abuse and neglect] involved children living in lone mother families’. The Australian Institute of Family Studies estimates that child abuse in such households is ‘about two and half times higher than would be expected given the number of children living in such families.’
This problem was created by the Whitlam government when it introduced the single mothers pension in 1973. This made it possible for women who did not work and did not have bread-winning husbands to raise children at taxpayers’ expense. What has ensued is the rise of a dysfunctional underclass of welfare-dependent single mothers with a complex range of personal and social problems, including substance abuse, domestic violence, and an inability to properly parent children.
A Senate committee recently recommended that the federal government issue an apology for the pre-1970s policy of forcing unwed mothers to give up their babies for adoption. We also need to admit that efforts to right perceived wrongs, starting with the creation of the single mothers pension, have precipitated a social disaster.
But we are reluctant to admit this because telling the truth about ‘diverse’ family structures is not politically correct. We are culturally deaf, as it were, to the fact that all ‘families’ are patently not equal when it comes to securing the welfare of children.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
