"They did not believe me” Responding to child sexual abuse by Church personnel in Australia

Child sexual abuse (CSA) by Church personnel has been subject to study internationally. Such studies have often held a specific focus on the Roman Catholic Church in nations such as Ireland, Belgium and the United States of America (USA). This paper discusses the findings of a study conducted by the author which considers the perspectives of 81 survivors of child sexual abuse by Church personnel in Australia. Participants in this study completed an online survey and then nominated to undertake an in depth interview. The majority of respondents to the survey (66 - 69%) reported experiencing CSA in a Roman Catholic Church, school or children’s home. This paper explores the voices of survivors and recognises the complex and dynamic ways in which they continue to construct and manage their experiences of CSA by Church personnel. In particular, this study considers survivors’ perspectives of the ways in which Churches have responded to their informal disclosures and official complaints of CSA by Church personnel. Similarly to other locations across the world, participants in this study reported feeling re-victimised by Church processes. Participants reported high levels of dissatisfaction with Church policy and procedure in managing child protection issues, as well as high levels of dissatisfaction with the outcome of their complaints.

Rich and purposeful mathematical knowledge of mothers and children in a Torres Strait Islander community

This paper focuses on a pilot study that explored the situated mathematical knowledge of mothers and children in one Torres Strait Islander community in Australia. The community encouraged parental involvement in their children’s learning and schooling. The study explored parents’ understandings of mathematics and how their children came to learn about it on the island. A funds of knowledge approach was used in the study. This approach is based on the premise that people are competent and have knowledge that has been historically and culturally accumulated into a body of knowledge and skills essential for their functioning and well-being (Moll, 1992). The participants, three adults and one child are featured in this paper. Three separate events are described with epiphanic or illuminative moments analysed to ascertain the features that enabled an understanding of the nature of the mathematical events. The study found that Indigenous ways of knowing of mathematics were deeply embedded in rich cultural practices that were tied to the community. This finding has implications for teachers of children in the early years. Where school mathematics is often presented as disembodied and isolated facts with children seeing little relevance, learning a different perspective of mathematics that is tied to the resources and practices of children’s lives and facilitated through social relationships, may go a long way to improving the engagement of children and their parents in learning and schooling.

Living in a broken world : how young children's well-being is supported through playing out their earthquake experiences

The therapeutic value of play can be shown in spontaneous play situations following children’s experiences of traumatic events. Following the events of the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand in 2010 and 2011, an investigation was conducted of how children used the earthquake event as a catalyst in pretend play with peers and in discussions with teachers. Supporting children’s well-being is a focus area in New Zealand early childhood education as it is a strand of the national curriculum, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education [MoE], 1996). In this article, children are observed engaging in pretend play episodes and with Learning Story books to explore personal reflections of the earthquake, prompting the children to make reference to things being ‘broken’ and needing 'fixing.' Analysis shows how the content of the pretend play experiences helped the children to come to terms with their experiences. Affording children time and interactional opportunities to play out and discuss traumatic experiences contributes to the psychological well-being of participants following a traumatic event.

It's just an old apron : aprons, artefacts and art - representations of personal and private 'her-stories', as public histories

This paper examines art and artefact in the representation and recollection of deeply personal WWII women’s experiences as POW’s under the Japanese. This kind of treatment of internees in the Tjideng Women and Children’s internment camp (and others) in Batavia under the Japanese in WWII, stands in stark and brutal contrast to the idyllic life lived by many families up to that time in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The deprivation and brutality of the Japanese incarceration of these women and children evoked responses - not military, but certainly militant, if muted. Representations of those responses – as both art and artefact - may be found in the most unlikely places and unexpected forms - and are still being unearthed to this day. However close we might personally be to these artists and artisans, can we, as observers from a distance, ever truly comprehend through spoken or written words alone, the day-today realities of those extraordinary times?

Informal kinship care in rural China : the influence of Confucianism and attachment

This article examines the role of informal kinship care in addressing the emotional needs and mental health, along with relationships, of school-age children left behind in rural China. Rural–urban migration in China has caused many rural children to be left behind in their local communities. Based on semi-structured interview data, this article explores Confucianism’s impact on Chinese kin caregivers’ understandings of children’s needs and their childrearing practices to address these needs. Through the lens of attachment theory, this study identified a close affective bond between children left behind and their kin caregivers. This relationship is underpinned by kin caregivers’ high commitment and love for children, and the Confucian concept of ‘benevolence’. It not only provides children left behind with a sense of belonging, it also alleviates their trauma/grief due to separation from their parents

Design and ethics in digital mental health promotion

This chapter presents a case study of Participatory Design as a design framework for developing interactive digital tools for promoting children’s resilience. The author argues for a participatory methodology as an ethical approach that involves children as co-designers in the process from which they are traditionally excluded, namely the creative design process and the process of mental health promotion.

Orchids, intersex and the auto/biographical project

Auto/biographical documentaries ask audiences to take a ‘leap of faith’, not being able to offer any real ‘proof’ of the people and events they claim to document, other than that of the film-maker’s saying this is what happened. With only memory and history seen through the distorting lens of time, ‘the authenticity of experience functions as a receding horizon of truth in which memory and testimony are articulated as modes of salvage’. Orchids: My Intersex Adventure follows a salvaging of the film-maker’s life events and experiences, being born with an intersex condition, and, via the filming and editing process, revolving around the core question: who am I? From this transformative creative documentary practice evolves a new way of embodying experience and ‘seeing’, playfully dubbed here as the ‘intersex gaze’.

Gender studies : Intersex by Catherine Harper

Intersex is the condition whereby an individual is born with biological features that are simultaneously perceived as male and female. Ranging from the ambiguous genitalia of the true 'hermaphrodite' to the 'mildly or internally intersexed', the condition may be as common as cleft palate. Like cleft palate, it is hidden and surgically altered, but for very different reasons. Intersex draws heavily on the personal testimony of intersexed individuals, their loved ones and medical carers. The impact of early sex-assignment surgery on an individual's later life is examined within the context of ethical and clinical questions. Harper challenges the conventional and radical 'treatment' of intersexuality through non-consensual infant sex-assignment surgery. In doing so, she exposes powerful myths, taboos and constructions of gender - the perfect phallus, a bi-polar model of gender and the infallibility of medical decisions. Handling sensitive material with care, this book deepens our understanding of a condition that has itself only been medically understood in recent years.

Foreword

In 1978, three years after the publication of Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish, which famously introduced Bentham’s notion of the Panopticon to a wide audience, the French historian Jacques Léonard remarked that ‘it would need a squadron of competent historians to sort out the mass of interpretations’ offered by Foucault’s work. In response, Foucault said that he wanted his work to provide a workshop which would allow both himself and others to undertake further work and experiment with different approaches. He also cheerfully noted that he was encouraged by the ‘irritating effect’ that his work produced on others. The present book, which comprehensively treats the work of Bentham both in the wake of and against Foucault’s work, is a cogent testimony to the continued currency of these observations.

Early childhood Australia's Best of Sustainability : Research, Practice and Theory

ECA Best of Sustainability: Research, theory and practice by Elliott, Edwards, Davis and Cutter-MacKenzie collates a range of key articles focussing on sustainability from past editions of the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood and Every Child. Sustainable service operation and promoting children’s responsibility and care for the environment are now part of the National Quality Standards and more importantly, all early childhood services must engage with sustainability in this time of increasing global environmental concerns. The publication documents the best of research, theory and practice to date and questions where has early childhood education for sustainability come from and more importantly, where is it going? There are multiple possibilities for educators, researchers, policy makers and managers to take action in early childhood settings for an environmentally sustainable future.

Friendships in the early years

Having a best friend or close friend is closely connected to children’s health and well being in the early years. Having friends safeguards children from social isolation and is associated with academic attainment and social success. In early childhood, children often make friends through play or other shared activities. This chapter investigates friendships and children’s well being in the early years of schooling. Drawing on direct accounts and representations from interviews with young children about friendships, the chapter outlines characteristics of friendship and strategies children use to make friends and manage disputes as they negotiate roles in play and shared spaces. Three key dimensions of friendship are evident in the children’s accounts: friendship is enduring, friendship is mutual and friendship involves an emotional investment. This chapter provides educators with an understanding of the important role that friendships have for happiness and wellbeing in the early years.

Phytophotodermatitis : case reports of children presenting with blistering after preparing lime juice

Letter to the Editor We read with interest the case report entitled ‘‘Contact with fig tree sap: An unusual cause of burn injury’’ by Mandalia et al. [1] and would like to report our similar experience with phytophotodermatitis caused by lime juice. Phototoxic dermatitis is understandably easily confused with a burn, particularly when a patient presents with large blisters of unknown mechanism. At the Royal Children’s Hospital Burns Centre, this injury was treated in the same manner as a burn and is described here...

Using digital technologies at home

Internet-connected tablets and smart phones are being used increasingly by young children. Little is known, however, about their social interactions with family members when engaged with these technologies. This article examines video recorded interactions between a father and his two young children, one aged 18 months using an iPhone, and one aged three years accessing an iPad. Drawing on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, this analysis establishes ways the family members engage and disengage in talk to manage their individual activity with mobile devices and accomplish interaction with each other. Findings are relevant for understanding children’s everyday practices with mobile technologies.

Talk about a YouTube video in preschool : the mutual production of shared understanding for learning with digital technology

Much of what is written about digital technologies in preschool contexts focuses on young children’s acquisition of skills rather than their meaning-making during use of technologies. In this paper, we consider how the viewing of a YouTube video was used by a teacher and children to produce shared understandings about it. Conversation analysis of talk and interaction during the viewing of the video establishes some of the ways that individual accounts of events were produced for others and then endorsed as shared understandings. The analysis establishes how adults and children made use of verbal and embodied actions during interactions to produce shared understandings of the YouTube video, the events it recorded and written commentary about those events

Agentive motility meets structural viscosity: Australian families relocating in educational markets

This paper will develop and illustrate a concept of institutional viscosity to balance the more agentive concept of motility with a theoretical account of structural conditions. The argument articulates with two bodies of work: Archer’s (2007, 2012) broad social theory of reflexivity as negotiating agency and social structures; and Urry’s (2007) sociology of mobility and mobility systems. It then illustrates the concept of viscosity as a variable (low to high viscosity) through two empirical studies conducted in the sociology of education that help demonstrate how degrees of viscosity interact with degrees of motility, and how this interaction can impact on motility over time. The first study explored how Australian Defence Force families cope with their children’s disrupted education given frequent forced relocations. The other study explored how middle class professionals relate to career and educational opportunities in rural and remote Queensland. These two life conditions have produced very different institutional practices to make relocations thinkable and doable, by variously constraining or enabling mobility. In turn, the degrees of viscosity mobile individuals meet with over time can erode or elevate their motility.