Dads -who needs them ? Dads are dangerous.Stepdads are deadly

Below is a response from Fathers4equality in relation to the article written by Alan Howe titled Dads -who needs them ? Dads are dangerous .Stepdads are deadly .


It is bloody hard to maintain good fatherhood responsibilities when a system seems hell bent on stereotyping all fathers' as criminals . Every which way dads are getting it in the neck .Forensic and academic studies in New Zealand show that domestic violence is not gender specific with both parties as guilty as each other .
Time for change and a long overdue balance of the scales ? We must address infanticide and child abuse in New Zealand now !! Happy kiwi kids need Dads Too.
d4j

F4E say;
"Murder-suicides committed by a father are among the rarest forms of child homicide. Australian Institute of Criminology statistics show there were 270 child homicide incidents in Australia from July 1989 to June 1999, involving 287 identified offenders and resulting in the deaths of 316 children under 15. When children younger than 15 are killed in Australia, they are most likely to be killed by a family member (66.9 per cent), primarily a parent (94.2 per cent),❠Australian Institute Of Criminology (AIC) research analyst Jenny Mouzos says in her report 'Homicidal Encounters.'



Although fathers are responsible for most cases of filicide (the murder of children by their parents) in Australia, these numbers are inflated by the number of non-biological fathers who kill children


When Mouzos crunched figures on the distribution of parents who killed children by gender and biological ties, she found biological mothers posed a more lethal risk to their own. Biological mothers account for about 35 per cent of all filicides (about the same proportion as stepfathers and de factos), while biological fathers account for 29 per cent."



http://www.news. com.au/heraldsun /story/0, 21985,23062221- 5000117,00. html



DADS - who needs them? Dads are dangerous. Stepdads are deadly.
Alan Howe


About 25 per cent of Australian kids have seen some form of violence against their mother or their stepmother. Drunk dads do much of it but sober dads are often behind the fists as well.



Men are genetically predisposed to violence and 23.5 per cent of all assaults reported to Victoria Police take place in the family home.



What's worse is the Australian Bureau of Statistics believes only 31 per cent of assaults are reported. That is a lot of unhappy homes. Far too many. And it'll be the dad who is mostly to blame.



Which is why I am not confronted by the latest bestseller, Knock Yourself Up, written by a New York lesbian, Louise Sloan, who used an anonymous sperm donor to have a baby - a boy.



In the book - provocatively subtitled No Man? No Problem! - Sloan interviews a range of single mums, mostly heterosexual women whose body clocks sounded a deafening alarm that spurred them into action.



Sloan writes: "Most of the women in this book would love to find the right guy but, when push came to shove, decided finding the right husband just wasn't their No. 1 priority. Having a child was."



The book is a best-seller and there has been uproar about the manner in which Sloan appears to have written off the need for a child to have a dad.



And some have asked why she didn't adopt.



My best mate is adopted, but it is not something I would ever do. I don't want to raise someone else's child. I want my own.



And that's precisely how Sloan and many of those she interviewed felt. They wanted pregnancies and to give birth - and that's a pretty natural desire.


As natural as alpha males beating the living daylights out of lesser beings.



There will soon be many more single mums now that Attorney-General Rob Hulls is giving them access to fertility treatment.



An interfaith council led by Rabbi Shimon Cowen has accused the Government of social engineering.



"The values that were with us until 20 years ago have gone out of control," Rabbi Cowen said on behalf of the committee representing the Jewish, Anglican, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim faiths.



That would be the Catholic faith that bars priests from having wives and families, and women from the priesthood, and the Muslim faith that allows a man to divorce his wife just by saying so.



No wonder women, repressed for centuries by organised religion, feel they have a right to take control of their fertility.



Another flank of the attack against Sloan is by men despairing of the future of children from fatherless households. I wouldn't worry too much.



While the economics of such households may pose a few problems - and equal pay, real equal pay, might help there - the phenomenon of women bringing up kids without their dads has been with us forever.



There are 663,000 lone parent households in Australia, 83 per cent of them run by mum.

One of our most cherished organisations is Legacy, which has helped widows of war for almost a century - 100,000 Australian men were killed in World Wars I and II, and in Vietnam - and their well-adjusted kids include Ron Barassi, TV star Clive James and guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel.



Last week it was revealed that Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and her husband, Greg Withers, who heads the state Office of Climate Change, were both raised in fatherless houses, Withers by his grandmother.



Both estranged from their alcoholic fathers, they seem to have done rather well.



But the drinking dad's no match for the deadly dad.



I drove past Winchelsea last week and saw the three little white crosses at the spot where Robert Farquharson (above) decided to murder sons Jai, 10, Tyler, 7, and Bailey, 2 on Father's Day, 2005.



No man? No problem? No argument from me.