Stop the Clock

A brief memoriam for an ignored campaign

Today, let’s look at the curious case of the Stop the Clock campaign. This campaign was launched in 2017 by the NSW branch of the Australian Medical Association because doctors were sick to their stomachs at the level of child abuse they had to deal with in emergency rooms. According to the campaign, a child is abused every 15 minutes. 42,400 substantiated incidences of abuse in 2014-15.

A horrifying statistic. I'm sure you remember how sick it made you feel the first time you read it.

Or possibly you don't. Because I'm betting you’ve never heard of the Stop the Clock campaign or its numbers, on account of the media refusing to cover it. 

Don't take my word for it - Google it. Now. Stop reading and run it through your favourite search engine. I did, and have, multiple times. Last time I did it, Google found a Canadian campaign with the same name aimed at stopping accidental injury and death of youth, before it found the AMA one – DuckDuckGo found a Victorian campaign to save animals (we can all get behind that, it seems) and Bing found the official website, but not until page 3.

And here it is:

http://stoptheclock.today/

I have had to amend the link, because as written it now longer does anything but point to the AMA front page, within which I found the original campaign archived.

It’s gone, apparently, finished. Because there was no media coverage. No one cared. The sole reference in the media I could find was in the Sydney Morning Herald article that alerted me to its existence some years ago. The links to the campaign in that article are now broken.

Well, maybe they just did a lousy job launching and promoting the campaign, you may be thinking. But no – when we check the Herald article we find they launched in conjunction with Westmead Children’s Hospital, and the relevant NSW minister at the time (for Domestic Violence), Pru Goward, was there.

The media simply chose not to cover this. As I said, this sole mention in the SMH (with no follow-up in the subsequent years) is it. Every other media outlet stayed quiet.

Think about that for a moment. How often did we hear about domestic violence in the last 7 years since this campagin was launched? Constantly? Endlessly? For good reason, too, it’s a scourge.

And yet a campaign specifically designed to stop one of the worst elements of DV, violence against children, by the AMA - one of our most respected bodies - was ignored by the media. It didn’t suit their agenda, apparently.

Didn’t suit their agenda to talk about that very thing they like to talk about? How does that work?

The reason may lie in Ms Goward’s comments. Here is her full quote from the article:

NSW Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Pru Goward said the campaign was a call to action.

"We have all seen it. We have all sensed it. We need to be empowered to act on it," Ms Goward said. "The lives of our most vulnerable children may depend on what we do."

The connections between child abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, and mental illness in adulthood was "frighteningly strong", Ms Goward said.

"They are tragically part of intergenerational abuse and neglect.

"I have met countless, countless women who are drug addicts or alcoholics who have their own children in child protection, [and] had a history of child sexual abuse.

"Parental substance misuse, domestic and family violence and parental [mental health] problems are so often not only common drivers of abuse but the key to repetition of that cycle," she said.

Notice she speaks only of women having their children taken away? That’s because it is primarily women who abuse children. She knows, gentle reader. She knows it is women committing this violence. It was her job to know. The same as she knows the drivers of this abuse are not toxic masculinity or patriarchy or the other nonsense we keep hearing, but trauma from generational abuse, addiction and mental illness.

Those of you from NSW – do you ever remember her speak about it at any other time? Launch any campaigns from her office to combat female domestic violence against children? Do anything during her entire tenure other than attack men as perpetrators of violence?

Look, I’ve got nothing against Pru Goward, I’ve never met the woman, I’m thankful for her years of service to this state. I don’t like criticising individuals for problems that are rampant throughout government, or the media. If I’m completely off the mark, correct me in the comments (I’ve removed the paywall for this article). And many men are perpetrators of domestic violence and deserve all they get – I am here to defend children, not men. But to protect children, we must wade into the swamp of gender issues, since women, our most protected group, are the predominant perpetrators of their abuse. Read Ms Goward’s words again – notice how she speaks more of women as victims than the children? Victims of drug addiction, alcoholism, mental health issues, their own childhood abuse - they are tragically part of intergenerational abuse and neglect. I remember her as appearing more concerned with protecting women by painting them as the ‘real victims’ than focussing on the protection of children. (I realise that sounds harsh and would back it up from her speeches, but they have been removed since she retired: both her site http://www.prugoward.com.au/Media/Speeches.aspx and the archive http://www.prugoward.com.au/Media/Speeches/tabid/95/articleType/Archives/Default.aspx now return errors. I doubt this is anything sinister, probably standard practise for ex-ministers.)

If you are interested, HERE are her speeches as Sex Discrimination Commissioner. They are the similar to those who came after her - a series of testimonies that for the office to actually work, the name should probably be changed to ‘Anti-Sex Discrimination Commissioner’, since these comissioners routinely discriminated against men in each and every speech. They appeared to see their role as promoting women’s issues – not combatting discrimination experienced by both sexes – and Ms Goward seems to have taken that into the role of Minister for Prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. She was there to protect women from those things, not point out when women were perpetrators. She became minister while her government sat on a damning report into their failures to protect children for two years. And as someone who had professional contact with FaCS (or ‘Department of Families and Justice’ as it is now called) during the transition from the policies of the previous government to hers (I worked in an agency and had regular contact with case workers from offices across Sydney) I saw first-hand the damage her government did.

Damage the AMA were trying to combat with their small contribution, which is now gone. They were trying to break the cycle of abuse, stop children being abused so they don’t grow up into the next generation of adults with mental health issues and trauma, turning to substance abuse to deal with it all, and taking it out on partners and children of their own.

Unfortunately, no one cared.

Requiem in pace.