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28 February 2007 Family Integrity - Worse than threat of arrest
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0702/S00391.htm
Wednesday, 28 February 2007, 4:58 pm
Press Release: Family Integrity
Worse than threat of arrest
Sue Bradford is probably right when she says Police will not charge parents every time they smack their child or use any other form of reasonable force to correct children. The real threat in her Bill to subvert parental authority is far worse: CYFS will come threatening to take the children away. Nothing could be more traumatic to a child, especially since the Children, Young Persons and the Families Act, Section 39, gives a single social worker, operating on her own, authority to use whatever force in needed to enter private homes and tear children from the mother's arms. The social worker doesn't need proof that abuse has taken place; she only needs to suspect that "ill-treatment" is "likely" to happen. And CYFS is not accountable if she makes a mistake.
Section (2) of Bradford's Bill makes the correction of children a criminal offence if one uses any hint of force whatsoever: a gesture, a threat to withdraw privileges, intimidation, an appeal to conscience or any kind of physical force. A core responsibility of parenting, the correction of their children, is being thoroughly subverted.
Section (1)(c) of Bradford's Bill lets a parent slap a hand over a child's mouth if he is about to repeat an offensive swear word. But if the parent says, "Don't do it again, or you'll be off to bed without dessert," the parent has just committed criminal assault, worth as much as two years in jail. If there is uncertainty whether the parent's actions were corrective or merely preventative, Section (3) of the Bill says the corrective interpretation must prevail, putting parents outside the law. Bradford's Bill appears to be the product of a fevered mind, corrupted by power, attempting to force its philosophy of child autonomy and minimal parental authority and maximum state powers of intervention upon us all in order to advance the utopia of a radical feminist agenda where so-called "patriarchal structures" such as the nuclear family are completely destroyed or neutralised.
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