There is a skin condition called Mongolian (Blue) Spot (wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_spot ) that doctors can mistake for an infant being beaten or otherwise abused. It has led to a lot of cases of false accusations and children being forcibly removed from their parents who were then charged with child abuse.
According to Wikipedia, as to the distribution of this condition,
> The birthmark is prevalent among East, South, Southeast, North and Central Asian peoples, Indigenous Oceanians (chiefly Micronesians and Polynesians), certain populations in Africa, Amerindians, non-European Latin Americans and Caribbeans of mixed-race descent.
So you can see how, in a Western European nation, even if no-one is being biased in the sense of "hating foreigners", the false accusations would cluster in "non-indigenous" populations, for want of a better word (I originally had "immigrants" then realised that isn't the correct split I'm looking for.). Personally I believe there is no defense for doctors, courts and social workers not knowing about this and checking for it before making any accusations.
This doesn't seem to apply to Romanians / Eastern Europeans specifically, unless they have partly Asian ancestry, but it does show that there are conditions that can be mistaken for abuse that appear in some cultures more than others.
Damn that hits home. I’ve got a blue spot birthmark that was seen at elementary school which then led to child services showing up at home. This happened in the US and everyone involved was “non Indigenous.”
Sorry to hear that happened to you - and I realise that "indigenous" in the U.S. means the opposite to some of Europe, sorry!
I'm guessing if some kind of Commanche social worker turned up to look at a case of blue spot, they'd go "Yeah that's a birthmark, about half our children have it, our nation even has legends about it. Have a nice day!".
> Oh the good old, violent Easter European bias mixed into crap science.
Honest question, trying to parse your statement (and bear in mind I don't live in Europe, so I'm surely missing the obvious): do you mean that in Denmark there is a bias against Eastern Europeans, such as Romanians?
Edit: excellent, got a downvote for asking an honest question and clarifying why I wrote it. Is this an example of the fine discourse we are supposed to have here? This is an honest question, I'm neither European nor a native English speaker and I have difficulty parsing the sentence I quoted. How on earth does this warrant downvotes?
It’s not just in Denmark, most Europeans have a negative bias towards Romanian immigrants (mostly because they’re too ignorant to even know Romanians are not Roma).
> because they’re too ignorant to even know Romanians are not Roma
I don't think the term Roma has a bad association, because in my experience nobody but the most woke even know it. That is the PC term. People I've encountered just use gypsy or their local equivalent.
I could not say I ever experienced it, but I have school-aged relatives that moved to Germany and received all sorts of crap from their peers explicitly for being romanians. Not a race thing because they're whiter than most germans( blonde, white, blue eyes).
Yes. Romanians probably get the worst of it from the association with Roma in general who are generally discriminated against, but there is generally a base level of anti eastern-european discrimination among western Europe (and especially the UK). Not that all or most western Europeans do this, but it's a significant enough minority that does that it's unavoidable.
Domestic violence is higher where poverty rates are higher. (I am not saying that poverty is the sole determinant, but it closely correlates). You will find pockets of higher domestic violence throughout the US. I don't think you can rationalize bias like this, people with ethnic prejudice will look for any apparent fact pattern to support their preconceived bias.
For your edit: 'honest questions' (which are in fact anything but: the person asking has no interest in the answer, and the question itself is often leading) are a common disruptive tactic used by people (normally pushing extreme right-wing ideologies) to derail a conversation.
I'm sure that you're not doing that here, but unfortunately people with genuinely honest questions have become collateral damage caused by disingenuous actors, especially among people with itchy downvote-trigger-fingers.
Yeah, I figured, which is why my original question clarified I'm not from Europe (so no vested interest) and that I might be genuinely missing the obvious answer. Which is why I was surprised by the drive-by downvote.
Thankfully people have responded and now I both understand the sentence and the why!
It could be, but communication issues could also be at play, plus overeager doctors/social workers.
In Romania they go at great lengths not to pull children out of family environments, in Denmark and other more developed countries it could be the opposite.
I'm not implying anything other than the fact in Romania social workers KNOW it's very, very likely the child will fare worse fate in an orphanage or foster care, EVEN in cases that would be considered abuse in the West.
Given a more developed country, I'd presume there are more people willing to adopt/do foster care for the right reasons and the social workers can regularly check upon the welfare of the child, thus there can be legitimate reasons to lower the threshold of taking a child out of a family setting vs a less developed country.
Not ripping children from actually abusive families is more developed. There are many cases of abuses families who need to lose their children, and in some those families still have children. There are other cases where good families lose their children.
Note that I carefully did not say anything about what abuse is. Unfortunately there is no agreement and I don't want to get into that debate (it is well worth having, but it would change the direction I'm trying to go here).
Development past a certain point is not universally a good thing.
The term is used to describe the stages a country has been through, and there’s plenty of evidence that as countries develop further, the nature of those developments may or may not be beneficial.
Brexit, online safety and other forms of “progress” come to mind.
I mean more developed, because a country like Saudi Arabia is rich but not developed imho, and there could be countries that are develope -- i.e. they have good education, infrastructure, medical care, human rights, clean environment etc etc and not that rich.
Not everything comes with evidence, nor is everything a court case. If you have experienced racism again and again though, you can often tell when you see it, or you can quite safely deduce it in a case or wrong treatment, even without hard proof.
> If you have experienced racism again and again though, you can often tell when you see it, or you can quite safely deduce it in a case or wrong treatment, even without hard proof.
There may be some overlap between systemic racial mistreatment and child abuse - however the nuances seem to set them far apart. I believe conflating the two makes it harder to get the full measure of each.
It's not that they can't be compared. It's that they ought to be fully considered in isolation first.
No, I don't have any bias, it's everybody else having biases. To be sure, I just checked how many times before I was biased (it's zero times), so I can't be now.
Wait, are there Europeans who don't acknowledge that this bias exists? In my experience with European colleagues and those who've traveled a lot there it's so universally-acknowledged that this would surprise me.
Seen complaints/protests like this in my country. Then the adult children of the lady leading these protests spoke out against her and pointed out she was just doing it to get a house and embezzling a load of GoFundMe money.
This wasn't SBS though, she just kept adopting out her kids to devote more time to her drug habits.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37670664.
There is a skin condition called Mongolian (Blue) Spot (wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_spot ) that doctors can mistake for an infant being beaten or otherwise abused. It has led to a lot of cases of false accusations and children being forcibly removed from their parents who were then charged with child abuse.
According to Wikipedia, as to the distribution of this condition,
> The birthmark is prevalent among East, South, Southeast, North and Central Asian peoples, Indigenous Oceanians (chiefly Micronesians and Polynesians), certain populations in Africa, Amerindians, non-European Latin Americans and Caribbeans of mixed-race descent.
So you can see how, in a Western European nation, even if no-one is being biased in the sense of "hating foreigners", the false accusations would cluster in "non-indigenous" populations, for want of a better word (I originally had "immigrants" then realised that isn't the correct split I'm looking for.). Personally I believe there is no defense for doctors, courts and social workers not knowing about this and checking for it before making any accusations.
This doesn't seem to apply to Romanians / Eastern Europeans specifically, unless they have partly Asian ancestry, but it does show that there are conditions that can be mistaken for abuse that appear in some cultures more than others.
Damn that hits home. I’ve got a blue spot birthmark that was seen at elementary school which then led to child services showing up at home. This happened in the US and everyone involved was “non Indigenous.”
Sorry to hear that happened to you - and I realise that "indigenous" in the U.S. means the opposite to some of Europe, sorry!
I'm guessing if some kind of Commanche social worker turned up to look at a case of blue spot, they'd go "Yeah that's a birthmark, about half our children have it, our nation even has legends about it. Have a nice day!".
> Oh the good old, violent Easter European bias mixed into crap science.
Honest question, trying to parse your statement (and bear in mind I don't live in Europe, so I'm surely missing the obvious): do you mean that in Denmark there is a bias against Eastern Europeans, such as Romanians?
Edit: excellent, got a downvote for asking an honest question and clarifying why I wrote it. Is this an example of the fine discourse we are supposed to have here? This is an honest question, I'm neither European nor a native English speaker and I have difficulty parsing the sentence I quoted. How on earth does this warrant downvotes?
It’s not just in Denmark, most Europeans have a negative bias towards Romanian immigrants (mostly because they’re too ignorant to even know Romanians are not Roma).
> because they’re too ignorant to even know Romanians are not Roma
I don't think the term Roma has a bad association, because in my experience nobody but the most woke even know it. That is the PC term. People I've encountered just use gypsy or their local equivalent.
I could not say I ever experienced it, but I have school-aged relatives that moved to Germany and received all sorts of crap from their peers explicitly for being romanians. Not a race thing because they're whiter than most germans( blonde, white, blue eyes).
Yes. Romanians probably get the worst of it from the association with Roma in general who are generally discriminated against, but there is generally a base level of anti eastern-european discrimination among western Europe (and especially the UK). Not that all or most western Europeans do this, but it's a significant enough minority that does that it's unavoidable.
Domestic violence is still common in Eastern Europe(i.e Romania) so go figure why there is a bias against Eastern Europeans.
Domestic violence is higher where poverty rates are higher. (I am not saying that poverty is the sole determinant, but it closely correlates). You will find pockets of higher domestic violence throughout the US. I don't think you can rationalize bias like this, people with ethnic prejudice will look for any apparent fact pattern to support their preconceived bias.
Yes, that's what GP meant.
For your edit: 'honest questions' (which are in fact anything but: the person asking has no interest in the answer, and the question itself is often leading) are a common disruptive tactic used by people (normally pushing extreme right-wing ideologies) to derail a conversation.
I'm sure that you're not doing that here, but unfortunately people with genuinely honest questions have become collateral damage caused by disingenuous actors, especially among people with itchy downvote-trigger-fingers.
Yeah, I figured, which is why my original question clarified I'm not from Europe (so no vested interest) and that I might be genuinely missing the obvious answer. Which is why I was surprised by the drive-by downvote.
Thankfully people have responded and now I both understand the sentence and the why!
this "are a common tactic" gets a bit old, good way to gatekeep certain topics.
If the same "tactic" is used, why not come up with a good counter? A point stands whether it's being asked disingenuously or not.
It could be, but communication issues could also be at play, plus overeager doctors/social workers. In Romania they go at great lengths not to pull children out of family environments, in Denmark and other more developed countries it could be the opposite.
Implying ripping children out of their families willy-nilly is "more developed."
I'm not implying anything other than the fact in Romania social workers KNOW it's very, very likely the child will fare worse fate in an orphanage or foster care, EVEN in cases that would be considered abuse in the West.
Given a more developed country, I'd presume there are more people willing to adopt/do foster care for the right reasons and the social workers can regularly check upon the welfare of the child, thus there can be legitimate reasons to lower the threshold of taking a child out of a family setting vs a less developed country.
Not ripping children from actually abusive families is more developed. There are many cases of abuses families who need to lose their children, and in some those families still have children. There are other cases where good families lose their children.
Note that I carefully did not say anything about what abuse is. Unfortunately there is no agreement and I don't want to get into that debate (it is well worth having, but it would change the direction I'm trying to go here).
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Its tongue in cheek. Germany is developed, but you will get arrested if you try to homeschool your children.
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Development past a certain point is not universally a good thing.
The term is used to describe the stages a country has been through, and there’s plenty of evidence that as countries develop further, the nature of those developments may or may not be beneficial.
Brexit, online safety and other forms of “progress” come to mind.
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That's not at all the implication.
In a lot of sci-fi, the most “developed” civilisations have their children raised by robots in crèches.
I don’t think it was supposed to be aspirational.
> in Denmark and other more developed countries it could be the opposite.
Did you mean: richer?
I mean more developed, because a country like Saudi Arabia is rich but not developed imho, and there could be countries that are develope -- i.e. they have good education, infrastructure, medical care, human rights, clean environment etc etc and not that rich.
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Seems like the bias is on your part… Which is ironic, given the articles content….
Or do you have _evidence_?
Not everything comes with evidence, nor is everything a court case. If you have experienced racism again and again though, you can often tell when you see it, or you can quite safely deduce it in a case or wrong treatment, even without hard proof.
> If you have experienced racism again and again though, you can often tell when you see it, or you can quite safely deduce it in a case or wrong treatment, even without hard proof.
There may be some overlap between systemic racial mistreatment and child abuse - however the nuances seem to set them far apart. I believe conflating the two makes it harder to get the full measure of each.
It's not that they can't be compared. It's that they ought to be fully considered in isolation first.
And yet they are wrong, so clearly evidence was needed.
[flagged]
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No, I don't have any bias, it's everybody else having biases. To be sure, I just checked how many times before I was biased (it's zero times), so I can't be now.
The username kinda suggests an Eastern European (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Muromets) so I read the post as a personal opinion that the bias exists.
Wait, are there Europeans who don't acknowledge that this bias exists? In my experience with European colleagues and those who've traveled a lot there it's so universally-acknowledged that this would surprise me.
It also because north Europe has one of the most toxic social services in the world, kidnapping kids 24/7. That's basically their job.
Whatever core truth you're trying to express, wording it in this way isn't helpful.
This is a difficult question I've been pondering between the UK/USA.
Who has more authority over their children and in which domains?
Medical providers, can they ruin kids' lives in various ways? It's easy to manipulate worried parents.
Schools, do teachers have authority over their classroom, how much? Can they override parents, for example when rescuing them from anti-LGBT?
Nobody trusts churches anymore, so that's not really a problem.
Seen complaints/protests like this in my country. Then the adult children of the lady leading these protests spoke out against her and pointed out she was just doing it to get a house and embezzling a load of GoFundMe money.
This wasn't SBS though, she just kept adopting out her kids to devote more time to her drug habits.
No.