toad you are a fool, jarbury was not taking the piss, see the above comments.

In a way it is taking the piss, because clearly it’s something Labour aren’t going to do. I was just floating an idea around…

Let’s cimininalise breathing (after all it’s noxious C02 we’re expelling, killing the planet with every breath), but have the PM direct the police, MeF etc that only individuals who are involved in activities deemed incompatible with societal progress be prosecuted.

My Greenie neighbour will be able to turn me in for going to church or reading bed-time stories to my kids, while claming that his drugged gay sex and plastic bag re-cycling is helping ‘progress’ our society.. so worth every breath.

getstaffed said: Another [related, relevant] fact is that any parent who has smacked their child for the purpose of correction since the repeal of s.59 is a criminal.

If you have done this I think you [*] should fess up and advise the Police. Unless, of course, you [*] consider your actions to be sufficiently inconsequential that they do not justify prosecution (as the law provides).

[*] , or your neighbour, teacher, passing busy-body, postie, local cop, friend’s tennis partner, wacked-out Gaia-worshiping Green list MP etc
~~~

No toad, if you’re really honest you and your Green mates are very happy to have perfectly good parents criminialised because it increases state power by driving the social intervention wedge deeper into family life.

You and your mates have re-defined ‘violence’ to suit your ideological ends. You have done nothing to prevent real child abuse and quite probably regard any current abuse as collateral damage in your relentless drive for more control of our lives.

Personally I think they should stick to their principles and vote against sending it to a select committee. However, surely you can see they could have legitimate reasons to actually vote for it at first reading.

What does it take to get a government “of the people, for the people”? A government that does things because they are the right things to do, not just whatever it takes to achieve power? MP’s who don’t lie, cheat and and spin shit, who don’t go back on their word.
Fuck, I suppose Disneyland could be a start.

Despite all their spin, the blanket banning of smacking was always the PSP’s agenda. I love how frogboy merges from that to the “It’s just for assault!” spin so flawlessly. He’s been doing it for so long.

kaya said: From Wikipedia: “The phrase tyranny of the majority, used in discussing systems of democracy and majority rule, is a criticism of the scenario in which decisions made by a majority under that system would place that majority’s interests so far above a dissenting individual’s interest that that individual would be actively oppressed.

Kids can’t vote. Nor can young people aged under 16.

QED, kaya.

Interesting, so toad believes that children who do not wish to be smacked are “dissenting individuals” who’s “rights” need to be protected. But wait, if they should be protected against how the cruel adult majority decides to discipline them, should they also be protected against said majority deciding to cruely restrict certain meat containing pastries in school shops?

But Mallard obviously blogged and posted several replies before he had actually read the Bill (or, alternatively, got his instructions from Goff).

So Mallard looked silly. No skin off my nose – I’m Green, so have no reason to defend him. Or Green MPs if they stuff up, for that matter.

Sure, guidance for children and young people is necessary, sensible and good.

Whacking them is not.

from jarbury: – Is that even more reason for Labour to vote for the bill though? Knowing that they could do so without actually worrying that it might pass…. you know, justify it on the basis that “88% of people in the referendum seem to indicate they want this issue looked at again, we’re putting our out of touch perception behind us and supporting what the people seem to want.”

Can see why? It is obvious. Yep, kids are not yet adults or have fully developed their faculty of reasoning to be able to think independently like adults and cope with the world. That’s why they don’t go to the supermarket on their own , they don’t drive on their own to kindy, they don’t rent flats on their own. Kids can’t survive on their own without adults. They will and must always be under the guidance of (an) adult/s whose faculty of reasoning is already fully developed unless that adult guardian/parent is mentally retarded or his/her mental state is slow like little children, then the law can step in and remove those children under the care of such adult. The term guidance as I used here is to meant the use of occasional smacking, which is how we humans learn when our faculty of reasoning haven’t fully developed (ie, need guidance at this stage). Guidance can come in different forms. You can scream all day in circumstances where the kid won’t pay attention to you regardless how loud you scream. You can do time-out. You can leave them alone unattended/unsupervised so that they can discover the external world on their own (hopefully, that during this unsupervised learning period, they won’t get electrocuted, and the law won’t have to prosecute you for negligence), and blah, blah, blah. So, smacking is one of those tools and it must be made available to the parents and not to be criminalized.

Nor should they.

If you have done this I think you should fess up and advise the Police. Unless, of course, you consider your actions to be sufficiently inconsequential that they do not justify prosecution (as the law provides).

In which case, have a happy evening and sleep well, getstaffed.

Ubiquitous Che // August 26, 2009 at 10:13 am

As someone who experienced some physical and emotional abuse growing up, here’s my two cents:

I don’t want this to be a sob-story – many children are abused far worse than I ever was. On the scope of things, my experiences are on the mild end of the abuse spectrum – but even so, abuse is abuse.

Its was my father. Without going into too much detail, he would vent on me. If I did something a little bit naughty, he’d completely overreact.

As an example, when I was 8 a friend has come over. We’d raided the lego and toy box to each create an army, and we’d turned my entire bedroom into a giant battlefield. Eventually we got sick of it, and just sat in the corner chatting.

My father walked down the hall past my room, and saw we weren’t playing. Gruffly, he told me to clean up now since I was done playing – perfectly good dad-behavour there.

So my friend and I started casually tossing toys back into their boxes and dissasembling legos, as we were chatting.

About ten minutes later my father came past the room again. We’d hardly cleaned anything. He strode forward – long legs – his face pinched. He backhanded me across the face. “I told you to clean your f**king room!” he hissed. “Do as your f**king told!”

The thing is – the hand to the face didn’t actually hurt. Other times he did hurt me, but I can barely remember those. But this instance sticks out in the memory. It wasn’t the actual physical violence that was the heart of the abuse – as I kid, I hurt myself far worse and on a far more regular basis than my father ever did.

No. It was the emotional aspect, the threat, the unpredictability, the slight hint of my father’s enjoyment, satisfaction, and self-righteousness as he struck me.

At the same time, mum would occasionally lightly smack me on the bum or the wrist. It was fine – it didn’t really hurt. But even when my father would hit me just as lightly as mum did, there was a different overtone to it that made it abusive.

So mum’s light smack and the same smack from my father fell into two different categories. The actual ‘force’ of the discipline wasn’t the defining character.

There’s… more to it than the mere act of violence.

Obviously, this kind of ambiguity is going to be difficult to account for in any legislation. I can’t remember who said it, but there’s a suggested principle that for any law we set to catch wrongdoers, we will inevitably catch some we didn’t mean to catch, and miss some we meant to.

So I don’t have a solution on offer here. Just a story to add on the mention of the non-physical components abuse. The non-physical aspects are the important bit – they’re just harder to objectively measure and assess.