Articles tagged with "child"

At the end of part one, charities that used child sponsorship were facing a period of transition, both at home and in the countries they served. Conflicts throughout Asia during this time obviously hampered child charity operations, regardless of their fundraising model: World Vision had to abandon operations in Vietnam and Cambodia, and SOS Children's Villages had two of their villages taken over by the Vietnamese government in 1976. The retreat from parts of Asia experiencing war or other conflicts would be a boon for other countries, although World Vision described having to abandon 23,000 sponsored children with their retreat. By the 1980s child sponsorship would surge again, as millions of dollars in humanitarian aid was sent to anyone and everyone working in, or singing about, Ethiopia during the famines of the early-to-mid 1980s.

Many of us who grew up with access to a TV may remember long ads that flashed through scenes of shanty towns, dirt roads, dishevelled children, and emaciated infants too exhausted to respond to the flies landing on their faces. These edits are followed by a B- or C-list celebrity exhorting viewers to sponsor a child for as little as $1 a day. Sally Struthers' long partnerships with the Christian Children's Fund (formerly China's Child Fund, now just ChildFund) and Save The Children (which officially discontinued their sponsorship programme in January 2026) come to mind:

A research paper published in February 2025 by Carrie Leonetti from the University of Auckland (UoA) School of Law looked at how judges, lawyers and psychologists use social science research in the New Zealand Family Court. This was published in the Indiana Health Law Review. In the abstract it states:

It started innocently, with a late-night doom scroll through Instagram stories when the following reel, cross-posted from TikTok, appeared:

It has been a busy week for me, and today has been the first day I've been able to unwind and reflect on everything that has happened. It has been good, but it has been a week bookended by two conferences, a board meeting, and a UFO lecture where I've had to do a lot of code-switching from professional skeptic, to professional disabled/Autistic person, to skeptical UFO enthusiast, to midwifery PhD researcher and lecturer, and finally back to skeptic. I am unreserved in enjoying the DeCult conference, and am pretty happy that I got to see 95% of the talks I wanted to see.

It has been a while since I wrote about pseudoscience and scams around curing Autism, but that doesn't mean I haven't been collecting a whopper or two to share.

During our “very special” episode of the Yeah…Nah podcast with Anke Richter, Anke referred to an anti-cult organisation that was taken over by Scientology. The group she was referring to was the Citizen's Freedom Foundation / Cult Awareness Network (CAN), which was founded by Ted Patrick in 1978. Although he had no formal education or training, Patrick was a pioneer of deprogramming, which he developed in response to the expansion of various cults and religion movements throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Deprogramming was always controversial, but seen as a necessary evil by many parents who paid Patrick and others like him to return their (often adult) children to them. Methods employed by Patrick and others included abduction, sleep and food deprivation, emotional abuse, desecration of symbols of the detainee's faith, and sometimes physical violence.

I saw a Facebook post from a friend that caught my interest. A weird thing happened to him on the morning of the 17th of April; he explained it as something from a horror movie. He had a doorbell where he had never put batteries in the ringer unit, but despite the lack of batteries at 6:30 am it started to ring, and continued to ring as he picked it up and shook it to double check it didn't have batteries. Indeed, it didn't.

If you listened to the February 8th episode of the Yeah…Nah Podcast, then this profile should not come as a surprise.

Newsletter readers and podcast listeners have probably picked up by now that my errand run takes me into stores and up aisles that many skeptics wouldn't tread (unless you are Mark Honeychurch). For every bit of silliness, such as ceremonial cacao and at-home hormonal tests, the local organic shop has also been a reliable stockist of feminine hygiene products and long-lasting cleaning products that, until recently, were unavailable in normie New Zealand supermarkets. One such product that I've always kept under the bathroom sink is a bottle of Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap. If the name doesn't sound familiar, then maybe you know its infamous blue and white label:

On Friday night just over a week ago I went to a Save Our Children meeting. Now, most people will read that and think I've been a civic-minded citizen, going along to a charity meeting. Save Our Children is a good thing, right? To which the answer is no, because Save OUR Children is not the same thing as the established charity “Save THE Children”.

We've covered the Peter Ellis case before, and indeed, it was a particular focus of NZ Skeptics activity in the 1990s.

So, back to COVID vaccines. This past week has seen a huge amount of activity in anti-vax circles.

I'm sure most people know the story of the Tiger King, a documentary series which became required viewing last year around the world when many countries went into lockdown. The series followed Joe Exotic, a flamboyant character who ran a big cat attraction and ended up behind bars for some of his questionable life decisions.

This week has seen the introduction of the Traffic Light System to replace the COVID lockdown levels currently in place. This will take effect once all of the country's DHB's achieve a 90% fully vaccinated rate for their populations.

I naively thought that the whole QAnon movement would fall apart after Trump lost his bid for re-election. For those who have somehow not heard about QAnon before, it's a conspiracy that started in the US a few years ago, and is supposed to be the writings of a high-level government insider who leaks secrets via hidden meaning and codes in his messages. However, it's been obvious since the start that QAnon is not an insider, but just a made up persona used to promote right wing ideas and Donald Trump in particular. As Wikipedia says:

This past week has seen an appeal of the Peter Ellis child sex abuse case being heard in the Supreme Court.

I'm sure Alex Jones is no stranger to most skeptics. The Info Wars host has an illustrious history of pushing nonsense ideas about the US - from the ridiculous (chemicals in the water supply are turning the frogs gay) to the downright dangerous (restriction of gun rights will cause a second revolution in the US). And somewhere in the midst of all that nonsense, Alex Jones decided to start pushing the ridiculous theory that the Sandy Hook massacre of school children in the US was a false flag operation, secretly organised by the government as a way to push for tighter gun controls.

The Secular Education Network, a group of parents and others who are passionate about ensuring the Education Act's promise of secular education in schools is realised, have just released a document reminding schools of their new obligations after the law was changed last year:

One of the myths (and there are a lot of them) continually pushed by those opposed to vaccination, is that “the MMR vaccine causes autism” – often coupled with claims that “there are no studies comparing the health of vaccinated & unvaccinated children”. (That's another myth, by the way.)

In the last issue of this publication it was mentioned some skeptics were pulling out of this talk due to the nature of the allegations against Lawrence Krauss. He was accused of sexually assaulting a number of women. That case continues, and his name persists in the link to the show at the Isaac Theatre Royal.

An Indonesian teenager has apparently "baffled" doctors by laying eggs. He's laid about 20 eggs over the last 2 years, and x-ray images show an egg inside him before he lays it. The x-ray image makes it unlikely that sleight of hand is involved - he's probably not pretending to produce an egg from internally, but actually just making it appear in his hand at the right time.

As a parent, I know what it's like to worry about whether you are doing the right thing for your child. When my daughter was born, I couldn't quite believe that after just a few days in hospital we'd be going home in sole charge of a small infant. Didn't they realise we were unqualified?!

I'm hoping that the anti-GMO crowd don't sink the new GMO banana before it has a chance to be properly tested. The banana has had genes inserted that allow it to create alpha and beta carotenes, which allow our bodies to create vitamin A, which should help some of the quarter of a million children who die every year due to a lack of the vitamin.

A mother in the US was found by doctors to be causing her child to fall ill because she was taking pills made from her own placenta. A company in the US makes the pills from dried placenta, and you supply them with your placenta after your child's birth.

An Australian woman with a newborn has passed whooping cough onto her daughter, and now wishes she'd taken the vaccine she was offered:

There was a Republican candidate debate on Wednesday, and I thought it would be good to look at the wrong-headed thinking of some of the candidates regarding vaccines.

I've heard it said more than once that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) 'does no harm'. I suppose that could be true of a healthy person using something like homeopathy, where the only harm is likely to be to their wallet. But time and again, forms of CAM have been shown to do harm, and now we hear of another tragic, and fatal, case.

As a teacher, it's unsurprising that I often come face to face with issues to do with children. I don't pretend to be an expert on children, and neither am I a parent, pediatrician or psychologist. However, while the government is making their laws, and social media is debating the ins and outs, and parents are wailing about their parenting rights, I have been there with the kid who has nothing for breakfast, the kid who thinks hitting is a way to solve problems, and the kid who thinks a certain way because that's what his mum and dad think.

Matthew Willey finds it difficult to get into the spirit of the holiday season.

The world-wide panic over the MMR vaccine was sparked by the actions of one doctor who breached several standards of scientific practice. This article is based on a presentation to the 2010 NZ Skeptics conference.

Alison Campbell reviews a study of why so many struggle with scientific concepts.

A Christchurch para-normal investigator says Canterbury's September 4 earthquake has more than doubled the number of reported supernatural events in the province (The Press, 8 November).

Spirits are increasingly making their presence felt in New Zealand, spurred on by celebrity ghost whisperers, says the Manawatu Standard (12 April).

Waikato University biological sciences lecturer Alison Campbell posts a regular blog on matters biological (sci.waikato.ac.nz/bioblog/). Her aim is to encourage critical thinking among secondary students. We think these need sharing.

Today, gonorrhoea infections in young girls are taken as certain evidence of sexual abuse. Yet there is an extensive but now-forgotten literature showing that this is not necessarily the case. This article is based on a presentation to the NZ Skeptics 2008 conference in Hamilton, September 26-28.

For those of us who learnt of the tragedy through the media, the anguish and grief of the family who lost their two youngest children in the icy depths of Lake Wakatipu is painful even to imagine. We know their lives will never be the same again. So it was comforting to read that the people of Glenorchy are doing what close-knit communities always do in times of adversity.

One possible source of the outlandish reports given by children in cases such as the Christchurch Civic Creche affair was described at the 2003 Skeptics' Conference.

A Feng Shui practitioner who died while on a life mastery course in Fiji was ready to leave his body, his widow believes. Stephanie Challis, pictured in the Nelson Mail (11 December 2002) smiling happily with her three children, told how her 41 year old husband Will had undergone a course of body cleansing which involved colonic hydrotherapy and drinking quantities of good quality water.

Professor JS Werry deserves thanks for his contribution in these pages regarding the present use/abuse of methylphenidate (Ritalin) and ADHD.

Two recent items in the overseas press show that NZ is lagging behind in recognising that the child sex abuse panic has been greatly overblown. In a case which closely paralleled the Christchurch Creche, Dawn Read and Christopher Lillie, Newcastle, were cleared in court of molesting children in a nursery eight years ago, says the Guardian (July 31). Despite this they were fired from their jobs and hounded into hiding by the media and the community. They have just won a libel case against the review team who assessed evidence from the children, the Newcastle City Council and the local Evening Chronicle.

It is hard to be sure what Mike Houlding is on about in his rather opaque letter but I gather that he is lumping the use of clairvoyants, homoeopathic remedies and ADHD under some collective rubric of quackery.

Damian Thompson argues that a tangle of folklore and urban legend, allied to a particular horror of paedophilia, has blinded many to the scientific facts

A Colorado colour therapist was jailed for 16 years after being found guilty of causing the death of a 16 year old girl. It must have been quite traumatic for the jury who watched a videotape of the session in which the girl begged for air and screamed that she was dying". What we need in New Zealand are equally tough laws that protect children from acts of omission, particularly where children are denied safe and effective medical treatment in favour of ludicrous quackery. (Dominion June 20th, Hokum Locum #59)

Being a skeptical parent in New Zealand isn't always easy, but it has its rewards. This was originally presented to the Skeptics' World Convention in Sydney, in November.

The Prevalence of HIV disease has continued to increase across the African continent and is a major public health concern due to cultural attitudes to sexuality and a degree of poverty which precludes effective pharmacological interventions. A quack Nigerian surgeon has been charging patients US$1000-1500 for a course of his vaccine which he claims has successfully treated 900 patients for HIV/AIDS. The Nigerian Academy of Sciences deemed the vaccine "untested and potentially dangerous". The Surgeon's response has been to allege that "he has been the victim of a conspiracy by transnational pharmaceutical companies, in league with the Nigerian Health Ministry, to steal his 'wonder vaccine'...." This is the familiar paranoid conspiracy theories of the quack.

It's my right as a parent to decide what is best for my child. After all, I'm a caring parent who dearly loves her children and would do only what is best for them.

Paper prepared for the 1999 Skeptics Conference, Auckland, 28-29 August.

This is an abridged version of Professor Hill's presentation to the 1998 Skeptics' Conference.

Chair-entity Vicki Hyde responds to a letter from a member who resigned from the society over the Skeptics' donation to the Peter Ellis Defence Fund. We reprint her letter as a clear statement of the Society's position on a controversial issue.

THE line which sharply demarks mainstream medicine from alternative medicine is the line of science. It is possible to cross that line, however. Any alternative treatment which is tested in a rigorous scientific manner and found to be safe and effective will be incorporated into mainstream medicine; it will have crossed the line.

One of the interesting things about the Skeptics is the wide range of opinions that can be found in our group -- not to mention the ever-readiness to express them. So I was interested to read Frank Haden's column on the conference and how he found it.

An article in the Tucson Citizen, May 18, 1994, about a teacher in Chicago tells a frightening cautionary tale. An extract follows:

Award-winning author and long-time Skeptic Margaret Mahy delivered the after-dinner speech at the 1993 Skeptics Conference. This is an abridged version of her talk.

There is a worldwide epidemic of satanic child abuse allegations. Are they true? Has satanic child abuse happened here in New Zealand?

(from the New Zealand Herald 1/5/90)