Australian PM Tony Abbott and why he is hated by the "Progressives"

Australia’s carbon tax has gone for good

Terry McCrann
Herald Sun
June 14 2014

TONY Abbott promised to stop the boats. They’ve been stopped.

Tony Abbott promised to abolish Julia Gillard and Christine Milne’s dishonest, punishing and utterly pointless carbon tax. When the Senate changes in two weeks, that now looks certain after Clive Palmer on Friday finally committed his four senators to abolition.

That leaves only fixing Labor’s debt and deficit budget mess to go, of the three big promises that the prime minister made in opposition.

That’s going to be harder to achieve and was always going to take longer. Obviously, it could never have been done in a single budget, even with an opposition prepared to behave responsibly; holding the government to account but also letting it govern.

We might not now get all the way back to a balanced budget in three or four years time — ultimately that outcome is hostage anyway to what happens in the US and China.

But whether or not the government gets some or all of its measures through a ‘recalcitrant’ Senate, the deficit and the debt WILL be smaller than would have been the case with a continuing Labor government.

It is also the case that the Budget promise was the least important of the three, for saving Australia from the disastrous course it was on under the Rudd, Gillard and Rudd governments.

The other two went to the fundamentals of our national sovereignty. Border protection, or in the famous words of John Howard — deciding who comes to our country — is the most basic issue of sovereignty. That’s true, whether we are talking of Japanese heading towards us in 1942, or ‘subcontracting’ our immigration policy to people smugglers in 2008-2013 as Rudd and Gillard did.

But the carbon tax was equally destructive of sovereignty. We had a government imposing a massive cost on both consumers and business, deliberately if mindlessly undermining the national economy.

At its most basic it was a government prepared to hand control of the future price of our carbon (dioxide) emissions — and so, of the price of our electricity and our key exports — over to European bureaucrats in Brussels.

Abolition of the carbon tax will deliver real cash savings to all Australians. The savings per year will go close to cancelling out ALL the cost increases imposed in the budget — if indeed they are actually imposed.

Arguably more importantly, abolition will take a great dead weight off business. It will also have huge political implications.

First off, it will demonstrate the benefit of wresting control of the Senate away from the destructive and dangerous control of the Labor-Green left combination.

Yes, we have ended up with all sorts of odds and sods holding the balance of power. They range from the rational and reasonable group of Nick Xenophon, Bob Day, David Leyonhjelm and John Madigan, to the ‘Palmer trio plus Ricky.’

But for all their oddities and particular agendas, they are NOT Christine Milne and Penny Wong.

The Prime Minister’s North American trip completely shredded the desperate lie that axing the tax would leave Australia isolated.

Despite the frenzied and quite hysterical ‘projections’ of the Fairfax press and the ABC, it did NOT put Abbott off-side with US President Barack Obama.

Indeed Obama specifically noted that Abbott had a mandate to abolish the tax — putting if anyone ‘off-side’ with him, the said Shorten, who refuses to accept Abbott’s mandate.

Abolition of the carbon tax will rule out any prospect of a double dissolution election. That means this Government will run its full term.

Yes, it might not be able to get some or even most of its Budget measures through the Senate, but they are all secondary. The really important thing is that we do NOT have a PM Rudd or Gillard — or indeed, Shorten — proposing NEW spending initiatives.

One absolutely important thing that has not been well understood — and why avoiding a DD election was so vital — is that the way the Senate vote works, this non-Labor-Green control of the Senate will last through the next parliament as well.

But it also importantly means that a returned Labor government would almost certainly not have a Labor-Green Senate majority.

Specifically, it would not be able to bring back the carbon tax. And by 2019 — the time of the next election — the whole global warming craziness will likely have imploded on its own unsustainability.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott meets US President Barack Obama in Washington DC this week.

Labor's Socialism's Multiculturalism: Fifth Column War against the Host Judeo Christian Western Democratic Nation

Trojan Horse debate: We were wrong, all cultures are not equal
For years, we all turned a blind eye to the segregation of Muslim pupils. Now it is time to stand up to propagators of barbarism and ignorance

Allison Pearson By Allison Pearson 
The Telegraph
11 Jun 2014

If I have learnt one thing working with children as a teacher, a volunteer and, more recently, a parent, it’s that what children want above all else is to fit in. The desire not to be different must be hard-wired, so urgent is the need of your average nine-year-old to have the same pencil case as every other nine-year-old. Individuality, much prized in adult life, is abhorred by our conservative juniors, who crave acceptance as the thirsty crave water. “Fitting in” is braided into the DNA of every child, regardless of creed or colour. When the deep, resonant bell of human evolution tolls, it says: “Belong, belong, belong.”



Integrating children into a new society, then, should not present too much of a problem. A football, some Panini World Cup stickers to trade, One Direction, Harry Potter, 97 episodes of Friends, especially the one where Rachel has a baby: common interests for youngsters are not hard to find. So how have we ended up with a situation where so many Muslims are adrift from the mainstream? Why this scandal in Birmingham where five overwhelmingly Muslim schools, some until recently judged to be outstanding, are to be put into special measures because they have sought to inculcate ideas that are repellent to this country?

Let me quote Myriam Francois-Cerrah, a writer and Muslim convert, who told Channel 4 News on Tuesday that she rejected calls by the Prime Minister and Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, for schools to promote British values. “In many ways, the problem is creating a hierarchy of cultures when you say you need to promote British values,” she objected. “What does that say to children in a classroom whose heritage harks from outside the British Isles? It says this country has superior moral values and you are coming from some backward culture whose values you … must not consider equal to our own.”

Funnily enough, that’s exactly what we are saying, Myriam. Spot on! A Muslim girl who winds up in Bolton or Luton should thank her lucky stars she doesn’t live in Sudan – or Pakistan, where, only last month, a woman was stoned to death by her family for the crime of marrying a man of whom they disapproved. Farzana Parveen’s father explained: “I killed my daughter as she had insulted all of our family by marrying a man without our consent, and I have no regret over it.”

Are British values superior to Mr Parveen’s? I do hope so.
Unfortunately, the great lie underpinning the creed of multiculturalism, as spouted by Francois‑Cerrah and her ilk, is that all cultures are “equally valid”. Well, patently, they’re not. The reason irate Pakistani patriarchs are not chucking bricks at their errant daughters in the Birmingham Bull Ring is because Britain has a basically uncorrupt police force, a robust judiciary and an enlightened, hard-won system of liberal values that regards women and girls as equals, not third-class citizens.

But instead of standing up to barbarism and ignorance, too often we have looked away in embarrassment or fear. How many teachers have averted their gaze when 13-year-old Muslim girls suddenly disappear from the classroom to be taken “home” for a forced marriage, because this would present unwelcome evidence that some cultures are less valid than others?

How many health professionals in Bradford are concerned, but never say so, that intermarriage in the Muslim community – 75 per cent of Pakistanis in the city are married to their first cousin – is causing babies to be born blind, deaf and with other disabilities? Back in 2008, when Labour environment minister Phil Woolas said that British Pakistanis were fuelling the rate of birth defects, he was slapped down by Downing Street, with a spokesman for prime minister Gordon Brown saying the issue was not one for ministers to comment on. Government after government has filed this thorny issue in “The Too Difficult Box”, the title of a timely new book edited by former Cabinet minister Charles Clarke.

This was all so predictable. Back in the summer of 1981, I was working in a primary school in west London where the children were dizzy with excitement about Prince Charles and Lady Di. The royal wedding was a great unifying event, but there was one group of pupils who were not allowed to fit in. The little Muslim girls did not wear cool, gingham-checked dresses in the heat like the others. Instead, they were dressed in the winter uniform – a polo neck and tunic worn over strictly non-uniform trousers and thick tights. As far as I could tell, no teacher dared challenge this clear breach of school rules. In a similar spirit, it was accepted that the Muslim girls could not attend the weekly swimming lesson.

When a trip was planned to Hampton Court, the children were told they would be seeing Henry VIII’s bed. Somehow, the word “bed”, coupled with the humongously horny Henry, set off alarm bells among Muslim parents, who withdrew their sons and daughters from the outing. This irrational boycott was tolerated. I remember thinking how awful and sad it was that liberal, white teachers didn’t stick up for the Muslim children’s right to play a full part in the life of their country.

It made me angry when I was practically a child myself, and it makes me even angrier now, 30 years on, thinking of the lost decades when good people did nothing to prevent the toxic situation outlined this week by the chief inspector of schools. Music and dancing banned in a primary school because they are un-Islamic. Muslim pupils not allowed to study Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing because it shows young people falling in love and marrying. A preacher who believes homosexuals should be stoned to death invited to address an assembly – in a British school in a British town, forsooth. Children as young as six told that Western women are “white prostitutes”, if you please.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, the Ofsted chief, said that hardline Islamists wanted to impose a “narrow, faith-based ideology” on schools in Birmingham, though clearly the problem is not confined to one city. Now Bradford, Luton and east London are being investigated.
And still our politicians will not face up to what multiculturalism has unleashed: one of the biggest peacetime challenges ever faced by Britain. Nick Clegg, at his most ineffectually Fotherington-Thomas, says he is “sure that all parents will support a wide curriculum”. As if. The promised “dawn-raid” school inspections, which will not give schools time to stage Christian lessons to fool Ofsted inspectors, are too little, too late.

Growing suggestions that all faith schools should be banned because some Muslims cannot be trusted to prepare their children for life in contemporary society are simply outrageous. Why should Catholic, Jewish and Church of England schools, which provide a terrific, disciplined learning environment for millions of children, be forced to cease their good work and shut down? Why must the tolerant be made to carry the can for the intolerable?

The crisis in Birmingham made me look up Ray Honeyford. The headmaster of a school in Bradford, Honeyford published an article highly critical of multiculturalism around the same time that I was wondering why Muslim girls in west London weren’t allowed to learn how to swim. Honeyford was damned as a racist and forced to take early retirement, but how prophetic his words seem now. The alarmed headmaster referred to a “growing number of Asians whose aim is to preserve as intact as possible the values of the Indian subcontinent within a framework of British social and political privilege”. Honeyford questioned the wisdom of the local education authority in allowing such practices as the withdrawal of children from school for months at a time, in order to go “home” to Pakistan, on the grounds that this was appropriate to the children’s native culture.

“Those of us working in Asian areas,” he wrote, “are encouraged, officially, to 'celebrate linguistic diversity’ – ie, applaud the rapidly mounting linguistic confusion in these growing number of city schools in which British-born Asian children begin their mastery of English by being taught in Urdu.”
Ray Honeyford died in 2012, so he didn’t live to see the Leeds secondary school where every single pupil, including a handful of white ones, is being taught English as a foreign language. He didn’t need to see it. He knew it would happen, and what the cost would be, and his warnings were shouted down or put away in the Too Difficult Box.

I think the battle we must fight now really has very little to do with sincere religious belief. It’s about social control, repression, misogyny and cruelty. The battle is about Kamaljit, a 14-year-old girl I once taught, who chided me when I read the class a story about snakes in India, like the good, clueless multiculturalist that I was. “Please, Miss, we don’t like that stuff,” she said. “We’re English. We like ice skating.”

We have to expose Muslim children to as wide a range of experiences as possible so they will feel the gravitational pull of British values. If a Devon primary school recently criticised by Ofsted for not being multicultural enough (yes, really) can arrange a horizon-broadening trip to the inner city, then surely it’s time that Birmingham and Bradford came to Hereford and Hampshire. It was Rodgers and Hammerstein who observed in South Pacific: “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear / You’ve got to be taught from year to year / It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear / You’ve got to be carefully taught. / You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late / Before you are six or seven or eight / To hate all the people your relatives hate / You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
But there is another song, and a better one, and children will learn it if they are only given the chance: Belong, belong, belong.

Pious Islamic Paedophiles "It is the young flesh they want"

Pious Islamic Paedophiles "It is the young flesh they want"

‘It is the young flesh they want’

Anne Barrowclough 
The Australian
June 14 2014


ON a hot summer’s day earlier this year, a beautiful young Pakistani girl named Amina stood in the living room of her western Sydney home, listening in horror as her father explained how he planned to ­murder her.

“I am going to kill you now, right here!” he shouted at the 16-year-old. “And no one will say anything about what I do to you. I am too powerful in the community.” Amina’s parents had promised her to a man 13 years her senior and she had made the mistake of refusing to marry him. Her arguments would not sway her father and even when her husband-to-be beat her in front of him, her dad remained ­resolute, telling her: “He is already your ­husband in front of God.”

“She adored her father but he believed that by refusing to marry this man, she was ­damaging the honour of the family,” says Eman ­Sharobeem, manager of the Immigrant Women’s Health Service in Fairfield, Sydney. “I have no doubt that he would have killed her if I hadn’t intervened.” Amina might have been raised in Australia, adopting the attitude and dress of her teenage friends, but to her father she was “just a good sale item, a stunningly beautiful girl who would bring a good dowry”.

The child’s father eventually agreed to spare his daughter’s life — not out of any sense of mercy, Sharobeem says, but because he realised it would be difficult to kill the girl and get away with it. So he packed Amina off to Pakistan, where she has been held in his family’s home for the past two months. “She texted me the other day,” says Sharobeem. “She said, ‘They won’t kill me because they know you know. But they will keep me here until I agree to marry that man.” Her last text said: “I might give in.”

For years, child marriage in this country has been hidden under layers of culture and tradition in tight-knit communities — a fringe issue that’s been difficult to gauge and hard to investigate. Then came news of a 12-year-old girl who was “married” in January to a 26-year-old Lebanese university student in an Islamic ­ceremony at the girl’s home in NSW’s Hunter ­Valley, and the layers of secrecy began to peel away. On best estimates, the number of girls in Australia being forced into marriage here or overseas is in the hundreds every year. Girls as young as 12 or 13 are disappearing from schoolyards, packed off to the countries of their parents’ birth to wed men they have never met, while others are taken from their homes in southern Asia and the Middle East and brought into Australia to marry.

The National Children’s and Youth Law Centre has identified 250 cases of under-age marriage over the past 24 months, while ­Sharobeem, who was herself married to a cousin at the age of 14, says there are at least 60 child wives living in south-western Sydney alone. In Melbourne, Melba Marginson, executive director of the Victorian Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Coalition (VIRWC), says she sees 150 women a week who are in forced and ­violent marriages, many of them married off when they were still children. “But what we are seeing is only the tip of the iceberg,” she says.

Those within the communities say the problem is greater than even these campaigners believe it to be. Alia Sultana, a Pakistani ­Hazara woman who works with Afghan ­Hazaras in Melbourne, told me: “I would say nearly every Afghan Hazara family in ­Melbourne is involved in this practice.” ­Sultana, who fled the Taliban two years ago with her family, added: “I only know about these girls because I am also a ­Hazara, and the other women tell me about them. They are kept prisoners, locked in their husbands’ homes and only allowed out if their mothers-in-law go with them, so they can never seek help.”

I am in a shopping mall in Dandenong, Melbourne, a vibrant area with a mix of migrant communities. With me is Badria, a pretty young Afghan woman who has lived in Australia almost all her life. One evening when she was just 15 years old, Badria was cooking with her mother in their Dandenong home when her father came in and hugged her. “Congratulations,” he told her. “You are engaged!” The man to whom she was promised was a friend of her 28-year-old brother, who had promised to help his mate leave Afghanistan and move to Australia. “My brother used me to get his friend an Australian visa,” says Badria. “But I didn’t know that at the time. I was so young I didn’t know what was happening to me. All I knew was that I didn’t want to get married yet.

“I wanted to make something of my life,” she says. “But in our culture you obey your father. I would not have thought of saying no to the marriage. On the day of the wedding, standing there marrying this guy, I felt helpless, trapped and scared. But I remember thinking, ‘If I say anything against this, I will shame the family’s name.’ ” Badria, who regarded herself as Australian, had hoped to finish school before she was married but she’d known her chances were slim: her mother was 14 and still playing with dolls on her wedding day. With two older sisters, Badria had expected to have more time to enjoy her teen years. “I knew my brother wanted his friend to marry one of us sisters; I had heard my parents discussing it,” she says. “But I was third in the [marriage] queue so I thought it would be one of the older girls.”

So why was she chosen? “That’s what I asked my mother. Why me? And my mother said because I was still so young and naive. She said, ‘You are a good girl, you are very quiet and ­sabore [patient]’. In our community, men like to marry very young girls because they can induct the girl into their lifestyle. Because she’s so young, she will soon forget her childhood and she will never question her husband. She is taken into her husband’s family and is told, ‘This is where your real life starts.’”

Later, I ask Sharobeem why children are so desirable as wives. She says her own husband had told her: “I take you as young clay so I can shape you the way I want. But really,” she adds, “it is the young flesh that they want.”

Badria’s marriage was brutishly violent. While her father persuaded his son-in-law to let Badria continue her education, she missed many days at school because of black eyes and bleeding lips. “I used to tell the teachers I had to stay home because I had a fever. They never thought I was married because I was so young, but I’m sure my friends knew. It was probably happening to them, too, but none of us talked about it. There is so much happening in our community that no one talks about. There are girls like me in every school in Dandenong. There are a lot of stories like mine, but it is a hidden thing.”

When Badria was four months pregnant, her husband beat her so badly — kicking her in the stomach with his metal-tipped work boots — that she lay in a corner, unable to move for a day and a night. The baby was born with severe heart problems and Badria is convinced it was the beating that did that damage. Soon after, she sought safety in a refuge with her baby. The little girl died, aged just eight months.

Badria shows me a picture of the infant, with her huge dark eyes and long curly hair, and sobs as she talks about her loss. She says the only thing that saved her from suicide was her parents’ decision to take her back to live with them. Badria insists they knew nothing about her ­husband’s violence until these last sad months. “So many times my father has kissed my hands and said, ‘I’m so sorry, my daughter, for putting you through this.’ But my brother never apologised. He didn’t think any of it was his fault. He only ever said: ‘I found you a husband.’ ”

Badria’s decision to leave her marriage makes her an exception in a community where the sense of duty is so strong that most girls would not refuse their parents’ wishes, and where the fear of fathers and husbands is so great that they will not flee even the most violent of ­marriages. The fear is very real; Amina is not the only girl whom Sharobeem has saved from a potential honour killing.

Recently, she was contacted by a mother whose 17-year-old daughter had shamed the family by having a boyfriend. The mother had heard her husband and son discussing whether to kill the girl or marry her off overseas. “This mother said, ‘I’m afraid she will run away and they will definitely kill her if she does.’” When Sharobeem went to visit the family, the girl’s father told her: “It would be better for everyone if she dies.” His son said, vehemently, “If it was up to me I would kill her right now. Either we throw her away [marry her off overseas to ­whoever would take her] or we kill her.”

This young man, who had been educated in Australia and knows Australian laws and values, explained: “She has shamed me and my family. I will be the joke of my peers — they will be laughing at me for the rest of my life. She has not only shamed me, she has shamed my future. No one will come near us now.”

The concept of honour underlines all areas of life in these strongly patriarchal communities. “It is important to protect their creed, their family, their honour and that’s why honour ­killings occur,” says Sarita Kulkarni, from the VIRWC. Panditji Abhay Awasthi, chairman of the Hindu Foundation of Australia, told me: “I am sure there are honour killings happening in Melbourne and in Sydney.” Awasthi, who counsels hundreds of young Melbourne women trapped in violent marriages, says he has become suspicious of a number of deaths and apparent suicides in the community.

“Honour killings happen in India and people have brought this culture here to Australia,” he says. “It is also going on in the Pakistan Punjab community. Last year I was told that families were taking their daughters back to Pakistan, and no one ever heard from them again. We are sure they’ve been killed, but it’s very hard to prove this is happening. Even those who are being tortured by their families don’t talk because that will only put them at further risk.”

Sharobeen says: “I have already saved two girls and failed to save one woman from murder. The violent enforcement against women in some of these communities is well known, and it is accepted. People don’t believe it is wrong.”

The woman Sharobeem was unable to save was a Coptic Christian who went to her mother for help after suffering daily beatings from her husband. But the girl’s mother brushed her concerns aside, telling her: “So what? Your father beats me.” The woman left her husband, but was persuaded to return to him by the ­family priest. Days later, the husband took her to a motel, drugged her, had sex with her and then murdered her.

This is the atmosphere in which young girls are growing up, only a few kilometres from the sophisticated centres of our major cities. “We are not in the suburbs of Kabul or Baghdad, but in Sydney,” says Sharobeem, but to all intents and purposes many of her clients could be ­living back in the cities of their parents’ birth.

The practice of underage marriage crosses cultural and religious lines. It is prevalent in western and sub-Saharan Africa, and in South Asia; for example, it’s estimated more than half of the girls in Bangladesh, Mali, Mozambique and Niger are married before the age of 18. One in nine girls will be under the age of 15.

Many of the women and girls Sharobeem deals with speak little or no English and the suppression of women is so inculcated that in many cases they themselves see nothing wrong with it. “I’ve heard men telling new arrivals, ‘It is our duty to keep the women away from the bad influences here and not let them learn ­English’,” says Sharobeem. “And both men and women believe they must treat their children harshly and marry them off early to keep them safe in a society where everything is loose.”

Many of those I spoke to, in Indian, Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani communities, stressed the difference between “arranged” marriages, where the girls’ consent was sought before an engagement could take place, and “forced” marriage. Many, including teenage girls, spoke eloquently of the advantage of arranged marriages over the Western version. One Hazara girl told me: “My friend’s ­sister is 15 and has just become engaged. But there is nothing wrong with that. She has given her consent and she probably won’t actually be married for a few years.”

However, others point out there is a fine line between the two. “There is a lot of manipulation,” says Manjula O’Connor, director of the Australasian Centre for Human Rights and Health. “Mothers tell their children that they will kill themselves unless the child agrees to the marriage. Some arranged marriages are done well but in others, the young people have no choice. They are effectively forced into the marriage.”

In February last year parliament passed the Slavery Act, which introduced the new offence of forced marriage; by its very nature child ­marriage was always ­illegal. Yet it would be wrong to suggest that even under-age marriages are planned with malevolence. Most parents genuinely want the best for their children and marry them to men whom they believe will be good husbands. Sharobeem’s father married her to an older cousin because he thought the cousin would keep her safe; Badria’s parents, too, believed that she would be cared for by her brother’s friend. Others marry off their girls to save them from what they see as the much worse fate of having a relationship outside of marriage, in the mistaken belief that as soon as a girl menstruates she is ready for sex.

Both Sharobeem and Marginson told me of being berated by men and women who accused them of encouraging children into sin by their campaigns against child brides. Instead, these ­people argued, once a girl was menstruating, she had to be married off quickly to protect her and her family’s honour. “One day when I was on the radio, a man rang to say: ‘You want our girls to have sex without getting married, and that makes you a sinner’,” says Sharobeem. “I had to tell him, ‘Having your period doesn’t mean you’re ready to have children’.”

In the Hunter Valley case involving the 12-year-old girl, court documents allege the father (an Australian man described as a Muslim convert) told police his main concern was that his ­daughter might commit “a sin against God” by having sex outside marriage. He allegedly ­consented to the marriage — even providing her with sexual advice — because she was beginning to “become excited around boys” and he didn’t want her to live “a sinful life”.

The father, and the girl’s “husband” — who has been charged with 25 counts of sexual intercourse with a child — are due to appear in court again on June 18. The imam who conducted the ceremony was fined $500 and is awaiting deportation.

Some families marry their girls off for mercenary reasons; they’re “sold” to men who will pay a large dowry for a young bride with an Australian visa. Hundreds of girls are brought into the country at the age of 17 under the Prospective Spouse Visa program, whose rules insist that a marriage must take place within nine months.

In a case reported in 2011, a Year 10 Lebanese girl brought to Australia was told by her family she would be “slaughtered and killed” if she didn’t marry her husband-to-be, although he was a violent drunk who already had another wife and three children.

Some brave girls stand up for themselves: in 2011, a 16-year-old Sydney girl applied successfully to be put on the Airport Watch List to prevent her parents from taking her to Lebanon to be married. A 13-year-old who told teachers at her Melbourne school that she was to be ­married was also put on the Watch List.

But girls who go against their parents’ wishes not only face rejection by their family but by their communities, who collude to keep them suppressed and silent. When I asked why girls did not leave violent, ­abusive husbands, I was told repeatedly, “The community will throw her away.”

Leyla, an Iraqi woman who at the age of 12 was taken off the street where she was playing, dusted down and taken into her engagement ceremony, is still with her brutal husband despite years of cruelty. Days after her wedding, furious that his child bride was refusing to have sex with him, and frustrated at his family’s demands to see blood on their sheets to prove her virginity, Leyla’s ­husband took a knife and slashed her vagina to provide his family with the all-important blood token. She was just 13 when she bore the first of her five sons.

Today, her face and body are disfigured: her broken jaw makes her face lopsided, and a dislocated shoulder hangs lower than the other. She is scarred inside and out by her husband’s brutality and her own self-harm. She weeps throughout our interview, and swears to me that she will leave her husband once her youngest son is married. But if she does, the community will turn on her. “I will never be able to marry again. It is impossible,” she whispers.

O’Connor describes the societal ­pressure on young girls as “the super-eye of the culture”. She explains: “You are not allowed to move too far out of it. If you do, or if you disobey their rules, not only are you excluded from your own society but so are your parents and family. No one will want to marry your sisters, and your brothers will be laughed at. The pressure on the girls is so enormous that they tend to behave themselves and don’t leave the family tradition.”

The power of the communities is so strong that Sharobeem, ­Marginson and the professionals who refer cases to them have to keep much of their work clandestine. When I ask Sharobeem to put me in touch with a doctor who has sent a number of child brides to her centre, she shakes her head. “He would never work in the ­community again,” she says. When I argue that his name would not be printed, she shakes her head again. “But the community will know.”

What makes it even harder is that so many women still accept it. There’s a saying they use for the wedding night: “Kill the cat to slaughter the cat.” Says Sharobeem: “The cat is the young bride and the saying means she must have her self-esteem slaughtered from day one so she will never raise her voice or have her say.”

Sarah, an 18-year-old Pakistani, tells me: “Girls know the first five years of marriage are a struggle. They are under so much pressure to make their marriage work that they don’t even think that what is happening to them is wrong. They think [violence] is just what happens.”

All those fighting for the rights of migrant women believe education is the key: not just a Western education, but teaching them that they don’t have to endure violent marriages. “These women feel very isolated,” says Nga Hosking, community development officer of the VIRWC. “They don’t realise they have the right to come out and ask for help. If they try to knock on one door and that shuts on them, they will not try again. It’s our job to teach them that they will get help if they knock.”

But it’s never an easy task. One woman told O’Connor: “Learning about my rights has made it harder for me because I still can’t leave. It was easier when I thought this was just what happened — I could stick my head in the sand and put up with it.”

“It is critical that the whole community is educated,” says Jennifer Burn of Anti-Slavery Australia. “The Koran does not support child marriage and the Grand Mufti of Australia says that consent is vital. But there are over 60 different traditions within the Muslim community, with different interpretations of the religious scriptures. We need the religious leaders to take the message into the communities, because they will listen to their leaders rather than us.”

There have been advances; some imams have begun to preach against underage marriage and teachers are now more aware of the issue. In the Hindu community, Panditji Awasthi and his colleagues try to convince women that it is not wrong to leave violent marriages. Thanks to programs run by organisations such as the VIRWC and the Immigrant Women’s Health Service, young girls are learning that they don’t have to agree to be married before they are ready and their parents are also being taught that the practice is cruel.

But there is still a very steep path to climb. One afternoon I find myself in Dandenong drinking tea and eating traditional Hazara cakes with the women of the Sultana family as they explain to me why the young girls brought from Afghanistan and married to men far older than themselves won’t seek help. Alia Sultana makes the most devastating point.

“These girls are just happy that they don’t have to get up at 5am to clean the house and work in the fields anymore,” she says. “In Australia they have a bed to sleep in; they have a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner. They don’t mind if their husband is violent and they will never try to get help because they are just happy to be out of Afghanistan.”