About

Joseph Wakim OAM is an independent writer on human rights issues. While completing his Bachelor of Social Work at the University of Melbourne, he became one of the original volunteer street workers in the Open Family Foundation in 1984. He then established a similar street work project for homeless youth in Adelaide and is known for exposing child prostitution in the church city. He was a social worker for the Arabic-speaking community at the time of the first Gulf War in 1991. After conducting hundreds of media interviews and writing letters to the editor, Joseph was invited to write opinion columns. He has been a prolific writer ever since and his body of work is highlighted on this site. His anti-racism campaigns  and initaitives earned the Commonwealth Heads of Government Violence Prevention Award in 1996. As a widowed father of three children, his writing is enriched by his personal experience with the big questions in life. His second book 'What my Daughters Taught Me' is a story of triumph and how the human spirit stays strong when life goes wrong. His story deals with the need for men to be ‘emancipated’ by being nurtured to be nurturers. It links with current debates about domestic violence and our male definition of strength. It also argues that it is the quality of the parenting, not the gender, that matters most. Gender differences are exaggerated and exploited, resulting in men missing out on so much. His book has been described as a ‘brilliantly honest memoir, hilariously so’, The book not only deals candidly with father-daughter relationships but additionally with resilience, hope, faith, masculinity, strength, grief and the ‘humour hormone’.