Comment by GW150914
8 years ago
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 !
That’s a massive wall of text filled with claims, many of which seem sketchy at best (1000-20000 children per year in Britain is a huge range for example, the latter number being twenty times the former) and I don’t have the time to sort through most of it. One thing did leap out at me however.
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)
That’s a suspiciously round %, and I’d love a citation for it. I think it would be helpful to get a sense of where you’re getting your numbers while avoiding the pages of opinion and invective.
True, I know US authorities are loath to take children away, it takes alot to lose your parental rights. Usually they are surrendered by the parent.
I think the poster above you is a sensationalist, but those sort of things, and the things happening in the article are based on one simple fact: We don't value children.
We will spend money to lock up a juvenile (or adult) before we give resources to poor parents or poor children. We get bad enough results when parents are struggling financially and mentally to provide for their own children. Usually there is some soft of biological imperative compelling them. When you take a stranger and put them under the same sort of pressure while expecting them to care for children of others, who may already have significant behavioral problems, you are asking too much.
This is obviously going to attract the wrong sort of people, and the right sort of people will be influenced by them and frustrated in their own right.
It sounds like this school was a world unto itself. Kids did not participate in activities away from it. This is exactly the sort of thing that brings out the worst in people. I know this offends homeschoolers, but every child should have some outside authority they trust. Those authorities should be a mix of religious and secular.
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