Sandra thought the amplified voice drifting into her kitchen came from the gelato vans that trundle along her suburban Melbourne street on Saturday mornings-until her son yelled, "There are men in masks outside." Seeing the four black-clad men, their faces hidden under caps and bandannas, Sandra spirited Peter to his room, dialed the police and yelled "I've got terrorists outside." But the police were already close by. The masked men had just paid a visit to Wendy, who lives in the same suburb, and officers had a copy of the letter one man was now reading through a megaphone while his companions distributed copies along Sandra's street. "Dear neighbor," the letter read, "Sandra has petitioned for divorce without reason, shamed her family and introduced an immoral stranger to her son. We the Blackshirts will not let those who corrupt children rest."
Megaphone-wielding fathers who refuse to accept judges' child-custody rulings have long been a fixture at Australian family courts. Some aggrieved men have attacked their former wives and partners, their children, and court officers. Now a group whose name echoes 1930s fascist movements is providing an aggressive new outlet for men struggling to cope with the consequences of marital breakdown.
Blackshirts spokesman John Abbott says his men are "doing what needs to be done to stop divorce and reclaim the status of marriage and family." But Family Court Chief Justice Alistair Nicholson accuses the group of behavior "that's one step along the path to terrorism"-and says it won't be tolerated by the Australian community. Ten days ago, the Preston Magistrates Court in Melbourne ordered the Blackshirts to stop harassing Wendy, Sandra, their children and Sandra's partner Luke. But the five-year bans won't end the Blackshirts' crusade, says Abbott: "With 6 out of 10 families now being corrupted and infiltrated [in fact, 4 in 10 Australian marriages currently end in divorce], it's a target-rich environment."
Waiting outside the Preston court in their Blackshirts attire, Simon and Clive, who are also contesting court orders-and Les, who says he's at the hearing because "I love to see [the women] cry"-won't reveal how many members the group has. But Abbott says, "All groups that support fathers are candidates for the Blackshirts." Fathers' rights advocates agree the traditional family unit is under assault from no-fault divorce and a Family Court that, they say, systematically sides with mothers. "There's a criminal element to the court," says Lone Fathers Association national president Barry Williams. "A man who's done nothing wrong won't get to see his kids because his wife's so hostile." But Williams, whose organization has 5,000 members, doesn't condone Blackshirt-style militancy. "I'm very respected at Parliament House," he says. "I can knock on every door."
Abbott also wants to influence Canberra-under the name John Abbotto, he's standing for election on the No GST Party ticket in Victoria's Federal seat of Calwell. In 1998, the Dane Entertainment Centre owner stood for the Senate as a Family Law Reform Party candidate alongside activists called Prime Minister John Piss the Family Court and Legal Aid, and Justice Abolish Child Support and Family Court. "I was stunned to receive only 2,400 votes," he says. "I thought the family was a major concern for the Australian people."
It's in Melbourne legal circles that Abbott and his antiFamily Court cohorts have made a lasting impression. "Some of the men are petrifying," says one family law practitioner. "We've been spat on, hit and threatened." Marshalls and Dent senior associate Mark Finn says Abbott was the ringleader of a group who used to attend court hearings wearing black shirts. (Angela, who has also been the target of Blackshirts protests, says they used to call themselves the Southern Cross Good Fathers). Says family law solicitor Sue Macgregor: "They'd sit at the back of the courtroom in their uniforms and make themselves extraordinarily annoying and intimidating to the women who came up [in hearings] against the blokes they were supporting."
For Wendy and Angela, who underwent long and bitter divorce and custody battles, the Blackshirts' visits have been a terrifying reminder of a time in their lives they had hoped was past. "It's been three and a half years since the court decided my ex-husband was to have no contact with our son," says Wendy. "I thought I could get on with my life. Now, every time the phone rings or there's a noise outside, my stomach turns over." While the Preston court order has brought some relief, Wendy still thinks "they don't get it. They are on a mission."
Abbott says the Blackshirts are not trying to intimidate women, simply exercising their democratic rights. That may be true when they protest outside public institutions, says Access Law partner Brenton O'Loughlin, who successfully defended three male Family Court litigants charged with contempt for scandalizing the court last year. "But protesting outside an ex-partner's home is a completely different proposition. It's personal, not political, and just ripe for a harassment charge." That was the view of Preston court magistrate Roger Franich, who said it was "incomprehensible" that the Blackshirts' conduct would cause their targets anything but fear and apprehension. The Victorian police are looking into the group's activities. "I don't believe any person has to put up with that sort of behavior on their own street," says an officer involved with the investigation.
Abbott says he's prepared to go to jail to save Australia's children, particularly from "predators" like Sandra's partner, Luke. Offering a briefcase filled with a decade's worth of newspaper articles about children murdered, he claims, by their mothers' boyfriends, Abbott says: "I'm going to hurt [Luke] real bad. I want him in and out of court every second day. I want every member of his neighborhood to reject him and we'll demonstrate against anyone who supports creatures like him." So far, the neighbors aren't joining the fight. "The residents are most upset by this type of behavior," testified the secretary of the body corporate at the block of flats where Luke lives. Abbott says the Blackshirts would stop demonstrating if "we had any notion that our behavior is frightening children. But we believe they'll grow to admire us. We don't like demonstrating, but the fear for our own welfare is superseded by the care of our children."
But groups like the Blackshirts are more interested in their own agenda than in children's rights, according to some lawyers and counselors. "Their ringleaders are usually embittered fathers with court orders not to contact their children who prey on emotionally stricken men and send their cases down the chute by trying to show that men are badly done by in the Family Court," says a Melbourne family law practitioner. Court counselor Owen Pershouse says such groups "tend to entrench men in an angry-victim role because they don't provide a way out for these people other than a knock-down, drag-out fight."
Pershouse, a Brisbane-based psychologist, is the co-founder of MENDS, a 12-week post-separation counseling program that he says "helps men to re-evaluate themselves and develop a more reasonable understanding of the process." It's one of dozens of support services that the Australian government is funding to combat high rates of violence, depression and suicide among divorced men. "Our ultimate priority," says Family Services Minister Larry Anthony, "is to make sure their kids get a reasonable lifestyle."
Sandra says her ex-husband has refused to seek counseling. Although he was "distraught" when they separated, "we were working things out between ourselves," she says, "until he became involved with John Abbott, who is reliving his own obsessions through people like my ex-husband." Militant action can only hurt fathers' chances in the Family Court, says solicitor Finn. One of his clients was once a Blackshirt, he adds, "but he's now realized he won't get anywhere unless he works within the system, not outside it."
Anorexia tricks the mind into wrecking the body. Most victims beat it within five years. "Mary," 49, has had it for nearly four decades. Growing up in rural New South Wales, she was worrying about her weight at age six. Kids at school teased her about her plump mother, a disciplinarian. "At home, feelings were not to be shown," she says, "so I did a lot of crying in my room. I felt that nothing I did was ever good enough." Over time, her anxieties fused into anorexia, and she's been in and out of hospitals since her 20s. Her disorder has stifled or destroyed just about everything worth living for-love, friendships, work. "My life is not a life," she says. "It's an existence."
Medicine had virtually given up on chronic anorexics, those 20% of sufferers who have been sick for 10 years or more. Conventional treatment programs-in which patients either commit to gaining weight or face expulsion-rarely work on long-term sufferers, but no one had managed to devise an alternative. Late last year, Mary was referred to a new program at Sydney's Wesley Private Hospital, where a group of chronic patients, aged between 18 and 57, meet twice a week. Clinical psychologists Chris Thornton and Louise George believe the key to helping these women is to forget, for the time being, about bulking them up, and instead explore why they cling to their illness with a tenacity that has exasperated their doctors. Less than a year after the program started, the pair are claiming some success, while Mary says: "For the first time in years, I feel closer to the point where I can control [the illness], rather than it controlling me." At the same time, psychologists believe they've made progress at the other end of the fight against anorexia. The results of a recent pilot study at a high school in Campbelltown, on Sydney's southwestern fringe, support the view that the best way to prevent anorexia is not to lecture girls about its horrors, but to help them like themselves more.
Anorexia strikes between 0.5 and 1% of girls aged 12 to 21. "It has tended to be viewed, by politicians and health administrators, as a yuppie kind of illness-a phase that mainly affluent young women go through and grow out of," says Stephen Touyz, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Sydney and a director of Wesley's eating disorders program. "What we've learned over the last decade is that that is wrong-that anorexia must be considered an extremely serious psychiatric illness." Were one to follow up anorexic patients 20 years after their first hospital visit, Touyz says, 5-10% of them would be dead, most commonly from suicide or cardiac arrest, though there is no bodily system that anorexia leaves untouched.
The disorder existed for centuries before it was erroneously named, in 1868, by English physician William Gull. Anorexia nervosa means "nervous loss of appetite," but sufferers-9 out of 10 of them girls-feel starved as they habitually deny themselves food. Typically hypersensitive, self-conscious perfectionists, anorexics act out of a morbid fear of becoming fat, though the reasons for this fear are elusive even to them. It is likely that some sufferers refuse to accept, and seek to avoid, the physical changes of puberty; for others, life, viewed from the bridge to adulthood, appears suddenly complex, unpredictable and frightening. For these young people, anorexia is a retreat-into themselves-that may be lonely and sterile, but where at least they're in control. "Anorexia tricks you into thinking that if you can just lose a few more kilos, you'll be happy," says former anorexic Melinda Hutchings, 30. "But no matter how much weight you lose, you never feel that way."
Chronic sufferers know it's a trick but can't break free. They are not fools, stresses Wesley's George. On the contrary, the seven hunched, emaciated patients she listens to for hours at a time are, she says, engaging and intelligent. "But they see themselves as defective and bad, as failures not deserving to take up space on the planet," George says. They also hate their lives and know their anorexia is to blame. "But at the same time," George says, "their disorder gives them something. It serves a function. If it didn't, they wouldn't cling to it."
The delicate process of encouraging them to identify that function begins by treating the chronic patients in an exclusive group. The group setting, Thornton explains, offers a sense of camaraderie missing elsewhere in their lives, while the exclusion of non-chronic sufferers means the women are not reminded of the excruciating slowness-or stagnation-of their own recoveries. Another must, he says, is for the therapists to back off from the issue of food. This is a radical departure from conventional practice and, at first glance, from common sense. But these women have rebelled for years against therapists who've stood over them at meals and demanded they gain at least 1 kg a week. Patients in the Wesley program aren't pressured to gain weight, and in breaks they may eat as little as they please.
Because anorexics can spend hours fretting about a looming meal, says Thornton, removing the threat of supervised eating creates a mood more conducive to effective, sometimes harrowing, talk sessions, which take place in a nondescript room at Wesley's Carlingford Centre, in the city's northwest. Though there are enough chairs in the room for everyone, many of the women sit on the floor. It is but one sign, says Thornton, of the "core belief" of worthlessness that is blocking their recovery. "Deep down," he says, "they don't think they deserve to get better." Led by gentle questioning, the women ponder why they feel that way. Invariably, a trip back to their early life begins: stories can emerge of a traumatic first sexual experience or simply a distant parent.
Thornton and George see anorexia as a wall that divides the sufferer's mind. On one side may be her unpleasant past and the empty present she refuses to face. On the other are obsessional thoughts about food, weight and body shape. Unlike the majority of patients, they say, chronic sufferers cannot be pushed into destroying the wall. But, says George, "the more effort we make to understand why they try to keep it, the happier they are to provide us with costs. For example, I'm protected from relationships because I'm safe, but I'm lonely." The hope is that as the women come to appreciate those costs, they will opt to change their lives by eating more normally.
It's an approach that appeals to other experts, such as Melbourne-based consultant psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dr. Richard Prytula. "I'm relieved that somebody is trying this," he says, "and heartened that the program is looking at the failure of sufferers to develop an adequate self-image." While encouraging a patient who is physically and mentally fragile to dig up suppressed childhood memories is "a risky business and not for beginners," Prytula adds, "it is necessary because these issues stand directly in the way of the patient's chances of getting better."
The Wesley psychologists don't claim to have performed miracles, but they do note some encouraging signs. Two women who left the program did so with the intention of starting to eat well enough to rejoin the workforce. Speaking anonymously on a Wesley video, another patient says of the program: "It gives me hope and strength. It has opened my mind to new possibilities." Another patient, "Abbey," 50, told Time: "I still can't imagine being cured, but I can imagine eating moderately from select groups of food." Though working with chronic anorexics is draining and sometimes demoralizing, Thornton and George find it increasingly worthwhile.
At a recent seminar at Sydney's Ravenswood girls' school, alumna Hutchings spoke of her battle with anorexia. Scattered through the audience were full-figured girls, whose parents hoped the evening's speeches would help their daughters to stay that way. But some psychologists now question the value of graphic first-hand accounts of anorexia as a preventative tool. There is some evidence-notably a recent study involving U.S. college students-that these accounts can do harm by giving healthy girls effective weight-loss tips and unintentionally condoning a fixation on body size.
Armed with this and other research, Larisa Konstantinoff, a 26-year-old psychologist on Campbelltown's Macarthur Child and Adolescent Mental Health Team, designed a program aimed at prevention that makes no mention of anorexia. In June, she tested it with 22 pupils in Years 7 and 8 at St. Patrick's College, Campbelltown. In six lessons over three weeks, the girls performed exercises in size estimation-drawing their hand from memory, then comparing the image to the real thing-to show, says Konstantinoff, that "how you see your body may not be how others see it." They were taught skills for approaching social events without obsessing about their appearance, and they evaluated the media's depiction of women.
The pupils were given the same questionnaire before and after the study. Their later responses, says Konstantinoff, revealed "statistically significant" improvements in self-esteem and reductions in depression, body dissatisfaction and drive for thinness, all thought to be key factors in the development of eating disorders. Those improvements were at least maintained in the follow-up study two months later. "I'm excited," says Konstantinoff. "This approach looks like an avenue to go down."
Researchers who've been studying the prevention of anorexia for longer than Konstantinoff are circumspect about her findings. Because anorexia has a range of causes, says Susan Paxton, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, "it is very difficult to prevent." Paxton argues-and Konstantinoff agrees-that "one program is never going to be enough, because the counterproductive information out in the real world is bombarding them every day." Ideally, Paxton says, intervention should begin in primary school: "Even coming in at Year 7 can be too late."
But Sydney University's Touyz sees broad prevention programs as a waste of money. The overwhelming majority of young women raised in affluence and exposed to TV and fashion magazines never get anorexia. It makes more sense, Touyz says, to target those thought to be at high risk. "I'm not opposed to prevention, but it's not nearly as simple as some people think," he says. "Why do the majority not get it? Do they have something or do something different from those who do get it? There are basic questions about anorexia that we don't know the answers to."
No answers will return to Mary the many lost years of her life. But the Wesley program has made her more hopeful about the time she has left. When she spoke to Time, she was considering a party invitation for the coming Saturday. She didn't think she would go-she still feels "fat and ugly all the time." But she was also feeling a growing resolve to leave the house more often. In the treatment of anorexia, one learns to be thankful for the smallest mercies.