How the New Zealand judiciary are still able to bias custody law.

Open Letter to Principal Family Court Judge Peter Boshier

Dear Judge Boshier,

I refer to your interview on TV One on June 28th 2009
(http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news/q-paul-holmes-interviews-peter-boshier-28096
34)
. Since the text of the interview is on the web, I assume that the interview was not edited before being screened -- incredibly enough!



Custody Bias

I say "incredibly enough" because of the following: In response to the accusation that women get sole custody in two thirds of cases, you stated that men and women got sole custody equally frequently, as a proportion of the numbers of times that mothers or fathers actually applied for sole custody. In other words, the reason for the fact that women get sole custody in two thirds of cases was that women applied for sole custody more often than men. In response to the interviewer asking for clarification, you then said:

"Right, well if you've got a mother applying for sole care, it's logical (my emphasis) she's probably going to get sole care. If a father applies for sole care he might, and so the number of applications that mothers file are many many more than fathers."


What is incredible, in my view, is that you did not see fit -- on one of the rare occasions when you have appeared on television -- to clarify your use of the word "logical". It cannot be news to you that subsection 4(4) of the Care of Children Act 2004 states quite clearly that:

"For the purposes of this section, and regardless of a child's age, it must not be presumed that placing the child in the day-to-day care of a particular person will, because of that person's sex (my emphasis), best serve the welfare and best interests of the child."



Section 4 is the section which states that the principle of the welfare and best interests of the child must be paramount -- yet here you are, as the Principal Judge entrusted with the implementation of the Will of Parliament,as expressed in this Act, stating quite boldly and without qualification that subsection 4(4) is not worth the paper that it is written on! Will you consider resigning?

As is well known to those of us who have studied law, and as is stated in the textbook Family Law Policy in New Zealand,1 people bargain "in the shadow of the law" -- i.e. with an assumption at the back of their minds about what the outcome would be if the matter went to court. So what you were in fact saying was that most lawyers advise their clients that the New Zealand Family Court is biased against fathers, and that a female client would be well-advised to make an application for sole custody, but a male client would not.



Welfare and Best Interests of the Child

Since I am not a judge, however, I am free to criticise Parliament's insistence that the welfare and best interests of the child must be paramount. There are typically at least three people involved in such cases:

the two parents and the child. It is prima facie arbitrary and a breach of two people's human rights for the rights of the parents to be disregarded. I am fairly certain that, if it wasn't for the fact that this principle is usually interpreted in a way that suits the mother, it would never have been included in the Act. Parliament is never happy unless it is favouring women and oppressing men. In that respect, you are in tune with the Will of Parliament.

Apart from the issue of human rights, there is also the issue of realism: It would only make sense for the welfare and best interests of the child to be paramount if there was some rational process for coming to a reasonable conclusion about which decision on custody would actually best serve the welfare and best interests of the child. There are principles stated in the Act, and there are criteria listed in past cases, but none of these are prioritised, and the job of the judge is to predict the future, when the science available to guide his decisions is even more uncertain than that guiding the forecasts of metereologists and economists!

Moreover, it is not clear that all the correct principles and criteria are being considered. As your interviewer pointed out,

"A child that has no father is 14 times more likely to rape, 20 more times likely to go to prison...."



The principles and criteria do not mention preventing rape, imprisonment, unhappiness, poor school results, truancy, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, suicide, and so on. If they did, they would probably favour father custody or joint custody -- and that was certainly not the Will of Parliament, was it?

Yours sincerely,

Peter Zohrab


1 Henaghan, M. and Atkin, B., Family Law Policy in New Zealand, 2 ed 2002,
Wellington:LexisNexis Butterworths, p. 267.

Violent Women Put in Refuges http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=3929 NZ Prostate
Cancer Screening
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/stories/2009/06/18/1245b6277b82 Right to life
in black & white
www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10570815 New
Zealand's
gendered mortality http://ips.ac.nz/publications/publications/show/251
Female Subjectivity as Standard for Law & Policy
http://equality.netfirms.com/subjecti.html International Men's Day
www.internationalmensday.com/

NZBC guidelines for misandry

Australian playwright David Williamson gives his thoughts on writing about women at the Author's Right To Speak seminar at the Sydney Writers Festival. No wonder all we ever hear about in New Zealand is misogyny but never misandry, which is the hatred or oppression of males!

A couple of thoughts from international colleagues in the Fathers Right Movement;

Robert writes;

“Freedom and liberty are not absolutes in today's world. They are subject to interpretation and secret censorship that leaves the population believing they have witnessed and are experiencing unadulterated freedom and liberty.This is not true as this pod cast from New Zealand epitomizes.You will find out how women can be defined in only a certain number of ways and definitely not in others, most interesting.

I have a great deal of sympathy with his views having been on a BBC
"internal steering committee" where scripts were altered 1 year in advance to get across the message of a planned campaign against men.

This is something that should belong to the Fascist and Soviet era but, no, it is alive and well in 2009. If anything, it reinforces the proposition that a Commissariat is at work in most countries benevolently 'guiding' how we think and what we think.”

Tom writes;

“Worth a listen to re the example of the NZBC guidelines for writing about women and the deliberate feminist agenda (propaganda) behind that push to manipulate NZ citizens."

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/
David Williamson on writing about women

Listen

Download MP3 (3.5MB, 7:45 minutes)
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2009/06/bsw_20090630_1020.mp3

Who is David Williamson?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Williamson

PAS is a great get rich scheme for family court filth

Unfortunately the insidious Parental Alienation Syndrome, promoted by the family court system, is not a recognized disorder by scientific and medical communities because it lacks validity and reliability. However, in the real world greedy unscrupulous lawyers and psychologists ride the gravy train so they can leech as much blood money from a family court file. They enjoy a court where false allegations are the norm.They delight in adversarial tactics for effect. They can meander a case on for years (mine started in 2001 and I want clossure). They don’t care about the damage to the alienated father, the paternal side of the family(RIP Mum) and the sad estranged children.

PAS “deprogramming” techniques divide relationships rather than unite, but then again that’s what the dirty low life family court is all about. A sick, sad joke. Many falsely accused fathers simply leave the country or commit suicide rather than face the overwhelming obstacles put in place by the feminist orchestrated court of hatred.

Sadly 87,000 cases passed through the scumbag family court last year. Great stuff a real growth industry for lying lawyers and twisted pus laden psychologists. Lies are again the winner on the day. PAS will enable the devious lying professionals to buy a new Beamer. You filth make my stomach turn, you mongrels, judgment is coming soon.

What a sick country that allows a court to create so much misery so professionals can get wealthy. No wonder we lead the world in child abuse.

The family court of New Zealand is a vipers den of evil.

$4 billion abuse industry rooted in deceptions and lies

Carey Roberts column
$4 billion abuse industry rooted in deceptions and lies


July 1, 2009
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/090701

Erin Pizzey is a genial woman with snow-white hair, cherubic cheeks, and an easy smile. It wasn't always that way. The daughter of an English diplomat, she founded the world's first shelter for battered women in 1971. To her surprise, she discovered that most of the women in her shelter were as violent as the men they had left.

When Pizzey wrote a book revealing this sordid truth, she encountered a firestorm of protest. "Abusive telephone calls to my home, death threats, and bomb scares, became a way of living for me and for my family. Finally, the bomb squad asked me to have all my mail delivered to their head quarters," she would later reveal.

According a recent report, the domestic violence industry continues to engage in information control tactics, spewing a dizzying series of half-truths, white lies, and outright prevarications. The report, "Fifty Domestic Violence Myths," is published by RADAR, Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting: http://www.mediaradar.org/docs/RADARreport-50-DV-Myths.pdf

How often have you heard the mantra-like claim, "domestic violence is all about power and control"? That's code for the feminist dogma that domestic violence is rooted in men's insatiable need to dominate and oppress the women in their lives.

And the obvious solution to partner abuse? Eliminate the patriarchy!

I know it all sounds far-fetched, but that's what the gender ideologues who get their funding from the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) believe. And no surprise these programs have been an abject failure. As Dr. Angela Parmley of the Department of Justice once admitted, "We have no evidence to date that VAWA has led to a decrease in the overall levels of violence against women."

Once you blame the whole problem of partner abuse on patriarchal dominance, the women who proudly call themselves the "VAWA Mafia" find themselves compelled to dress up the fable with a series of corollary myths.

Here are some examples: When a woman attacks her boyfriend, claim she was only acting in self-defense. Shrug off her assault with the "He had it coming" line. Aver her short stature prevents her from ever hurting her man. Or assert she grew up in an abusive household, as if that somehow lets her off the hook.

Above all, the ideologues will never admit that partner violence is more common among lesbians than heterosexual couples. Just consider the case of Jessica Kalish, the 56-year-old Florida woman who was stabbed 222 times last October with a Phillips screwdriver wielded by ex-girlfriend Carol Anne Burger. But no one dared call it "domestic violence."

Once you begin to play tricks with the truth, you need to invent ever grander prevarications. So sit back and get ready for a good chuckle, because there's not a shred of truth to any of these claims regularly put forth by the domestic abuse industry:

1. A marriage license is a hitting license. (Truth is, an intact marriage is the safest place for men and women alike.)

2. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women. (The leading causes of female injury are unintentional falls, motor vehicle accidents, and over-exertion. Domestic violence is not even on the list.)

3. The March of Dimes reports that battering is the leading cause of birth defects. (The March of Dimes has never done such a study.)

4. Women never make false allegations of domestic violence. (That's the biggest whopper of all.)

5. Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for violence against women. (Will the abuse industry never tire of its demagoguery?)

These are just five of the 50 domestic violence myths documented in the RADAR report. As former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once deadpanned, "You're entitled to your own opinions; you're not entitled to your own facts." Hopefully the $4 billion partner abuse industry will begin to pay attention.

Carey Roberts is an analyst and commentator on political correctness. His best-known work was an exposé on Marxism and radical feminism.

Mr. Roberts' work has been cited on the Rush Limbaugh show. Besides serving as a regular contributor to RenewAmerica.com, he has published in The Washington Times, LewRockwell.com, ifeminists.net, Men's News Daily, eco.freedom.org, The Federal Observer, Opinion Editorials, and The Right Report.

Previously, he served on active duty in the Army, was a professor of psychology, and was a citizen-lobbyist in the US Congress. In his spare time he admires Norman Rockwell paintings, collects antiques, and is an avid soccer fan. He now works as an independent researcher and consultant.

© Copyright 2009 by Carey Roberts

Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship

ARTICLES & COMMENTARY

Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship

By Christina Hoff Sommers

Monday, June 29, 2009

http://www.aei.org/article/100695

"Harder to kill than a vampire." That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But, as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the hardest of all to slay are those promoted by feminist professors. Consider what happened recently when I sent an e-mail message to the Berkeley law professor Nancy K. D. Lemon pointing out that the highly praised textbook that she edited, Domestic Violence Law (second edition, Thomson/West, 2005), contained errors.



Her reply began: "I appreciate and share your concern for veracity in all of our scholarship. However, I would expect a colleague who is genuinely concerned about such matters to contact me directly and give me a chance to respond before launching a public attack on me and my work, and then contacting me after the fact."



The critical work of 21st-century feminism will be to help women in the developing world, especially in Muslim societies, in their struggle for basic rights.



I confess: I had indeed publicly criticized Lemon's book, in campus lectures and in a post on FeministLawProfessors.com. I had always thought that that was the usual practice of intellectual argument. Disagreement is aired, error corrected, truth affirmed. Indeed, I was moved to write to her because of the deep consternation of law students who had attended my lectures: If authoritative textbooks contain errors, how are students to know whether they are being educated or indoctrinated? Lemon's book has been in law-school classrooms for years.



One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack. Lemon's Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook--a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward: "The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. . . . The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe."



Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology--the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase "rule of thumb" did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.



A few pages later, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, "The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease." Not true. When I recently read Zorza's assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, "That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study." The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.



Zorza also informs readers that "between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence." Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent.



Few students would guess that the Lemon book is anything less than reliable. The University of California at Berkeley's online faculty profile of Lemon hails it as the "premiere" text of the genre. It is part of a leading casebook series, published by Thomson/West, whose board of academic advisers, prominently listed next to the title page, includes many eminent law professors.



I mentioned these problems in my message to Lemon. She replied: "I have looked into your assertions and requested documentation from Joan Zorza regarding the March of Dimes study and the statistics on battered women in emergency rooms. She provided both of these promptly."



If that's the case, Zorza and Lemon might share their documentation with Leavitt, of the March of Dimes, who is emphatic that it does not exist. They might also contact the Centers for Disease Control statistician Janey Hsiao, who wrote to me that "among ED [Emergency Department] visits made by females, the percent of having physical abuse by spouse or partner is 0.02 percent in 2003 and 0.01 percent in 2005."



Here is what Lemon says about Cheryl Ward Smith's essay on Romulus and the rule of thumb: "I made a few minor editorial changes in the Smith piece so that it is more accurate. However, overall it appeared to be correct."



A few minor editorial changes? Students deserve better. So do women victimized by violence.

Feminist misinformation is pervasive. In their eye-opening book, Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies (Lexington Books, 2003), the professors Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge describe the "sea of propaganda" that overwhelms the contemporary feminist classroom. The formidable Christine Rosen (formerly Stolba), in her 2002 report on the five leading women's-studies textbooks, found them rife with falsehoods, half-truths, and "deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries." Are there serious scholars in women's studies? Yes, of course. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist at the University of California at Davis; Janet Zollinger Giele, a sociologist at Brandeis; and Anne Mellor, a literary scholar at UCLA, to name just three, are models of academic excellence and integrity. But they are the exception. Lemon's book typifies the departmental mind-set.



Consider The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World (2008), by the feminist scholar Joni Seager, chair of the Hunter College geography department. Now in its fourth edition, Seager's atlas was named "reference book of the year" by the American Library Association when it was published. "Nobody should be without this book," says the feminist icon Gloria Steinem. "A wealth of fascinating information," enthuses The Washington Post. Fascinating, maybe. But the information is misleading and, at least in one instance, flat-out false.



One color-coded map illustrates how women are kept "in their place" by restrictions on their mobility, dress, and behavior. Somehow the United States comes out looking as bad in this respect as Somalia, Uganda, Yemen, Niger, and Libya. All are coded with the same shade of green to indicate places where "patriarchal assumptions" operate in "potent combination with fundamentalist religious interpretations." Seager's logic? She notes that in parts of Uganda, a man can claim an unmarried woman as his wife by raping her. The United States gets the same low rating on Seager's charts because, she notes, "State legislators enacted 301 anti-abortion measures between 1995 and 2001." Never mind that the Ugandan practice is barbaric, that U.S. abortion law is exceptionally liberal among the nations of the world, and that the activism and controversy surrounding the issue of abortion in the United States is a sign of a vigorous free democracy working out its disagreements.



On another map, the United States gets the same rating for domestic violence as Uganda and Haiti. Seager backs up that verdict with that erroneous and ubiquitous emergency-room factoid: "22 percent-35 percent of women who visit a hospital emergency room do so because of domestic violence."



The critical work of 21st-century feminism will be to help women in the developing world, especially in Muslim societies, in their struggle for basic rights. False depictions of the United States as an oppressive "patriarchy" are a ludicrous distraction. If American women are as oppressed as Ugandan women, then American feminists would be right to focus on their domestic travails and let the Ugandan women fend for themselves.

All books have mistakes, so why pick on the feminists? My complaint with feminist research is not so much that the authors make mistakes; it is that the mistakes are impervious to reasoned criticism. They do not get corrected. The authors are passionately committed to the proposition that American women are oppressed and under siege. The scholars seize and hold on for dear life to any piece of data that appears to corroborate their dire worldview. At the same time, any critic who attempts to correct the false assumptions is dismissed as a backlasher and an anti-feminist crank.



Why should it matter if a large number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate things? Here are three reasons to be concerned:

1) False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women's movement.

2) Over the years, the feminist fictions have made their way into public policy. They travel from the women's-studies textbooks to women's advocacy groups and then into news stories. Soon after, they are cited by concerned political leaders. President Obama recently issued an executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. As he explained, "The purpose of this council is to ensure that American women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy." He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it is alleged, women face a "chilly climate." The president and members of Congress can cite decades of women's-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by scholarly merchants of hype like Professors Lemon and Seager.

3) Finally, as a philosophy professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.



"Thug," "parasite," "dangerous," a "female impersonator"--those are some of the labels applied to me when I exposed specious feminist statistics in my 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? (Come to think of it, none of my critics contacted me directly with their concerns before launching their public attacks.) According to Susan Friedman, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "Sommers' diachronic discourse is easily unveiled as synchronic discourse in drag. . . . She practices . . . metonymic historiography." That one hurt! But my views, as well as my metonymic historiography, are always open to correction. So I'll continue to follow the work of the academic feminists--to criticize it when it is wrong, and to learn from it when it is right.



Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI.

More bullshit from Boshier on TVNZ

Boshier dribbles more utter crap ; “No, when I was appointed in 2004 I just felt that it was wrong, that you had a court operating that wasn’t transparent and accountable”

But Judge Boshier, you fobbed me off in 2004 when I repeatedly tried to highlight a travesty of justice that is ongoing in the secretive and sinister world of the family court. You wouldn't know the meaning of the words accountability and transparenctly.How does a lying corrupt creep like you sleep at night? Remember you wrote in 2004;

“Dear Mr Burns
Thank you for your further letter of 12 October 2004. I will not be responding any further on this issue.”

I wrote to Boshier requesting that a bias and unscrupulous family court psychologist John Watson be withdrawn from my family court proceedings because he was causing great stress to my mother, who was suffering bad health. Boshier fobbed me off and John Watson hounded my mother to death a year later. RIP mum. I will get even with your corrupt court Boshier. Believe me I will.My case started in 2001.It was built on false allegations of child abuse and domestic violence. This case is far from finished.

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be seen on tvnz.co.nz at,
http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news
JUDGE PETER BOSHIER interviewed by PAUL HOLMES

PAUL The Family Court was established back in the early 80s, it's become a very controversial court. The Family Court deals with some of the most sensitive most difficult matters in our community life. It handles the painful disputes within families, within marriages. It has a huge effect on the lives of children. The Court deals with protection orders after there's been domestic violence say and decides custody matters, but the Court has been criticised over the years vehemently for the length of time it takes to make decisions, and it is especially criticised by men's groups who say the Court fails fathers, and is mother biased. Well the Principal Judge of the Family Court since 2004 is Principal Judge Peter Boshier. Thank you very much for joining us.
PETER Good morning.
PAUL How bad are the delays in say your custody issues?
PETER BOSHIER – Principal Family Court Judge
We have delays that we've got to improve on. When people have go their children's issues to resolve they’ve got to have them done speedily, so we've got a long way to go yet to make access of justice where I want it to be.
PAUL What causes the delays?
PETER Sheer volume of work Paul, we are the second busiest court now in New Zealand, 87,000 applications are filed in our court each year, and 27,000 of those deal with care of children, so it's sheer volume.
PAUL Sheer volume, and I spose you're dealing in shades of grey aren’t you?
PETER We are, and we're dealing with people, who feel that they know what's best for their children when they don’t always. They're often their own issues.
PAUL Exactly, both parents know what is best. Dr Muriel Newman however, the former ACT MP says the delays are horrendous Peter, she says sometimes custody cases are taking up to a year. Now that’s a long period, I mean even before it gets to the Family Court this is a long period of uncertainty for kids isn't it?
PETER Yes, and that’s why I've been very keen to do reforms in the Family Court, I think we've needed to.
PAUL But what are you doing about getting them down beneath a year?
PETER Well we have now a programme called Less Adversarial Trials. That’s turning the way we do court work on our head, because we're now limiting the sort of issues that people have bring. So traditionally people have flown with whatever they’ve wanted to, we've now been much tighter and we're reducing the time that we're prepared to give them for their cases.
PAUL You’ve also added another stratum haven't you, you’ve got mediation now.
PETER Yes.
PAUL Which keeps things away from the judges, takes some of the volume of work off judges?
PAUL So what kind of cases would go this mediation stratum?
PAUL Well the Family Court matters legislation passed last year sets up mediation for non judges, but it's yet to be funded and introduced. So I unapologetically want to say to you I will look forward to the day when we have funded and we have non judge led mediation.
PAUL Right, so it's been set up, non judge led mediation, but no funding for it?
PETER Mm.
PAUL Now your attitude to fathers, Judge. Bob McCoskrie of Family First, a thorn in your side I guess, he quotes – well he got this through the Official Information Act, he says the Court remains unfair to fathers. He says 50/50 custody is granted in only 13% of cases, and women get sole custody in two thirds of cases, that hardly seems to be balanced equally between mothers and fathers.
PETER Mm, well one of the good things about the openness of the Court which I've been very very comfortable with, is the that we now publish our statistics, and they demonstrate that the times that men get care of their children, pretty much correspond with the times when they apply for them. So to the extent that mothers get care more than fathers, it's almost exactly proportionate to the number of times that men and women apply. It's uncanny.
PAUL Explain that to me.
PETER Right, well if you’ve got a mother applying for sole care, it's logical she's probably going to get sole care. If a father applies for sole care he might, and so the number of applications that mothers file are many many more than fathers.
PAUL Right, so when Bob McCoskrie says 50/50 custody is granted in only 13% of cases that does not necessarily imply a bias against fathers?
PETER No no, exactly, and you can't force fathers to have equal care if they don’t want it, many fathers don’t, and Family Court Judges are forever exhorting reluctant fathers to have more care time, but I think that we're getting there on changes to attitudes, and I'm pleased that men are willing and wanting to be more fatherly.
PAUL Because there is a danger in their not being fatherly isn't there, fathers get alienated from their kids of course the less they have to do with them. Are these figures roughly right. According to some research I discovered there is a great danger in children having no fathers. A child that has no father is 14 times more likely to rape, 20 more times likely to go to prison, would those numbers surprise you?
PETER They wouldn’t surprise me, and if you looked probably at the figures in the Youth Court of the profile of young people offending, a lot of them Paul will unfortunately come from dysfunctional families, and probably even not know their fathers.
PAUL Of course on this business and before we go, was it because of the Men's Groups and the aggravation they gave you, and the what you perceived to be misunderstandings that you opened the Family Court to the news media, or to the public via the news media?
PETER No, when I was appointed in 2004 I just felt that it was wrong, that you had a court operating that wasn’t transparent and accountable, so you do need to protect privacy, but it's wrong frankly to have a court that the public doesn’t know what goes on inside, so it was always the right thing to do.
PAUL Does the Family Court have the view that mothers are more important?
PETER No. No, in fact what I'd want to stress is that what I'm most wanting in my time is to have families that even when they separate they have both parents. If we can achieve both parents looking after their children, even though they're separated, we're gonna have a much better society.
PAUL Domestic violence, Judge Boshier, you’ve called it one of the most pernicious problems facing this country. How bad is it, what do you see?
PETER We're a very violent society in New Zealand, and I don’t know why. Some of the violence that I see when I'm doing defended cases, frankly Paul it moves me sometimes nearly to tears. I don’t know why the violence is just so awful and we see domestic violence cases played out in the media, the beatings of the most awful sort, it is a problem that cannot possibly be exaggerated, it is there.
PAUL You’ve questioned some of the domestic violence programmes, you wonder if they work?
PETER Yes, yes.
PAUL In what ways do you think they don’t, what tells you that they might not be working, the numbers? 75,000 cases reported of domestic violence in 2006 alone. Anyway what tells you?
PETER Well I don’t think that we can just send every person who's a perpetrator of violence to the same programme and expect that it's going to be good for them. I think what we need to do is look at what each individual perpetrator is doing, why, their ethnicity, their culture, whether they're affected by drugs, if they're on methamphetamine you can't treat them the same as just some other perpetrators of violence that aren’t on P, so it depends.
PAUL You went on to the Stellar Trust recently which is a trust aimed at creating awareness of P, and the scourge of P and the dangers of P, are you starting to see more and more P related domestic violence, family breakdown?
PETER Yes, and you know the thing that really worries me about P is that in the care and protection work we do, that is to say where the State intervenes, it's so hard to rehabilitate young parents who are on P, and you can rehabilitate young parents on some other drugs, they can go to Odyssey House, but to try and rehabilitate young parents on P, we're really looking at the State often taking the children off them, it's so hard to get a positive turn around, that’s my difficulty.
PAUL That’s your worry about that particular drug?
PETER Yes it is, and it seems that once people are addicted to P, the violence that often I can't even recall afterwards is just massive, more than I would normally expect to see.
PAUL Quick word on the proposed On the Spot Protection Orders which the government is proposing. The Bill is in parliament now. Basically what this will do is if there's a domestic violence incident the Police are called, the Police will come round to the house, if they think they know what's gone on, they can remove a party from the house for five days, in other words on a hunch a 22 year old constable can throw 57 year old Jo Blogs out of the house he's paid the mortgage on for 30 years, what do you think of this particular proposal?
PETER Well it has my support, I think that when the Police go in there is demonstrable violence they can arrest, if they arrest they can't issue an On the Spot Protection Order, so it's a lesser being and I think it will be good in cases where one party is just out of control, there is obviously going to be violence and there has been, but the Police just can't work out who's occasioned it. So I think that there are times when it's going to provide security to that family that’s just under siege.
PAUL I thank you so much for your work, and for coming on the programme.
PETER Thank you it's nice to be here.
PAUL Principal Judge of the Family Court, Peter Boshier.
ENDS

NO Amnesty for Abused MEN!

NO Amnesty for Abused MEN!

I want to comment on your new anti-domestic-abuse ad fixture in Hamburg, Germany . If you want it to be realistic, you need to show it with the woman hitting the man as unbiased research shows women are as violent as men in domestic settings. In fact,
The American Psychiatric Association in Psychiatric News August 3, 2007 Volume 42, Number 15, page 31 has this to say:

Regarding perpetration of violence, more women than men (25 percent versus 11 percent) were responsible. In fact, 71 percent of the instigators in nonreciprocal partner violence were women. This finding surprised Whitaker and his colleagues, they admitted in their study report.

As for physical injury due to intimate partner violence, it was more likely to occur when the violence was reciprocal than nonreciprocal. And while injury was more likely when violence was perpetrated by men, in relationships with reciprocal violence it was the men who were injured more often (25 percent of the time) than were women (20 percent of the time). "This is important as violence perpetrated by women is often seen as not serious," Whitaker and his group stressed.

http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/42/15/31-a


I ask why are we given false information on the real truth of domestic violence? The Violence Against Women Act has helped few women and has made it more dangerous for women. Meanwhile if offers NO protection for the men who are abused. This ad only enables women to be abusive while it insults the many men who have been and are being abused.


Pastor Kenneth Deemer

Director Shattered Men
P.O. BOX 166
MARION INDIANA 46952-0166

shatteredmen@earthlink.net

JUNE is Domestic Violence Against Men Awareness Month

Web site: http://www.shatterdmen.com