ninme

So, some thoughts about my previous post, which I’ll put here, separately, so they don’t get lost.

First of all, I’d like to point out that if this girl, even without being mentally impaired, just 16, and with such a pitiable history, had been gang-raped by her Muslim cousin and his friends for some Western-style transgression, it would be all over the blogosphere, starting with LGF and ending with a Christmas appeal over at PJ Media or something. So it’s worth pointing out that it isn’t just Islamic, bearded, misogynistic, Osama-loving, sharia-wanting, wanna-be terrorists who are capable of this, but also a couple of Australian social workers.

Secondly, I saw this on Saturday, but didn’t really know what to say about it:

The Times - Protect me from child protectors
This year I was suspected of child abuse over an incident involving my daughter. I learnt some lessons, by Ross Clark

As Charles Pragnell, who was head of research at Cleveland social services at the time of the 1987 scandal puts it, child protection agencies “are racked with too many theories for which there is little or no evidence. Social workers’ training does not equip them for undertaking investigations. There is a group conditioning among social workers and paediatricians which prevents them ever accepting they are wrong.”

Innocent remarks by children, he adds, are blown up into full-scale investigations because of the requirement to report immediately to their appointed “child protection officer” anything that could possibly be interpreted as a sign of abuse. Child protection workers then begin with the assumption that abuse must have taken place. The consequent deluge of investigations makes it all the harder to pick out genuine abuse.

I know what he means, because I have been at the receiving end. I have a pubescent mentally handicapped daughter who, besides tantrams and uncooperative behaviour, this year started taking her trousers down at her special school and playing with herself. The school went to some lengths to reassure me and my wife that this is common behaviour when you have a two-year-old mind in an adolescent body, but would we mind if the local child development team helped?

We agreed, and soon afterwards were met at home by two health workers. It soon became clear, however, that the pair did not see their remit as offering useful advice: rather, before even meeting our daughter, they had jumped straight to the conclusion of child abuse and were on a fishing expedition for evidence.

There followed another visit from one of the workers, who waited until I had left the room before accosting my wife with the suggestion that our daughter “may have been interfered with”, adding: “How do you react to that, Mrs Clark?” One could almost see the cogs of the health worker’s brain clunking round: men are child-abusers — must be something going on. She added menacingly that if our daughter carried on removing her clothes an investigation would follow.

So that’s the thanks you get from the State after ten years of bringing up a difficult child: no help, no praise, just put under suspicion of child abuse.

I quote his whole story because I think it’s important to hear, even if it has little real bearing on the Australian situation. But that line at the top, I think, ties in nicely with the fact that it was “two new social workers”, probably just out of university, brimming with shiny new theories and empathy for those who have suffered from the cruelty of white Australia in the past, who swept in, convinced a whole department to remove this girl, snatching her away from a loving household, and put her back in the hands of the same people who had given her fetal alcohol syndrome and syphilis as a seven-year-old.