Jason Lees, child killer and national hero

Manstream media’s cover-up of the latest murder-suicide father’s revenge incident is shameful but it isn’t fooling all of us. All of the public discussion around the murder of 2 year old Brad Lees, is centred on defending the character of his killer, Jason Lees. Lees, who threw his screaming baby son to his death off the Story Bridge in Brisbane on Monday, was, according to every single news piece I have seen, a “well-respected” official, card-carrying Good Guy. Because heaven forbid any man be seen to ever do anything wrong, ever. The high school where he used to teach will be making a “tribute” to him, even. Because, as the newspapers keep telling us, this is a tragedy born out of a Good Guy’s “despair”. The headlines all refer to the “happy dad” or the “best dad a kid could want” who “jumped off a bridge”. They don’t refer to a “baby-killer”.

You would think that throwing a screaming, terrified baby off a bridge might negate all the Good Guy creds that he had thus far clocked up with the community. Clearly, he was not a Good Guy. But the pro-establishment media lackeys are tip-toeing around this issue despite the fact that police are treating this as murder, or murder-suicide to be more accurate, but I don’t like that term; it obscures the fact that someone was murdered and cleverly gets the reader to focus only on the suicide of the murderer, instead. Where are the pro-life extremists when this shit happens? It’s outrageous that children’s “right to life” does not extend beyond the gestation period. Children’s status in society is strongly reflected in the erasure of Brad from the narrative of his murder.

We will recall, when reading of this atrocity, the way Arthur Freeman murdered his little girl, Darcey, in 2009. Freeman did this out of revenge, to punish Darcey’s mother for leaving him.

There is an abundance of academic literature now available on the way the family courts prioritise entitled male abuser’s feelings over the right of women and children to escape abuse and tyranny, and to live free of violence; in fact just to live.

We have ample documentation of men’s selfishness and disregard for the human rights of former partners and children in the context of divorce and separation.

Men kill their own children as an effective way of hurting their former partners, for life.

Fathers’ Revenge Syndrome is real, and family court magistrates, as well as all the psychologists and lawyers who assist abusers to gain access to children and former partners, extending the paradigm of domestic violence and abuse, need to wake the fuck up.

4pm Update: This man is all but being hailed as a hero for fucksake! And shame on the Anglican Church Grammar School for their public defense of a child killer.

Some blogs and news articles are full of commentary by people vouching for his great character. People genuinely can not seem to get their heads around the fact that he killed a child, based on his fine reputation within his community/s. Let’s see if we can keep two thoughts in our heads at once here.

Seemingly nice men who contribute well in their community context can still be violent, abusive arseholes in their personal relationships.

Chances are he was an abuser and that’s why his wife left him and the child. Maybe she thought she was keeping the child safe by leaving him with the abuser, given the propensity for left husbands to use the excuse of not seeing their kids as a motive for more violence. Maybe it was an act of appeasement to leave the child with him. Maybe she knew it was either her or the child – that there was no way they could both live.

Based on my vast experience with DV, I am of the opinion that perpetrators are brilliant actors, and will go to great lengths to cultivate a charming public persona, one that is very different to the person experienced by those he lives with.

The ethics of Valentines Day: why you should boycott.

Charming slave bracelet courtesy of Dear Lover

When I was a very young girl of fifteen, working full time in the local bakery, I unexpectedly received a box of orchids from one of the male workers who had been preying on me. I was so excited. I asked my boss, a wise woman who had escaped a violent husband and moved to Sydney from the country to start over, what I might have done to deserve this honour. She looked cynical and replied “It’s more about what you’ll have to do”.

Valentines Day – it’s harmful on so many levels that I need to keep the focus of this post narrow lest I be sat here all day. National Pronging Day would be a better title for it. Dude, pressured by masculinist propaganda, forks out a shitload to persuade the unforunate woman he prongs or aspires to prong, that today of all days she must succumb to social pressure and offer up her body for his personal use. He’s paid good money for it after all. He’s made the purchase of the obligatory red thing and carried it proudly through the town as a demonstration of his capacity to buy access to the female human body and PIV. Straights like to call it romance or love. I see it as re-gilding the cage for her but as badly as we might feel for hetshackled women at this time of year, the practice serves as a public reminder to ALL women of the neverending reign of male domination. She is socially and culturally obligated to grant access to her body every other day of the year, after all. Today is more about reinforcing ideas of gender power relations in the public sphere than about individual expressions of affection between drone-like hetcouples.

As if all this isn’t bad enough, it gets much worse when we peek beyond quaint hetwestern sex rituals and examine all of the other ways that Valentines Day reifies global patriarchal structures. Basically, V Day wouldn’t have morphed into the current nauseating circus that it is now, without the cut flower, chocolate and lingerie industries and their reliance on slave labour of women and children.

This piece by Adeline Lambert makes a powerful case against V Day. The article focuses on the cut flower industry in the americas but things are not all rosy here in australia either. In australia we have industrial regulations and employment laws to protect workers to a degree, however during peak and high demand times such as V Day, the market is saturated with imports from the countries mentioned in the article linked to above. Local growers are annoyed about this, not because of any ethical concerns about child labour of course, but because it hurts their profits. So people who purchase flowers for Valentines Day are most probably helping to sustain child slave labour in other countries or at the very least, the labour exploitation of large numbers of women and children.

When we talk about “death by chocolate” we’re not usually talking about human trafficking and slave labour. In the west, chocolate is heterocentric code for het sex.

Found here.

According to National Geographic, in 2010 47% of consumers were expected to purchase candy for V Day, and 75% of those purchases were expected to be in the form of sexy chocolate, which, according to antislavery.org means that Valentines-related chocolate purchases are directly supporting child slavery and abuse.

Finally, the lingerie industry, mass producer of women (and children’s) subordination uniforms, also relies heavily on slave and exploited labour of children. Rarely do we hear about forced labour of vulnerable peoples (well, except when a woman-bashing opportunity arises), and certainly not at times when it might put a dampener on our hetcentric festivities.

So we can see that what appears on the surface to be a fun day of lerv and romance for western straight folks, is actually playing a very significant role in upholding oppressive social structures and institutions. You might be flattered by a bunch of cheap red roses, or cheesy red satin, but access to those items is facilitated by a vast global capitalist system of abuse, violence, misery, poverty and exploitation of many millions of people, mostly women and children. People who actively buy into the bullshit are cheerfully supporting this. Anything other than actively seeking to abolish V Day is to show tacit approval of this dirty rotten system.

Still feeling sexy?