28/04/04

Social Workers Lynch Mob 

Matilda Bawden

Dads on the Air

Due to unforeseen technical problems, no audio is available for this week’s edition. It will return as normal from next week. With Special Guest Matilda Bawden President - Shared Parenting Council of Australia.

The creation of the Shared Parenting Council of Australia, a loose alliance of over 20 family law and fathers groups, has been a significant step forward for the many people campaigning for family law reform.

Here's some of President Matilda Bawden has to say:

I grew up knowing who my father is. I grew up knowing of his love for me and having had the benefit of learning under his guidance, supervision and above all love. I am proud to say my dad is here with us today.

 tens of thousands of children in Australia every year will never know what it is like to hug or kiss their father.

Unfortunately, tens of thousands of children in Australia every year will never know what it is like to hug or kiss their father. They will never know what his family origins were or even what his profession or trade was. They will never know what it feels like to kick a ball with him, go to a theatre or concert with him or what its like just to play rough and tumble.

To strengthen child protection, we must challenge the mythologies about males.

For those who don’t know, I am a Social Worker. My first experience in dealing with so-called “men’s issues”, happened when (as a new graduate) I was approached for an independent opinion by a father who maintained that he had been falsely accused of seven rape and incest charges against his then 5 year old daughter by the then SA Department of Community Welfare (now Family and Youth Services or FAYS).

Like most Social Workers, I too believed that if he was accused, he must surely be guilty,

Like most Social Workers, I too believed that if he was accused, he must surely be guilty, after all - first and foremost - he was a man. Besides, how could a team of social workers, police, doctors, Crown lawyers and psychologists get it so wrong???

Well, if not for his desperate pleadings, persistent phone calls and he insistence that he was innocent of the charges over some two weeks, I would probably have read his file once or twice and concurred with the opinion of all the other professionals.

So what changed my mind? Each time I read the file, I read it from the presumption of his absolute and irrefutable guilt. Then I tried a different approach – I began to ask myself, “Could he possibly be innocent?”, “Could there have been a mistake by the prosecution’s team?”, “If so, could a guilty man walk because of sloppy investigative work by the government’s team?” and “Was the so-called evidence of the man’s guilt as contained in his file the fruit off a poisonous tree?”.

When I read his file from the position of his possible innocence, the holes in the prosecution’s case became so massive, one could drive a fleet of buses and several jumbo jets through it! So much so, it would be another 5 years later before the father would be exonerated by a front-page Sunday mail story.

This was the first of many cases for me in which the father would face false allegations of abuse

This was the first of many cases for me in which the father would face false allegations of abuse and then been subjected to endless and relentless persecution by Crown lawyers. Often the Crown’s case would be buoyed by stories fabricated by departmental Social Workers themselves and I can say this as I am a witness to some of those occasions when the false allegations would later emerge.

Identical practices have been exposed in many cities overseas around the mid-1980’s, including England and Miami, Florida. We know from the practices we have observed that the verballing and interrogation of children under the age of five by our authorities, is common-place. Your child could be brought in for questioning on something entirely unrelated, but two or three hours later make disclosures you could never have imagined possible, much less plausible.

So my next burning question became, “What ideological, procedural, legislative or organisational culture could lead an entire team of professionals to behave like a lynch-mob?”.

To answer the question, I had to start with myself, as I too would have succumbed to the same mentality.

Retrospectively, as I stand here today, I can attribute a range of factors and causes for why we have, as a community accepted a very indifferent and casual attitude to the separation of children from their families.

As a woman, I know how in Social Work the feminist agenda is possibly the single most dominant perspective

As a woman, I know how in Social Work the feminist agenda is possibly the single most dominant perspective which is taught to impressionable and perhaps disillusioned women, like myself at the time. With over 90% of Social Work students being female, it is hardly surprising that many are prepared to absorb such doctrines like a sponge; as if preaching to the converted.

With no “male liberationist” perspective to counter-balance this equation, new Social Workers are ill-placed for de-programming themselves. This is particularly so in a public sector culture where professional de-skilling is the order of the day and independent thought is rendered impossible if one is not to be the subject of professional suicide or reprisal for challenging the elite.

Then we have the gender-feminists who have naturally found themselves careers working in such areas as child protection, DV services and women’s shelters, just to name a few. In these roles, the community has accepted them as champions not of oppressed, disadvantaged and down-trodden women, but almost always of all children!

But, just ask those battered, oppressed and down-trodden women how much their lives have been changed for the better because of the feminist movement, when to this day they cannot access income support, housing, health care, respite, police protection, legal representation and other goods and services after they are forced to flee the family home.

If we could conduct a survey of the profile of senior employees who enters this line of work, I suspect we would find that many who believe they had been abused by men would eventually find themselves working within this industry.

But should we be developing social policy on the basis of people’s pathology?