Comment by pnutjam
8 years ago
Hard to read, but I think we owe a debt to society. We need to make sure these things don't happen again. This is why charter schools, home schooling, and other aspects of society need oversight to protect kids from predators.
Parents are the authorities given the responsibility of oversight over their own kids in order to protect them from predators. 99.9% of the time anybody else who tries to stick their nose in will not know better than the parents what is best for the kid. And more than that, the parents are far more likely to care enough about the kids to actually do what is best for them.
What you have here is an example of what tends to happen when parents are missing.
Broken homes are a huge source of unprotected children today.
I think we got that covered already - https://abc13.com/society/woman-calls-cops-on-8-year-old-gir...
I think not. If that woman had seen an 8 year old girl in the custody of a religious figure, she'd look the other way.
Religious flamewar is not welcome on HN. Please don't post it here. We've had to warn you about this before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1 reply →
The problem is that the oversight itself is almost always the cause of the abuse. In the case of parents, obviously. But of course this was the case in the past, where the church and the state (the social agency referred in the article and it's management, which is the government) were the problem.
Any kind of oversight necessarily puts people in power over others' children, as does the very concept of an institution or orphanage, including of course schools. It is that power, not which geometric shapes the organizing power insists get put on the wall that attracts child predators.
Giving people power over children is the problem. Attempts to "make sure these things don't happen again" so far have massively increased child abuse. The numbers I checked for the Netherlands are staggering: 1 out of every 3 children in child care gets sexually assaulted in the sense that they report it to the police. Roughly half of those gets abused by foster parents or government employees, half by other children (they just put babies with teenagers, then leave them alone due to lack of manpower or outright unwillingness of employees). Suicide rates are almost 10x what they are outside of child care.
And the incredibly sad part is ... once in child care 1 in 3 gets sexually assaulted, but barely 1 in 10 is put in child care because of allegations (usually not even a complaint) of sexual abuse. Mostly it's because of ... hygiene problems.
The problem is that without giving institutions power over children, nothing happens: children will refuse to leave their parents in all but the most extreme cases of abuse, until they are at least halfway through their teens. And the huge problem is that statistics clearly show that that is the right decision to make for the children: outcomes for children with their parents, even when abused, are far superior to outcomes in child care. In terms of education, in terms of living independent as an adult.
Here's some links:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/norways_hidden_s...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/29/rotherham-ch...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_child_abuse_scandal
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/social-services-centre...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6112955/telford-politicians-ch...
And, of course, the abuse was accepted and reinforced:
http://www.childrenscreamingtobeheard.com/fostering-scandal/
Who turned out to be pedophiles in the past 20 years or so ?
* The social services chief for a large British city. Note: AFTER he was convicted of sexually assaulting children Graham Bould was still put in charge of child services, as well as other social services (no worries: I'm sure he behaved himself much better around adults ...)
* an unspecified number of North Wales psychiatric child care workers at 18 different government facilities for child care (and some foster parents), who sexually abused at least 140 children
* The local councilor of that same city. These 2 worked together to, firstly, allow the local vicar to abuse children, and all 3 worked together to threaten abused children into silence.
* The child psychiatrist in charge of the "Child Expert Commission" for the entire country of Norway, who decide whether children get taken from their parents or not
* a dozen French government psychologists, in charge of diagnosing children in psychiatric care
* hundreds of Spanish government doctors, nurses, and also nuns and priests
* US public school employees, hundreds, from janitors to administrators and social workers
* Sebastian Edathy, a very high level German politician, and a senior cabinet minister in the government of Angela Merkel, Agriculture Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, was fired for protecting him and tipping him off
* Dutch Jehova's witnesses employees and members cooperated to commit and hide child sexual abuse, for decades
* Government day care employees in the Netherlands
* Red Cross and Doctors without Borders aid workers (who did it, with the knowledge of the top of the organizations, for over a decade)
* Public school employees in Holland exploited the children entrusted to them on a large scale (specifically these were promising athletes sent to a special school)
* UN peacekeepers sexually abusing indigenous children in Western Sahara, Mali and other places
* Oxfam rescue workers (who were protected by the board of Oxfam)
* The leadership of an islamic school in the UK, and local politicians
Not pedophiles, but at the very least encouraging child abuse:
* A majority of the British parliament (who voted that private companies would be allowed to pay social workers to give them children they "offer up" for adoption (meaning they sell them))
Quote: "A foster agency receives £20.000 for every single child they sell, adoption agencies £36.000 for every child sold, all with tax payer’s money, most of the agencies are owned by ex social workers. So, are the agencies working with the social services?"
(Needless to say "somehow" these sold children have a disturbing habit to end up in prostitution. I wonder how that happens)
Not a one of these examples is less than chilling, even terrifying, and provokes a sense of immense outrage. Like examples of rape, murder and child abuse by total strangers it makes us all feel fearful and powerless, but it also misses a critical point. Most children are abused or neglected by family and loved ones, not distant authorities or strangers. Most people are murdered (including children’ by their nearest and dearest.
It’s important to make those distant authorities which somkften get things wrong be accountable, yet at the same time we have to avoid the bottomless pit of something like Stranger Danger. The examples you cite are sensational, but they’re not typical. The typical case is the child being raped by a family member or family friend, the wife being murdered by the husband, or the friend being murderers by a friend. For every extreme and chilling case of someone far away in a position of power abusing thst power, there are hundreds of much quieter yet no less damaging cases of the same thing being done close to home.
> Most children are abused or neglected by family and loved ones,
Why do you say "abused or neglected". They are not the same at all. And interfering in a case of neglect clearly leads to abuse within the child care system ...
At the very least child care will inflict massive psychological trauma on any child it interacts with. No child, no matter how neglected, will react positively to being torn from their parents. Being violently torn from their parents, then locked up into an unfamiliar environment that has predators ... that's just indescribably traumatic. And that's the best case for those services interfering ... That's assuming no actual abuse follows, which is clearly rather too likely.
The measure should of course be that that massive trauma is significantly less than the damage that the parents do if left in control. I would argue that in the case of neglect, that is essentially never the case. Even in the case of abuse, I would argue that it's rarely the case, and that the child should be the one taking the decision, and that child should be provided with the authority to undo that decision at will and without explanation. Children are perfectly capable of figuring out which is the better situation for themselves, a right systematically denied them in every child service.
And if you argue differently, can you really claim to be acting in the interests of the child ?
This is a best case scenario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR8cZuXPiYU&t=137s
Note: you might wonder what sort of abuse the mother subjected the child to ... well, she did not force the child to see his father despite a court order. For that, the judge took the child away from both his parents, and despite not getting adopted will not get to see either of his parents again until he is an adult ... Needless to say, the government defended this action, it is "justified". Why ? The agents followed the law and the judge did indeed have this option available to her (judge was female). Can you explain to me again why you are defending these people ?
Also in the example above, can you please let me know your opinion: because of this action, did the odds of the child getting abused increase or decrease because of the child services intervention, because any sane person knows perfectly well that those odds just went up massively.
And yes, child services taking children almost never happens because of actual abuse. Hygiene (as judged by teachers), and parental separation are the main causes (and by that we mean 80%+) of child services interfering with young children. Later it becomes theft (as in the child stealing something)
> The examples you cite are sensational, but they’re not typical.
No they're not. They're truly banal. If you read up on them you will quickly realize that the only reason those are examples at all is because of systematic fuckups on the part of the perpetrators, and even then that was usually not enough. Mostly there is also interference by someone in power to get any progress at all in the case. And notably: almost never does the government give the children back even when it was a goverment institution getting caught abusing the children. So there is zero willingness on the part of the government to act in the interest of the child, even when caught red handed abusing the child.
These are the people you're defending.
Clearly the 33% figure points out that abuse is far more likely in the child services case, than in an environment where nothing is done (children just left with parents). I guess it is, however, 17% short of "typical".
And, of course, despite this massive child abuse committed by social services, it has not actually helped. In theory they do this to prevent what happened in the 90s. And ... of course ... in that it is a total and complete failure, a few examples:
https://www.hoogeveenschecourant.nl/nieuws/hoogeveen/531051/...
https://www.omroepgelderland.nl/nieuws/2303872/Klopjacht-op-...
https://www.rtvdrenthe.nl/nieuws/125426/Cel-geeist-tegen-ped...
https://wnl.tv/2017/12/06/pedo-huisarts-opgepakt-om-ontucht-...
> much quieter yet no less damaging cases of the same thing being done close to home
I think reading the links will also quickly elucidate that every government, from the UK, to the Dutch, the US and the Norwegian government acted to protect the abuses, through legal and illegal means. So those cases are exceptional only in that they were big enough and that the victims actually managed to get heard. But if a small group of child care employees managed to systematically abuse 140 children for years, like in the UK case, how many cases are there of 1 child care employee abusing a child where the government succeeds in silencing the whole issue ? Hundreds ? Thousands ? That, to me, seems like an extremely low and conservative estimate. How many cases of children being left to themselves and then, when they become teenagers in such a forced prison situation, abusing each other ? I don't even want to guess.
You claim the scale of abuse by people in positions of power is small. And yet ... this is clearly not true:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/18/adoption-has...
It is not hard to find sources talking about the scale of the abuse. Just for the Britain alone, we're talking from 1000 to 20000 children per year. If you call that small scale, I will call you crazy.
Per year.
We can all see what the incentives are here. If these people truly acted to protect children, they would almost never actually act, and require truly extreme circumstances before they take a child away. In other words: these organizations would not have any meaningful work to do. Taking and abusing children is a self-reinforcing loop for these organizations: without that, they would shrink and eventually cease to exist. Their incentives are very clear: make the problem worse, and worse, and worse.
Now let's assume for a second that over time, these organizations actually do what's good for them, regardless of any early intentions. Then we would find no end of complaints and stories of the cruelty of these organizations online ...
Oh wait ...
That's exactly what we see. I'm sure it's nothing but a coincidence !
3 replies →
This has more to do with a culture of silence. People avoid the uncomfortable.
This is why children need to be part of the community, that's what oversight looks like. Teaches, parents, and social programs.
In many cases, the community was the problem. In many examples given above, teachers and social programs cooperated resulting in child sexual abuse.
In many cases that was "unintentional". All these programs intended to do, in most cases, was to take the children away from the parents. Because they end up in a structure that is like a prison: enforced helplessness in an environment with predators, child abuse was the result.
In a non-negligible amount of cases, however, child abuse was the whole purpose of the social program. The people who carried out the program took the actions with the specific purpose of abusing children.
There is a third case of course, where the social programs merely break the power of parents (and still put the child in that environment), and abuse probably did not result.
Now the huge question is: would the outcome have been better, for the children (not the aid workers !), if no actions were taken at all.
And with the Dutch numbers we can calculate. Odds of abuse in the group of child care children ... something like 10%. Odds of abuse if child care interferes ... 33%. Yep ... the outcome would have been better if no actions had been taken at all (and that's taking the complaint numbers as fact, when in reality, of course, they're a lower bound).
Given what actually happens to these children, those prison-like institutions, I must say I can't call this outcome surprising in the least.
There's a movie, the first half of which is about this problem from an adult perspective: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7153766/
But the point is: the outcome would be better if nothing was done at all. It would be a lot more visible too, which I bet is the real issue the government is reacting to.