Keep an eye out for the upcoming book Children of the State by Peter van de Voorde, to be published by A Sense of Place Publishing.

The following press release has gone out on AAP Media Net following the release of shocking footage of children being abused in a Northern Territory detention centres known as Don Dale.

The images propelled the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to launch a Royal Commission, an action applauded by some and decried by others. Royal Commissions are a shamelessly over-used tactic by Australian politicians of which the public have become rightly skeptical.

They are often little more than a smokescreen and more often than not governments ignore, fail to implement or cherry pick the resulting recommendations.

The multiple abuses in Australia’s deeply flawed child protection systems need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. The upcoming book Children of the State by activist and author Peter van de Voorde takes a sustained look at the underlying causes, both systemic and ideological, which have led to the current impasse.

http://medianet.com.au/releases/release-details?id=862580

MEDIA ALERT

The author of upcoming book ‘Children of the State’ has condemned the response of Australian authorities to the abuse of children in juvenile detention centres in the Northern territory as ‘totally inadequate’.

Peter van de Voorde, who is associated with the investigative group ‘Family Briefing.com’ said, “Another Royal Commission will do nothing but line the pockets of lawyers to tell us what we already know”.

“The horrific abuse of teenagers in detention centres as exposed on the ABC 4 Corners program has been known to authorities for many years.”

“That Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion did not initially look at the footage despite having been alerted to its impending broadcast and claimed to not have previously seen evidence sufficient to peak his interest, simply defies belief.”

“Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull can be as ‘shocked and appalled’ as he likes, but he sits atop a system of chronic child protection mismanagement to which successive governments have been either willfully blind or blissfully ignorant for many decades.”

Family Briefing is a small collection of concerned citizens and researchers who have spent many years collecting information and analyzing data on global family and child protection systems in order to understand the underlying causes which repeatedly lead us to the same horrendous state supported child abuse outcomes.

‘Children of the State’ to be published by ‘A Sense of Place Publishing’ in October, is the culmination of those years of work.

‘Every 48 hours, an additional 820 Australians will lose the protection of their family, while 9 will end their life and hundreds more will commence their journey into drug and alcohol addiction or succumb to an induced mental health disorder, due to the utter despair at being dis-empowered and dispossessed of their families by the state’.

“As this week’s tragic revelations from the Don Dale youth detention centre in the Northern Territory have so dramatically shown, Australia has once again failed to meet its international duty of care obligations to protect the children in its care.” Children of the State Audio Podcast – https://db.tt/M0ViNqzs

Family Briefing.com

Contact details: Author: Peter van de Voorde 04 2864 8691
Email: [email protected]

Publisher: John Stapleton at A Sense of Place Publishing 02 4786 0329 Email: [email protected]