to think steralisation should be enforced

[claw3]

on anyone who abuses children?

Bureaucracy has replaced common sense.

"Poverty isn't an indicator of anti-social behaviour, crappy parenting and abused children."

Actually, sadly, it is. It is, in fact, the biggest single indicator of all those things. Which is not because being poor makes you hurt children, but because people who are all or some of the following: uneducated, unintelligent, chaotic, have been abused, are amoral, hooked on drink and/or drugs etc tend to be poor, because people who fit all or some of these categories are less likely to have great jobs.

good comment from simon heffer here

In what circumstances can they do that rebelmum???

oh NOT this shit again

seriously, it's driving people away from MN. Take your hysterical tabloid-guzzling fascist histrionics elsewhere

Franny Lyons I believe she had to leave the country.

Whatfresh - i dont believe that castration would have detered him. But i do believe he will serve a prison sentence, come out, disappear and reproduce

I think that was her name but it certainly wasn't an isolated incident.

it's the Telegraph..

Was that the girl who misread the letter from social services and fled to Ireland with her mother??

All the social services wanted to do was have a meeting with her as she had had problems in the past. They certainly weren't threatening to take her child away.

I believe in that case, SS believed that she was likely to harm the baby. I don't recall the details, but they weren't going to do it on a whim.

There is always a difficulty that public perception swings between "SS are useless, they leave children to be abused", and "SS are useless, they take children away from their families needlessly" depending on what the most recent high-profile case has been. Either way, they're damned if they don't make the right call 100% of the time.

I agree with CountessDracula, but not for the OPs reasons. It's been shown that sexual child abusers cannot be rehabilitated. Cutting off their goolies would prevent them from from a sexual drive perhaps. If there is some other reason such as mental instability then perhaps a lobotomy is in order. heh, just put them to death, slowly and painfully.

WHABT: not all abusers can be rehabilitated but some can. The drug addicted, ignorant and immature can, if their parenting has been neglectful rather than deliberately cruel, often be helped. And sometimes those who abuse partners/children because they were abused themselves can be helped to break the cycle, too.

claw3 on Mon 17-Nov-08 12:01:56
.
"As you say, you seek medical advice, abusers dont. I can appreciate that some medical conditions could be mistaken, but others most definately could not."

This isn't actually statistically true. Some abusers do seek medical advice and that's how they're caught. And in fact, many medical practitioners believe than an excessive interest in going to the doctor is a dodgy sign in itself (Munchausen by proxy). As it's the medical practitioners who are going to be the expert witnesses in court what they believe is pretty relevant to the running of the justice system.

Anyway, what do we do about those medical conditions that could be mistaken? Do we make a law that says a jury has to know about all the medical conditions there are- and any that may yet be discovered!- before they are allowed to return a guilty verdict in a case where it might carry a castration sentence?

In our case, it wasn't even a jury who didn't know about dd's condition: it was a consultant paediatrician. And there is no doubt that her condition affected many different parts of her body that had no obvious connection with each other, but some of which (e.g.frequent UTIs) are sometimes connected with abuse. So what hope would we have had in front of a jury? Thankfully, it never went that far. But if it had, I think ours is a good case for meeting out punishment that is not irreversible once it turns out a mistake has been made.

Remember, there have been cases where innocent people have been jailed on suspicion of child abuse. How would you undo a castration?

The Dutch Parliament are considering a bill to force unfit mothers to take contraception: here

I appreciate this is not totally on point as it is for 'unfit mothers' and not abusers, and it is enforced contraception, not enforced sterilisation. But if arguably the most progressive Parliament in the world is debating these issues, it is an indication that policymakers are beginning to go into areas which were previously taboo.

Why not forcibly sterilize all people with and IQ of < 100; and everyone with < 5 GCSE's and anyone on BENEFITS too

FFS !

morning cory - all im saying is that take baby p's step dad for example, he will receive a prison sentence, come out of prison. Then what? he will be free to have children or shack up with another mother who has kids and abuse again. Would another mother want to have a relationship with him, if he has been castrated?

He may be a changed man when he comes out, that i seriously doubt. Personally if castrating him means saving only one kid from being abused it would be worth it.

claw3 on Tue 18-Nov-08 09:37:27
"morning cory - all im saying is that take baby p's step dad for example, he will receive a prison sentence, come out of prison. Then what? he will be free to have children or shack up with another mother who has kids and abuse again. Would another mother want to have a relationship with him, if he has been castrated?"

Sterilisation does not actually make you unable to have sex. (people use it as birth control, you know) And the kind of man who abuses children isn't going to be stopped from shacking up with another woman by sterilisation. The sort of vulnerable woman who takes up with someone like him isn't going to ask questions about his sexual status first. Or if she did, she isn't necessarily going to be put off by his being unable to have more children.

I can see no way in which castrating a man will stop him from being violent to children. It is not that I don't want him stopped. It's not that I care more about his rights than about the child's. It is simply that I can see that this is another knee jerk reaction that would achieve precisely nothing.

A man like that would still want a woman for his creature comforts. And there are plenty of vulnerable women out there. Once he was in a relationship, sterilisation would be unlikely to make him a more gentle caring stepfather. Probably quite the opposite.

If not being able to engender children would make him incapable of abusing children- then baby P would never have been in danger in the first place. He hadn't engendered him.

Oh, lovely claw - you've gone from "sterilisation" to "castration" in one seamless move there . You really are an unpleasant person, aren't you? A man who has not sexually abused anyone is now to be castrated because that way he'll never be able to have a stable loving relationship with a woman who might have children, who he might hurt. Charming!

You're making it clearer and clearer as this thread goes on that you are a nasty vindictive person who is motivated only by "making them suffer" and not by taking a serious look at how the criminal justice system can be modified to protect children from offenders.

Do you ever stop to think how your own motivation overlaps with the sadistic acts which you claim to think are so abhorrent?

And you still have not answered my question. It is a well known fact that innocent people do occasionally get jailed for child abuse- or even child murder- which then turns out to have been a case of misdiagnosis. It has happened to parents of Marfan's syndrome children, and it has happened in a few other cases. What would you do if you found out afterwards that the child which looked like a classic case of abuse did actually suffer from an illness which produced identical symptoms?

Clearly, social workers cannot always discount big open wounds, unexplained bruises, a constant history of broken bones, strange scars, frequent UTIs, skin marks that look like burns. Yet it is known that there are diseases that produce exactly these symptoms, sometimes all of them.

Prison sentences have been reversed. So it seems dangerous to introduce punishments that are not reversible.

Cory - In baby p's case, a woman would ask questions if his testicles had been removed, surely even the most vulnerable of women wouldnt want to knowing have anything to do with a child abuser?