Bag's Rants

A caring society. Don't make me laugh.

Well it seems that a complete family have received a suspended sentence for goading two children into fighting. Read here.

After reading the text and comments on this subject on The Magistrates Blog I was a bit surprised to read that most people thought this was reasonable. Now I know Bystander has a different attitude to sentencing and it shows. Many time I have read about things that I think make sense, not all the time though as I don't think this one does.

It seems that a poor family is invariably less harmful than a good institution. I think that is probably true. In this case is this a poor family? If a good institution is worse than these then why do we have institutions? We should change them immediately. From what I can see social services seem to invade much better homes and remove kids from loving families with much flimsier evidence and yet that seems to be a good thing?

I know that legislating for extreme cases makes bad law. Is this an extreme case though? This sort of thing seems to escape justice because we don't believe we should interfere in family life. There must have been someone there who could look after the kids while the others go to jail for a few months.

We legislate all the time for every little thing and, yet again, only the good law abiding people follow the law. The ones that actually do want to do well with the kids and don't need to be legislated for. The others know that the same kids they are abusing will protect them from the law. So what is the point of all this interfering? Things have got a lot worse since our parental responsibilities have been usurped by the government.

I don't normally like change in the government. It costs money and yet never leads to anything +ve. This is one of the few areas where I thing we should be more authoritative. Reid would say it's not fit for purpose and he would be right. Although to be honest no matter where he went he could say the same and be right. We should take kids away from these people. Jail them and kick them out of their council homes. They won't need them when they get out. We need to completely overhaul the care system and get rid of all the namby pamby bean counters running it and put in people who really do care about the kids. Put in protection to ensure they are not abused or forgotten about. Revamp the adoption process so anyone who meets the criteria can get a kid without going through so many hoops. Revamp social services so that they are not a law unto themselves and have to justify their decisions to investigate, remove kids or not, prosecute or not to a third party.

This sort of thing gets me wound up. The kids who need protecting don't get it and the people who do the crime don't get punished. It's all screwed up.

Yet we call ourselves a caring society. It's for the children you know.

posted by Bag @ 11:25 am