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Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai (Read 34425 times)
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Re: Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai
Reply #285 - Aug 1st, 2018 at 3:01pm
 
Gawd....so this crap has spilt over to this MRB as well.  Jayzuz......that's about four now.

I am having my say here.

Link.
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Frank
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Re: Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai
Reply #286 - Aug 11th, 2018 at 6:28pm
 
Mattyfisk wrote on Aug 1st, 2018 at 2:59pm:
Setanta wrote on Jul 28th, 2018 at 10:57pm:
Mattyfisk wrote on Jul 28th, 2018 at 2:13pm:
Frank wrote on Jul 28th, 2018 at 12:54pm:
Islam enriching Lakemba by making it a no-go zone. 'Divershitty' is newspeak for submission to an oppressive ideology.



What's your ideology, old boy? And which culture do you belong to?

Please don't say Australian.


Not my idea of the Aussie "fair go", cop it on the chin. I find it abhorrent that there are areas the police will "protect" from being offended because of someone walking around asking questions, no matter her views. Areas that the police will tell you not to go to because they are "highly religious" and would defend that stance with the weight of their power to prevent you(disobeying a police directive). That is not the Australia I grew up in. Perhaps we need a new export industry, swap the sheep we export the ME with people that just don't fit.



I may have missed something in the news lately, Setanta, so can you say which police have said not to go to which areas?

Cheers.



You have to actually watch the vid and listen, Paki. Just looking at the screenshot is not enough.

Cheers.

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Mattyfisk
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Re: Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai
Reply #287 - Aug 11th, 2018 at 6:44pm
 
Frank wrote on Aug 11th, 2018 at 6:28pm:
Mattyfisk wrote on Aug 1st, 2018 at 2:59pm:
Setanta wrote on Jul 28th, 2018 at 10:57pm:
Mattyfisk wrote on Jul 28th, 2018 at 2:13pm:
Frank wrote on Jul 28th, 2018 at 12:54pm:
Islam enriching Lakemba by making it a no-go zone. 'Divershitty' is newspeak for submission to an oppressive ideology.



What's your ideology, old boy? And which culture do you belong to?

Please don't say Australian.


Not my idea of the Aussie "fair go", cop it on the chin. I find it abhorrent that there are areas the police will "protect" from being offended because of someone walking around asking questions, no matter her views. Areas that the police will tell you not to go to because they are "highly religious" and would defend that stance with the weight of their power to prevent you(disobeying a police directive). That is not the Australia I grew up in. Perhaps we need a new export industry, swap the sheep we export the ME with people that just don't fit.



I may have missed something in the news lately, Setanta, so can you say which police have said not to go to which areas?

Cheers.


You have to actually watch the vid and listen, Paki. Just looking at the screenshot is not enough.

Cheers.



I see. So which areas?
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Re: Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai
Reply #288 - Aug 11th, 2018 at 9:53pm
 
...

YAWN...
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Frank
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Re: Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai
Reply #289 - Sep 30th, 2018 at 2:15pm
 
Muslim cultural enrichment in Barcelona:

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=kANsi_1538159366
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Re: Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai
Reply #290 - Oct 8th, 2018 at 7:39pm
 
The fear in Sargun Ragi’s voice was palpable as she begged a Melbourne magistrate to extend an intervention order against her estranged husband. They’d been married for just over a year but the 23-year-old arts graduate was so frightened of Avjit Singh that she initially refused to even enter the court where he sat bullishly in the front row of the public ­gallery, waiting for her to give evidence. After repeated assurances from the magistrate and police that their thin blue line would protect her, she bowed her head and shuffled past him, then bravely shared a harrowing account of how he’d repeatedly bashed, starved and stalked her.

It was September 24, 2012 and the restraining order was granted. Ten days later, Sargun Ragi was dead. Singh slit his young wife’s throat, stabbed her, doused her in petrol and set fire to her after locating her at what was meant to be a safe house. He died from burns sustained in the attack.

Fifteen months earlier, the young Sikh couple had enjoyed an extravagant arranged wedding in India. They’d met for the first time on the day they got engaged and she was full of excitement about beginning a new life in Australia. Singh had been living in Melbourne for eight years and had been granted residency, but instead of looking for a wife here he returned home to the Punjab to collect a bride chosen by his family, and with good reason.

The practice of paying dowry was outlawed in India in 1961 yet it remains a widespread custom and alarmingly, in recent times, the promise of a visa to Australia has become a lucrative bridal ­bargaining chip. A modern dowry can include whitegoods, cash, cars and gold but the promise of a spousal visa can substantially increase the value of the dowry expected to be paid by the bride’s family to the groom’s, sometimes even doubling it.

“Dowry is an abuse of human rights and it must be stopped before more women are hurt or die,” says Melbourne-based psychiatrist Dr Manjula O’Connor, who believes the payment of dowry is linked to a spate of attacks against Indian women in Australia, including horrific “bride burnings” in which women are doused in acid or petrol and set alight. “Almost every day I’m seeing Indian women who’ve been abused coming into my practice,” she says. “I’ve been ­contacted by more than 200 women who are the victims of dowry-related abuse over the past couple of years and I know it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sadly, women are still seen as a financial liability in Indian culture — her family effectively pays the dowry to the husband’s family to encourage them to take her. An Australian visa is very prestigious and has become a very dangerous weapon.”

O’Connor, founding director of the Australasian Centre for Human Rights & Health, sees a ­common pattern in the stories of the broken women she counsels at her clinic. “Young men come here as students, they have girlfriends here and no intention of marrying a girl in India, but the mother insists. He has large student loans to pay and a visa to a country like Australia is very, very valuable. So there is intense pressure because the dowry paid in a wedding back home can pay off his student debts and set up his family too. Once she marries, culture dictates that the family owns her and they control her. That’s when the problems begin.”

After their wedding, Avjit Singh returned to Australia, leaving his new bride to live with his family while they waited for her visa. From the day she arrived in Australia almost six months later it was clear that Singh, who’d had a string of extramarital affairs in her absence, had no intention to love, honour or cherish her. The taxi driver deadlocked his new wife alone inside their house each day while he went to work. There was no TV, computer or refrigerator and he took the house keys and her mobile phone with him, returning once a day to bring her food. Singh constantly threatened Sargun with deportation if she refused him sex. With no money, no support and no way to escape the house, she became his prisoner.

After months of abuse, she managed to climb through a window and fled to the home of a neighbour, who helped her seek support from police and domestic violence services. Soon after, Singh found her and killed her.

Her horrific death rocked Queensland social worker and academic Jatinder Kaur to the core. Like O’Connor, she has witnessed the devastating effect of abuse against Indian women in Australia. Kaur, also a Sikh, is the first Indian woman to be appointed to a parole board in Australia and is behind the establishment of the Women’s Sahara House in Brisbane, a refuge for women in crisis. “Sargun’s death…” she says, before pausing to compose herself. “I’ve worked in domestic ­violence throughout my career, I’ve been at the frontline and I’ve been a first responder alongside police to domestic violence incidents, but nothing has affected me like Sargun’s death. What struck me was the lack of response from the community. There was a lot of victim blaming and no one from the Indian community speaking out about the atrocity of her death. The deafening silence shifted something with me.”

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Re: Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai
Reply #291 - Oct 8th, 2018 at 7:41pm
 
And then came more deaths. In 2013, ­Parwinder Kaur, 32, ran screaming from her Sydney home in what witnesses described as a “ball of fire”. She suffered burns to 90 per cent of her body and died the next day. Her husband Kulwinder Singh is awaiting trial, charged with her murder.

In 2014, Deepshikha Godara was killed by her estranged husband Sunil Beniwal in Melbourne. He repeatedly stabbed her in front of their three-year-old son, then took his own life by driving into an oncoming car. Deepshikha worked as a physiotherapist in India before their arranged marriage. Before she’d even arrived in Australia her new husband and his father demanded more and more money from her family in India, insisting they had not received enough dowry. Beniwal regularly kicked his wife in the stomach, burnt her with hot tongs and threw broken glass bottles at her face. She was murdered despite the legal steps she’d taken to protect herself from her husband.

“In June 2018 India was ranked as the world’s most dangerous country for women,” says Jatinda Kaur. “Indian women are raised to be subservient and violence against women is an accepted part of family life — and we are seeing that these terrible cultural, religious and patriarchal values and beliefs are not left at borders, persisting with newly arrived Indian migrants.”

By 2015, rising evidence of violence against young migrant women prompted the Federal Government to issue anti-violence information packs to new arrivals in Australia. The kits contain information about women’s rights, with the specific message that they do not have to stay in an abusive relationship, as well as contact information for domestic violence support services.

In 2016, the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence found evidence that dowries were directly linked to a spate of family violence, murders and suicides in Victoria. As a result, the Victorian Parliament has recently passed legis­lation outlawing dowry abuse — defined as “using coercion, threats, physical abuse or emotional or psychological abuse to demand or receive a dowry, either before or after a marriage”; it’s believed to be the first western state in the world to do so.

O’Connor is heartened, but says this is just the first step. She believes the government needs to urgently set up a working group between India and Australia to educate families in India. “It’s a multinational problem. Some dismiss this and say we don’t need a law here because the marriage occurs in India, but the violence occurs here and we all have a responsibility to stop this.”

In the wake of the royal commission findings in Victoria, federal Labor MP Julian Hill, whose electorate of Bruce in Melbourne’s south-east is one of ­Australia’s most multicultural, spoke about the issue in parliament. But rather than corralling support from the Indian community, he was subsequently overwhelmed by calls and emails from men outraged by the ­proposed dowry ­legislation and calling for it to be blocked. “The reaction was quite extraordinary,” Hill says. “I guess I was surprised but not shocked. I had men telling me it was all very ‘silly’ and claiming that women like Dr O’Connor were making it [reports of violence] all up.

“It was a very passionate, if I can use that word, response. The men were telling me dowry and violence are not a problem and really bagging the brave women who were speaking out, but their campaign backfired because the more I learnt about the issue the more I wanted to shine a light on it.” During his investigations, Hill heard countless stories of dowry-related abuse and was so shocked by the level of domestic violence within the community that he called for a Senate inquiry, which is currently underway. A final report is due in early December.

O’Connor and Kaur hope the Senate inquiry will ­follow Victoria’s lead and recommend national laws. They’re also pushing for detailed research to determine the full extent of the issue and provide more effective cultural responses. While the focus of the Senate inquiry is specifically on the Indian community, countries such as China, Sudan, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh still support the custom of dowry-related arranged marriage; in some cultures it is the groom’s family who pay for the bride.

Vasan Srinivasan, former chair of the Con­federation of Indian Australian Association, is a vocal opponent of the dowry legislation. He is a member of the Australian Multicultural Council and a board member of the Mental Health ­Foundation Australia. “We’ve got enough laws to protect our women in this society, I don’t see why we need a special law for dowry,” he argues. “Dowry itself is not a problem in Australia, I have been very connected to the Indian community since I arrived here in 1987. I don’t think the Indian community that has been established here has a problem. The problem is coming from India itself; this is an issue of mental health and greed related to new migrants coming to the country. Dowry is a ­migration issue. I don’t believe dowry payments are happening in Australia.

“I do agree that there is an issue with the visa. Some men are using visas as a bargaining chip. But how can we go around in India and tell every ­family not to do this? It’s impossible to police everyone going out of Australia to marry.”

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Re: Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai
Reply #292 - Oct 8th, 2018 at 7:42pm
 
In a submission to the Senate inquiry, Gurdip Aurora, president of the Australia India Society of Victoria, echoed Srinivasan’s sentiments. “I have been in Australia since 1972,” he wrote. “Usually most cases of dowry abuse and domestic violence have occurred amongst Indian couples who have migrated in the past few years and who were ­married in India. It is more prevalent amongst the international students waiting for their visa ­applications to be processed.

“Laws of any kind are unnecessary as the ­giving and taking of dowry does not exist within the Indian community and their children who are Australian citizens and permanent residents.”

On any given afternoon in the northern ­suburbs of Melbourne, a small group of Indian women gather for “chai and chat”. On the face of it, they could be a mother’s group, a book club or any group of friends catching up, but the absence of laughter is a telltale sign of the heartbreaking bond they share. Prisha*, 36, who arrived in ­Australia after an arranged marriage in Bangalore, India five years ago, followed a path chillingly ­similar to that of Sargun Ragi. She considers ­herself one of the lucky ones. The highly credentialled engineer was a rising star in one of India’s biggest aviation firms, leading a team of engineers on a complex international project, when one afternoon her parents phoned her office and instructed her to pack up her desk and come home immediately — she was engaged to be ­married. Her fiance Ayush* had been living in Australia and was coming home to collect the bride he’d never met. They would live in ­Australia after the ­wedding, she was told.

“It was a bit gut-wrenching,” says Prisha. “I knew it [the arranged marriage] was coming sooner or later and I was sort of excited to meet my husband but I really liked my life and my job.”

Prisha met her fiance at their engagement party. During the celebrations he told her the dowry her family had offered wasn’t enough, and that they’d need to provide a more substantial “gift”. Prisha’s family, who were market gardeners, had offered their life savings — a car, gold, a silver dinner set, whitegoods and $50,000 in cash to ensure their daughter’s bright future. Ayush demanded double.

On the day of their marriage, when it became clear no more dowry was available, Ayush verbally abused Prisha, telling her she was ugly and not good enough for him. He left after the wedding ceremony and returned to Australia. In the meantime, as is customary, she was forced to live with his family and was not allowed to work or leave their compound while she waited for her visa. She became the family servant. “My mother-in-law controlled my life. The irony is, they wanted more and more money from my parents and yet my ­salary [before I was married] was double what they could have given or what he earned, but I wasn’t allowed to work.”

The situation worsened when Prisha arrived in Melbourne. Ayush was physically and psychologically abusive. He forced her to have sex and often took a knife to his throat in front of her. “It was a nightmare, and I wanted to leave but I couldn’t. He threatened to kill me and himself if I left because of the shame it would bring to our families. And yet he was sleeping with other women the whole time. In our custom, when you marry, it’s for life. My family would have suffered great embarrassment if I’d left.”

When she fell pregnant Ayush fled interstate, leaving Prisha alone to raise their child. She receives no support from him and although she is desperate to return home to India, he placed a flight ban on their child. “It’s his way of controlling me forever,” she says. “I will not leave without my baby, so I’m stuck.”

Prisha has been battling depression and ­anxiety and she is not alone; stories of abuse and intimidation echo around the coffee table, and Prisha knows of at least seven other women in a similar situation. Dr O’Connor has been helping these women rebuild. “In Indian culture, from the minute a girl is engaged, she belongs to that family,” she explains. “So, imagine then she belongs to a family who beats her up. She thought she was entering a wonderful marriage but she’s being beaten up and she has no place to turn. Divorce isn’t an option and her family have given every dollar they have for her dowry. They can’t afford a second marriage for her. Her life, and her family’s, has been ruined.”

O’Connor arrived in Australia when she was 21 and fell in love with an Australian man. On her wedding day she received some gifts of gold ­jewellery and a collection of precious saris from her family, which she still treasures today. There was no dowry given or taken. When one of her daughters married recently, she gave her a small amount of money to put towards a house deposit. “I gave that to her because I wanted to, not because I felt obliged under tradition.”

Her fight against dowry abuse has become her life’s work and she is relieved to be making progress. However, speaking out has come at a cost. Some sectors of the Indian community have denounced her efforts, claiming she is “bringing their culture into disrepute”, she says.

“The backlash against me personally is huge,” O’Connor explains. “People in the Indian community do not like me speaking up — they say I’m focusing on the minority, not the majority — but the reason I keep going is because I see women coming into my clinic every day who’ve been abused. One woman abused is too many.”

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Re: Multiculturalism enriching our Western values agai
Reply #293 - Oct 8th, 2018 at 7:43pm
 
“The backlash against me personally is huge,” O’Connor explains. “People in the Indian community do not like me speaking up — they say I’m focusing on the minority, not the majority — but the reason I keep going is because I see women coming into my clinic every day who’ve been abused. One woman abused is too many.”

Mother-of-two Jatinder Kaur has also paid a price. A relentless campaign has been waged against her, including death threats. “Some men have made it very clear they are unhappy about me speaking out, but I will not be silenced,” she says. “There has been no accountability from the Indian community about this issue.”

Both women hope the Senate inquiry will recommend national laws banning dowry abuse and they hope it will be the catalyst for global change.

“I am not done yet campaigning,” O’Connor says. “We want continuity in the laws internationally, so no matter where you are in the world you know that dowry is not OK. I am pleased the Australian government is now taking this seriously, but there is much more work to be done. We must continue to talk about this, and we must work together to bring an end to violence against women, not just Indian women, but all women.

“I’ve wanted this change since I was a girl and I feel deeply proud that we are making headway. It gives me enormous satisfaction to think about the difference this will make in the lives of young girls like my daughters and the next generation.”

* Name changed for legal reasons. Domestic Violence Crisis Line 1800 800 098; 1800RESPECT 1800 737 732

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/dowry-death-an...
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