childhood | TJ Withers

I just read the most heartbreaking message from 41 children who have been ignored and unheard when going through the Family Court of Australia.

One, 15-year-old said they felt “squashed”.

I just had to do what I was told and be quiet and suck it up, even if it wasn’t what I wanted.

Two sisters were ordered by the court to spend time with their father, even though they told the court they didn’t want to because they would not be safe with him. One of the sisters said:

That was always one of my biggest regrets because I’m like, maybe if I had said something differently, or emphasised it more, they would have understood what I was trying to say and actually listened… It wouldn’t have made such traumatic memories, which happened afterwards, when we were forced to see him.

The main themes they highlighted match previous research that looked into the fundamental flaws in Australia’s national “child-centred”, “DV aware” court.

For example, studies about the Family Court process and judges’ decision-making have found that:

“The courts are seemingly prioritising protection of the child from the risk of psychological harm by the mother due to her failure to facilitate meaningful ties with a father over the risk of alleged physical or sexual harm by the father. We see this as a serious concern.” (Easteal, Prest, & Thornton, 2019)
There is a “lack of fit” between the types of cases that end up in the Family Court, which “are invariably complex, and likely to involve allegations of domestic violence and/or child abuse, mental health concerns, high conflict, and substance misuse”, and the court’s repeated focus on shared parenting by both parents, “reflected in decisions that appear not to reflect the system’s overarching principle of the ‘best interests’ of children and may also pay insufficient attention to the safety of women and children.” (Laing, 2017)

So what is the Family Court of Australia actually supposed to be doing for children, and why is it refusing to meet its legal obligations?

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In March, Sting gave a TED talk called ‘How I started writing songs again’ (http://www.ted.com/talks/sting_how_i_started_writing_songs_again).

As a youth, he lived by a shipyard, and constantly thought of getting free. As we all know, he did, selling more than 100 million albums and earning 16 Grammy Awards.

But something changed – he got writer’s block, stretching on for years. To overcome this, he recently found himself writing new songs by returning to the stories of the shipyard workers he knew as a boy.

I found his talk incredibly moving, as a creator and as someone who remembers a difficult childhood. In his talk, Sting sings songs from his upcoming musical, as well as my favourite of his songs, ‘Message in a Bottle’.

This ties back to my posts about incubation and writer’s block. I’ve written about how incubation of years has helped me to rewrite stories that I first imagined in high school now, as an adult. In Sting’s case, an unwanted incubation period that stretched for years (the writer’s block preventing creation) was solved by returning to childhood stories that had been incubating from even longer ago, bringing new creation.

Have you ever struggled with writer’s block? How did you get past it?