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15/2/00
Smacking
Bottoms
Just before Christmas of 1999, you
might recall
an incident where a father - a teacher - was arrested because he had smacked his
daughter when she refused to leave the dentist's waiting room to go and
have a tooth examined. The child had been suffering considerable pain from her
tooth for the previous two weeks. It had kept her awake at night despite the use
of strong painkillers. The father was desperate to sort out the problem there
and then - before the Christmas period - because the dentist was becoming impatient and was going to cancel the
appointment.
When the father was arrested he was put in a
police cell for five hours. During this period of time both of his children were
taken away by the social services. The father was told that he would not be
allowed to see the children. The result was that on Christmas Eve the mother and
the two children had no father. As the mother recalls, her children were sobbing
their eyes out for the whole evening.
For the whole Christmas period the children
and the mother were separated from their father. He was not allowed to enter his
own house.
This father was actually charged with assault,
and at the ensuing trial he was given what the Scottish courts call an
'admonishment'. This father was the first parent ever in this country convicted
simply for smacking his child.
He was also sacked from his
teaching post of 20+ years.
On Channel 3's Tonight Programme the father
described how he and his wife were now living in an absolute nightmare situation. They
lived in constant fear that someone might turn up at the door to take the
children away. They feared more accusations. For example, children often injure
themselves accidentally, and they felt that, should this occur, the social services
and the police would be knocking at the door to take the children away again
for more interrogations and more examinations - something that is a common
occurrence these days.
Can politicians and media people imagine what
everyone in this family was put through over this two-week Christmas period? Can
they just reflect on this for a moment? Do they have any understanding of what
it must be like for a child in this situation to have to testify in court
against her own father? Can they appreciate what the emotional consequences for
everyone in the family will be in the future?
Surely, this
child has been subjected to an appalling act of emotional abuse.
This child's security was totally
undermined in a number of ways. She was hauled off by uncaring strangers from
the social services. She was intrusively interrogated and interviewed for hours.
She was aware that her father had been arrested and refused access to her over
Christmas. She will have internalised the pain and anguish of both her parents,
and she will have continued to do so as both of the parents thereafter lived in fear of an
uncertain future and she detected this both consciously and unconsciously.
The child-abuse hysterics win again, don't they? They have damaged the man in this family,
they have poisoned the relationship with his children, they have undermined the
children's security and their happiness with family life, and they have got the
message out to all our fathers. "Do anything that we don't approve of, and
we'll get you. All of you. Including the children."
But for most of those working in
the child-abuse industry, such damage to our children and to their families matters not
a jot.
Their aim is to shatter those
families bit by bit so that they can continue to justify their existence and
their funding.
And if you think that this is an
exaggeration, then please think very carefully about why, for example,
organisations such as the NSPCC have, for the past three decades, been telling ALL
those children who have been abused that they "will be
damaged for life".
If you care about someone, the
very last thing you would do is to persistently drum into their
heads that they have been damaged for life following some
incident.
But the NSPCC has been doing this
very forcefully for three whole decades! This organisation, clearly, does not
care about children at all!
What it cares about is itself!
And if it can rake in the
donations by telling everybody that children who have been abused will be
damaged for life then, regardless of how badly this might affect the
children, it will do this.
And the very same is true with
regard to the smacking issue.
These child-abuse organisations
will say anything, and do anything - even if it hurts our children - in order to
get funding.
And the result has been that, bit by bit, the parents -
especially the fathers - and, indeed, most of the rest of society - have been forced to back
off from the children in their midst; lest they be accused of some form of
'abuse'.
And even if, for example, no
parent ever smacked a child again, these child-abuse organisations would then
portray some other action as being 'abusive' in order to keep generating their
income.
In other words, they will never
stop expanding their definitions of 'abuse' so that they can continue to justify
their existence.
Indeed, some child 'experts' have recently tried to claim that shouting is an act of
abuse, and so is calling a child 'naughty'.
And as the fathers back away, perhaps throwing
in the towel altogether and leaving the family home or, perhaps, just bothering
less with the children lest they put a foot wrong, so it is that the children
become more dysfunctional and more difficult to control. So it is that the
mothers have to do more of the work. So it is that the problems in our
communities get worse, particularly with regard to the behaviour of the boys. And
so it goes on.
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