We girls usually know when we are in danger. The scary creep following me in his panel van one day when I was walking home from school, was obviously not our trusted Mr Whippy. I knew that if I didn’t scream for help and use all the force I could muster in self
defence, I would be raped by this fifteen year old boy pinning me down at a party. That uncle trying to feel my bra strap over my school uniform was clearly a ‘dirty old man’, as was my neighbour who was dancing much closer to me at my parents dinner party, than he should have been.
| Mr Whippy |
But two Australian females a week don’t realise they are in trouble until it's too late – when they are being murdered, often after being raped. And helpless dependent babies like my two month old cousin Robert, whose father, my uncle, thrashed around until he was paralysed and suffered irreversible brain damage, aren’t even old enough to know the peril they are in. I wasn’t told until years later that Robert didn’t actually fall off the nappy change table, the official story, because how could I have possibly comprehended such unimaginable violence committed by a father against his own defenceless little baby.
At 14 and 15, girls are experimental with adult things as we tiptoe into the kissing and touching world. And we hide everything from our parents. Sexual predators knew that too. They somehow knew this was the perfect age to assault and get away with it because we were a lot easier to overcome, and it was unlikely we would tell anyone out of fear, shame, and humiliation.
Thankfully I escaped what so many other girls didn’t in their childhood. I was neither sexually abused, nor raped. I do recall my father sitting me on his lap once in my first year at high school, shortly after Mum had given me a book called something like 'The Facts of Life', for my sex education. I read it under my blanket with
a torch, filled with the same excited anticipation that I flung open the hard covers of a suspenseful NancyDrew murder mystery with. As I sat on Dad’s lap he announced “One day, boys will want to touch you here”, putting his hand ever so fast but feeling like forever, on my school uniform jumper covering my pubescent breast. I froze, tilting my head sideways to gaze awkwardly at the few chips left in the newspaper they came wrapped up in with the fish and scallops we had guzzled up just earlier when he was still 'Daddy', wondering what the “eff’ he was doing. Even if it was for a split second, I haven't forgotten because I didn't even let boys my own age touch me there. I also have a vague recollection of a relative fleetingly putting his hand down the front of my swimsuit bottom once, during summer holidays on the northern beaches-thankfully not reaching anywhere. That was the extent of my exposure to what witnesses and statistics tell us, so many men did, and do, to young children and teenage girls (and boys).
| Vicki Barton |
| Children look for their peer, Vicki Barton |
What was so shocking was that the perpetrator, Alfred James Jessop, was only 14 when he killed Vicki Barton. A child still: younger than the boys I’ve had crushes on all year. I couldn’t have imagined any of our boys at school capable of an act so horrific. But then again, I am screaming for parental help at a party this month, as I fight off an alcohol and testosterone fuelled fifteen-year-old.
News of Vicki Barton’s disappearance spread through Australia fast. It had a similar effect on our national psyche as the disappearance of the Beaumont children did years earlier. Jane, Arnna and Grant, ages nine, seven and four respectively, disappeared without a trace from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide, on Australian Day 1966, when I was barely a toddler Grants age. The Beaumonts sent their cherished children off on a five-minute bus ride to the beach that hot humid day – on their own. They never came home. And they were never found. Reading this today, most parents – and anyone who has watched Bondi Rescue – would be mortified. As much because of stranger danger, as out of fear their young children might drown in the surf, or be hit by a bus or a car on the way. Not to mention being accused of parental negligence. But at this time in our history, Australia was considered safe; and children were both given, and assumed, greater responsibilities at much younger ages than children are today.
| The Beaumont Children |
If children’s fairy tales and child bride practices are anything to go by, the sexual and violent abuse of children by adults has been going on for a long, long time throughout the
| The Bogeyman is Coming, By Goya, 1797 |
ages. All those scary things out there that would stalk disobedient, insouciant children, kidnap them, visit them in their bedrooms or in their dreams at night, or stuff them in a burlap sack in December and lock them away in their house in Spain until they learnt to to 'be good', were just allegories for evil, evil men ( and the odd deranged woman). Some original versions of children's fairytales sound like they were written by utter sociopaths: either that or they actually reflected the ever present mortal danger children faced when they were written. Take Sleeping Beauty. Aurora is deep in her hundred year REM sleep when, "a king sees her, gets aroused, and rapes her while she sleeps. Nine months later she gives birth to twins while still asleep, and only wakes up when one of the children sucks her finger. Finally cognisant, she is now the mother of two children and a rape victim". The Pied Piper drowns all the children dancing so mesmerised behind him, and Hansel and Gretel don't get 'lost' in the forest; they are dumped by their poverty struck Mum, who can't afford to feed them. Until reliable birth control, kids were being pushed out from between the legs once a year for so many Women.
I’m not sure why parents felt safe the day before the Beaumont children disappeared, given how many other children also vanished around that time. Being hitherto the biggest crime investigation in Australian history, the chief suspect in the case of the Beaumont children, Bevan Spencer von Einem, was by all accounts doing Dr Josef Mengele proud. Von Einem was reported as having conducted surgical experiments on the Beaumont children, including sewing them together. One child died during his experiment so he killed
| What the Bogeyman looks like with his cape off: Von Einem |
the other two and buried them somewhere, it is said. Several murdered teens had also been found similarly surgically experimented on, but Von Einem was only charged with one teen murder he admitted to, not the Beaumont children. Another suspect, Arthur Stanley Brown, was charged with strangling a seven and a five year old child, while they were on their way to school. And yet another, James O’Neill, was jailed for life for the murder of a 9-year-old boy. Then there was Derek Percy who murdered a 12-year-old girl. Witnesses in the Beaumont case claimed there was a secret society of powerful Adelaide men who preyed on boys and young males, by drugging them, raping, and sometimes killing them.
Why on earth did Australians feel safe back then?
Vicki Barton’s killer was 18 when he was finally charged and sentenced to life in prison. The judge said Jessop was a "continuing threat", a "dangerous psychopath" and a "sexual deviant". How could a 14 year old be all these evils things?
Vicki Barton’s murder was as big as it got in our Mountains on the crime font.There was an ominous looking foster home in Woodford built by the Child Welfare Department in 1946, for unwanted, orphaned and neglected pre-school children who coudnt be fostered
out. By the time we were at school, Weroona became known as the Woodford Boys Home. Their young men, many Aboriginal, were sent to our school. We called them Gubbs. It closed in 1984. I shudder to think what went on there, given what we now know of the abuse, especially sexual, that was rampant at the time in so many institutions like Weroona. There was a budding drug culture in Katoomba because rehabilitation centres were located there and when interns were released, some would slip back into a life of petty crime to sustain their habit.
Even so, we felt safe. We left our homes unlocked by day and by night: same with our cars. We didn’t need to secure our bicycles because no-one would steal them. Neighbourhood Watch was our Mums who were usually at home busily keeping their eye on who was doing what - when, where, why, how and with whom. Parents were legally entitled to serve up corporal punishment on their children, as were schools. Domestic violence was rife in that the attitude of the times was what happened in the family stayed in the family. Women had few rights or economic opportunities that would enable them to escape abusive environments to save their children, and themselves. Despite Vicki Barton and the Beaumonts, and all those other children and teens who disappeared – often after they left home at the very young age teenagers left home in the 1970’s and earlier - we still went to school, sports training, to the shops, down the bush and out with our friends, by ourselves. As my diaries reveal, I was often walking home alone in the dark.
| Weroona |
Even so, we felt safe. We left our homes unlocked by day and by night: same with our cars. We didn’t need to secure our bicycles because no-one would steal them. Neighbourhood Watch was our Mums who were usually at home busily keeping their eye on who was doing what - when, where, why, how and with whom. Parents were legally entitled to serve up corporal punishment on their children, as were schools. Domestic violence was rife in that the attitude of the times was what happened in the family stayed in the family. Women had few rights or economic opportunities that would enable them to escape abusive environments to save their children, and themselves. Despite Vicki Barton and the Beaumonts, and all those other children and teens who disappeared – often after they left home at the very young age teenagers left home in the 1970’s and earlier - we still went to school, sports training, to the shops, down the bush and out with our friends, by ourselves. As my diaries reveal, I was often walking home alone in the dark.
My parents never told me who the Bogeyman really was. Instead, where ever they could, they put obstacles between him and me.
Statistically Australia is one of the places in the world (in a study of 65 countries) where females ( children, teens, women) are the most likely to be sexually assaulted, along with Sweden, Finland, England and Wales. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated in 2005, that 33% of all women have experienced physical violence. Ten per cent of women experienced sexual abuse before the age of fifteen, usually by their parents or step parents. Eighty one per cent of us ladies know our offender with three quarters of intimate partner homicides involve men killing us. Despite familiarity with our murderers and rapists, 70% of us Australian women still feel unsafe when walking after dark in case an opportunistic psycho happens along as he did to Jill Meagher just recently, and to too many other women before her, and since her. I’d have placed America the most dangerous place for women, with not just the occasional serial killer, but 35 to 50 serial killers active at anyone time, and one person shot by a firearms every 17 minutes (2010), and with almost three women a day killed by their intimate partners. But no, proportionally, it’s men residing in Australia behaving homicidally (and Sweden, Wales, England and Finland – all high consumers of alcohol by the way, as is Australia).
Rape is also becoming more common the world over says the UN, even though it isn’t recorded in national crime statistics in so many countries. No one can seem to agree on what constitute rape. Might that be because lawmakers and politicians are still mostly men tasked with the role of deciding on whether what they, their friends, family, relatives and others of their gender, do to women and children when they say 'no', is rape or not? And when you have countries like Turkey, where 33% of police officers agree that 'some women deserve rape' and a further 66% agree that 'physical appearance and behaviors of women tempt men to rape', who is going to report being raped?
| Stoning a woman to death-unpunished |
| Acid thrown in her face |
As for the sexual molestation of children in other parts of the world, a University of Barcelona study found 19.7% of women globally experienced sexual abuse prior to the age of 18 (and 7.9% of boys). Africa, takes first prize for molesting their children (34.4% of reported children molested) with South African men sexually violating a staggering 60.9% of boys and 43.7 % of girls. Europe has the lowest rate at 9.2 % and Asia, at 23.9% of children molested. Seven countries reported more than 20% of girls being sexually molested. Our beautiful democratic free thinking free spirited Australia is one of them, at a shameful (37.8%). Followed by Costa Rica (32.2%), Tanzania (31.0%), Israel (30.7%), Sweden (28.1%), the United States (25.3%) and Switzerland (24.2%).
What are our men doing to our children Australia? 37.8%!
In much of the world, men consider women so worthless that a multi billion dollar business revolves around enslaving them in trafficked sex trade. An estimated 800,000 women and children are conned, lured, drugged, and kidnapped across international borders with just as many consumed by men in their own countries. They are locked up, in suburban neighbourhoods in massage parlours, spas and strip clubs. They are made to perform in pornography, or put onto streets to service the local paedophiles or sex tourists and perverts. The same men doing this are usually involved arms and drug trafficking.
Much of this trafficking occurs in an overpopulated, financially desperate world throughout Asia where human life has such little value because there is so much of it. And in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where economies have collapsed and people are desperate. Australia, a wealthy developed nation, has become a prime market for Asian sex slaves who are smuggled into Australia by boyfriends, friends, neighbours, and even their own parents. Or they are lured with offers of real jobs, or promised marriage, educational opportunities and a better life, only to find themselves imprisoned, their passports confiscated, then told they are actually working illegally and are forced to repay their travel and living costs back with sex. According to the NGO Soroptimist, these women are, “often deprived of food and sleep, are unable to move about freely, and are physically tortured. In order to keep women captive, victims are told their families and their children will be harmed or murdered if they (the women) try to escape or tell anyone about their situation. Because victims rarely understand the culture and language of the country into which they have been trafficked, they experience another layer of psychological stress and frustration. Often, before servicing clients, women are forcibly raped by the traffickers themselves, in order to initiate the cycle of abuse and degradation. Some women are drugged in order to prevent them from escaping. Once “broken in,” sex trafficked victims can service up to 30 men a day, and are vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases, HIV infection and unwanted pregnancy.”
| The Secret Life of Child Brides. Pulitzer Centre |
Why Yemen Won't Ban Child Marriage and Rape
There is no one-profile pedophile. They are rich and poor, of all nationalities, often hiding under the cover of cultural norm or acceptance, often married with children whom they do or don’t abuse (some unbelievably claim they have sex with trafficked children to avoid abusing their own children), to your very own Daddy. Given what was going on around me at the time, in Australia and overseas, I feel grateful that all I was subjected to as a child was the occasional beating by Dad, the wooden spoon or hair pull by Mum, the momentary wrong move here and there, and some exploratory boys whom I managed to fend off.
I can’t begin to imagine the terror, shame, and confusion a young child experiences at that dreaded sound of squeaking floorboards, the door knob turning ever so slowly so no-one else hears, as the pedophile rapist enters the room. I can hear her voice screaming inside “Mummy, Mummy, HELP!” I wonder, where was Mummy? Why hasn’t she realised what’s going on? If she realises what’s going on, why isn’t she stopping it? And my heart pains for all those children of Australia who, for whatever reason, were abandoned to institutions, or sent to them for an education or care, or ended up alone with an abusive father or step father, who had no-one to scream to for help, when the Bogeyman entered the room.
Today, India and China - both countries that have been spreading their excess populations around the world - caused the largest increase in global population growth between 1990 and 2010, with the highest in India (350 million) and China (196 million). Is it a coincidence that a hungry growing China has doubled its military spending since 2008 and has 'invaded' and occupied the South China Sea - home to a third of the world’s shipping, and vast oil and gas fields, and destroying precious living coral reefs in the process - to build offensive military infrastructure?
Outside of China and India, The Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, South East Asia and Latin America have the highest rates of growth at more than 2% a year, while the extravagant and wasteful, water and agriculture poor, desert nations of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are growing at an irresponsible 315% and 271% respectively.
Humanity’s ancestral thinkers have pondered the thorny issue of human population growth since way back when. Despite much smaller populations in their times, they could see where we were headed. Tertullian, an early Christian author (ca. AD 160-220), wrote: "The strongest witness is the vast population of the earth to which we are a burden and she scarcely can provide for our needs; as our demands grow greater, our complaints against Nature's inadequacy are heard by all. The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to overcrowded nations, since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race."
The famous historian and humanist, Niccolo Machiavelli, didn’t accept that God would provide for the famined masses (because he didn’t believe in God). He wrote, "When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere... the world will purge itself in one or another of these three ways", (floods, plague and famine).
The World in April – May 1976
In April 1976, India’s Prime Minister Indira Ghandi– no relation to the great Mahatma Ghandi – was in the midst of a self proclaimed internal national emergency, and was ruling by decree, in what was one of the most controversial periods in Indian political history. Indira Gandhi was revered by the masses, especially the poor, the minorities, and the Dalits, or the “untouchables” – those Indians that fell outside the four principle castes in the Indian hierarchical system that stratifies the most desirable people, down to the least desirable, and rewards or deprives them, accordingly. Women loved Indira too because they fell disproportionately into all these categories. In an economic system graded by clearly defined classes and where a minority owned the majority the nation's wealth, Indira Ghandi came to power in 1971 vowing to 'get rid of poverty'.
Poverty isn’t easily eradicated if population growth outstrips a nation’s ability to provide basic infrastructure, food, water and shelter, for the ever increasing numbers being born. On April 16, 1976, Indira’s Ghandi’s government announced a mass reproductive sterilisation program aimed at lowering India's exponentially exploding population. Land, housing, and money or loans, were offered to men and (mostly) women who underwent either a vasectomy or tubal ligation (both are reversible). Millions more were also believed to have been sterilised by trickery.
Due to generalised outrage, especially internationally, sterilisation in India has been voluntary ever since. And so India’s population continued to grow reaching 1 billion in the year 2000. India now produces 1/6th of the world’s entire population. At the current rate of growth, India's one billion people will double to two billion by the year 2040 because only half the sexually active population uses contraception. In the rural areas where 50% of people live, children are bred as welfare due to the failure of government to provide it. The other 50% have difficulty accessing contraception.
The patriarchal economy that rules India is much to blame for the growth, like most other countries with population size issues that affect the whole world. Most women will continue having children until they have at least two boys. Men are more prized because of India’s supposedly outlawed but widely practiced dowry system where it is the woman’s family who has to pay the husband’s family in the money, jewelry and household items needed to set up the conjugal home. 'Raising girls is like watering someone else's lawn', is the Indian saying that enshrines how Indian women are viewed as an economic liability. The distribution of wealth, hence, the economic empowerment of women through education, is one pillar of fertility reduction, but at India’s current rate of education, this won’t be achieved until 2060, if at all. Meanwhile India adds up to 1,000,000 hungry mouths to the world every 20 days.
China has been as criticised for a one child policy it put in place in 1978 when its' population was also about to reach the near billion mark, causing enormous environment and social stresses. According to China’s government officials, the policy has helped prevent 400 million births.China now has unparalleled economic power to supports its global expansion. In November 2014 – just when the world needs less people, no more - China relaxed the one child policy.
China and India have not been alone in realising that high fertility rates undermine economic prosperity, quality of life and the ecosystems upon which sustainable economic development depends, and then acting responsibly within their economic and cultural means. After a growth rate of 3% a year between 1956 and 1986, Iran moved to a negative rate of -0.7% a year by 2007, promoting the benefits of smaller families and the use of contraception. Family planning courses were mandatory for both sexes before a marriage license was granted. In 2014, Iran reversed this policy. Permanent contraception and advertising of birth control are now outlawed. Iran aims to increase its population from 77 million to 200 million. To avoid becoming a nation of old people was the official justification, however Iranian reformists and women’s rights proponents feel male religious leaders are trying to lock women back up in the home (feeling threatened by the sixty percent of university students in Iran who are women?).
Singapore, recognising that it is an island with no-where to expand to except up, also reduced its population growth with a ‘Stop at Two’ program , promoting sterilisation and a two child family. They went even further with a short lived publicly opposed eugenic style Graduate Mothers' Scheme, which favored child birth for more well-educated mothers. In 1987 Singapore also reversed its' policy with a “Have Three or More” plan because fertility went below replacement levels. In Myanmar, a population control health care bill requires some parents to space each child three years apart. Uzbekistan, a now practicing Muslim country following the dissolution of the USSR, is also promoting the benefits of smaller families much to chagrin of Uzbeks who have long measured success by family size. It has also been reported to be pursuing a policy of forced sterilizations, hysterectomies and IUD insertions since the late 1990’s.
Outside of China and India, The Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, South East Asia and Latin America have the highest rates of growth at more than 2% a year, while the extravagant and wasteful, water and agriculture poor, desert nations of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar are growing at an irresponsible 315% and 271% respectively.
| Tertullian |
Plato and Aristotle would probably be mortified to see the number of humans that now coat the earth. Back in 322 -284 BC Aristotle thought a large increase in population would bring, "Certain poverty
on the citizenry, and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil”. Abortion and infanticide would be needed to curb human growth he wrote. Plato proposed that cities need to be large enough to defend themselves against invasion but small enough to be manageable, habitable and democratic. Procreation, immigration and exportation to colonies should be puppeteered to manage a perfect population balance.
China has been obsessing over its numbers for quite a while. Confucius (551-478 BC) warned, "Excessive growth may reduce output per worker, repress levels of living for the masses and engender strife." He also noted people die of famine when food supply falls short of demand. On the other hand, ancient Rome required larger numbers to expand its' empire. Using a carrot and stick approach they encouraged high reproduction with tax breaks and preferential employment. But confiscated 90% of the property left to a surviving spouse in the event of the husband’s death, if the couple failed to produce offspring.
Christian Europe in the middle ages simply told everyone to obey the biblical command and "Be ye fruitful and multiply". When people faced starvation, Martin Luther reassured, "God makes children. He is also going to feed them.”
| Machiavelli |
