Aboriginal Families: Sincerely sorry!

“Sorry seems to be the hardest word” sang Elton John in one of his early hits. But the new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, found it easy enough. As the first official parliamentary act of his government last week, he apologised to his Aboriginal countrymen in an eloquent and passionate speech. “For the indignity and degradation... inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.” 

Many of Australia’s 500,000 Aborigines live in Fourth World conditions in a First World country. Life expectancy for them is 17 years lower than for the rest of Australia. The statistics for health, housing, literacy, infant mortality and employment are appalling. Last year the Federal Government spent A$3.8 billion on Aboriginal affairs and had precious little to show for it. No big deal. Neither had its predecessors.

Yet the Prime Minister was not apologising for any of this. Nor was he apologising for the theft of land, the murders, the discrimination, the neglect of the past 200-odd years since European settlement. Instead, he was apologising for wrecking Aboriginal families. An estimated 50,000 of their children were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970 – the so-called “Stolen Generation”. Rudd called it “one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history”.

A thick 1997 report, Bringing Them Home, brought these stories to the attention of white Australians. As Rudd said, “There is something terribly primal about these firsthand accounts. The pain is searing; it screams from the pages. The hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity.” 

PARENTS ANGRY OVER PEER SEX-ED INSTRUCTION

The battle over sex education in the United States continues, with some parents of students at a New Jersey high school challenging a programme that uses peer instructors. School district administrators say that New Jersey law requires them to teach a comprehensive class that addresses abstinence, safe sex, dating violence, HIV-AIDS, and how alcohol and drugs affect sexual decision-making. But one of the objectors says her 14-year-old son was uncomfortable with a session in which a student taught the class how to put on a condom, using a banana. "Do you want a 16-year-old boy teaching your 14-year-old daughter" how to do this? asked Lisa Westerman.

When she asked to look at the programme, Clearview Regional High School gave this mother the 900-page Teen PEP (Prevention Education Program) instructors' manual, but said that it taught only parts of the curriculum. Families considering whether to let their children attend don't know what's in and what's out, she said.

Last year there 244 disputes over sex education across the country, up from 204 in 2006, according to the lobby group the Sex Information and Education Council of the US. Programmes limited to teaching abstinence until marriage and not promoting contraception have been popular in many states, which receive federal funding for them. A further $141 million dollars is available for this year, but some states are forfeiting the money and reverting to so-called comprehensive sex-ed on the pretext that abstinence courses have been proved ineffective.

'Social' websites implicated in another SUICIDE!

What appears to be a suicide cult has claimed another victim in the Welsh town of Bridgend. (See the blog of January 28) Angie Fuller, 18, (picture) was found by her boyfriend, Joel Williams aged 21, hanged at the house they shared.  The pair were engaged to be married. Miss Fuller appears to be the 14th young person to have killed themselves in the past year in Britain. Her death follows that of Natasha Randall last month and six young men from the same area. The deaths have fueled concerns about young people's use of social networking sites -- many of the victims had sites on Bebo. Miss Fuller, who worked in a fashion clothing shop, used the websites. On her Facebook profile page she says: "I don't like myself, but hey who does? I'm an angry drunk."

A psychologist writing in the London Telegraph blames "social networking" online for "displacing key periods of emotional and social development with time in front of a screen" and producing social disengagement, loneliness and depression amongst young people. Dr Aric Sigman notes that the trend (in the UK at least) is "part of a growing privacy accentuated by record levels of divorce, the longest parental working hours in Europe, and children having fewer siblings than ever before." He also criticizes "a generation of parents who are determined not to appear uncool. And besides, they're too busy sharing similar tastes in music with their children, who they treat as their best 'mate

Father's essential role in upbringing confirmed

Fathers are often missing from family life and this puts their children at a considerable disadvantage, as research over the last 20 years shows. A Swedish team reviewed 24 published studies and found that active, involved fathers, or "father figures", protect boys from developing behavioural problems and girls from psychological problems.

Regular, positive contact also reduced criminal behaviour among children in low-income families and enhanced their intellectual development. Children who actually lived with both a mother and father figure had fewer behavioural problems than those who lived with just their mother. Long-term, women had better relationships with partners and a greater sense of well-being at age 33 if they had a good relationship with their father at 16.

The researchers say they are not able to conclude exactly what kind of engagement the father figure needs to produce the positive effects. Nor are they sure if outcomes differ depending on whether the child lives with their biological father or with another father figure. They conclude that governments and employers need to come up with "father-friendly policies" that support the increased involvement of fathers in child-rearing

Where did universities come from?

When a group of students and professors refused to hear the pope speak at their Roman university they were denying their own tradition.

The conventional view nowadays regarding faith and reason is that there is simply no relationship between the two. It is inconceivable. The notion of a "rational" or "reasonable" faith is viewed as an oxymoron. Consequently, any ethical judgment associated with a religious faith is deemed non-rational and irrelevant to those not sharing that faith.

 

In a lecture intended for delivery at La Sapienza University in Rome earlier last month, Pope Benedict XVI undertook to address this issue and to show that faith cannot exist without reason and that reason itself cannot flourish without the faith. His whole argument is based on the concept of the Western university, whose emergence in the Middle Ages was not some sheer historical fluke, but an outgrowth of the intellectual requirements of the Christian faith itself -- a point which suggests why universities did not develop in Asia, Africa or the Middle-East.

Perhaps we need to reflect on T.S. Eliot's observation about the relationship between Western culture and the Christian faith:

If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.

Police fear internet cult inspires teen suicides

Detectives fear a bizarre suicide craze is sweeping through teenagers in a small town fueled by chat on social networking sites after seven friends took their own lives. As well as the deaths during the last 12 months, several more have attempted suicide and police fear they are being driven by a desire to achieve prestige by having a memorial website set up in their name. Many of the victims had their own web pages on the social networking site Bebo, which they spent hours on each day. After their deaths a special site is set up where friends can leave messages, photographs and videos. Police have visited the parents of every member of a 20-strong group who they are most worried about warning them to keep a close eye on their children.

The latest victim is Natasha Randall, 17, who was found hanged at her family home last Thursday. Within 24 hours two of her friends had tried to kill themselves. One 15-year-old girl was on a life support machine yesterday while the other, also 15, was recovering after slitting her wrists. Police, who are investigating a possible suicide chain, fear the teenagers think it is "cool" to have an internet memorial site and are killing themselves to achieve kudos among their peer group. Within hours of Miss Randall's death, a tribute site called "R.I.P. Tasha" had sprung up with photos, videos and messages. It has 345 members been viewed more than 2,100 times. Her death follows those of Gareth Morgan, 27, Liam Clarke, 20, Thomas Davies, 20, David Dilling, 19, Dale Crole, 18, and Zachary Barnes, 17.

They all seem to be copying each other by wanting to die. I think the problem is they do not know how to speak like adults about serious issues like this. They can speak to each other on the computer but do not know how to express their emotions in other ways."He did go on Bebo and apparently he had a page on there. He must have discussed his other friends dying on there because it had upset him."Like most parents, I have no idea how to get on these sites or what other kids are talking about. But I would warn other parents to beware and to keep a close eye on their children. A police source said: Parents should keep a close watch on what their children are doing on the internet and what they are talking about."It's often easier for them to disclose their real feelings on a computer rather than face to face with an adult or even their friends, and social networking sites are the ideal way to do that." Madeleine Moon, Bridgend MP, has met with senior police officers to discuss Bridgend's alarmingly high suicide rate. The Bridgend and Glamorgan Valleys Coroner, Phillip Walters, has also raised his concerns and a special "task force" has been set up in the town to investigate the problem.

All screens, all the time for British kids

A generation of multi-tasking British children are living their daily lives -- including eating and falling asleep -- to the accompaniment of television, according to a survey of youngsters' media habits. The flickering of the screen accompanies most of them before they go to school, when they return home, as they consume their evening meal and then -- for 63 per cent, far more than read a book each day -- in bed at night. The study of five- to 16-year-olds shows that four out of five children now have a TV set in their bedroom.

So ubiquitous has television become that many children now combine it with other activities, including social networking online, flicking their eyes from laptop to TV screen and back again. Even if they are focusing on the television, young people are now reluctant to commit to one programme, with boys in particular often flipping between channels to keep up with two simultaneous shows at once.

"They flick from one to another and cannot conceive that they should have to make a decision. They are puzzled that you should put them in a situation of having to make one or another choice," said a researcher.

The report, based on interviews with 1147 children in 60 schools around Britain, found TV viewing now averages 2.6 hours a day across the age group, though one in 10 say they watch more than four hours daily. Some 85 per cent access the internet and 72 per cent have visited a social networking site. Communication has overtaken fun (eg online games)as the main reason to use the internet and study is far behind.