Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Judge puts boot into boot camps
"At the end of the day, we've got an inadequate workforce," he said. "There's no specialist training in child and adolescent psychology in New Zealand and it's a gap."
Can somebody tell this psycho nutbar that all responsible and loving parents are well trained in common sense family psychology. We don't need some dickwack academic dictating to us on the correct nurturing process for healthy and well balanced children. The left despises the thought of parents putting in place childhood boundaries, because they want the tentacles of big brother government in every household. That makes it easier for the state to control the family unit, meanwhile radical feminists do their best to create a huge gravy train fractured family growth business for psychologists and lawyers.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/
Judge puts boot into boot camps
By EMILY WATT - The Dominion Post | Friday, 27 February 2009
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The traditional "boot camp" for young offenders was "arguably the least successful sentence in the Western world", the principal Youth Court judge says.
"It made them healthier, fitter, faster, but they were still burglars, just harder to catch, " Judge Andrew Becroft said.
He said physical programmes backed up by mentoring and family support could work, but New Zealand's corrective training camps, which ran up till 2002, found 92 per cent of young attendees reoffended within a year.
"It was a spectacular, tragic, flawed, failure," he said.
The Government's proposed military-style activity camps, introduced this month as part of its 100-day urgency plan, has worried some justice and youth experts, who say overseas and local experience show military-style boot camps do not work.
Judge Becroft made it clear he was not commenting on government policy, but said any debate on the merits of a so-called "boot camp" must be clear on what was being discussed.
An outdoor, physically challenging programme run by quality instructors, combined with intense family therapy, drug and alcohol counselling, education and other support could be beneficial.
Kim Workman, of Reducing Crime and Punishment, said American experience showed that when the military-style "short, sharp, shock" approach was combined with mentoring and after-care, it still made no difference at all.
A physical programme based on a therapeutic model could be beneficial, he said, and there were already a handful of outdoor-based programmes in the country that were working well.
Social Development Minister Paula Bennett agreed the old boot camps lacked the necessary follow-up support to work.
But the Government's proposed military-style activity camps would be followed by six to nine months of intensive mentoring, she said.
"At no point are we going to throw them in there, get them fit, beat them around a little bit and send them back on the street, that's just not it at all."
Ms Bennett has said the three-month camps for the country's 40 most dangerous young offenders would use army-type facilities and training methods to teach self-discipline, personal responsibility and community values as well as literacy, numeracy and drug and alcohol support.
Ms Bennett agreed the proposal was contentious and welcomed healthy public debate. She said she had been congratulated by police and army personnel who strongly support the scheme.
The policy is a favourite of Prime Minister John Key, who raised it in his state of the nation speech last year, talking about the "1000 ticking time bombs" of youth offenders on the streets.
Auckland University psychologist Ian Lambie agreed boot camps alone would not work but could be effective with long-term follow-up. He said the Defence Force would need support to deal with the highest-risk youths, and more skilled clinical psychologists and social workers were needed.
"At the end of the day, we've got an inadequate workforce," he said. "There's no specialist training in child and adolescent psychology in New Zealand and it's a gap."
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Suppression continues for woman who admits under-age sex
This is just another example of judicial sexism. If the offender was a man then the sympathetic female judge would not consider name suppression. The court does not consider the feelings of children of fathers that are falsely accused by a gender bias justice system.
http://www.courtnews.co.nz/story.php?id=1720
Suppression continues for woman who admits under-age sex
By David Clarkson
A 36-year-old mother who had sex with an under-age boy has been allowed to keep her interim name suppression for the sake of her own two daughters.
The girls are aged 10 and 15 and were described as vulnerable during the suppression appeal before Justice Christine French in the High Court at Christchurch today.
When the woman pleaded guilty on January 16, District Court Judge Stephen Erber refused suppression but allowed the interim order to continue until the appeal could be heard.
Justice French said the judge was likely to have reached a different conclusion about suppression if he had been given the additional material that was now available to the High Court.
The woman admitted the charge of having sexual connection with a boy aged 15 about September 6. The two had been at a Linwood address on an evening when they had alcohol and party pills, and then had sex.
The woman said the boy had helped himself to the pills and had initiated the sex. She admitted having sex with the boy when the police spoke to her, and said it was “the biggest mistake of my life”.
The woman is due to be sentenced in the District Court next Friday and defence counsel Gilly Ferguson said today she would be seeking permanent suppression at that hearing if an interim order were granted today.
Submissions from counsel, and medical and psychiatric reports were put before the judge.
Mrs Ferguson said the woman’s daughters had been distressed when the mother had discussed the case with them recently and she had mentioned the possibility of her name being published.
The reports mentioned the possibility of the girls facing ridicule, bullying, criticism by peers, and the desire of parents for their children to discontinue their association.
“We are dealing with one isolated moment in the life of a mother who slipped from the decent standards she had previously observed,” she said.
Prosecutor Shannon-Leigh Litt said the crown had sympathy for the two children who would be particularly vulnerable if the name was published.
Justice French said the fact that a woman had been charged with under-age sex was unusual and was likely to attract significant notoriety.
But she said it was an isolated incident and there appeared to be no need for publicity to “flush out” further offending.
“I am satisfied this is a rare case where the need to protect the appellant’s daughters displaces the public interest in revealing the appellant’s name,” she said.
The order remains interim, and a decision on permanent suppression will need to be made by the sentencing judge in the District Court on Friday.
http://www.courtnews.co.nz/story.php?id=1720
Suppression continues for woman who admits under-age sex
By David Clarkson
A 36-year-old mother who had sex with an under-age boy has been allowed to keep her interim name suppression for the sake of her own two daughters.
The girls are aged 10 and 15 and were described as vulnerable during the suppression appeal before Justice Christine French in the High Court at Christchurch today.
When the woman pleaded guilty on January 16, District Court Judge Stephen Erber refused suppression but allowed the interim order to continue until the appeal could be heard.
Justice French said the judge was likely to have reached a different conclusion about suppression if he had been given the additional material that was now available to the High Court.
The woman admitted the charge of having sexual connection with a boy aged 15 about September 6. The two had been at a Linwood address on an evening when they had alcohol and party pills, and then had sex.
The woman said the boy had helped himself to the pills and had initiated the sex. She admitted having sex with the boy when the police spoke to her, and said it was “the biggest mistake of my life”.
The woman is due to be sentenced in the District Court next Friday and defence counsel Gilly Ferguson said today she would be seeking permanent suppression at that hearing if an interim order were granted today.
Submissions from counsel, and medical and psychiatric reports were put before the judge.
Mrs Ferguson said the woman’s daughters had been distressed when the mother had discussed the case with them recently and she had mentioned the possibility of her name being published.
The reports mentioned the possibility of the girls facing ridicule, bullying, criticism by peers, and the desire of parents for their children to discontinue their association.
“We are dealing with one isolated moment in the life of a mother who slipped from the decent standards she had previously observed,” she said.
Prosecutor Shannon-Leigh Litt said the crown had sympathy for the two children who would be particularly vulnerable if the name was published.
Justice French said the fact that a woman had been charged with under-age sex was unusual and was likely to attract significant notoriety.
But she said it was an isolated incident and there appeared to be no need for publicity to “flush out” further offending.
“I am satisfied this is a rare case where the need to protect the appellant’s daughters displaces the public interest in revealing the appellant’s name,” she said.
The order remains interim, and a decision on permanent suppression will need to be made by the sentencing judge in the District Court on Friday.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
A Black Eye for Justice
POLICE OFFICERS ought to be ardent supporters of legislation to take guns away from domestic abuse suspects. After all, it's the officers' responsibility to uphold the law, and abuse suspects use handguns and rifles to break it at alarming rates; half of the 75 domestic-violence-related homicides...
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
Monday, February 23, 2009
United Nations Discovers Most Human Traffic Perpetrators are Women
Oh my, yet another radical feminist sisterhood lie exposed.
Women are the majority of traffickers in almost a third of the 155 nations the U.N. surveyed. They accounted for more than 60 percent of the human trafficking convictions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
For many, human trafficking is a world they had been pulled into themselves.
"Women commit crimes against women, and in many cases the victims become the perpetrators, " Antonio Maria Costa, director of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. "They become the matrons of the business and they make money. It's like a drug addiction."
Most of the world's nations reported some form of "modern slavery" last year involving mainly the sex trade or forced labor.
And the number of victims should grow as the global financial crisis deepens, Costa said.
The report by Costa's office was based largely on human trafficking convictions reported to the U.N. between September 2007 and July 2008. About 22,500 victims were rescued during that time. About four of every five reported cases involved sexual exploitation; most of the rest involved forced labor.
But Costa's agency gave no overall figures for how many millions of people might be affected. He said most countries' conviction rates for human trafficking rarely exceed 1.5 per 100,000 people.
Two of every five countries covered in the report had not recorded a single conviction from 2007 to 2008.
"Either these countries are blind to the problem or they are ill-equipped to deal with it," Costa said.
"We only see the monster's tail," he said. "How many hundreds of thousands of victims are slaving away in sweatshops, fields, mines, factories, or trapped in domestic servitude? Their numbers will surely swell as the economic crisis deepens the pool of potential victims."
The report's release coincided with the appointment Thursday of Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino as a U.N. goodwill ambassador to help Costa's office fight human trafficking. Sorvino, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1989 with a degree in Chinese, won an Oscar for best supporting actress in 1995's "Mighty Aphrodite."
"Until a few years ago, I blissfully believed that slavery was a thing of the past. ... Well, obviously I was terribly wrong," she said after Costa draped a blue-ribboned medal around her neck.
Sorvino told how the stories of trafficked children hit her particularly hard since becoming a mother with two young children herself.
"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," she said, repeating a famous statement by Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday was celebrated Thursday.
The report also pointed out that women and girls suffer most from sexual abuse. About 20 percent of victims globally were children, mainly in Southeast Asia's Mekong region and parts of Africa.
Costa, who serves as the U.N.'s chief crime fighter, said it's difficult to get nations to address human trafficking because "it's at the crossroads" of other complex occurrences such as human migration and prostitution.
Sixty-three percent of the nations in the report had adopted some laws against human trafficking. The U.N. said most did so only after its protocol against human trafficking entered into force in December 2003.
United Nations Discovers Most Human Traffic Perpetrators are Women
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS — Surprisingly, the perpetrators behind human trafficking around the world are often women, the U.N. reported Thursday.Women are the majority of traffickers in almost a third of the 155 nations the U.N. surveyed. They accounted for more than 60 percent of the human trafficking convictions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
For many, human trafficking is a world they had been pulled into themselves.
"Women commit crimes against women, and in many cases the victims become the perpetrators, " Antonio Maria Costa, director of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. "They become the matrons of the business and they make money. It's like a drug addiction."
Most of the world's nations reported some form of "modern slavery" last year involving mainly the sex trade or forced labor.
And the number of victims should grow as the global financial crisis deepens, Costa said.
The report by Costa's office was based largely on human trafficking convictions reported to the U.N. between September 2007 and July 2008. About 22,500 victims were rescued during that time. About four of every five reported cases involved sexual exploitation; most of the rest involved forced labor.
But Costa's agency gave no overall figures for how many millions of people might be affected. He said most countries' conviction rates for human trafficking rarely exceed 1.5 per 100,000 people.
Two of every five countries covered in the report had not recorded a single conviction from 2007 to 2008.
"Either these countries are blind to the problem or they are ill-equipped to deal with it," Costa said.
"We only see the monster's tail," he said. "How many hundreds of thousands of victims are slaving away in sweatshops, fields, mines, factories, or trapped in domestic servitude? Their numbers will surely swell as the economic crisis deepens the pool of potential victims."
The report's release coincided with the appointment Thursday of Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino as a U.N. goodwill ambassador to help Costa's office fight human trafficking. Sorvino, who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1989 with a degree in Chinese, won an Oscar for best supporting actress in 1995's "Mighty Aphrodite."
"Until a few years ago, I blissfully believed that slavery was a thing of the past. ... Well, obviously I was terribly wrong," she said after Costa draped a blue-ribboned medal around her neck.
Sorvino told how the stories of trafficked children hit her particularly hard since becoming a mother with two young children herself.
"If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," she said, repeating a famous statement by Abraham Lincoln, whose 200th birthday was celebrated Thursday.
The report also pointed out that women and girls suffer most from sexual abuse. About 20 percent of victims globally were children, mainly in Southeast Asia's Mekong region and parts of Africa.
Costa, who serves as the U.N.'s chief crime fighter, said it's difficult to get nations to address human trafficking because "it's at the crossroads" of other complex occurrences such as human migration and prostitution.
Sixty-three percent of the nations in the report had adopted some laws against human trafficking. The U.N. said most did so only after its protocol against human trafficking entered into force in December 2003.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
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