FAMILY VIOLENCE RISING

Violence is being caused by break-down in family caused by drunken husbands, women playing cards and drinking home brew, teenagers coming home drunk and young single mothers with no money for a baby.

A Lutheran pastor advises that many men and women have relationships outside their marriage at the work-place. This can be the cause of problems in the home. Women and men never let their spouse see their mobile phone.

Many children suffer violence at the hands of mothers who are too young to have a mature attitude to raising a child. They are angry at having to look after a baby while the small boy father is nowhere to be seen.

They smack children when they should be training them. A child may be smacked for disturbing the mother while she is playing cards. A small boy is smacked for faeces on the floor.

Children may learn to cry for hours and never be taken up by the mother who can be busy elsewhere.

But another mother may suffer as she has no money for food for children or medicine. The child has had malaria for 3 days and the mother has no money to go to the hospital.

Some married women may take their child when they meet their boy-friend. The child is left with his family who could not care less. The child may be sexually abused by some man in the family of strangers.

I will raise this matter when invited to the Men and Boys Forum sponsored by the Department for Community Development and Cardinal Sir John Ribat Archbishop of Port Moresby.

The paradigm shift to men and boys was explained in a recent editorial of The National and has great possibilities. But the powers-that-be must not forget the personal development curriculum in Papua New Guinea schools.

Child sexual abuse usually occurs in weak families with parents not caring where the child is and not concerned in going out to search.

In the media today there is a report of an 8 year old girl who is missing from her distraught family and a small girl raped by her uncle.

As a parent, I would be almost insane with worry at suffering a lost child may be having at the hands of a paedophile child trafficker or serial killer.

There was a report in the media of a young woman in Japan deserted by the father of the baby, gave birth and then threw the baby out of the window of a 15 storey flat.

AIDS Holistics has been much involved in school curriculum.