Today, in made-up crimes...

I don't know what the hell wandering is, but apparently it's a crime mostly committed by girls, and can end in STDs and pregnancy. Consider yourselves warned.

State-sanctioned abuse is not 'discipline'

Last weekend, when I grabbed the newspaper from the little old man who is so gingerly perched on the island in the middle of traffic that I'm nervous to move too quickly lest everything topple over and throw him to his demise in front of a sugar cane tractor, I was alarmed. Not by the newspaper man - he's safe - but by the enormous front page photo and the story that accompanied it. And so I became caught up in a frenzied clack-clacking on my computer, filled with outrage and wonder, which I then had to suspend because of other work. And alas, the outrage has not returned in sufficient measure to pick up exactly where I left off. But here's the photo in question, with my own description excerpted below, as I began to write it last weekend.



(The front page picture of a senior teacher at a local secondary boys' school who made the decision to wait at the school gates and publicly flog any student who arrived late. Do you need to re-read that? I'll give you a minute. The photographer went one better than that, though. He included in the shot not just the teacher with his cane or stick or whatever it was, but him actually taking hold of a student and beating him. Another minute? Take your time.

The above shot was taken from the online version of the story, and was not the one used on the front page of the paper version. In this one, the child is taller than the teacher, and is glancing disdainfully at the man as if to say "dude, do you know how long it took me to fix my pants like this? You're really harshing my look here." So it's an offensive image, but not as immediately jarring as the front page photo of the smaller child who looks about 11 and taken quite by surprise.)

Since that story was published, the debate has opened up quite a bit about the legitimacy of flogging in schools. And you know what? I don't understand it. I don't understand how we get into heated arguments around whether it is an effective disciplinary measure to engage in the state-sanctioned beating of other human beings when we've already answered that question in the negative. Remember? We used to have this monstrosity called the cat o' nine tails with which we beat convicted criminals? And this and all other forms of judicial corporal punishment were formally declared inhumane and consequently unconstitutional by the Barbados Supreme Court?

Yet, in 2009, pastors and educators and Matthew Farleys abound, writing articles and giving interviews contrasting crime and social statistics and all manner of 'moral indicators' - whatever those are - in countries where flogging is banned with those where it is still practiced, and arguing on this basis that beating the crap out of children represents the yellow brick road to Utopia. And I used to get all caught up in those arguments myself. I used to yell from my side of the aisle about how Caribbean societies seemed so well-behaved because 1) children who are systematically beaten often don't manifest learned, violent behaviours until they are much older, making it harder (also because of high numbers of migration) to draw a straight line from a beaten child to his criminal behaviour; 2) becoming an offender within the judicial system is not the only manifestation of being generally screwed up; and 3) there are plenty other factors at work keeping our 'moral indicators' as the moral majority would like than corporal punishment - just give a glance to the 'crimes' still on the law books, like homosexuality and dressing like a woman, as opposed to those not on the law books, like marital rape. And on I would go blah-blahing within the parameters of reasoned insanity.

I once even got my bristle board and Sharpie out and picketed the headmaster's office at my school, because he was about to flog (behind closed doors and with no one else present) a teenaged girl who had filled condoms with water and distributed them to her friends to have a laugh.

FLOGGING OF FEMALE STUDENTS IS VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN!!

That's what my sign said. I was 15 years old, and traumatized by the notion that a grown man was going to splay a 16-year-old girl across his desk and beat her, and we were saying that was alright because she happened to be on a school compound between the hours of 9 and 3 and he happened to be called Headmaster.

But these days, I hardly get that far into debates about whether flogging works as a disciplinary action, because I find it absurd that it is even an option. Sure it works in the short term to rule and silence a population with fear, violence and intimidation. We have countless examples of that throughout history, and even today; and we condemn them all. What changes when the population in question is below the age of 18? I would think we'd be more indignant and less willing to do harm to those we're meant to protect.

And how can we draw so neat a line between child abuse - with which this region is struggling more and more every year - and flogging in schools? I hear all kinds of silly little differentiators: "Flogging should not be done in anger, and only by principals and senior teachers." Because that's not at all inhumane. Let's pencil the offending student in for a 2:00 p.m. flogging, yet expect her to be academically productive in the meantime, and then march her off to headteachers' chambers at the appointed hour for a detached, methodical beating. Yeah, that's much better. Then there's the old "I was flogged as a child, and it didn't do me any harm. I turned out great!" Yeah, you turned out great alright. You turned out to be an adult who thinks it's ok to hit children. Well done, you.

I was flogged as a child, and it did me harm. It did me harm to realize that the people I trusted not to hurt me could not be trusted after all, and that their kindness and care were conditional upon certain behaviours that I was still learning. That horrified me. It did me harm to watch my neighbour and primary school classmate walking up the street from school, limping, and when we, concerned, pulled back her skirt, to see her fair skin black-and-blue and purple, bruised, swollen and tender from a teacher's bamboo rod. I cried for her that evening, and had trouble sleeping for days after. It did me harm to have to stand up for myself as an 11-yr old, to tell the principal I would not, in fact, allow him to hit me because I had gotten one problem out of 100 wrong (one strike per wrong answer), and then to feel the victory seep away from me after I sat down again and realized that no one was going to defend the students who had gotten 10 wrong, or 20, or 30. It did me harm to watch my sisters awakened in the middle of the night and struck for some newly-discovered transgression, like reading the wrong type of book, or saying hello to the wrong type of neighbour. I love my parents, and had some great teachers, but the fact that I'm not currently incarcerated for murder doesn't mean none of that did me harm.

Human beings have short memories. So sure, we feel fine now. But children's worlds are small, and the adults who occupy them very, very big. It's time for us to stop finding ways to justify organized, state-sanctioned abuse, get off our lazy asses and parent our children.

"Too indulgent" mother denied access to her children

Help me. Because I'm having a really difficult time understanding exactly what on earth is going on here. I'm going to have to post most of the article, because it's just paragraph after paragraph of wtf [emphasis mine]:

A COURT has denied the former wife of a rich City financier all access to their three children after she was found to be turning them against him.

In an extraordinary ruling, the woman, who was also judged to be too indulgent a parent, has been legally barred from seeing her children for three years. She was jailed for approaching one of them in the street and telling him she loved him in breach of a court order. She is facing a possible return to jail this summer for posting a video about her plight on the internet.

The woman judge presiding over the case justified banning contact between the mother and her children because they were being placed in “an intolerable situation of conflict of loyalties resulting in them suffering serious emotional harm”.

During supervised visits with her, the children made serious allegations about their father which were later shown to be unfounded. Social workers believed the mother was either prompting them to make the claims or they were saying them just to please her.

A psychiatrist who assessed the case said the mother “loved her children” but had harmed their development by trying to be always “available” to them.

The judge said she had “serious concern about [the mother] infantilising the children, encouraging them to make complaints about the father and encouraging them to want to take an inappropriate part in these proceedings”.

The mother breached an injunction excluding her from her children’s lives by approaching her son in public. She also sent texts to her former husband, including one saying she was sorry. Another said she would do whatever he wanted to get access. She was sentenced to a month in prison.

Custody cases are messy, and it's not unheard of that children, confused, make unfounded allegations against one parent, or even that angry parents seek to influence their children against the other party. But this is the kind of dysfunction that merits court-mandated parenting classes or restricted, supervised visits. Surely it doesn't merit removing all access to the children.

"The woman judge presiding over the case justified banning contact between the mother and her children because they were being placed in “an intolerable situation of conflict of loyalties resulting in them suffering serious emotional harm”."

That's called divorce: there will be conflict of loyalties. The role of both parents and the courts is to minimize the harm caused by this conflict, not to place all blame with one party and imprison her. And if she was suffering post-partum depression that, according to her, contributed to the unfolding of these events, then she ought not to have been punished for it, but rather supported through it along with her family. If there was a court order in place barring access to the children, and it was breached, then this mother has to accept responsibility for that, and one might argue that she knew the consequences of not adhering to the law, and contacted the children anyway. But to spend a month in jail for telling her son she loved him, and to face further jail time for posting a video on the internet? Something about this does not sit right with me.

"A psychiatrist who assessed the case said the mother “loved her children” but had harmed their development by trying to be always “available” to them."

That devil woman. I think that at worst, when I picture the most exaggerated incarnation of who this woman might be, I see someone in need of some psychiatric attention and help with parenting. But absent other details, it seems like three years' removal from her children is a bit of overkill. Still, I have not reproduced. So maybe I'm missing some analytical skill that from the point of view of the other parent, would deem this ruling a fair one. I submit myself to your enlightenment.


Read an article containing more details and an interview with the mother here.

Child protection: you're doing it wrong

A very disturbing case of child trafficking has been in the news recently. It seems that since March 2006, 77 Chinese children have gone missing from a children's home in London, and only four have been found:

Organised criminal gangs have exploited a children's home beside Heathrow airport for the systematic trafficking of Chinese children to work in prostitution and the drugs trade across Britain, a secret immigration document reveals.

[...]

Only four have been found. Two girls returned after a year of exploitation in brothels in the Midlands. One was pregnant while the other had been surgically fitted with a contraceptive device in her arm. Others are coerced with physical threats to work as street-sellers of counterfeit goods. It is thought that many work in cannabis farms.

The document reveals that the children are "absconding" at the facilitation of organized crime groups, and when a spokesperson for the home was interviewed on the news recently, he was very quick to point out that the care facility cannot restrict the movements of children, implying that if they want to leave to get involved in prostitution and other nefarious activities, then no one can stop them.

I don't even know where to begin with this one. If, as the news report suggests, these children are taken into care after they have arrived at Heathrow airport having already been initiated into a trafficking ring, the fact is that at the moment the local authority places them with this children's home, it is responsible for their safety; unless the UK government has now turned to state-sanctioned pimping. If these were British children who had been taken from neglectful parents, and had then ended up in the hands of traffickers, all of the UK would be in an uproar. But somehow, we seem to have no problem acting as holdover facilities for Chinese children being sold into prostitution and child slavery. And after these children are taken to this home, how is it that they have the means to subsequently arrange with the traffickers to meet them at pre-designated locations? And why in great googly-moogly, after seeing a trend of flight from this particular institution next to Heathrow, do the authorities still take children fitting this particular profile to this same home, facilitating the traffickers' access? If they do intend to process them through the system and get to the bottom of their unescorted arrival to the UK, why not undertake reasonable measures to see that they are removed from immediate danger?

I'll tell you what it looks like. And you might gasp, choke and splutter at the implication but feel free because here it comes anyway: they can't be arsed. These are Chinese children who as far as they are concerned have already become involved in a system of trafficking, and if they disappear just as easily and as suddenly as they show up, well then so be it. They aren't British. Let someone else deal with them. The very idea that an official from or representing this home would get on the news and suggest that they don't lock the doors so the children can leave to be sold into prostitution if they want is the part that is gasp-worthy. There is no agency here. Would you jump through a window to run headlong into a life of unpaid or underpaid harrowing physical labour if you had the choice? If you didn't feel threatened or coerced or desperate? If you are going to take the step, as a government agency, to 'clean up' the sidewalks outside Heathrow by clearing these wandering children from it, then you are also responsible for taking every reasonable precaution to protect them from threats that you know exist.

As if there weren't enough evidence of buck-passing, Julian Worcester, the deputy director of Children's Services, had this to say:

"There is still a large proportion who go missing but the total numbers are going down," said Worcester. "As a result of coordinated action, Heathrow is now seen as a more difficult airport to traffic people through. We think some of the activity has been displaced to other airports, in particular Stansted in Essex and Manchester."

Ah well that's much better, then. Keep all that nasty trafficking business away from the tourist hubs.

The UK government is at the moment struggling with providing adequate protection for children who merit social care attention. Cases such as the one involving Baby P are strewn all over the news and rightly inspire public outrage that is very slow in dissipating. The lives of these 73 children who have disappeared from this home aren't worth any less than they would be if they had been born here. But it seems the authorities don't see it that way.

The power of hate and intimidation

I wasn't going to post today, and I had intended that my next post tomorrow would be a big bag of "we just cleared 100 posts w00t" etc. But that hardly seems appropriate given this news [via Shakesville]:

11-Year-Old Hangs Himself after Enduring Daily Anti-Gay Bullying

An 11-year-old Massachusetts boy, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, hung [sic] himself Monday after enduring bullying at school, including daily taunts of being gay, despite his mother’s weekly pleas to the school to address the problem. This is at least the fourth suicide of a middle-school aged child linked to bullying this year.

I encourage you to read the entire article, which I was moved to post considering how we in the Caribbean seem to feel that words are harmless, children should learn to be tough, and it is perfectly acceptable to call someone a buller, as part of a language of intimidation, without consequence. Well there are consequences, and this is what they look like.

I’m in “Good” Company: Hitler, Mussolini and Pinochet

The mongoose has her first guest post. Last week, Archbishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho became famous in the news for the excommunication of the adults involved in providing an abortion to a nine-year-old child who had been raped by her stepfather. Today, Jodi, a writer from Jamaica and one of the directors of WHAN, shares her thoughts on the incident from a religious and philosophical perspective. Welcome, Jodi and take it away:
_______________________________________________________________

“Practical Wisdom is the combination of moral will and moral skill.” – Aristotle

Tonight I read that a nine year old girl had an abortion and as a result a Brazilian archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church, Father Sobrinho, excommunicated her mother and the medical doctors who carried out the abortion. Apart from the fact that the girl is nine, the medical doctors decided to carry out the abortion because:

1. The child was going to die because she only weighs 80 pounds and can’t support two foetuses. The little girl was pregnant with twins. (Attention Father Sobrinho supporters: if the child was going to die, chances are the foetuses weren’t going to make it either.)
2. The child was raped by her step-father.
3. The child is nine years old.
4. Nine.
5. Years.
6. Old.

The fact that the child’s life was in danger is enough for a logical person to feel that the abortion was a sensible decision taken by the adults in her life in order to save her life. Without even knowing it, we automatically apply Aristotle’s definition of Practical Wisdom in order to come to these decisions. Moral skill allows us to know what is right and moral will allows us to do what is right, often in spite of what the rule book, society or our family says we should do. Rather than apply practical wisdom, however, the Catholic Church has chosen stupidity and hatred in the form of excommunication.

Excommunication in every practical sense of the word means nothing to a non-religious person such as myself. In the Roman Catholic Church, it is merely a formal announcement (not usually made public) that someone is no longer allowed to receive sacraments other than reconciliation. Reconciliation is the act of asking a priest for forgiveness and paying penance. Penance is usually the recital of a few well-rehearsed prayers such as the Hail Mary and the Our Father. If you’ve been really, really bad you can only be reconciled by the Pope himself. Otherwise, you can more than likely be reconciled by the local archbishop. Hallelujah!

Though excommunication may seem like a silly consequence to people like me, to someone who is religious and who relies on the Catholic Church as their community and a major source of support in times of difficulty, I can imagine that excommunication is a cause of great shame and may create a sense of hopelessness and confusion as well as loss of self esteem. For them, excommunication from the Church is the same as being sentenced to hell.

I know all of this because I am a Roman Catholic. I should say that though I am not a practicing Catholic, I have not yet been excommunicated. Apparently, I am in good company; other non-practicing, non-ex-communicated Roman Catholics were Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Augusto Pinochet who each managed to avoid being excommunicated from the Church while they were alive.

I can’t argue this from a biblical standpoint. I am not a Christian and I can’t even pretend to know the bible. In my own opinion, religion has been and continues to be a tool used by men for centuries to carry out atrocities upon groups of people they hate. Unfortunately, women have always fallen into that category. Some will argue that just as religion has been used to carry out atrocities, it has also been used to carry out good. Well, I am sorry, but I do not believe that the end justifies the means. I’m sure that Hitler, Mussolini and Pinochet did nice things for people they liked on the same day as they were ordering the murder and torture of others. I also believe that the people who do good in the name of religion would do good without the existence of religion. However, some people who carry out evil in the name of religion would think twice about doing so without the support of their religious leaders and followers.

This is not a rant against religion, and I apologise if it seems that way; it is a rant against this ugly act against this family and a plea for humanity to apply a little practical wisdom each day in spite of rules of law, religion or society.