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In the late 1990s, my parents divorced, and my mother took my brother and myself and had us go live in a very rural area of Australia with a psychopath who was

• vidarh 12y ago
  Consider that in the late 90's cellphone penetration was still low enough that not being allowed cellphones was fairly common, and certainly not something anyone would react to. Not being allowed to leave the house after school hours, or use the internet is still a fairly common situation for kids in many sects that are not considered problematic enough to interfere with. What you describe as "being kept captive", others would consider protecting their children from corrupting outside influences (I'd like to emphasise that I absolutely don't think that is right). That the stepfather in this case seems to have been motivated by hiding from the authorities doesn't make much difference - the point is most schools have students that are in similar situations, so it's not something most schools would see as exceptional and something they can interfere with. It's a difficult tradeoff in terms of child protection, because the traumatic experiences of being taken into care or disrupted by lots of interference can easily become worse than what the interference is meant to fix, and because the moment you start passing moral judgement over peoples parenting, you're in for a crazy struggle over how it is acceptable for people to raise their kids.
  • orangecomputer 12y ago
    That's a very very logical perspective of it, considering it from both sides. A lot of times, my parents (mother and stepfather) played it off as "he needs to be disciplined etc", although they omitted certain truths when it came time to talk to the police. A punch to the side of the head was a "clip over the ear" etc. The police however seemed not to care, I will never forget hearing their "Ah yeah." reactions to it, but again they face the same thing as mentioned above. Even if you're not legally allowed to hit a child now, it's still seen in some places here as an unwritten omission of law to discipline your child if it is "Reasonable", such as a smack on the bum etc. Indeed being kept inside the home wasn't really the bad part of it all. I have always been much of a loner, and it was very likely I wouldn't have done much outside of the home. I did sometimes "Run away" for nights, and I would walk through the city or walk out into the country for a very very very long time at night wondering where to go or what to do. Now that I look back on it, I'm actually very surprised albeit greatful that I never was abducted or robbed. But at that point, I didn't really care where I went or what happened because anything seemed better than what was going on at home.
• orangecomputer 12y ago
  The teachers noticed, and they tried to help at first, but this only resulted in aggressive confrontations with my stepfather. They then wanted absolutely nothing to do with either himself or me. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/child-death-cover-up-how-child-protection-system-left-peanut-2-to-die-at-home/story-fnpn118l-1227154877199 http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/child-death-cover-... The Department of Community Services was responsible for overseeing cases such as child abuse etc in during that time (or DOCS as we called it). My counsellor spoke in great depth to me about it, but he was not confident that much would be done (as seen above, many many cases are left behind or ignored). He put in a lot of requests to DOCS to look into my situation, and they did only a few of those times, but their methods were shocking and they did absolutely nothing. They interviewed my stepfather once and it more or less consisted of "have you mistreated a minor in your household?" "No?" "Oh okay well thanks anyway, bye". On another occasion, they spoke to me about it. I honestly couldn't remember what we talked about, as I felt a bit too young to fully understand what was really going on. I spoke to so many people about it and no-one was able to help, including the police. (I'm wondering if the department was understaffed or suffering some other internal crisis? They still are apparently.) In 1999, I would've been 10 years old, so when I finally left, I was 17 nearing 18 as the new year approached. Goodbye teen years, but it would've been a lot worse if I was a kid. A lot of the physical nasties that occurred stopped as I grew older, perhaps out of the fact that my stepfather was aware I'd be a lot wiser about how to tackle it (ie I could more easily convince police of something going on.). He was very careful to get as close to the border-line of crossing the arrest threshold as he could, without ever actually going over it. He never hit my mother, but he hit us and we were raised by him to believe that getting either choked, kicked in the back etc was "Discipline" rather than abuse. I'd have to agree on the inadequacy of both child protection and law enforcement here, as it's been shown in the last couple of days with the "terrorist" in sydney, the justice system here is seriously broken. The same man who deprived us of liberty was walking free on around 40-50 other charges, including break and enter, sexual assault of a minor, assault etc, much like the fellow who held up the cafeteria. I don't know where the break down is, but the justice system always seems to "let people off with a warning" or a light sentence. If you assault someone, expect to walk free. If you break into someones house and molest a child as he did, you walk free with a big scary "warning". If you continue, it's another big scary "warning" etc. He's still out today, and I haven't pursued it, because I know that there is no way he would ever be behind bars, the justice system completely let us down and I wouldn't trust it with my life. One of the first men I rented my first apartment with was exactly the same; multiple charges that should have landed him behind bars, yet he was walking free but with police coming to the door from time to time to "check on him". Of course it wouldn't stop any crook from doing something stupid if they are clever enough not to be caught.