The breakdown of the family unit is responsible for 90% of the world’s poverty, the head of the World Congress of Families told its conference.

Wrapping up the controversial and chaotic Christian event in Melbourne on Saturday, the managing director of the Congress, Larry Jacobs, told attendees marriage was a lifelong union of one man and one woman, raising their children in a loving and nurturing way.

“We believe that sex should be within that union,” he said. “Fifty years ago, we wouldn’t have had to explain this.”



“We have to find the truth, and the truth says that statistically there is no better place for a child to be [than a conventional family],” Jacobs said. “Ninety per cent of poverty can be solved simply through the affirmation of marriage.”



Earlier speakers returned repeatedly to attacks on behaviour deemed to be outside the traditional family structure, including equating sexual health with sterilisation and abortion, and criticising fatherless families.

A theologian and Anglican pastor, Mark Durie, said the breakdown of the traditional family – a man and woman marrying and raising their own biological children – was “causing an epidemic of social problems” in the UK.

“If you rationally point out girls are more likely to be sexually abused – as many as 20 times – by a stepfather than a biological father this is not a slur.



“It’s just one of the facts of life.”



He was also troubled by the role of alcohol in sexual assaults. “The difficulty of prosecuting rape cases when the woman is drunk is difficult and distressing,” he said.

Louise Kirk, UK coordinator for Alive to the World character education, spoke about the “scourge” of sex education overtaking schools.



“This is a scourge because from a breakdown of the passing down of values from parents in all our societies, children are lost,” she said.



“And there is no one to pick them up and aspire them to marriage.”



She said children had spiritual imagination which was filled with God.



“And if they’re not filled with God there isn’t a vacuum,” she said.



“Without God they get filled with pornography or terror or computer games.



“If you’re going to teach children sexuality you need to teach children correctly with the best teachers. And the best teachers are the parents. The parents protect their modesty.”



The conference was hit by the chaos over its venue and the withdrawal of several senior politicians after it found a home at the Catch the Fire ministries, whose pastor Daniel Nalliah, famously linked the Victorian bushfires to abortion laws.

In their absence, its star speaker was the American doctor Angela Lanfranchi, who repeated her view that a link could be established between abortion and breast cancer.

“There is a misperception in your country that scientists at the national cancer institute in my country do not support that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer,” Lanfranchi told attendees.



“In fact they do.”

Hundreds of the world’s leading doctors, scientists and researchers who reviewed all the studies on the relationship between pregnancy and breast cancer have found abortions and miscarriages do not increase a woman’s breast cancer risk.

