Category Archive

A few decades ago the joke about justice was that an accused person was innocent until proved Irish. For Irish, now read “bullied parent”. The current child protection procedures and the proposed laws to penalise parents for their childrens’ bad behaviour provide a charter for child bullies. They can be as anti social as they like and their parents will be punished - not them. It is a power too far.

Of course the typical teenager would not use such a power againt its parents - but then the typical teenager is unlikely to be bunking off schools or indulging in anti social behaviour on the street. The mistake is to assume that parents of anti-social, excluded or truanting teenagers either condone or ignore their child’s behaviour and do nothing to try to stop it.  Undoubtedly some parents do not care but there are, I believe, a great many who have taught their children community values, provided loving and supportive homes, acted as reasonable role models, set firm and fair guidelines and adopted the recommended parenting techniques but still find themselves faced with an abusive and sometimes violent child.

What do the parents do? Curefews don’t work - they are ignored; grounding won’t work unless your home is secured like a prison - the child will run away, climing through windows or sneaking out in the night;  listening and talking don’t work - you risk verbal abuse, sometimes violence. The child acts as differently from the parent as it possibly can. It stays out all night, it doesn’t come home from school. It leads its friends’ parents to believe that it is being abused, kept prisoner, being unreasonably treated at home. Its parents try to get help - but nothing is available.  The assumption is that it’s the parents’ fault: inadequate parenting skills, not enough love, not enough positive encouragement, inconsistent discipline, too strict, too lax, too aggressive, too much shouting, not enough listening…..

The routine parenting classes can even make things worse. At the one I went to the tutors didn’t seem to grasp what the parents (all volunteers giving up their Saturday) were telling them. One woman who had been abused by her alcoholic teenage daughter for two years was told to tell her daughter that the abuse and swearing was totally unacceptable and that she should stop it now. This was not a case for “choices and consequences”, because there was no choice. The poor woman didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. What, she asked, did they think she had been doing for two years?

The nightmare gets worse. The child’s invincibility is confirmed when it gets slightly injured (small scratch or bruise) while it is physically attacking its parents. In my experience, if you are a parent your right to reasonable self defence (trying to push it away or hold it still) does not extend to protecting yourself against your child (because you might hurt it!!). The police accept the defence - but not the social services. They will put you through child protection procedures without even interviewing you first. You are presumed guilty and they are rescuing your child. It is even doubtful whether proving that your child abused you will help. Apparently most abusive children were abused themselves and no doubt the parents are the most likely suspects.

So what chance of family reconcilliation? What chance of justice?  Most damming of all - what chance for the child? Is it really in the child’s interest? Does it help a child who has been bullying its parents to punish its parents? (Imagine the headlines if the victims of a playground bully were the ones excluded from school).

Despite their trauma, distress and often mental health problems caused by the experience, the parents are still the people most concerned about their child’s interests and welfare. Whatever the child has done to them or or caused to be done to them, the parents still want to see their child grow up safe, healthy and happy, fit into society as a well adjusted person and make the most of its opportunities. 

My concern is that some of the children in this position may need serious help for underlying illnesses (whether mental or physical) and the assumption that their behaviour stems from the abuse or inadequacies of their parents is preventing them from getting the help and services they really need. Even if you don’t care about the parents and agree with the presumption of guilt be careful that your hasty, well meaning and politically correct beliefs are not further damaging the child they are designed to help.

Is the popular uproar about failed asylum seekers and illegal immigrants the last bastion of acceptable racism? I’ve only met one person that was, I later learned, an illegal immigrant and I bet none of the people making political capital from this serious issue would have minded his presence here one bit. He was a white, middle-aged American, fairly well to do with a pleasant personality and he came to work in the UK.  He didn’t “sneak” into the country but entered through the normal channels as a visitor on a business visa. He didn’t stay long and was gone within a few months but by working without a work permit he was in breach of his conditions of entry and therefore an illegal immigrant, liable to removal.  While he was working here he travelled in and out of the country without once being challenged as to his intentions or reason for entry. On the other hand I know that, a few months later, an Indian national of equivalent social and educational standing and doing a similar job was detained and questioned about his immigration status after taking an internal domestic flight between two UK cities. He had a valid visa and work permit and eventually managed to sort the matter out. But it makes you think. Doesn’t it?

It is arguable that the real victims of illegal immigration and the failure of the system to detect them are the illegal immigrants themselves. Many are forced to take employment on the black market. They often work for pitifully low pay and sometimes in dangerous conditions. Think of the Morcombe Bay cockle pickers. They may have intended to come to the UK as economic migrants but whether they deliberately chose to flout the immigration laws or whether they were conned by unscrupulous trafficers I don’t know - but they didn’t deserve to die. Failures of the immigration system not only enable scroungers to thrive but also allow the vulnerable to be exploited. It may have cost the the Chinese cockle pickers their lives.

Illegal immigrants who try to play the asylum card should be sent home but is our system up to determining the genuine from the bogus? Apparently 20% of failed asylum seekers are granted asylum on appeal. A system that fails one in five people when their lives are at stake is appalling.  Over recent years the system has been tightened up to reduce the grounds for appeal. So let’s hope that the genuine asylum seekers who arrive here with no possessions, no money, no means of earning a living, frequently separated from loved ones, often unable to speak English and sometimes traumatised, disorientated and suffering the effects of torture are in a sufficiently robust condition to navigate their way through the legal system and deal with officials whose culture, language and expectations may be completely alien to them.

I read a comment recently that there were too many asylum seekers “and they weren’t even escaping from a war zone”. I presume the implication was that they therefore could not be genuine asylum seekers.  I’m not an expert but as I understand it the fear of becoming “collateral damage” either through direct acts of war or because of conflict induced poverty and famine does not necessarily amount to a well founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, without which an asylum claim will fail.

Fortunately for people fleeing war zones the conflict is likely to make the news and even without the help of the Human Rights law, it would  create bad publicity and lose votes for any shade of government to be seen sending women and children back to a dangerous, war torn area from which they had just escaped. For people escaping less newsworthy persecution there may be no TV pictures to help them make their case.