CHILD AWARE is a registered charity (chy19291) that is non-profit. It has been set up to stop child abuse wherever it is and in whatever form it exists. We are here to help not only survivors of Institutional and domestiic abuse from the past, but also for the children of the present and the future. From our very recent beginnings we intend to provide support for a school curriculum to promote child awareness  for children at every level; to provide financial and social support for victims of child abuse; to support adults on child abuse awareness in the home; to promote better laws to protect children from child abuse.

CHILD AWARE itself was born from frustration and pain from victims, their families, and their supporters. Its beginning started In December of 2009.

That was when I reached out and made contact with Hanora Brennan to help me in this cause. We had much in common. Not least was our history of having been reared in those infamous Industrial / reformatory institutions since we were little children. From there we set about trying to bring closure to the thousands of  people who lived through those  'Childrens Gulags'. It would not be an easy task for often the enemy was within with support groups leaders' pretending to support victims but in reality only supporting themselves and their cronies. Egos and self interest also ruled the day. The Irish Government was happy to pay and keep them there as 'representing' over fifteen thousand living and aging survivors so they and their co defendants, the religious, could pocket any compensation due them except for a token payment per victim for stolen and abused childhoods. The middlemen, the solicitors and barristers, got the rest which amounted to tens of millions of taxpayers money. There was no  mention of reflective compensation or apology for the State kidnapping, wrongful imprisonment and convictions for the 170,000 children that had served an average term of seven years each in a 36 year period alone. The last of these prisons closed down in 1996.

Many of those survivors today live in the streets that they call home; many fill the cemeteries in the only place that they could find a home and  the peace that came with it. The journey to it was often by their own hand that helped them get there. Many are still among the living  though their spirits have long since died. Then there are the other survivors that  faced similar fates and have come forward from every walk of life and from every type of home, with or without parents. Domestic abuse out stripped all other abuse while child slavery and prostitution is on the rise. Their stories meshed with all the other horrors stories of children sufferings is on a global scale of  the epidemic problem that is child abuse. They cried out for the urgency of their plight and only now their voices are less muted though their suffering has grown. Out of those stories and because of them CHILD AWARE was born.

We hope you like this site and that we have something for everyone. We hope also you will support us not only with a financial contribution, but with whatever skills you can bring to the table. How large or small your help is  will make an even bigger difference.  

 REASON

For us to achieve our goals it is imperative that we use reason at all times and more so against the most unreasonable. This will be our greatest challenge and yet the key to change. It will morph the shape of that change and the fickle fortunes of truth and fact that is set against an unbending will of of a strong belief system. This is a universal problem.

There is also too what seems a natural mental defense mechanism at work when we meet criticism about who we are and what we believe in from others in social  society. It is displayed all too often by physical or emotional violence in the defending or the attacking of any one point depending on the level of ones ignorance from the critic and from those that it criticizes. It is in the most primitive sense ‘a failure to communicate’.

In times past these things were defended or attacked by the sword along with verbal put downs. Little has changed since, merely the rules. These are more sophisticated today and more varied. In its arsenal too the shining daggers of guilt, confusion, and double meaning are the weapons of choice hidden as letter openers.

All weapons are there first and foremost to defend the emotion of fear, real or imagined. Emotional fear can only be taken away by the knowledge and acceptance of reason given with a constructive and non- biased heart.  It is rarely given any other way.

Too many people live lives of subterfuge because of their fears. They can be closeted gays to atheists. They can be also Muslims, Catholics, Christians, Jews and Agnostics. They come in all shapes and sizes and are multi coloured. They carry the most feared voices, the voices of reason with most of it  hidden. They are against vast forces superior in numbers that are in decline and always dangerous.

Those forces carry in them the fear of that reason; believing for far too long that the world was flat when it was round. Believing for far too long that black people were devils and that white people had a monopoly on racism and hate. Believing for far too long that the world was no more than seven thousand years old and ripped apart the fact of evolution. They murdered dissenting voices and today they still do it with a pen that is no less a weapon against that reasoned individualism. They rely on safety in numbers and quote them liberally as if it all means something. When that voice of reason became too strong they embrace it on a public platform and deny it in a private one. Lies have become their truth and they cannot tell the difference anymore. Their will is to deny their fears that has made their intellect dead and corrupted. When the physical body goes the same way they will be forgotten; That, perhaps as they live is their greatest fear of all.

It would be proof that they were ignorant, hateful, and diseased with the sum of all their fears. They will have left no tablet to be remembered or quoted; no voice that will echo through the wind tunnels of time; no footprint to be tracked to guide the vulnerable. Even though they had murdered or imprisoned through the ages; Socrates and Galileo; feared Cicero; scoffed at Charles Darwin and laughed at Einstein; their fear to reason has proved to be their only forgettable epitaph. 

If, by itself, history has proven anything; it has proven that reason will prevail. The dark ages gave rise to the renaissance in later times and was fueled by reason but was there all along before recorded history. Its stilled voice gave rise over the primitive even though the individual was often crushed. Over time reason showed a quiet but strong force in the advance of the sciences, political treaties and passive resistance. It was the force used by Gandhi and Martin Luther King. It was the force used by the great civil rights and criminal defence lawyer, Clarence Darrow, in the pursuit of hopeless causes. Reason continues to inspire and rewrite history to a more truthful account. It debunks religious superstition and deep prejudices and brings to a moral account greed and corruption sooner or later. It holds back ever so tentatively Armageddon on the push to a war where there will be no peace for afterwards there will be no one left to reason with. It is the backbone of truth and morality itself; without it we would not have gotten this far.  It shows us how to learn anew, to understand what went before and the wisdom to know the difference of what is or was truth or fiction. Reason demands from us to teach our children how to learn rather than what to learn. This reason too will in the end help protect our children and turn the tsunami tide that is child abuse into a shield of iron that will be a defense for their future.   

Barry Clifford    May 2010  
        

“Prejudices are what fools use for reason".
Voltaire (French Philosopher and Writer. One of the greatest of all French authors, 1694-1778)

"In questions of science, the authority of a thousand people is not worth the humble reasoning of one individual".

Galileo    1564-1642                                        

"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of reasoning as fear".

Edmund Burke 
British statesman and philosopher       1729-1794

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 Declaration of
the Rights of the Child passed by the United Nations

1    All children have the right to what follows, no matter what their race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, or where they were born or who they were born to.
2    You have the special right to grow up and to develop physically and spiritually in a healthy and normal way, free and with dignity.
3    You have a right to a name and to be a member of a country.
4    You have a right to special care and protection and to good food, housing and medical services.
5    You have the right to special care if handicapped in any way.
6    You have the right to love and understanding, preferably from parents and family, but from the government where these cannot help.
7    You have the right to go to school for free, to play, and to have an equal chance to develop yourself and to learn to be responsible and useful.

Your parents have special responsibilities for your education and guidance.
8    You have the right always to be among the first to get help.
9    You have the right to be protected against cruel acts or exploitation, e.g. you shall not be obliged to do work which hinders your development both physically and mentally.

You should not work before a minimum age and never when that would hinder your health, and your moral and physical development.
10    You should be taught peace, understanding, tolerance and friendship among all people.