Heavy political comment, but not very funny.
(Author's note: I apologise for the lack of jokes in this piece, but the story in question makes me far too angry to think of anything funny. I'm working on something for next week that is hopefully more tongue-in-cheek.)
Last year a story did the rounds about a nine-year-old girl in an Aboriginal community up in Queensland that was raped by nine guys at once. There was a brief public outcry over it; you may have seen the news stories. Not terribly much heard about it on the news feeds since, and I'm saddened, but unsurprised. It seems sometimes to me that this sort of thing is, to use a term I just coined and don't particularly like, tragedy porn. It's like we have some kind of collective addiction to these horrible stories but once the juicy bit is revealed we lose interest.
That's particularly bad when there's more to the story. Case in point with this young girl; I did a little reading, turning to my favourite informant - the ABC. In a lengthy article I found off the main page, there was an interview with the child protection officer assigned to the community in question, who resigned shortly after this assault occurred. He had some rather damning things to say, largely about the self-serving bureaucracy he had to work within.
I won't waste your time by paraphrasing this article, although that is my usual lazy-man style of editorialising. Instead I'll just highlight a couple of key points.
1) That his superior in the department told him to tell the community that he was an Aboriginal, although he clearly isn't.
2) He never actually had any training before being sent out into the field.
3) That this girl, who unsurprisingly had a host of behavioural disorders associated with being abused from an early age, had contracted gonorrhea at age six. SIX.
4) When the local police gave him a written report detailing their concerns about the neglect and abuse of a young boy, he gave it to his superior who tore it up.
5) At another community, this community worker managed to lower the juvenile repeat offender rate to zero, for which he was reprimanded, because that would impact on the departments funding.
The director-general of the Queensland Department for Child Safety has said that this man's allegations are very serious and that he should take them to the Criminal Justice commission. I mention this partly so we can all have a big righteous huff about her dismissing his claims, but also just to make the point that the ABC are still referring to these as allegations. I don't know if what Mr. Green says is true, and to be honest I still have enough faith in humanity to find it hard to believe - but not impossible.
So we have institutionalised abuse within the community and a state government department more interested in securing its own funding than actually caring for the people it's meant to look after. And now that we've dropped our forks in spastic fury and roared at the bad man on the television, it's time for the sports update.
Last year a story did the rounds about a nine-year-old girl in an Aboriginal community up in Queensland that was raped by nine guys at once. There was a brief public outcry over it; you may have seen the news stories. Not terribly much heard about it on the news feeds since, and I'm saddened, but unsurprised. It seems sometimes to me that this sort of thing is, to use a term I just coined and don't particularly like, tragedy porn. It's like we have some kind of collective addiction to these horrible stories but once the juicy bit is revealed we lose interest.
That's particularly bad when there's more to the story. Case in point with this young girl; I did a little reading, turning to my favourite informant - the ABC. In a lengthy article I found off the main page, there was an interview with the child protection officer assigned to the community in question, who resigned shortly after this assault occurred. He had some rather damning things to say, largely about the self-serving bureaucracy he had to work within.
I won't waste your time by paraphrasing this article, although that is my usual lazy-man style of editorialising. Instead I'll just highlight a couple of key points.
1) That his superior in the department told him to tell the community that he was an Aboriginal, although he clearly isn't.
2) He never actually had any training before being sent out into the field.
3) That this girl, who unsurprisingly had a host of behavioural disorders associated with being abused from an early age, had contracted gonorrhea at age six. SIX.
4) When the local police gave him a written report detailing their concerns about the neglect and abuse of a young boy, he gave it to his superior who tore it up.
5) At another community, this community worker managed to lower the juvenile repeat offender rate to zero, for which he was reprimanded, because that would impact on the departments funding.
The director-general of the Queensland Department for Child Safety has said that this man's allegations are very serious and that he should take them to the Criminal Justice commission. I mention this partly so we can all have a big righteous huff about her dismissing his claims, but also just to make the point that the ABC are still referring to these as allegations. I don't know if what Mr. Green says is true, and to be honest I still have enough faith in humanity to find it hard to believe - but not impossible.
So we have institutionalised abuse within the community and a state government department more interested in securing its own funding than actually caring for the people it's meant to look after. And now that we've dropped our forks in spastic fury and roared at the bad man on the television, it's time for the sports update.