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The Raelians are a truly weird cult, that is for sure, and the fact they are claiming to have produced the world’s first cloned human is hardly going to calm feelings about the technology. However even if their contention to have done so is true (not surprisingly I am disinclined to just take the word of a group which claims humans are the descendents of bio-engineered clones created by space aliens), I must say that I find it hard to get all that excited about the whole matter.
Although I do have worries that the technology and underpinning science is sufficiently immature that there is cause for concern for the health of a cloned child, the principle itself does not bother me at all… a child is a child is a child, and the manner of its creation does not give it any less worth or intrinsic rights.
However the issue of how to assign paternal and maternal responsibility for the child is, of course, going to keep a small army of lawyers busy for quite a while! I would be quite interested to see what people’s views are as to “who is left holding the baby”, if you will forgive the expression 
Sundon Lower School in Bedfordshire has banned video and digital cameras from its nativity play this year, because it is worried that the images may get into the hands of paedophiles.
So let me get this right… The head teacher of a state school has banned parents from recording their children in a play. How can it be okay for a woman in authority to be instilling fear of sexual predators into small children, clearly implying their own parents are collectively under suspicion?
This is the toxic paranoid psychology of the witch hunt. The world is not packed full of paedophiles hunting for pictures of nativity plays but it suits some people to act as it that was the case… powers must be expanded to ‘protect’ children after all and who better than a pettifogging head teacher to do that?
I suspect that this head teacher must be a fifth columnist for the Home Schooling Movement in Britain because no one is really that idiotic and paranoid, right? Right?
Alice Bachini looks at parenthood without any rose coloured glasses.
I moan a lot about having children. This sometimes makes me feel really mean, and I certainly wouldn’t do it in the presence of my dear friends who have wanted children for years and been unable to conceive so far. But maybe I should.
Of course, children are wonderful. The problem is, they are likely to be only slightly more wonderful than the treatment they get from you, the parent, and we parents have an incredibly difficult time trying to do things right.
Let me take the hypothetical example of, say, a one-year-old baby. This is what a day is like with a one-year-old baby. You wake up, with the baby in your bed, and breastfeed, for maybe an hour. Then you get up, carrying the baby. Then you try to get dressed, while the baby plays with something, if you’re lucky. Maybe you get interrupted a few times. An hour later, you can attempt to get some breakfast.
Entertaining one-year-olds is not easy; there isn’t much they can do, and their attention-span is zero. Another hour later, you can maybe go out, carrying the baby yourself or pushing it in a buggy for maybe fifteen minutes before she gets bored again.
Where will you go? A friend’s house, or a playgroup, where you will follow your baby around trying to make sure she doesn’t eat any live wires or spiders, and constantly looking for anything that will occupy her for ten minutes so you can have a cup of tea and some conversation. About feeding babies, entertaining babies, baby illnesses, and how to get any housework or cooking done.
I won’t bore you any further. It’s not much intellectual stimulation for a person with an adult-sized brain. → Continue reading: The consequences of convenience
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator. She is a supporter of Taking Children Seriously and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective. Her third book, Bound To Be Free deals in depth with the hidden costs of so called ‘free’ education, including further discussion of the issues below
According to last week’s Independent on Sunday a new mental health campaign sparked off by the fear that parents may face jail over compulsory drug orders for their children if a new Bill becomes law. Not content with collecting personal and private data on parents and children via the Orwellian Connexions scheme, the Blairite regime is now proposing to parent our children for us still further by accusing parents who do not favour drugging their children of being negligent and denying their children medical treatment.
The use of the ADHD drug, Ritalin, continues to rocket – 208,000 in 2001 compared to 2,000 a decade earlier. Compulsory treatment orders are a symptom of a culture which treats children as products and an adjunct of administering a brutal, centralised ‘free’ education system. Those who do not conform to this ‘one size fits all’ educational machine are ‘bad’ and/or ‘dysfunctional’ and can be diagnosed and treated. The more the system feels threatened, the more aggressive the intervention. In a collapsing state education system so-called hyperactivity disorders such as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) are popular tools of control and neatly shift the focus of failure away from the non-individually responsive institution and onto the child.
There are an increasing number of doctors and psychiatrists who consider that there is no objective difference in the behaviours of so called ‘normal’ and ADHD children. There are even some, like Thomas Szasz, who put these objections vigorously, pointing out that feeding children what is effectively ‘speed’ in order to curb what is not a disease, but a ‘catch all’ for troublesome behaviour, is a matter of adult convenience and control, not of medicine.
Formerly, quacks had fake cures for real diseases; now, they claim to have real cures for fake diseases.1
When big brother is threatening to drug your children so that they can be more suited to the homogenised environments of state schools perhaps its time not only to fight back, but to ensure that more and more people are aware that they can opt out of the system entirely and choose the freedom of home education. The hidden costs of so called ‘free’; state education are on the increase – not only through massive taxation, but also via services delivered with increasing menaces to civil liberties.
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood
1 = Chemical Straitjackets for Children by Thomas S. Szasz
© 2001 The Foundation for Economic Education
Blogger Alice Bachini rejects yet another collectivist ‘one size fits all’ approach to the problem of juvenile crime
If a certain group of people is identified as causing particular kinds of crime, is it OK to legislate against the rights of that group? Say, black men were proven to be responsible for 90 percent of stabbings. Would that make it OK to ban black men from buying or owning knives? What if white men between twenty and forty were responsible for 95 percent of all drink-driving deaths? Should we make a law banning them from pubs except between certain hours of the morning, say?
Obviously not. Which is why it is a good thing that plans to bring in an ageist curfew in Corby have been shelved. But of course, no-one there is concerned about the civil liberties of people under fifteen. The argument seems to be between those who want something done about certain kinds of crime perpetuated by this age group, reasonably enough, and those who think more football and youth clubs are the answer to immoral behaviour, which, they aren’t. And I don’t have any easy answers either, but I do think some kind of intelligent understanding that young people are human beings like the rest of us would be a good start.
My other main suggestion is to make it easier for young people to do proper, money-earning work. As long as the system continues to ban kids from doing honest mornings on low-paid milk rounds on the grounds that this interferes with their totally pointless unpaid days of school, it is actively preventing many of them from finding a good way forward with their lives.
Alice Bachini
Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously
I read in The Telegraph the depressing statistic that even when the police know a child has been killed by one of his parents, they still only convict 27 percent of murderers, as opposed to 90 percent when the murderer is a stranger.
“This failure to convict arises when parents blame each other or refuse to disclose any details about the injuries and there is no independent evidence.”
So the law against murder doesn’t exactly guarantee children’s safety. And I’m not sure giving them guns is the answer. The trouble goes deeper than anything libertarianism is qualified to solve, because it is about what goes on behind closed doors, and libertarians are only interested in protecting the rights of door-owners.
Except that I don’t think this is true. I think there are some libertarians who believe in right and wrong, and who think that the reason freedom matters is that it is morally a good thing, and that children benefit from it just as much as adults do.
At the moment, the family, or the parent/child relationship, is a largely private institution. This benefits those of us who want to improve on the norm in radical ways without being scrutinised, but those who want to do evil to their children sometimes abuse this private freedom in the most horrible ways imaginable.
Libertarians are right, I believe, that subjecting all families to more state interference would, even on this kind of balance, be wrong. But this does not mean that murdering children should be more legal than murdering adults. Nor does it make hitting kids OK. It just means that legislation is too flawed and clumsy a mechanism for improving children’s lives.
What’s the real answer? You really need to ask?!
Alice Bachini
Alice Bachini is a blogger in her own right and supporter of Taking Children Seriously
Think about this: your husband decides that you need to go to the dentist. He drags you there against your will, and orders you to have a tooth extracted. You don‚t want the treatment. He threatens you, then strips half of your clothes off, in full view of everyone in the waiting-room, forces you down onto your front, and starts hitting you painfully on the exposed parts of your body.
The wrongs of the case of the man who was convicted for smacking his daughter as mentioned by Natalie Solent on her blog go much deeper than smacking and whether it should be prosecutable. Of course, I think that violence against children should be illegal if violence against adults is illegal, which it is. But I don’t know how much laws about it will help children in the current climate. A law change might even damage children more than they are being damaged already, if it results in people they want to have around being forcibly removed from their homes, for example.
There is a correlation between bad coercive parenting and smacking, but it is perfectly possible to be extremely damagingly nasty without smacking, and (theoretically, at least) above (the not-very-impressive) averagely useful to your kids while habitually tapping them lightly on the wrist if they do something you don‚t like (although IME this kind of pointless exercise is not actually the most of it).
→ Continue reading: Violence is violence
You lucky kids! Those cool people at the BBC don’t just know what’s good for you, they even know what you want. All of you. Despite anything you might say to the contrary. If you have forgotten what you want and need to be reminded, just check out this website from children’s news programme “Newsround”. See, it’s telling you: “Kids Want Tougher Air Rifle Laws.”
Adult readers seeking a more detailed rundown on this topic, including details of which of the BBC’s own guidelines are being ignored, might like to see my post at Biased BBC.
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a libertarian home educator and freelance writer who supports ‘Taking Children Seriously’. She writes in with some insightful views on the Orwellian ‘Connexions’ programme.
The nine most frightening words in the English language, Ronald Reagan is once reputed to have said, are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” One only has to glance at the latest brainchild of ‘joined-up government’ to know the truth of that statement. The Connexions scheme is meant to ensure that children are tracked in order to give them maximum access to the benefits everything taxation has to offer. The price tag comes in the form of an electronic card that is programmed with a complete history of the child. It is optional, no one has to join the scheme – it’s simply that learning institutions can make it a requirement for registration and it remains to be seen how many other public sector institutions will be joining in the rush for data.
This back door identity card is administered by ‘personal advisors’ (PAs) using the ‘Connexions Assessment Tool’. Based on a system used by Social Services, the tool enables PAs to assess eighteen areas of private life and ‘score’ the answers from 1 – ‘positive strengths’ to 5 – ‘critical or complex issues identified’. With just one simple tool these PAs can sum up and objectify young people under the all encompassing headings of: Life Skills
Key Skills
Basic Skills
Achievements
Participation
Substance use issues
Emotional well-being
Physical health
Income
Housing
Social & community factors
Family history & functioning
Capacity of parents/carers
Risk of offending
Relationships within family & society
Attitudes & motivation
Identity & self-image
Aspirations
When it comes to ‘exploring issues’ with the young person no category escapes scrutiny, for example ‘attitude to authority’ is ‘explored’ as a key skill for young people. As the sickening document develops, PAs are advised to look for evidence of living in a criminal environment to predict risk of offending. Blair’s advisors have not yet discovered any gifted precogniscants who can see the future and lock up offenders before they commit their crime in the manner of the recent ‘Minority Report’ Movie, but they are doing their best to decide people’s futures even without the aid of extra sensory perception.
Young people are expected to report on their parents as part of this welfare provision, telling all about the level of their parents’ aspirations for the young person, what kind of dental care they have provided and how often they are made to take a shower. Parental stability, difficulties and ‘evidence’ of substance abuse by parents, all as perceived by the young person, are all recorded.
Again and again the recurrent word is ‘appropriate’ and the document suggests that it is highly appropriate for some under trained, intrusive PA to explore a young person’s private sexual history alongside her ‘developmental progress’ and immunisation history. Moreover, this PA, fresh from her in service training course on how to be an authoritarian government lackey goes on to delve into the young person’s mental health. ‘Do you now or have you ever had suicidal thoughts?’ Does the teenager have any other juicy emotional life experiences that can be recorded for his own good? Self harm? Bereavement? Masturbation doesn’t seem to be listed, but then there is enough of that going on in this document already.
Home-educated young people are amongst the few escaping the routine invasion of this new and invidious scheme, but as they enter colleges later in their education they are being asked for details of their Connexions cards and pressurized to join the herd of electronically tagged Blairite citizen fodder. Having libertarian views would no doubt earn them a 5 score for critical and complex attitudes to authority. Living in a household where they are taken seriously as autonomous human beings able to initiate and motivate their own learning would put them well off the scale, a new class of ‘potential offenders’ in their own right. The Connexions scheme is inimical to liberty and we need to be campaigning against it vociferously before all young people are made the subjects of joined up government ‘help’.
Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood, North Wales
Question: if someone wanted to swathe you in cloth dipped in turmeric water and then bury you alive in a pit, what would you say? Awww, c’mon, it’s only for a minute or so, and in the 400 years of this tradition, no one has died yet (they say). Actually, the participants on the sharp end (or is it in the deep end?) are typically young children, it being far too terrifying a procedure to subject adults to. They say it’s completely consensual, and after all, if the gods are not appeased, who knows what might happen! Naturally, the police don’t want to intervene, because no one is calling them to do so. Hang on a minute, one of those little children is bound to place a call to her local police station or submit a complaint in writing if there is any problem, isn’t she? The fact that her parents are making her submit to being buried alive by putting the fear of the gods into her is neither here nor there, is it?
Following a news item about a mother in Ohio whose children suffered second degree sunburns at a fair, some folks on a private Libertarian List have been busy theorising about want should happen. Obviously, the children would not want hideous sunburn or skin cancer, and nor would they want the extreme discomfort of baking in the sun. At this point, people leap to the conclusion that the answer is for the parents to impose their will on the children,and not take them to the fair. Dare I mention the existence of such everyday things as sunscreen, hats, sunshades, tea tents (oh all right then, beer tents), and, for slightly older children, the solving of problems through pleasant conversation? There is absolutely no reason for a child to get fried or miss out on the fair. Luckily, children don’t have to understand the physiological effects of baking in the sun, any more than I have to understand anything about any number of things that significantly affect my life. Just as I might have a doctor, a dentist, surgeons, tax/investment advisors, and so on to advise me, children have their parents (and others) to advise them. It is a mistake to assume that there are only two options, one being to say nothing and let the child rot, and the other being for parents to coerce their children. That is a false dichotomy. If you think of it that way – just like statists think that bad things will happen without the government benevolently coercing citizens for their own good or the good of others – it will indeed seem as though force is the best option. But in fact, there is a third option, which people use all the time with friends: reason, persuasion, the creation of new knowledge. When you fail to persuade your friend of something, you may think that he is stupid and foolish, but you do not leap to the conclusion that it is right to impose your will on him for his own good (or whatever). Even if you could persuade the entire world that your friend is making the biggest mistake of his life, you still would not think that gives you any right whatever to impose your will. You would think that (1) you might possibly be mistaken, and (2) it is his life and his mistake to make, not yours. If you want to use a different standard for children, you need an argument that isn’t circular. No one has come up with one so far. I shall be speaking about such matters (title: Unreasonable Parents – why spanking won’t help!) in San José, California, USA, on 28th August. See my web site for details.
After the recent abduction and murder of two young girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, parents everywhere fear for their children’s safety. This morning’s TV news was full of related items. There was an attempted child abduction just yesterday morning near where I live. And in another item, a Huddersfield University researcher reported that one in five children have been subjected to unwanted sexual advances outside the home. On GMTV yesterday morning, in an item about how to keep children safe, a National Society for the prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) representative said that parents should tell children that they don’t have to do everything an adult tells them.
But what are children to think, when in the next breath their parents demand complete obedience? TCS (Taking Children Seriously) parents don’t give these mixed messages. Unlike many parents, they do not impose their will on their children, but instead resolve disagreements with their children rationally, by consent. In my Taking Children Seriously article, Questionable Motives?, soon to be re-published by the Libertarian Alliance, I argued that:
Large imbalances of power, such as that of adults over children, make it easy for the powerful to coerce the powerless in a thousand ways, from the most overt to the most subtle. Slaves were commonly raped by their masters. Yet even where this was illegal, the slaves could do little about it. The cure – the only effective cure and the only morally justifiable one – was not harsher penalties for miscegenation; it was to free the slaves: to give them equal rights. Generally, were children accustomed to being in control of their own lives, they would be far more likely to complain about any ill-treatment they received.
[Editor: Samizdata.net welcomes Sarah Lawrence’s first post as a contributor]
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
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