A 'best buy for a Christmas gift' in New Zealand

It is a sensitive and painful time for fathers and mothers who have no access to their children when Christmas comes around. But to add to the pain that men have suffered and are suffering from the cruelty of our Family Court and Radical Feminists, the NZ Herald had advertised from a Major Shopping Complex the '5 best
buys for Christmas.'

One was a knife set that is a male figure with knives placed into his head, chest, stomach and 2 in his knees. Its official name is the 'Voodoo Knifeblock,' but it's being called the 'All Men Are Bastards Knifeblock'. (When you go into this page, you will find 4 links under the picture of Helen Clark. To see a 2 minute video, click the link that reads, 'Christmas gift.') Susan Woods, one of our main TV newsreaders, brought it to the public's attention. She said she was 'deeply disturbed' over it. She even showed it to our 'Radical Feminist and Prime Minister, Helen Clark, who said it was, 'Horrific.' The following night Susan Woods brought this knife set back on her program again, to share replies from the public. And this time, she showed a lot more concern as she seems to have realized the public are outraged.

Here are two stories running currently in the New Zealand papers about gender violence, a subject that generates a lot of press but not all of it well-balanced. It is my opinion that we should consider both genders are victims and perpertrators, and that children receive abuse from both men and women.

In answer to the 'white ribbon' campaign, men are now asking for males to wear a black arm band on November 25th 2006 in respect for all the fathers that have committed suicide because of the unjust treatment they have received in domestic violence and through the Family Courts. Their pain will never be accepted while The Labour Party stays in power.

I can't wait for the day when this is not about money (funding) but about the people. I will wear neither white nor black...but I will tell each person I see giving or selling white ribbons that I disprove of the way NZ is handling men and women regarding domestic violence.

--Jane M. Smith (NZ)

http://subs.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10410452

November 25th 2006 is 'White Ribbon Day' in New Zealand

Two top health researchers have accused the Families Commission of "ideologically driven" bias in presenting domestic violence as a problem of men battering women.

"In a high proportion of these couples, we are seeing mutual fighting. It's brawling," said Professor Fergusson.

In contrast, the commission is backing White Ribbon Day on November 25, which asks men to wear a white ribbon to show that they do not condone "men's violence towards women".

The commission, chaired by former Race Relations Conciliator Rajen Prasad, was set up by the Labour Government in a deal with Peter Dunne's United Future party after the 2002 election. It has a budget of $8.2 million a year. The private spat between the professors and the commission began after last year's White Ribbon Day, when commission chief executive Paul Curry said: "Almost all family violence is carried out by men on women and children."

Commission principal policy analyst Radha Balakrishnan said Mr Curry now accepted that he had made a mistake but stood by the claim that the worst domestic violence was perpetrated by men. "We are talking about the most serious and lethal cases where perpetrators are predominantly men and the sufferers are predominantly women and children," she said.

"The gendered nature of intimate partner violence is really important."

The country's longest-running study of a birth cohort, covering 1037 people born in Dunedin in the year ending March 1973, found that 37 per cent of women and 22 per cent of men who had partners by the age of 21 had perpetrated acts of violence against their partners ranging from "pushing, grabbing or shoving" (29 per cent of women, 21 per cent of men) up to "beating up" (1 per cent of both men and women).

At age 21, 360 of the young people in the sample agreed to bring their partners to be interviewed too, providing what was said in 2001 to be the world's "largest study of abuse in a representative sample of couples to date".

The results showed that both partners abused each other in most couples where any abuse occurred.--NZ Herald

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/author/story.cfm?a_id=135&ObjectID=10410171

No refuge for battered male victims

The only men's refuge in the country has closed because of illness but its founders believe there is still a need for it.

The Separated Fathers Support Trust ran the four-bedroom refuge, officially a men's "retreat house", in Manurewa from December 2002 until May, when the manager, Warren Heap, became paralysed with the rare nerve disorder Guillain-Barre Syndrome. He formed the trust in 1998 and opened a support house in Glen Eden. However, he could get neither state funding nor permission to put up posters at the Family Court. That support house closed 16 months later.

But four years later, in Manurewa, he found the mood had changed. He still couldn't get state funding but he kept the new house running with money from lottery grants, Sky City, ASB Trust, Lion Foundation, Pub Charity and the like. This time he was allowed to distribute flyers.

He accepted men who needed refuge from abuse or support after a separation. They had to be fathers, and he says the main need the house filled was as a safe place where judges were willing to allow men to have access to their children. "Because of their low-income bracket - about 85 per cent of them were beneficiaries - they had a lack of resources and got into debt.

"We did get some men that came from caravan parks. They needed it because a caravan park was not a suitable place to take children at weekends."

Heap says the refuge was always full, and for a while had a caravan as well. In all, 51 men and 71 of their children stayed in the house for up to three months. Some of the men were escaping physical abuse, in a way comparable to women's refuges. One had knife wounds "all up his arms", inflicted by a partner who was a drug addict. "There were quite a few that were knifed," Heap says. "It's my belief that a lot of women, because physically they are not as strong as men, tend to use weapons." But in most cases there was blame on both sides, he says. "I would say they were equally abusing each other."--NZHerald