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You what?

The new offence would make it a crime to do anything that deliberately harmed a child’s “physical intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development”.

This could include deliberately ignoring a child, or not showing them any love, over prolonged periods, damaging a child’s emotional development.

Harming their social development? Not taking them to Chuck E Cheese for their birthday party? Not buying the “right” trainers for them?

What the fuck has got into people here?

You can prosecute anyone under this. Sending them off to boarding school at 7? Harms their emotional development you know. Not letting them attend the prom? Harms their social development. “Not showing them any love”. What if you don’t in fact love the child? During a bitter divorce if one side doesn’t let the other actually see the kiddie can the unseen one then be prosecuted?

And what the hell’s going to happen to all those social workers who simply manage but not love the children in their care?

This is insane.

37 thoughts on “You what?”

  1. The irony is that, only a few years ago, someone proposing this would have been taken into care, as they would obviously be deranged.

    This sort of thinking stems from the belief, now solid and fully established in the minds of the elite, that bureaucrats can accomplish anything and everything.

    I wonder what Fleming would have said if a bureaucrat told him that his quantum of solace was real and measureable?

  2. The bansturbators reckon they are going to hedge this around with all sorts of restrictions that means that only “real and significant” emotional damage will count.

    Bets the first restriction is something along the lines of “no person acting under statutory authority or court order will be subject to the provisions of s.X”?

  3. “physical intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development”

    Does that cover teaching about the big sky fairy who gets angry when you don’t wipe your bottom correctly?

    Dawkins would have a field day on this one.

  4. “The new offence would make it a crime to do anything that deliberately harmed a child’s “physical intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development”.

    That will put about 30% of the UK’s schools under surveillance then.

  5. And continuing the theme of schools, what’s the betting that councils would use the law to prosecute parents who took their children out of school so that they can go on a cheaper holiday. I mean, RIPA was only to be used for terrorist offences, not prosecuting parents who were thought to be cheating the system to get their kids into school. So parents could be prosecuted for putting their kids into school and prosecuted for taking their kids out school. Madness.

    If they do prosecure parents for taking their children out of school, shouldn’t the councils also prosecute the teachers when they go on strike. The children are affected even worse by strikes as parents will typically plan their holidays to minimise the damage to their child’s development whilst teacher’s strikes are usually surprises with little warning.

  6. I mean, RIPA was only to be used for terrorist offences,

    No, please don’t continue this meme. RIPA was supposed to replace all of the common law surveillance powers that were revoked by HRA98’s implementation in to UK law of Article 8 ECHR. This included, yes, the Security Services and (then) Special Branch surveillance of terrorists but also all the way down to Trading Standards under-age buying tests, watching out for fly-tippers and other local council surveillance.

    Note – the comment above isn’t intended to suggest that RIPA isn’t being misused by councils, with sign-offs at too low a level or simply rubber-stamping requests.

  7. “Writing in tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph he says: “Not too many years after the Brothers Grimm popularised the story of Cinderella, the offence of child neglect was introduced”

    Other legislation being considered would make it a criminal offence to kiss a sleeping beauty without her explicit consent and a new range of penalties to tackle talking grasshoppers who attempt to groom sentient puppets into becoming “a real boy”.

  8. So Much For Subtlety

    I keep saying liberal Britain is dead. Our lords and masters simply do not live in that world. They do not understand the basic values of a liberal society.

    It is the slow rise of the Stalinists through the institutions.

  9. “you can prosecute anyone under this”.

    Yes. Feature, not a bug.

    It will soon become impossible for any citizen to live normally without committing some sort of criminal offence. Perhaps we are there already.

    And the “prolonged period” part, that will wither away at the first ‘interpretation’ by an activist judge. So in effect it will be a criminal offence not to turn your child into a self-centered snotty little bastard.

  10. The poster is correct. This is a licence for the state to steal tens of thousands of children from their parents and put them in foster/state care–where they will receive so much “love” and “care” of such a standard that it will destroy them.

    It might sound tinfoilhattery but I find it hard to believe that this is not part and parcel with the work of the left. The feminist commissars have used demonisation of men (as paedos, domestic violence monsters, rapists etc) as their weapon of choice to attack the family as the basis of bourgeois society The other shoe, so to speak, is welfarism–here reaching its corrupt and evil zenith– a second (and just as successful ) line of attack.

  11. “The bansturbators reckon they are going to hedge this around with all sorts of restrictions that means that only “real and significant” emotional damage will count.”

    No, the exact opposite. This has been around in residential care and schooling for ages. It’s used to get people they want to do over, basically. It will be never used against lousy parents who don’t feed their children, don’t care about their education, just abandon them so they can get smashed etc.

    Emotional abuse has included telling them off, for example.

  12. You know all liberty has been lost when the government introduces laws that mean you are always guilty of breaking them, no matter what your actions. That means your freedom is entirely beholden to the state turning a blind eye.

  13. JuliaM

    “Given you can ACTUALLY starve your children in the proper sense of the term and not face any jail time, just who is kidding whom here?”

    Isn’t this a common trend? In the face of obvious wrongdoing that goes unpunished, normal, everyday people get criminalised and punished instead.

    It’s much easier to prosecute law abiding people.

  14. Mr Ecks – and I thought Mr Cameron’s Alinskyite “Big Society” plan was just meaningless electioneering verbiage.

    The rainbow flags flying above government buildings the other day proved me wrong. Whatever one thinks of gay marriage – and good, sincere people can be found on both sides of the argument – this marked a radical legislative change to the bedrock institution of not only our society, but of Western civilisation. And it was sprung on a surprised electorate with no credible democratic mandate for it, because our lords and masters know better.

    So now we’re being reminded that we only keep our children on the sufferance of HM Government, and if HM Government wants to give them condoms or abortifacients or fill their heads with nonsense about climate change or whatever, we’d better bloody well nod approvingly or social workers will descend like the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys.

    This is why the Yanks are so keen on their Second Amendment rights, much good that it does them.

  15. I look forward to being prosecuted at the behest of the two Ms Redactos for telling them when they were much younger that when an ice cream van played its chimes, it meant that it had run out of ice cream.

  16. Steve:I don’t have any kids and if I did they would be grown by now (altho’ there might well be grandkids), so this is one they can’t use against me personally. However, it would seem increasingly likely that severe resistance to the state is becoming the only option left. If they are going to ruin your life and your family because you are bringing up your kids in the way you want–well is that a lesser cause than the homes and hearths for which millions of men went to France and many never came back 100 years ago?.

  17. “This could include deliberately ignoring a child, or not showing them any love…”

    Anyone fancy having a go at defining “love”?
    Presumably this doesn’t include having sex with them. Or does it? It seems to define other “love” relationships. Or is it “love” in the sense of chocolate?

  18. Mr Ecks – I can’t think what they’d “get” me for, my kids are happy little bundles of trouble and snotters. But you never know. Maybe they’ll find my secret stash of Viz back issues.

    A few years ago we’d have laughed at the crazy paranoid idea of social workers taking kids off foster parents because the adults were in UKIP:

    http://www.heraldscotland.com/mobile/news/home-news/row-as-council-take-children-from-foster-parents-for-being-ukip-members.1353750554?_=976e638184b5016c2ad8d7482b550ef4432bd6f4

    10 years ago nobody would have accused you of being a homophobic bigot because you thought civil partnerships were just fine, but didn’t agree with gay marriage. It’s now been established that failing to agree that gay marriage is wonderful makes you an evil homophobic bigot, and we know how social workers feel about homophobia:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2199076/Grandparents-children-given-gay-couple-adoption-denied-access-years.html

    It’s not all that far fetched to believe evil climate change “deniers” might be next. “So tell me, how often do your parents recycle?”

    Severe resistance? Much as I’d enjoy smoking Gauloises and laying down suppressing fire on a convoy of NUT gauliters with a Bren gun, I think it’s more likely that the State will turn us all into liars and hypocrites like the cowed populations of the old Soviet Union.

  19. I’m not by nature a believer in conspiracies – I suspect this is more about empire building than a war on the family. But it makes one think.

  20. After reading this proposal, does anyone doubt that the ruling classes regard us as living on their sufferance?

  21. A hundred-or-so years ago, I, as an old bloke with cancer, would be reasonably relaxed about my incipient demise as, having lived a reasonably “good” life, I’d be looking forward to meeting my Maker.

    In these Godless times, my passing will be made less traumatic by the knowledge that I won’t have to put up with all this sort of sh*t any longer.

  22. So Much For Subtlety

    In passing there is a push to add this to family law in so far as it applies to spouses. It is already a crime in France to be “abusive” of your wife.

    So if she says “Does my bum look big in this?” remember you could be spending the next two to five years in a cell.

  23. “Isn’t this a common trend? In the face of obvious wrongdoing that goes unpunished, normal, everyday people get criminalised and punished instead.”

    It is indeed. It is also an excellent way of addressing the intractable problem of over-representation of certain ethnic and socio-economic groups in the prisons, and in the child welfare “looked after” sector.

  24. Bloke in the pub with strong but ill founded opinions

    Things ain’t what they were. Political correctness gone mad. Stuff and nonesense. It’s all Brussels . Etc etc.

  25. This is another ‘nudge’ to stop whites having children. The diverse will just ignore the law as they do with other laws.

  26. I think it’s just Parkinson’s Law re the growth of government bureaucracies (they grow because that’s their nature and never stop because they can’t go bust).
    On the bright side, we’re must now be close to the point where further attacks on the family will trigger a bureaucrat cull.

  27. Does anyone really think this will be applied equally? Only if you do, I have this lovely bridge across the Thames I’d like to sell you!
    Complaint against muslim marrying his 12 year old daughter to a 50 year old goatherder? Islamophobia!
    Complaint about a couple of homo blokes abusing their foster child? Homophobe! (Women too of course)
    Worried about some African illegal chopping up her albino child for ‘mutti’? Racist!
    Think there’s something wrong with chavs spending their dole on drugs and Stella instead of feeding the kids? Oppressor of the Poor!
    You are only at the slightest risk if you are pink and have worked for a living.

  28. Robert, if all those that pay taxes are in jail for neglecting their children by going to work, who is going to pay for keeping us there?

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