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It is that time of the year when NAPCAN (National Association for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect),  an organisation founded in 1987 to advocate for the protection of children, is running its annual high profile campaign to raise funds and awareness in its fight against child abuse and neglect in Australia.

A noble cause indeed, and in support of this campaign Fathers4Equality contacted NAPCAN  last year and volunteered our assistance during their National Child Protection Week.

Fathers4Equality offered to distribute a child abuse awareness survey to all our members, as well as assist with fund raising, amongst other worthwhile measures in support of this worthy cause.

After an initial positive response from NAPCAN, all correspondence came to an end.

We followed up our offer via numerous emails and a number of phone messages left with NAPCAN staff, although to our frustration no one returned our calls or emails.

We finally managed to speak to someone on the phone after persisting for several weeks, only to be told that NAPCAN did not want to associate itself with single fathers’ groups , and that we would not be hearing from them again.

Pretty heavy handed stuff, and quite remarkable when you consider that this single fathers’ group represents fathers who want to provide the best “care” for their children, in co-operation with the child’s mother.

In any case, we did not hear from NAPCAN again, but for an email that inconspicuously entered my inbox on the 25th August, 2011, heralding the 2011 National Child Protection campaign from NAPCAN.

Although NAPCAN’s behaviour was indefensible and bizarrely out of step with their charter to boldly protect the welfare of children, I can’t say that it really shocked me, given the enormous stigma that all separated fathers have to endure with regard to child care and child abuse in this country.

In fact, I challenge any person not convinced of this statement to walk in the shoes of a separated father going through a child custody dispute in this country.

Every step of the dispute, you will feel the presumptions of an over-zealous and obsessed industry out to protect children and women from the stereotype of the sinister male.

This stereotype is a potent myth of such legendary and unchallenged proportions that most people believe it to some degree, without even realising it.

Unfortunately, life is much more complex than this, and surprisingly the facts on child abuse show quite a different story. In fact, up to 80% of all familial child abuse occur in single mother households, a sad irony given that the media have demonized the safest parenting arrangement, being “shared parenting”, and that the Gillard government will effectively put an end to all shared parenting arrangements,. despite its almost zero rate of child abuse incidents.

The obvious problem with organisations like NAPCAN, like other related organisations such as the NSW Department of Child Services (DoCS), is that somewhere along the line their primary purpose ceased being about the protection of children, and became an ideology with a self-imposed reality of re-inforcing stereotypes of child abuse. Rather than finding out who the abusers were, they now became the protectors of women and children, and the challengers to paternalistic authority.

And somewhere in the midst of all this intellectual arrogance, child abuse continued unabated.

A case in point was the Dean Shillingsworth, ‘body in the suitcase murder’. In this case, the mother had made explicit threats of wanting to kill the child, but DoCS acted as the protector of the mother’s interests, at the expense of the child’s health and wellbeing. As a direct result of the complicity of DoCS, this child was murdered by the mother, despite all the efforts of the child’s paternal grandmother.

DoCS has apologised for this mis-handling, but I strongly doubt that anything will change as a result of this murder.

As long as organisations like NAPCAN treat the issue of child protection from a gender perspective, children will continue to slip through the cracks, and despite your political sympathies on this topic, I think we could all agree that presumptions of guilt have no place in the protection of children.

Ash Patil

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