Two Wishes international campaign launch

Webinar on coercive control of children and Two Wishes launch, 4 Feb 2021

David Curl, CEO, Two Wishes Foundation

Thanks for joining me (and some of the local flies), here, at Uluru in the middle of Australia.

Like many of us, I’m passionate about looking after children … especially when it comes to some of the lesser-known, yet life-threatening, risks they face. 

These days, a substantial proportion of children experience the divorce or separation of their parents. And many of these children are harmed for life during a process that leaves them in unhealthy or unsafe situations, or loses them important, loving relationships – or both. This is particularly true for the large numbers of children we talk about as being “turned against” their own parent or family. If children are taught to hate their own flesh and blood, that’s exactly what they begin to do. Often, with tragic consequences.

How can we stop this?

I asked this question in a conference survey in 2019. And the results of the first 100 responses showed that even professionals working in this field don’t really know what’s needed to actually prevent such harmful outcomes. Their top response, for instance, was “educating professionals” which, though it might improve identification or treatment, clearly has a potential impact too late – too far “downstream” – to prevent harm.

The fact is, there is no cure for this sort of psychological child abuse – and never will be. All those years lost. All that trauma and pain. You can ameliorate it but never will you get rid of all its damaging impacts once it’s occurred.

For some of us, that makes the decision as to where we allocate our time even easier: we all know that “prevention is better than cure” – but it’s so much better when there’s no cure. 

So, what can we do further “upstream”? What does actual prevention really look like?

Well, as it happens, you don’t need to know what symptoms a disease like cholera causes, or even what it’s called, to run a campaign to prevent it. You just need to have worked out that healthy water prevents many children from dying horribly from cholera – and stops lots of other bad things while you’re at it – and then engage the public and motivate politicians with this simple, powerful idea.

So, too, “healthy families” prevent many children from dying early – as a consequence of lots of bad things that happen to children today, especially when parents split up.

Sure, it can help motivate – or “outrage the unaffected” (to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin and others) – to see images of kids dying from the ravages of cholera or turning up at emergency wards in the middle of the night as a consequence of self-harming behaviour following a family separation.

Here, in the heart of Australia, indigenous communities provide a particularly powerful illustration of what happens when, based on the ideology of the day, you remove children from parents and proceed to prejudice them not just against their own family, but against their entire culture. The inter-generational trauma of Australia’s Stolen Generations should outrage and inform us all.

But the essence of a successful campaign has to be something more. Something durable and practical. Something positive – uplifting, even. Something people can relate to and want to – and can – do something about.