Farrar on Anti-Smacking Bill
David Farrar at Kiwi Blog nails it with this post on Sue Bradford's Anti-Smacking Bill.
Reflecting on the anti-smacking bill, supporters of it have claimed that the Police won't prosecute parents just for lightly smacking their kids if they misbehave. Now this might be true, but what there hasn't been much focus on is how CYFS will use the new law.
There has been a great deal of evidence that already CYFS has a very heavy handed approach to parents, even a bullying approach where they threaten to remove custody if you challenge their wishes,
Now imagine the situation once this bill is passed. CYFS could use this provision to act against any parent or family who smacks a child, no matter how minor or justified. Imagine how it might be used in custody disputes - one could use it against the other parent, even if you had both agreed to it.
So yes if the law is changed, you won't see a lot of parents going to jail for smacking their children, but you might see a lot of them get done over by CYFS, who no doubt next year will announce theyneed a huge budget increase to cope with the extra workload.
Add to the mix, nasty neighbours, jilted lovers, disgruntled business partners, jealous rellies, political or business rivals etc etc....
How many small business people have been "dobbed in" to IRD over the years, by former wives or girlfriends? I have read that it is one of the most common catalysts for IRD investigation.
Not everyone has a small business or diddles their taxes.
However most people do have kids. The possibility of losing your children, would terrify almost every parent.
Yet, if Sue Bradford's Bill passes, it could be only an anonymous phone call away.
Of course it would never happen would it? I mean, nobody could be that malicious, could they?
Reflecting on the anti-smacking bill, supporters of it have claimed that the Police won't prosecute parents just for lightly smacking their kids if they misbehave. Now this might be true, but what there hasn't been much focus on is how CYFS will use the new law.
There has been a great deal of evidence that already CYFS has a very heavy handed approach to parents, even a bullying approach where they threaten to remove custody if you challenge their wishes,
Now imagine the situation once this bill is passed. CYFS could use this provision to act against any parent or family who smacks a child, no matter how minor or justified. Imagine how it might be used in custody disputes - one could use it against the other parent, even if you had both agreed to it.
So yes if the law is changed, you won't see a lot of parents going to jail for smacking their children, but you might see a lot of them get done over by CYFS, who no doubt next year will announce theyneed a huge budget increase to cope with the extra workload.
Add to the mix, nasty neighbours, jilted lovers, disgruntled business partners, jealous rellies, political or business rivals etc etc....
How many small business people have been "dobbed in" to IRD over the years, by former wives or girlfriends? I have read that it is one of the most common catalysts for IRD investigation.
Not everyone has a small business or diddles their taxes.
However most people do have kids. The possibility of losing your children, would terrify almost every parent.
Yet, if Sue Bradford's Bill passes, it could be only an anonymous phone call away.
Of course it would never happen would it? I mean, nobody could be that malicious, could they?
posted by Trevor Loudon at
2/25/2007 03:25:00 PM
3 Comments:
What's the deal with these anti-smoking laws? I have a heart problem, but so far, this second-hand smoke thing hasn't complicated anything for me.
The level of msm analysis of this matter is, not to put it mildly, shoddy.
What might Bradford's underlying (as opposed to stated) motivations in pushing anti-smacking legislation?
Bradford remains an unreconstructed Communist working within another political party to gain the political traction she would never have achieved had she run for political office under her true banner.
Karl Marx asserted that society is evolving inexorably toward socialism through an ongoing, incremental struggle of opposing economic currents. Here, an existing condition (thesis) comes into conflict with a new condition (antithesis) that is attempting to emerge. Out of the dialectical conflict between these two contending forces a new, higher condition (synthesis) emerges. This is then put through the process again as the new thesis, until full socialism is achieved.
Lenin expanded Marx’s structural analysis of capitalist society from its early focus on economic relationships to take in social and political relationships, thus widening the role of the revolutionary as a change agent. The task of the revolutionary was now to identify and exploit pressure points for dialectical conflict, thus undermining the legitimacy of the existing social and political order, and hastening the eventual triumph of socialism.
The family has always been a core Marxist-Leninist target because it is the primary environment in which the capitalist values of hard work, thrift and personal responsibility are perpetuated. These values are the only defence posts against the totalitarianisation of our society.
For Marxist-Leninists, the formative family is the institution within which children are inculcated into an acceptance of the hierarchical system of capitalist class relations. As Engels famously asserted in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State: "Within the family, man is the bourgeoisie, women and children the proletariat."
Undermining traditional parental authority over their offspring expands the role of the state in picking up the pieces for ever-increasing numbers of children. The ultimate goal is for children to be socialised by the state, rather than by their parents.
Much has been written and discussed about the criminalisation of ordinary, loving parents under Bradford's proposed legislation, but nobody has taken this analysis a step further.
In all too many cases, the Swedish experience shows that parents convicted of breaching anti-smacking laws will see their children seized by state social workers based on a presumption of "parental unfitness."
In 1979 the Swedish state arrogated to itself the power to be the primary protector of the child. It can now determine at its sole discretion whether a single, mild form of corporal punishment, verbal chastisement or temporary restriction of the child's activities, constitutes a legal offence by which the offending parent becomes subject to a jail sentence.
The Nordic Committee has provided historical statistics relating to the seizure of children by Swedish authorities. These have proved difficult to obtain because they are not recorded in criminal offending statistics.
Children are taken away by an administrative court analagous to New Zealand's Family Court which, in the public interest, naturally, keeps the figures safely out of reach of most people.
Sweden has a population of around eight million. It has a generous welfare state and virtually no poverty. There should be only a handful of cases where children need to be taken from their parents.
Yet in 1981, Swedish authorities seized 22,000 children, representing an annual seizure rate 86 times greater than that of West Germany. An equivalent figure for the United States would have been more than 687, 000 children in just one year.
No doubt the authorities had such a field day due to the number of children claiming to have been smacked by their parents before the 1979 Act became operative.
Although seizure rates fell somewhat in succeeding years, by 1995 some 14,700 Swedish children were still being removed from family homes. This remains an annual seizure rate 57 times that of Germany. In American terms, this would equate to almost 500, 000 removals a year.
The Nordic Commission has been unable to access more recent data, though Swedish authories have claimed that the number of child seizures has dropped to a "negligible" level due to widespread acceptance that smacking children is now unlawful.
state as mother and father.
helen could pull that off.
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