Four days later, Bandit collapsed on the floor.
He was soon experiencing bloody diarrhea, and by the time Higginbotham and her mother got him to his veterinarian, his organs were shutting down. His liver showed that he had eaten something toxic. Certain that Bandit's inexplicable illness had already become too severe, the veterinarian suggested putting him down, and Higginbotham's mother and son agreed.
But she refused, and after nearly $4,000 in medical bills and three weeks of intensive nursing that included in-home I.V. care, Bandit recovered. Though the vet could not link the chicken jerky to the illness, Higginbotham said he thought it was likely the cause.
Bandit's puppyish spark has come back, but Higginbotham remains anxious, feeling an overwhelming sense of helplessness over what she might be feeding her dog.
At the opposite corner of the country, in Eastern Florida, Danielle Kinard-Friedman's story did not end as well. Two weeks ago, Millie, her 18-month-old yellow Labrador, began vomiting bile after weeks of growing progressively more lethargic.
When Millie wouldn't eat anything, Kinard-Friedman took her to a vet. Blood tests revealed that Millie was experiencing kidney failure, and so she spent a week in an emergency pet clinic receiving intensive treatment that eventually proved futile. She was put down this past Sunday.
It was Millie's vet who asked Kinard-Friedman if she had been feeding her dog chicken jerky treats. She had. In fact, she had just started buying the treats -- under a different brand-name from Bandit's -- two months prior.
The vet then asked a more alarming question: Was the chicken from China? She had no idea, but she checked the label as soon as she got home. It was. When Higginbotham checked her treats, she found the same thing. Their vets could not prove anything, but both suspected the treats had sickened the dogs.
Higginbotham and Kinard-Friedman have now joined thousands of pet owners speaking out on the Internet and asking the government to force a recall of chicken jerky dog treats made from Chinese chicken. Concerns over the issue first arose as early as 2007, but the movement has gained significant momentum in the past month, even gaining the support of Ohio's Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Dennis Kucinich after Ohio resident Candace Thaxton contacted them about two of her dogs who fell ill.
Congressmen and FDA sink their teeth in
On February 7, Brown
brought the issue to the Senate floor, saying he had urged the Food and Drug Administration to accelerate its investigation into these chicken jerky treats -- found under multiple brand names but all sourced from China -- that appeared to be sickening dogs across the country. Two weeks later, the senator held a press conference and issued a news release again urging the FDA to act swiftly.
Back on Nov. 18, 2011, the FDA cautioned consumers that chicken jerky dog treats from China may be associated with a rising number of dog illnesses. This followed earlier warnings of the same issue in September 2007 and December 2008. After a drop in 2009 and 2010, reports of dog illnesses have spiked once again. More pet owners are speaking out now than ever before.
The
November 2011 FDA notice warned dog owners who purchased chicken jerky to monitor their pets for decreased appetite, decreased activity, vomiting, diarrhea (including bloody , increased urination or increased water consumption. If any of those symptoms worsen or last more than 24 hours, owners should bring their dog to a vet, the notice said. Blood tests could indicate kidney failure, while urine tests might indicate Fanconi Syndrome, a disorder that results in nutrients normally absorbed into the bloodstream instead being released through urine.
What's more, an FDA spokesperson confirmed to Food Safety News that the agency has recently received more than 600 reports from dog owners who say their pets have fallen ill because of jerky products made from Chinese chicken.
Still, despite the increased scrutiny, the FDA has not revealed a contaminant in the jerky products. Without any clear cause of the illnesses, the agency can do little but continue to investigate the issue. In the meantime, the 15 companies with chicken jerky products implicated by consumers have issued no recalls, seeing no conclusive evidence that their products are harming animals.
Since the issue first arose in September 2007, the FDA has run numerous chemical and microbial tests on Chinese chicken jerky samples in search of a contaminant. Though the agency said it could not conclude anything from the test results, the details remained under wraps until March 1, when an FDA document describing tests dating back to 2007 was sent to Kucinich's office. According to a Kucinich aid, the congressman "took them to task" at a briefing in order to get the information.
The one-page document outlines 241 tests for potential contaminants and 130 tests with pending results, none of which conclusively link the jerky to contaminants at dangerous levels. The 2012 tests with results still pending, however, are searching for heavy metals.
The Kucinich aid and many pet owners said they hope those latest tests might finally link the treats to a toxic substance and resolve the mystery of their pets' problems. The FDA has stated repeatedly that it is actively investigating the issue.
According to the FDA, at least one Australian chicken jerky manufacturer has recently issued a recall of its products made from Chinese chicken, pulling the products as a precaution.
The agency may be mindful of March 2007, when hundreds of pet illnesses linked to melamine-contaminated Chinese ingredients prompted the recall of thousands of pet food products. The FDA received thousands of reports of dogs and cats dying from kidney failure, but confirmed very few cases.
Pet food industry says don't blame us
A month ago, the private Facebook group called "Animal Parents Against Pet Treats Made in China!" had roughly 100 members. Today, the number has exploded to more than 2,500.
One petition demanding the ban of jerky treats from China has acquired more than 3,000 signatures.
Susan Rhodes created
another petition on March 3. She has asked the FDA to recall the jerky treats after she found that her dog, Ginger, had suffered permanent kidney damage and was losing weight at an alarming rate. Rhodes said she had been feeding the treats to Ginger for the past two years. Days after creating the petition, she has racked up more than 300 signatures from dog owners reporting similar diagnoses.
Media coverage and word of mouth have brought a heightened level of attention to the manufacturers of these treats, some of whom report being hit with a large number of complaints. The amount of attention that seems to be snowballing, however, might lead some pet owners to incorrectly blame other health problems on the treats, said Kurt Gallagher, spokesperson for the Pet Food Institute, an industry public education and relations resource.
"Pet food companies want to make safe, nutritious products. It's their top priority," Gallagher told Food Safety News. "When everyone's talking about something like this, I think there's heightened awareness and sensitivity for pet owners looking for it."
Gallagher recommended pet owners take any sick pets to a vet to get a clinical opinion before diagnosing any issues themselves. If the vet considers pointing a finger at a certain food, the owners should contact the food manufacturer. Food companies should be tracking their complaints and looking for patterns and problems within their food supply, he said.
Pet owners have been quick to amass lists of jerky manufacturers sourcing their chicken from China. Rhodes' petition, for example, names 15 such companies.
A spokesperson for a dog treat company at the center of the furor reiterated that the FDA's testing has not found any contaminants and so his company has no reason to believe their product has sickened dogs. The company has a comprehensive food safety system at their Chinese facilities, he said, including quality control inspectors who monitor for safety. He added that his company appreciated hearing from concerned customers.
"Obviously, we take food safety very seriously," he said. "Millions of dogs enjoy our products without ever getting sick."
Multiple pet owners have told Food Safety News that the spokesperson's company has backed away from its original intention to offer customers small monetary settlements for harm their jerky might have caused pets. According to sources, once the complaints reached a certain volume, spokespeople for the company told customers that providing any settlements would be an admission of guilt.
Made in "America"?
Blogger Mollie Morrissette has been following the chicken jerky developments for more than a year on her website,
Poisoned Pets. She said that the issue has reached a sort of tipping point in the last month, with more and more pet owners speaking up about sick dogs.
"I get letters every day from broken-hearted pet parents -- people who had to put down their beloved family dog or five month-old puppy," she said. "They all fed their dogs chicken jerky."
One issue frustrating pet owners, Morrissette said, is that many of these dog treat packages boast that they are made in the U.S., though the fine print on the package often reveals that the chicken actually comes from China, where a cultural preference for dark meat makes for cheap white meat.
These "country of origin" claims are made possible by laws that say that once an ingredient is "substantially" altered in a given country -- the U.S., for example -- the resulting food can be considered a product of that country. These alterations can include cooking, mixing or otherwise reprocessing the ingredients in some way.
Just as oranges from Brazil can be turned into Canadian orange juice, chicken jerky from China can be reprocessed and repackaged in the U.S. to become a U.S. product. This can trick consumers into a false sense of security about the safety of their pet's food, Morrissette said.
Higginbotham said that the brand of jerky she bought for Bandit claimed to be "Proudly manufactured by an American company." Kinard-Friedman believed the same thing about the jerky she fed to Millie.
Morrissette said that pet owners feel helpless as they wait for some sort of justice on behalf of their pet, and she criticized the FDA for what she saw as a lack of urgency in investigating the illnesses.
"A lot of these pet parents are just wringing their hands, hoping the FDA will find some sort of answer," she said. "If this was [potentially contaminated] baby formula, we would have had the answer when it started five years ago. It would all get pulled off the shelves out of caution as soon as anyone suspected it might be contaminated." Owners say they won't back down
Candace Thaxton, the woman who spurred Senator Brown and Congressman Kucinich into action, has more than one dog motivating her to uncover that answer.
In November 2011, when her 10-year-old pug, Chansey, started urinating unusually often and refusing to eat, Thaxton assumed it was just a sign that the dog was simply getting old.
Chansey's health quickly deteriorated. At a vet appointment, Thaxton learned that the dog's kidneys had shut down and she would need intensive medical treatment to recover, if it was possible at all. Thinking Chansey had naturally progressed to the end of her life, the Thaxtons chose to have her put down.
Within weeks, the family had adopted a mixed-breed "pixie" puppy named Penny, who earned a pristine bill of health at her first vet appointment. Right around Christmas Day, Thaxton ran out of the treats that came with Penny when she was adopted, so she started feeding her Chansey's leftover treats: chicken jerky. Of course, Chansey had never eaten jerky until weeks before she grew sick. She had never even finished her first bag.
In the weeks that followed, Penny started urinating a lot more than normal. Then, after New Year's Day, Thaxton saw a news story online about the FDA's warning for chicken jerky made from China. She checked her bag of treats, which said it was from South Carolina.
Then she noticed the text over the barcode: "Made In China."
Thaxton stopped feeding her the treats, but Penny started vomiting. When the vet saw her, she showed all the same symptoms as Chansey.
"Her kidneys were worse than Chansey's," Thaxton said.
Penny went on 24-hour surveillance at an emergency pet clinic. She recovered a week later, but Thaxton was just getting started.
"Candace went to bat," Morrissette said. "She's the driving force behind all of this, all the publicity."
Thaxton filed two complaints with the treat manufacturer -- one for Chansey, one for Penny. It looked like she was going to at least get a settlement amount to cover part of her $3,000 vet bill, but the company eventually rescinded as more complaints began to pour in, Thaxton said.
Even before the settlement talks broke down, Thaxton's story had run on two local news channels. When the company refused to pay her, Thaxton promised to take the issue national within the week.
"By Friday night, Congressman Kucinich had written a letter to the FDA. By Monday, I had a press conference with Senator Brown," she said. "We've had two more conferences since then. I talked to Inside Edition. I told them I was going to be the one who pushed. I'm not stopping now."
Like Thaxton, other pet owners seem determined to keep the pressure on FDA to find answers and hold any guilty party responsible. For many, a sense of uncertainty, frustration, and even guilt, lingers.
"Pets are part of your family. When they die, you lose a family member," Higginbotham said. "I'm dealing with a lot of guilt over this. I'm the one who feeds my dog and is supposed to make sure he's safe and healthy. How do I do that if I can't even trust his food?"
-------
Photo captions, from top to bottom:
- Bandit, Maria Higginbotham's dog
- Ginger, Susan Rhodes' dog
- Sarge, Ray Parker's dog. Sarge, a seven year-old chow-corgi mix, fell ill soon after eating a single chicken jerky dog treat, Parker said. After nearly two weeks of clinical treatment, including intensive critical care, Sarge was put down.
- Chansey, Candace Thaxton's dog
NPR. "We're not talking about abandoning standards for safety and efficacy, we're talking about leveraging opportunities in science so we can do a more effective job as regulators and also improve the drug development process." The agency said eliminating or reducing the number of routine visits to the doctor could free up prescribers "to spend time with more seriously ill patients, reduce the burdens on the already over burned health care system and reduce health care costs." Drugmakers would have to request a switch for each drug individually, and the FDA would judge the safety of each proposal on a case-by-case basis. "We're not talking about very specific drugs right now, we're talking about the concept," Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of FDA's drug center, told NPR. --- On the Net:
reported earlier this week that it found the unsafe levels of the chemical 4-methylimidazole (4-MI -- used to make caramel color -- in cans of Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, and Whole Foods’ 365 Cola. Coca-Cola confirmed that changes were being made at its facilities to keep within the law but argued that the CSPI’s allegations on the dangers the ingredient posed on humans were false. “The company has made the decision to ask its caramel suppliers to make the necessary manufacturing process modification, to meet the specific Californian legislation,” A spokesperson for Coca-Cola told
Daily Mail Online. “Those modifications will not change our product.” California added 4-MI to its list of carcinogens, after studies showed high levels of the chemical led to tumors in lab animals. However, the studies were inconclusive on whether the chemical was dangerous to humans or not. “Caramel is a perfectly safe ingredient and this has been recognized by all European food safety authorities,” the spokesperson added. “The 4-MEI levels in our products pose no health or safety risks. Outside of California, no regulatory agency concerned with protecting the public’s health has stated that 4-MEI is a human carcinogen.” “The caramel color in all of our ingredients has been, is and always will be safe. That is a fact,” the spokesperson said. This had been the CSPI’s second go-around with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA over the dangers of 4-MI in soft drinks. It first petitioned the regulator last year, but the FDA has continually maintained that the claims were exaggerated. “It is important to understand that a consumer would have to consume well over a thousand cans of soda a day to reach the doses administered in the studies that have shown links to cancer in rodents,” said FDA spokesman, Doug Karas to the Daily Mail's Laura Pullman. CSPI maintains that the regulator is allowing soft drink companies to needlessly expose millions of Americans to a chemical that is known to cause cancer. “If companies can make brown food coloring that is carcinogen-free, the industry should use it,” CSPI’s executive director Michael Jacobson told
Reuters. The FDA said it will review the watchdog’s petition, but that the soft drinks in question were still safe. CSPI took cans from stores in the Washington DC area, where they found some had levels of 4-MI near 140 micrograms per 12-ounce can. California has a legal limit of 29 micrograms of 4-MI per 12 ounces, it noted. The FDA’s limit for 4-MI in caramel coloring is 250 parts per million (ppm . Once the caramel is mixed in with the soda it becomes diluted. According to calculations by Reuters, the highest levels of 4-MI found in the soft drinks were about 0.4 ppm, significantly within the safe zone. “This is nothing more than CSPI scare tactics,” the American Beverage Association (ABA told Reuters in a statement. “In fact, findings of regulatory agencies worldwide ... consider caramel coloring safe for use in foods and beverages.” ABA said its member companies will continue to caramel coloring in certain products but that adjustments were being made to meet California requirements. “Consumers will notice no difference in our products and have no reason at all for any health concerns,” the ABA said. Diana Garza-Ciarlante, a representative for Coca-Cola, said its suppliers would modify the manufacturing process used to reduce the levels of 4-MI, which is formed during the cooking process and as a result may be found in trace amounts in many foods. “While we believe that there is no public health risk that justifies any such change, we did ask our caramel suppliers to take this step so that our products would not be subject to the requirement of a scientifically unfounded warning,” she said in an email to
The Telegraph. --- On the Net:
In an
investigation update Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said nine cases have been reported in Michigan, five in Iowa, three each in Missouri and Ohio, two in Kansas and one each in Alabama, Arkansas and Wisconsin.
The 11 cases confirmed since the CDC's last report,
on February 24, were from Alabama, Michigan and Ohio.
Of the 24 ill people who provided information to outbreak investigators, 21 (87 percent said they ate sprouts at Jimmy John's restaurants during the week before they became ill.
The ill people range in age from 9 to 53 years old (median age is 26 and 88 percent are female. Six were so ill they had to be hospitalized. Onset of their illnesses ranged from Dec. 25, 2011 to Feb. 15, 2012.
"Results of the epidemiologic and traceback investigations indicate eating raw clover sprouts at Jimmy John's restaurants is the likely cause of this outbreak," the CDC has concluded.
There have been no recalls involved with this outbreak, and the CDC and Food and Drug Administration have not named the sprout supplier.
Raw sprouts, considered a high-risk food, have been associated with at least 40 foodborne illness outbreaks -- mostly E. coli and Salmonella infections -- since 1990. Raw sprouts served at Jimmy John's restaurant franchises have been linked to five outbreaks in four years.
Sprout seeds are typically the problem. They can become contaminated with pathogens from animal feces, or from dirty growing or processing equipment. The bacteria then multiply to dangerous levels as the seeds germinate under humid conditions. Homegrown sprouts are not necessarily any safer than commercially grown sprouts.
Jimmy John's recently indicated it would no longer serve raw sprouts with its sandwiches.
The CDC's advice about sprouts:
- Children, older adults, pregnant women, and persons with weakened immune systems should avoid eating raw sprouts of any kind (including alfalfa, clover, radish, and mung bean sprouts .
- Cook sprouts thoroughly to reduce the risk of illness. Cooking thoroughly kills the harmful bacteria.
- Request that raw sprouts not be added to your food. If you purchase a sandwich or salad at a restaurant or delicatessen, check to make sure that raw sprouts have not been added.
- Persons who think they might have become ill from eating potentially contaminated sprouts should consult their health care providers.
More information about illnesses associated with sprouts can be found at
Sprouts: What You Should Know.
CDC outbreak map
As far back as September 1998, the FDA issued a warning against sprouts urging:
children, pregnant women and the elderly should not eat alfalfa sprouts until growers find a way to reduce the risk of a potentially deadly bacteria that infects some sprouts, the Food and Drug Administration said this week. The FDA, which is investigating sprout industry practices, said children, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems should avoid eating sprouts. The agency's statement, issued Monday, repeated similar but little-noticed advice the U.S. Centers for Disease Control gave to doctors and researchers a year ago.
Bill Marler, publisher of Food Safety News, has
filed two lawsuits against Jimmy John's in Iowa.
report today alongside a campaign that addresses smoking among youth and young adults. For every tobacco-related death, two people under the age 26 pick up the practice. That's the startling news outlined in today's report. The report: "Preventing Tobacco Use Among Youth and Young Adults: We Can Make the Next Generation Tobacco-Free" is accompanied by a Surgeon General video released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office on Smoking and Health. Surgeon General Dr. Regina Benjamin identifies teens and young adults as a vulnerable group tempted by tobacco. "The addictive power of nicotine makes tobacco use much more than a passing phase for most teens. We now know smoking causes immediate physical damage, some of which is permanent," Dr. Benjamin said in a statement released by the CDC. Urgency to address teens and young adults was first identified in 1994, when the Surgeon General released its first report on youth and tobacco use. Since then, the knowledge about tobacco use among youth, its prevention and challenges to cessation have been expanded. These new findings and tactics are identified in the report. The numbers on smoking adoption among teens are staggering. Roughly 99 percent of all first use of tobacco occurs by the age of 26. However many smokers start while still in school. More than 600,000 middle school students and 3 million high school students smoke, according to the report. "We don't want our children to start something now that they won't be able to change later in life," Dr. Benjamin said. Health risks associated with smoking are much greater when started at an early age. The report identifies the long-term risks for young smokers including cardiovascular damage and reduction of lung functionality, which can occur early in life for long-term smokers. One half of smokers who started as early adults are likely to die about 13 years earlier than nonsmoking peers. Cigarette use is not under the umbrella of tobacco use among teens. The report finds that nearly one in five White adolescent males aged 12 to 17 uses smokeless tobacco and one in 10 young adults ages 18 to 25 smokes cigars. Further, many teens and young adults use more than one form of tobacco. In the report it states that over half of White and Hispanic male tobacco users report they use more than one tobacco product. Steps taken to reduce the rate of smoking adoption among teens and young adults include the passage of Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control ACT (TCA . Under this act, the Food and Drug Administration have the authority to regulate tobacco products to prevent purchase and use by minors. Actions include age identification verification at retailers, restrictions on the sale of single cigarettes and a ban on certain candy and fruit-flavored cigarettes. TCA activities also include support for state quit lines that provide counseling for smoking cessation. In addition, the government will also launch web and mobile-based interventions aimed to reach young people. While the Surgeon General's campaign ramps up its own marketing, it looks at tobacco marketing, and its practice of targeting young adults. "Targeted marketing encourages more young people to take up its deadly addiction every day. This administration is committed to doing everything we can to prevent our children from using tobacco," said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in a statement. A video posted by the CDC on YouTube shows teens stating when they began smoking, and what their future holds. "At 15, I was addicted," says one teen. "By 40, I'll have lung disease," says another teen. In the video Surgeon General Dr. Benjamin urges people, including adults, to visit the CDC's site on tobacco to learn how to make the next generation tobacco free. For most people, smoking is a lifelong addiction. As many as three out of four high school smokers continue to smoke into adulthood. To put it into different terms, as many as 88 percent of adult daily cigarette smokers report they started smoking by the age of 18, the report finds. The report and accompanying campaign hopes to curb those statistics. "We can and must continue to do more to accelerate the decline in youth tobacco use," said Dr. Howard Koh, assistant secretary for health at the HHS office, in a statement. "Until we end the tobacco epidemic, more young people will become addicted, more people will die, and more families will be devastated by the suffering and loss of loved ones." --- On the Net:
When Mal Brough announced the Northern Territory National Emergency Response into remote Aboriginal communities, I experienced an uncanny sliding doors moment.
I remembered working at a rural Victorian sexual assault service, and the claustrophobic sense of gated paedophilia I started to sense about that township. Perpetrators ranged from the ex-police chief to local bikies gang-raping two-year-olds.
Gathering dust in a back room were the victim files. That hideous archive of self-generating social dysfunction went from the floor to the roof and it was jammed with the lifelong suffering of mostly women and girls, but increasingly boys, inflicted by men - most of whom had histories of violent abuse themselves. The thing is they were close to all white offenders.
That room put a disproportionate part of the local community on skids. I rarely met survivors with life passions that informed their education or professions. Most of them were unemployed, lost and trying to manage a bunch of kids they'd had too young because they had no clue what else to do with their lives. These were brave, inspiring women. But so often they drank or got into drugs, they got into relationships with violent drongos, they struggled everyday with depression, anxiety, panic attacks, isolation, rage and despair.
To my mind that file room defined dystopia. Every day I worked at that juncture of disclosure, between victims wanting justice and support, and the men who actively set about destroying human potential. I wanted someone to send in the army. Not the nice army, with ukuleles and footballs and women soldiers that the community knew, as was said of NORFORCE, but battalions of scary SWAT teams who busted in on offenders in riot gear and carried them off to somewhere akin to Guantanamo Bay, leaving the rest of us, finally, in peace.
You simply could not get angrier than I was at men that bashed and raped women and children. I saw the devastation they wrought and I wanted them dead.
We've been hearing from shell-shocked health professionals working in remote Aboriginal communities, staring glassy-eyed into our living rooms, trying to convey to the rest of us what the inside of that file room looks like when it becomes the outer parameters of an entire community.
Eleven-year-old girls hanging themselves; mothers with head injuries; children needing genital surgery to remain continent. The extent of damage being perpetrated against Aboriginal women and children hasn't been known since the frontier.
Then as now, it beggars belief. Then as now, it's easier for non-Indigenous Australians to think of it, not as something we do, but as something particular to Aboriginal manhood. It's clear men's violence is worse in some remote communities; that is not that same as being exclusive to those communities.
Aboriginal women are wary of white feminists like me talking about Aboriginal men's violence. Some have pointed out white women were part of the cycle, enforcing patriarchal family structures as missionaries that undermined Aboriginal women's traditional autonomy and authority, or employing desperately lonely, vulnerable girls removed from their loving families as domestic indentures. In both scenarios white women were themselves violent to Aboriginal women and girls.
'Demonising' Aboriginal men as wholesale rapists and wife-bashers only alienates Aboriginal communities further. Louis Nowra and others have attempted to characterise Aboriginal men's violence as intrinsic to traditional warrior identity.
I have surveyed large swathes of the colonial archive and extracted over 50,000 words of settler imaginings of Aboriginal women's gender status. There is no question the frontier was one of the most dangerous places for women in the history of human conflict, but the tropes of bride capture, of eating tossed scraps, of routine camp violence, were confected by a handful of settlers and recirculated through the press as credible ethnological data. That's until Bronislaw Malinowski undertook a thorough survey of the available literature in 1913 and found them to be the repetitions of the erroneous views of early settlers.
I have traced the bride capture trope to David Collins (Judge Advocate and Secretary of the Colony , and later to John McClennan's 1865 Primitive Marriage, who sourced his rather florid account from an anonymous newspaper article in the popular London magazine Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature Science and the Arts
.
Why did settlers cling to these speculative tales? Because they wanted to believe that colonialism was an act of gallantry. In the process of disavowing their own violence against Aboriginal women, Aboriginal men's violence became a staple fetish.
Violence isn't a problem of Aboriginality, but of offender masculinity which some Aboriginal men became assimilated to over generations of impoverishment, structural disadvantage, alcohol and more recently violent porn.
With billions of dollars invested in services still missing from remote communities, non-Indigenous communities manage to contain the fallout of male violence, keep it under wraps, keep it nice. In remote communities it has climaxed to this level of cultural visibility because the services to contain the fall out aren't there. This isn't to deny the situation is in crisis in those communities. It is to say men's violence has created a salt and pepper crisis throughout the wider community and we should stop using violence by Aboriginal men as a distraction from the rest.
Offenders need to be singled out as in fact anomalous to the majority of men in their respective communities. They need to be held to account and removed from the families and communities they damage. Not left in their homes and communities reoffending while protracted legal cases telescope into plea bargaining and appeals. And not removed to prisons, but to something like rehabilitation/health /training and education centres. Every city and regional centre in this country needs an offender centre.
It is from here that men who have been charged need to pursue their legal defence, so their wives and children can stay in their homes and get on with their lives in safety. It is here that offending men need to undergo best practice psychiatric assessment, treatment and particularly rehabilitation from alcohol and other addictions. It is from here they need to heal from both the devastation they have wrought in their own lives and very likely their own histories of learnt abuse. It is from here offenders need to redefine their manhood with the best intervention programs into hyper-macho identity money can buy. It is from here they need to reconnect to their passions and talents and work out how to generate income from them. It is from here offenders need to learn how to consume, as do men who aren't self-destructive, food, grog and porn.
Where cultural factors inform their offending, like intergenerational unemployment and racism, they need to be sensitively addressed, such as by implementing every recommendation of the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Report. It is critical that the most brilliant, dedicated and inspiring health professionals and educators in the country staff these offender ventures. I cannot think of more important work any of us could do.
And if it takes years, even the rest of their adult lives before they pose no risk to our communities so be it. Let's be clear. Offenders are our foe. For too long their legal rights have been prioritised over that of women and children's right to safety. What was needed from Mal Brough, what was always needed, then and now, right around the country, is a national emergency response into offender masculinity.
Liz Conor is an academic at the National Centre for Australian Studies. She will present this talk tonight on a panel for International Women's Day convened by Melbourne Free University. View her full profile
here.
No comments:
Post a Comment