The problem is how you define cruelty, and how the law works in practice.
"You can look at a range of behaviours, from ignoring a child's presence, failing to stimulate a child, right through to acts of in fact terrorising a child where the child is frightened to disclose what is happening to them," Mr Buckland told BBC Radio 5 live.What's a legal definition of any of that?
What's the legal definition of 'nasty'?He said the new law would not criminalise parents for being nasty, but for their criminal behaviour.
"This proposal is not about widening the net, it's about making the net stronger so that we catch those parents and carers who are quite clearly inflicting significant harm on their children, whereas they should be nurturing them and loving them," Mr Buckland said.Can't imagine how this wouldn't widen the net, from a logical point of view. If it provides new powers, then more people will come under attention, and if it doesn't provide new powers, what's the point? What new powers are given that aren't in, say, the Children's Act of 1989? This from Wiki:
Each local authority has a duty to ‘safeguard and promote the welfare’ of children who are assessed as being in ‘need’. A child is deemed as ‘in need’ if they are disabled or unlikely to achieve a reasonable standard of health or development unless services are provided.Fairly sure significant harm is already considered to include emotional harm. Set all this against a background of secret family courts, gagging orders, forced adoptions, etc, and is it really a good idea to give new powers before any of that's addressed? Back to the BBC article, and the likely implementation of the aims:
...
A care or supervision order may be granted by the court if a child is or is likely to suffer significant harm if they are not placed into local authority care.
The Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 provides for the punishment of a person who treats a child "in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health (including injury to or loss of sight, or hearing, or limb, or organ of the body, and any mental derangement)".That's going to give a massive opportunity for lots of test cases (probably heard in secret) to figure out what all of that means. Wonder if he's got 'use cases' where social workers know what goes on in Family X, have the evidence, but can't do anything about it? Will parents voting UKIP or BNP constitute intellectual or social harm? Perhaps it should actually be teachers and social workers worried about a law that gives a sweeping definition of harming a child?
Mr Williams's bill would add a further category of harm for which the perpetrator could be punished: impairment of "physical, intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development".
I worry the government is just pursuing ideas which superficially sound good to the electorate but which don't actually result in sensible laws.
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