User:Barbbiggs

Barbara Biggs, born December 3 1956, is an Australian journalist and author.

Books

Her first book, published by Sly Ink in 2003, was the first part of an autobiography, called In Moral Danger, about her life up to the age of 22.

It tells of her sexual abuse at 14 by a famous Melbourne criminal barrister, Robert Vernon, 42, also a paedophile (deceased), who paid Biggs grandmother for the introduction to her then homeless grand-daughter.

The abuse continued for nine months, but the book also tells of the damaging after affect, including at 16 being in a pyschiatric hospital, at 18 escaping Cambodia weeks before it fell to the Khmer Rouge and at 19 being a prostitute in Japan. By 21 she had attempted suicide four times, received death threats and caused national headlines (see below).

The book became a runaway success, selling 25,000 copies in its first three years. It was reprinted for the sixth time in 2006.

In Moral Danger has since been published in Sweden [] and Greece [] in 2006, in the UK in 2004 and New Zealand[], where it became Number One on its best-seller list, in 2005.

Biggs' second book, The Road Home, published by Sly Ink in 2004, is about her life from 22-42, culminating in a legal battle with the barrister, which she won. It also tells how she became a mother, classical pianist, journalist and property millionaire.

The book was launched in May 2004 by former disgraced Governor General, Peter Hollingworth, a year after he became the first Australian GG to resign. Two years earlier he had made inappropriate comments about child sexual abuse and mishandled certain complaints made to him during his career as an Anglican minister.

Hollingworth also wrote a foreword to the book, in which he said it and the prequel had helped him understand the issue of child sexual abuse.

In Moral Danger and The Road Home were both auctioned in Japan and published there in one volume in 2006[].

Biggs has written three more books.

Child Protection Campaigner[]

Since Biggs first book was published she has become an advocate for social change and awareness about child sexual abuse. She was the keynote speaker launching Child Protection Week in Victoria in 2003.

She now speaks about her life and the issue of child sexual abuse at child protection conferences.

Her first two books are used in one of the world's leading treatment programs for child sex offenders, Kia Marama Prison in New Zealand.

In February 2009, in response to parents stories of violent and abusive parents being given access to their children by the Family Court, Biggs began the Safer Family Law Campaign, which led to the formation of the National Council for Children Post-Separation  . With the help of a small group of parents, which grew to 3500 signatures on a petition and rallies in five states around Australia, Biggs produced and posted a series of Youtube videos which told stories the media couldn't. One Youtube video a day was posted in the leadup to the national rallies. Parents' stories told by actors, journalist calling for a repeal of the gagging laws and professionals telling how they routinely saw in their work how the Family Court failed to keep children safe.

The day after the last Youtube video was posted, and the day before the rallies, the Chief Justice of the Family Court of Australia, Diana Bryant, was reported in the press as having written to the Attorney General saying 'urgent consideration' needed to be given to repealing the Act. Two weeks earlier, in a Queensland speech, Bryant had denied the Act was problematic.

Since the campaign, two further reviews of the Family Law Act, including one by the Attorney General's Dept were instigated.

Political Candidacy

She stood as an Upper House candidate for new political party, People Power, in the 2006 Victorian election. She also wrote the party's child protection policy. Because of the party's preference deals, she was the last candidate eliminated before the Greens candidate took the seat[].

Political History

When she was 21, Biggs caused national headlines by being the second person in Australia to use new legislation which allowed her to not join the tramways union on conscientious grounds. She was a tram conductress at the time.

Politically ignorant, she refused to join because her union rep had threatened her. It was only later, when she received anonymous death threats, that she discovered the first person in Australia to use the conscientious objection certificate had been murdered in a Sydney pub three months earlier.

The strike lasted two weeks. Before it could spread to national action, Biggs accepted a secondment to the Ministry of Transport which moved her off the trams and the strike ended. The Industrial Relations Tribunal found the union in breach of the law by striking against Biggs, but the fine applicable under the act was never paid. Almost thirty years later, when Biggs stood in the Victorian state elections, socialist blogs still referred to her as a 'scab' and 'the most obnoxious' of her party's candidates. [[]