HUMOURLESS BRITAIN

A labourer was jailed for a month and put on the sex offenders register for seven years after he slapped the bottom of an off-duty policewoman. Anthony O'Neill, 22, was stunned when he was given the sentence. His relatives are furious and say the punishment is over-the-top for, what they say, was a silly joke. They say he has lost his job and been branded "a pervert".

O'Neill, pictured, ended up in trouble while he was drinking in a city centre street at 11am one day in November. He told a court he thought it would be funny to smack the woman's behind when she bent down near him. Instead, the woman officer produced a police warrant card and arrested him. O'Neill, of Goredale Avenue, Gorton, admitted sexual assault at Manchester Magistrates' Court. District Judge Paul Richardson told him: "What you did was insulting and demeaning - it was anything but funny."

As well as being put on the register, he was jailed for a month but immediately released because he had already spent five weeks in custody. After he was arrested, O'Neill admitted: "I have done it before. Some women like it, others don't." Outside court, O'Neill claimed he only admitted the sex assault charge because he wanted to be released after being held for 16 hours. He is considering an appeal. He said: "I should have been sent away because it's taught me a lesson not to smack a woman's bum. But to be put on the sex offenders register is just daft."

O'Neill's mother, Karen, said: "I think it is terrible. People will see that and wonder what on earth has he done, and think it must be very serious. Rapists and serious sex abusers get put on for that long. "He wouldn't harm anyone. Everyone can get a bit out of hand when they've had a drink." The sex offenders register was set up in 1997 and holds details of about 29,000 people convicted, cautioned or released from prison for a sexual offence against children or adults. Convicted sex offenders must register with the police within three days of their conviction or release from prison and failure to do so can result in prison. They must also inform police if they change their name or address.

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THE CARTOONS REVIVED

Controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad have been reprinted in a US magazine with commentary by leading US cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who offers what he calls a "fatwa bomb meter" to rate their offensiveness. Harper's Magazine published the article by Spiegelman in its June edition available on US newsstands from today, joining only a handful of US outlets which have printed the cartoons which provoked furious protests that killed 50 people. Denmark's Jyllands-Posten newspaper published the 12 cartoons last year. Other newspapers around the world, mainly in Europe, later reprinted the cartoons.

A number of Muslim clerics have condemned the cartoons and a small minority have called for a violent response. A fatwa is a religious edict in Islam, sometimes equated with a death threat since Iran's late ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered Muslims in 1989 to kill British novelist Salman Rushdie.

In an article headlined "Drawing Blood: Outrageous cartoons and the art of outrage," Spiegelman, an elder statesman of political satire famous for his New Yorker cartoons, said the cartoons needed to be seen to be understood. "As a secular Jewish cartoonist living in New York City, I start out with four strikes against me, but I really don't want any irate Muslims declaring holy war on me," Spiegelman wrote in the article.

The cartoonist described himself as "a devout coward". "It's not intended to add fuel to any fire," Spiegelman said. "I think that the tone is the tone of a secular wise-guy cartoonist rather than a scholar, but I wanted to show ... what couldn't be described," he said. He was surprised that most of his friends had not seen the cartoons. Spiegelman noted that the cartoons appear "banal and inoffensive" to secular eyes, revealing a gulf in understanding. "To my secular eyes it seems like the real insult has been things like Abu Ghraib," he said, referring to abuse of prisoners by US soldiers in Iraq.

In the article Spiegelman analyses each of the 12 cartoons for artistic merit and offensiveness, using a rating system of one to four bombs in the "fatwa bomb meter". A cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban, generally cited as the most offensive, received three bombs from Spiegelman, who described it as a "hackneyed" expression of an idea. His most offensive rating of four bombs went only to a stylised cartoon said to depict five women's head scarves in a line-drawing made up of Islamic symbols such as the crescent. He said it had "no redeeming features" and in terms of craftsmanship it "might almost be worth a fatwa". "I don't really even quite understand what it's a cartoon of, except 'We don't like Muslims'."

The article criticised all sides in the controversy. "The Jyllands-Posten - a newspaper with a history of anti-immigrant bias - seemed somewhat disingenuous when it wrapped itself in the mantle of free speech to invite cartoonists to throw pies at the face of Mohammad," Spiegelman wrote. He said many newspapers reprinted the cartoons to reinforce "their own anti-immigrant or Islamophobic biases". But he criticised US news outlets for not showing the cartoons out of what he called "political correctness that smelled of hypocrisy and fear". Drawing historical parallels with cartoonists jailed in the past, he said, "I do believe in the right to insult".

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A culture of black violence that must change

How political correctness is hurting black Australian children

Cases of violence and child sexual abuse revealed to ABC's Lateline this week by the Alice Springs Crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers reveal conditions in some remote Central Australian Aboriginal communities so depraved and dysfunctional as to defy belief. Rogers described how a seven-month-old baby was taken out of her home and raped. Blood in her nappy finally alerted somebody that she was injured. She needed surgery under general anaesthetic.

A two-year-old girl left unattended while her mother was away drinking was whisked away by a man and sexually assaulted. She also required surgery. A six-year-old girl and her friends were followed to a waterhole by an 18-year-old petrol sniffer. "While she was playing in the water, he pulled her under and anally penetrated her and drowned her, probably simultaneously," Rogers said. Rogers also detailed cases in which girls of 10 and 12 were handed over as "promised wives" to old men who took them away, with the permission of their family, and sexually assaulted them.

These horrendous crimes were catalogued in a dossier Rogers produced for police. Its revelation in gory detail on Lateline has caused ripples of outrage across the country. But it is not the first time such atrocities have been revealed, tut-tutted over and then forgotten. In 1999 Queensland's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women's Task Force on Violence published a survey of 25 Aboriginal communities. The Aboriginal academic Boni Robertson presented graphic accounts of alcohol-induced domestic violence and child sexual abuse, including the pack rape of a three-year-old girl. "I can't remember when I didn't feel scared," one woman told the task force.

Nothing much seems to have changed since. White Australia has attempted to assuage its guilt about the awful state of many Aboriginal communities with inquiries such as the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and Sir Ronald Wilson's 1997 "stolen children" report. The resultant ostentatious hand-wringing has arguably made life worse for the most vulnerable, voiceless members of already disadvantaged communities, where the word "disadvantaged" doesn't even begin to convey the truth.

The outcry about "stolen children" led to indigenous children being more likely to be left in abusive, dysfunctional families than non-indigenous children because welfare authorities are terrified of being paternalistic and creating another "stolen generation".

The Community Services Commission described a few years ago "the current culture of 'hands off' when it comes to Aboriginal children". In 2000, the NSW Child Death Review Team noted the reluctance of authorities to intervene in Aboriginal cases of neglect or abuse: "A history of inappropriate intervention with the Aboriginal families should not lead now to an equally inappropriate lack of intervention for Aboriginal children at serious risk."

Outcry over the deaths in custody report led to more lenient sentencing and a reluctance by the "white legal system" to be seen as further victimising Aboriginal men. Nice in theory, but what about the victims? An Aboriginal elder, Margaret Kemarre, told Lateline this week that what was needed to protect children and women was less alcohol and tougher sentencing. "It is all right for the judges . sitting up there, and putting things, but they don't know how our feeling of the parents and the whole extended families have . the grief."

Nanette Rogers began working in the Northern Territory as a defence barrister but became "sick of acting for violent Aboriginal men and putting up the same old excuses when I was appearing for them", she told Lateline. She switched to prosecutions after realising "how much emphasis was placed on Aboriginal customary law in terms of placing the offender in the best light, and it really closed off the voices of Aboriginal women, their viewpoints about how customary law impacted on the offence or the offender".

Joan Kimm, a Monash University academic and author of A Fatal Conjunction: Two Laws, Two Cultures, said yesterday she agreed with Rogers "in every point which she makes about indigenous male cultural attitudes to violence towards women". In her book, Kimm analysed criminal cases dating from the 1950s and described how "indigenous men have relied on the cultural 'defence', that is, elements of traditional law and lore, to exonerate themselves and for mitigation of sentencing when charged with violent assaults on Aboriginal women". She points out the "paradox" of a justice system which "might put the rights of traditional Aboriginal culture, with its inherent violence towards Aboriginal women, above the universal human right of those very women to live free from violence".

Although "traditional society was very violent to women, it was not like the rampant violence which now occurs because that violence was once confined within a strict legalistic society. The structure of that law and that society has been devastated. Yet that customary law has been successfully pleaded as a cultural defence." Kimm says she hopes Rogers "does not receive the odium (from some non-Aborigines and some Aborigines) which I have incurred for raising this issue".

The odium has begun. Yesterday's edition of the Crikey email newsletter contained criticism of Rogers for "blaming the victim". And on the Herald's letters page yesterday, Dr David Rose from Gladesville blasted the Lateline story as sinking to "new depths of shock-jock journalism" and lambasted Rogers for having a "poor understanding of the social and historical background that produced [the crimes]." Rose objected to Lateline broadcasting "obscene, graphic details of child sexual abuse". Perhaps he would prefer that the crimes go unpunished and the victims' advocates be silenced just so his sensibilities aren't offended. Full marks to Lateline for pursuing the story so vigorously.

But why did Tony Jones feel the need to ask Rogers: "Are you worried that the information itself may be abused by tabloids and racists even, shock jocks - the sort of people who will take information like this and exploit it?" Are there really people so morally confused that they see opposition to the rape of babies as a "shock jock" phenomenon?

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