challenging institutional disbelief around domestic & sexual violence and abuse
Today is Father’s Day. Whilst the media, and all high street shops, celebrate men, we’d like to raise the issue of financial abuse of children. We want to talk about all the children in the UK currently living in poverty because their fathers, and it is overwhelmingly men, refuse to pay child maintenance. A report […]
Paul Thomas has been convicted of manslaughter in the death of his 11 month old son Oliver Sargent who died in 2012. Thomas’s wife Ashlea was convicted of “causing or allowing the death of her child” and given a two year suspended sentence. Oliver died in hospital after suffering a severe skull fracture. He also had […]
Child Sexual Exploitation is in the news again – the media are over-run with commentators who are wringing their hands, apologising, claiming that they’re not sure how they didn’t know, telling us that work is in progress to ‘remove this vile scourge’ from our communities. But what are we actually doing? We’ve looked over a […]
The cover of a recent edition of The Mirror: Girl, 13, told ‘your rape complaint will spoil the police doctor’s Sunday lunch’ The teenager was allegedly attacked in scandal-hit Rotherham and told her mother when she was drunk Firstly, Rotherham is not “scandal-hit”. This implies the city of Rotherham has been out committing petty theft […]
It is with a heavy heart that I read the recently published article The Rotherham inquiry- An alternative view Honestly, after seeing the responses the article received from readers on social media I was expecting it to be an unpleasant article, what I wasn’t expecting was it to read like an all out victim blaming […]
(Cross-posted with permission from Opinionated Planet) We wake up this morning to yet another headline about child sexual exploitation. I’m not actually sure how many more reports I can read without exploding. Let me say this loud and clear to all news agencies, academics, researchers, reporters, journalists, broadcasters and politicians; THIS IS NOT NEWS. The […]
I have only read a small amount regarding Judie Finnigans comments but enough to understand that people are under the illusion that some rape is less damaging than other rapes. What they seem to forget when they are making these comments on how it was a non violent form of rape rape victims read and […]
This is a major headline today with a number of media outlets covering the story. We are not surprised to learn that an employee of the children’s charity Barnardos wrote a letter in 1993 to survivor of child sexual exploitation, abuse and rape hold them responsible for the abuse. Victim blaming culture is endemic – […]
Ritual abuse does exist and we are very pleased to see that the Metropolitan Police are taken the safety of children seriously. However, we are very concerned by the number of mentions on our twitter feed suggesting that this article in the BBC on the Met’s investigations were a joke or that it was an […]
On Wednesday afternoon, when I got back from work I sat at my PC and watched the Alan Titchmarsh Show. I can’t say it’s something I’m proud of, but I was keen to see it as I knew Laura Bates of Everyday sexism was on the programme discussing whether or not sexism still exists. I […]