The men from Uncle making a difference in boys' lives

A mentoring project for boys with absent fathers is struggling to stay afloat, writes Saffron Howden. When Luke Chamberlain's father died suddenly of a heart attack while surfing near Byron Bay two years ago, the nine-year-old was left with his twin sisters and a loving mother. It wasn't enough. He needed a male guide: someone to take him hiking, camping and surfing; someone to talk about cars, movies, sport and girls.

An uncle was the obvious choice - and Uncle, a unique community group that for nearly 15 years has helped hundreds of boys with absent or fickle fathers find adult male mentors, provided just that. "There's a lot of boys growing up without father figures around; some of them are slack, some of them have left, some have gone off with other women," Uncle's chief executive, Mark Gasson, said. "[Uncle is] never a replacement for a dad, but it's someone in their life that they can call and say, 'I'm having this crisis."

Special schools a fast track to prison

Boys are being segregated from the mainstream school system for behavioural and emotional disorders at about six times the rate of girls. A study by Macquarie University researchers has found a disturbing pattern suggesting specialist behaviour schools may act as a "school-to-prison pipeline", in which students do not return to mainstream classes but enter juvenile justice centres.

The proportion of boys in special classes rises as diagnosis of their condition becomes more subjective, with boys accounting for 85 per cent of students in special schools with behavioural and emotional disorders. The enrolment pattern for students with behaviour disorders in juvenile justice facilities mirrors the trend in special schools, with enrolments for boys rising steeply from 13 on.

Dr Graham said the similarities of the trend in behaviour disorders and juvenile justice involvement raised the question of whether behaviour schools "precipitate movement down a school-to-prison pipeline. Reports suggest that these kids are being sent into holding pens. They're becoming repositories for kids ... and once they go in, it appears a high proportion are not coming ... out. These are kids who are disengaging because they're not learning at the rate of their peers in the first school years."

Big Buddy - help a boy become a man (NZ)

Big Buddy mentoring is based on the simple philosophy that boys need good male role models in their lives to become good men. Unfortunately, many boys do not have a father or other male role model in their lives and while mothers do courageous work in raising their boys alone, they cannot model maleness. And above all else, boys learn through modelling. A simple solution is to match these boys with a well-screened male mentor who can foster a relationship similar to that of say an uncle; a relationship we hope is for life. To do this we recruit men from the community to act as voluntary mentors to these fatherless boys. The Big Buddy mentor commits to spending 2-3 hours a week with a boy (Little Buddy, aged 7-12) for at least a year but all going well, for much longer than that. They spend quality time together doing ordinary things like kicking a ball round a park, fishing, walking on the beach or visiting a museum. The content of the outings is not important - just showing up regularly, listening to and being with a Little Buddy is probably the most important gift a Big Buddy gives. They can both have a lot of fun in the process! A regular weekly phone call adds continuity to the relationship.

Former primary teacher molested boys in tent

The Victorian County Court has heard a former primary school teacher molested two Grade 3 students in a backgarden tent while her family was at home. After a three week trial, a jury found 59-year-old Josephine Greensill from Altona Meadows guilty of nine counts of indecent assault. Yesterday, the Crown urged a judge to jail her for at least five years for the offences committed in the late 1970s. She was a 29-year-old teacher at a school in Melbourne's outer east when she invited the 8-year-old boys to her home. While her then husband and three children were inside the house, she had sex with the boys in a tent outside. Prosecutor John Livitsanos told the court the eight-year-olds "really didn't know what was going on and weren't in tune with what sex was".

Woman offered 14-year-old sex, drugs on flight (USA)

A Chicago area father claims in a lawsuit that Southwest Airlines failed to protect his teenage son from an older female passenger who made sexual advances and offered him illegal drugs during a flight two years ago. The incident occurred on a July 2008 flight from Chicago's Midway Airport to Orlando, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court. The boy, who was 14 at the time, asked flight attendants to switch his seat multiple times but "was emphatically told no," the lawsuit said. "This was a little boy who was flying alone who was really, you know, in the care and custody of that airline," the family's attorney, Jeffrey Deutschman, said in a telephone interview. "They failed to protect him. They allowed an individual to get intoxicated on that flight. That person was harassing my client sexually as well as trying to give him drugs. He was a very scared little boy."