So the NSPCC are currently offering schools the chance to run an assembly encouraging children to speak out about abuse. This is brilliant, of course. My problem is they have chosen Ant and Dec to front their campaign and I feel like it is totally wrong to have an addict who has been convicted of causing a crash through drink driving.
Now, i totally get and agree that he has a right to second chances and has seemingly (for now at least) taken the right steps to sort himself and his career out. He’s also not a child abuser. Except he has ploughed into a car carrying a child whilst blind drunk. Surely the NSPCC could have left him to do that and found someone else to front this campaign?
I am one of so many who have had to protect their children from their other alcoholic parent. Alcoholics can cause a huge amount of damage to their children- drink driving, lies, denial, emotional unavailability, neglect, chaos….
In too many families, the addict and other adults around them choose to live in denial (often angry denial) where the children grow up learning not to trust their gut about the problems they feel and know are being inflicted on them.
I feel like the NSPCC are feeding that tendency to mistrust their own feelings and the damage it does to children by basically saying, yes he has done bad things and yes he is an addict but you should just ignore all that and trust what he says.