Make verbal abuse of kids ‘an offence’
Detective Sergeant David Beattie, of New Plymouth, is fronting a call for legislation that recognises psychological abuse as an offence.
Any one remember the Bradford Bill?
Of course it’s fathers that are the bad guys here:
“I have examples of a father calling his 10-year-old daughter a “little whore” for misbehaving and the F word and the C word being regularly levelled at children,” he said.
It’s a stuff article by BLANTON SMITH who could have easily pursued the question but no, the LITTLE BITCH was happy to use the quote to have a go at fathers.
The article is open to comments.
Oh dear, how many police habitually use bad language to teenagers and younger? If this “bill” is passed by the old bill we have a greatly reduced police force. What about bad language in general, as used by school children? I do believe that language in general is getting “rougher” but those who live in glasshouses etc etc. I would like people in general to watch their language more but I suspect that the young girl was simply making a nuisance of herself. I could suggest a cure for the young girl but then I could be accused of aiding and abetting a crime [anti smacking law].
$
Comment by andrew — Wed 28th May 2014 @ 8:18 pm
Of course, there’s always the third parent, why don’t the police come and arrest the television for teaching our children American words like ‘mother f##cker’ – who ever heard that word before it appeared in a movie.
Comment by Downunder — Wed 28th May 2014 @ 8:35 pm
I hereby sentence you to have an installed microphone on you at all times. Every word you say shall be recorded and monitored for inappropriate use of language (hereinafter referred to as ‘abusive language’) in the presence of any child or woman.
Such ‘abusive language’ shall be deemed to constitute ‘psychological abuse’, and meet the test of ‘domestic violence’.
The aforementioned monitoring shall be 24-by-7; and any transcript of such monitored verbal communication shall be deemed ‘admissible evidence’ in any Court of Law in New Zealand.
In the event such ‘abusive language’, ‘psychological abuse’, ‘domestic violence’ be recorded, you shall then automatically be subjected to a ‘Protection Order’ in favour of the recipient of your ‘abuse’; and in the case the victim is a minor, such Protection Order shall be automatically extended to include the victim’s mother. You shall thereafter be immediately removed from any ‘shared family home’, and subject to ‘supervised contact’ only in respect of the minors.
Any offence under the fore-going ruling shall be considered a ‘strike’ in accordance with the ‘three strikes’ provisions of sentencing.
I have spoken.
Comment by Family Court Judge — Wed 28th May 2014 @ 9:04 pm
And such installed microphone shall honestly monitor all familycaught$ hearings…..
Or am I getting confused?, maybe such honest microphone MUST be turned off during all familycaught$ hearings, so as to avoid accidental creation of HONEST evidence of any and all such familycaught$ hearings….
Comment by MurrayBacon — Wed 28th May 2014 @ 9:30 pm
Premonition …
Men will be arrested whenever their female intimate partner swears at their children … the Patriarchy and all that feminist twaddle.
Boys sworn at by their mothers will probably be denied protection. They could probably learn from their experience.
Women and girls will only swear in self-defence.
Studies will be produced that reveal children being less affected when sworn at by their mothers than by their fathers. Studies will be produced that reveal Men swear at children far more than women do. Counter studies will be produced and debated infinitum.
The media will report “Man swears at child” or “Person swears at child” depending on the gender of the offender.
A policeman in Canada will advise women to refrain from swearing. That will cause Worldwide Fuckwalks.
Comment by soMENi — Wed 28th May 2014 @ 9:35 pm
The protection of children should go a whole lot further. Come on Detective Sergeant Beattie, how can you stand by and watch children subjected to all manner of other damaging abuse?
Reprimands and other punitive consequences are traumatic so should be outlawed against children. Children’s rights should be protected regarding their choice of foods and if any parent denies a child the food of his/her choice then that should be a new ‘Child Neglect’ offence. No adult should ever use ‘power and control’ to make a child do anything, because using power and control is abusive, apparently. No parent should ever be allowed to say ‘no’ to a child because that will disappoint them and that’s domestic violence. Each child should be provided with his/her own room and all children’s rooms should be legally required to be the same size so we don’t give any one child a sense of inferiority, and children should always get the biggest rooms in the house. Chores for children should be outlawed because that’s exploiting them. Women can be provided with a special legal defence against these crimes such that if they provide evidence (that is, say) that they felt unhappy at the time they can be acquitted.
Comment by Man X Norton — Thu 29th May 2014 @ 12:52 am
Dear Man X Norton, you just aren’t being practical enough. Many people live in houses that are already built.
But all is not lost, if some rooms go faster than others, then the sizes can become the same – Einstein’s Law of Relativity. With huge amounts of methamphetamine in the water supply, all rooms can go at the speed required for true equality, as noone could tell the difference. Methamphetamine is already proven safe on humans, well safer than the present familycaught$!
I do agree with the dear, little policeman, just so long as he can accurately and reliably measure the damage done? I have never seen or heard of anyone who could do it, even 30 years after the point of measurement, let alone at the time. Or was the precious policeman meaning that the punishments could be dished out by lottery, like POs?
As far as I can see, the largest single social damage is so many children growing up, without being able to know their fathers or wider family. (See Care of Children Act.)
Prime culprits, arrogant, less competent mothers and familycaught$ judges and lawyers (legal workers) milking these paramount opportunities. Perhaps some of the payment is in tents pleasures?
Either way, wouldn’t these two groups suddenly fill our jails with rotting flesh?
Better to prevent such damage from occurring in the first place – any change of parenting plan to be approved before it is put into action. (Any claimed emergency to be justified using evidence, of the type known before familycaught$ went into military action, with unjustified transgressions being taken as hard evidence of unsatisfactory parenting skills.)
Comment by MurrayBacon — Thu 29th May 2014 @ 9:25 am
Many women specialise in psychological abuse so I doubt this will ever become law. If it did then its existence would have to be acknowledged, then the image of men as brutal women bashers would be tarnished if they were shown to be provoked by the abuse – hell that defence has got several women off of murder charges recently.
Comment by Daniel — Thu 29th May 2014 @ 2:10 pm
I agree Daniel it is not likely to happen for fear that more women would end up in court than men.
If it did happen the courts would interpret male comments as abuse intended to control the child and female comments as unfortunate but only intended to protect the child. The courts would still manage to manipulate the law into a double standard.
Worse though is that it would give children a lot of power over ordinary men who don’t abuse their children but are more likely to be asked to discipline the child, and that would have a far greater impact on society than the prosecution of a few cases of genuinely abusive parents.
Comment by Downunder — Thu 29th May 2014 @ 3:45 pm
Not so! Women will be no more capable of psychological abuse than they are apparently incapable of physical abuse. Mothers will not be charged; they will be justified and excused. Anything a mother could ever say will never be as violently strong as anything a man could say.
Comment by OMG You're (&*)^*( — Thu 29th May 2014 @ 6:29 pm
Dear OMG You’re (&*)^*(, your rhetoric matches the apparent public image (certainly as portrayed by profit/entertainment media).
NZ statistics are rather poor, in that police appear relatively willing to write off child deaths in the care of mother to cot death, where it is possible that careful investigation would show asphyxiation or poisoning.
Generally men make little attempt to hide the nature of child deaths that they are responsible for, eg a beating turning into smashing to death, or throwing a child off a public bridge, or shooting.
Even with the above limitations, more children die at the hands of their own mother, than other women and father and other men put together.
But arguing over which gender homicides more children, is to miss the way larger damage being done to our children, by neglect.
Child deaths may be the obnoxious and visible end of the spectrum of child abuse, but the greatest social damage lies at the other end of the spectrum – neglect to develop the child normally, by feeding but not responding to the child’s developmental needs.
No bruises, no bones to show breaks on a x-ray image, no screams in terror, just deathly silence. These are the children who are much more likely to murder women, murder men, injure by violence.. fill our jails.
The vast majority of these children don’t come to such public notice, but suffer much of their life in lonely emotional suffering. This distracts from schooling, employment is often blighted by mental illness problems. This wrongful damage also generally impacts negatively on their performance as parents…..
By encouraging many solo mothers to chase away the fathers of their children, the familycaught$ is the great enabler and patron saint of emotional neglect of children.
At what point does several hundred thousand child abuses add up to a monslaughter or murder equivalent?
In my opinion, this point was reached, even before the familycaught$ was officially opened, if we judge from driven suicides of fathers and children’s difficulties to handle schooling successfully.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Thu 29th May 2014 @ 8:03 pm
Just a small point Murray.
There wouldn’t be a patron saint of emotional neglect – it would need to be a patron saint of the emotionally neglected.
Comment by Downunder — Thu 29th May 2014 @ 8:42 pm
In all seriousness some women teachers can really abuse children in a terrible way [they have years of practice]. Male teachers by contrast tend to reprimand in a short decisive way and they tend to keep to the point. Same as fighting, with boys maybe a bleeding lip or nose and next day both victim and assaulter are friends again, with girls the fight starts with letters text messages etc when the fight occurs it can start again anytime and again. Who are the crueler sex? much though I love some of them.
Comment by andrew — Thu 29th May 2014 @ 9:13 pm
Andrew, have you observed women teachers being more particularly cruel with boys, than with girls?
The reason that I ask, is statistics show that some mothers physically beat boys worse than their daughters. I was surprised at first, but it shows up in all countries that I have seen statistics for. It even shows up in hospital statistics for length of stay, boys aren’t as often injured, but when they are the injuries are more severe, including asphyxiations and boys beaten to death by mothers.
Perhaps where some mothers do it physically, others do it as emotional abuse and emotional neglect?
Dear Downunder, the thought of emotionally abused children praying to familycaught$ is as sick as catholic priest’s sexual abuse of children… Maybe I mixed metaphors just too diabolically, and given neglect not being a touchable thing, oops I mean physical object as such. I was just alluding to familycaught$ responsibility for the very thing that Parliament set them up to protect children from – diabolical too.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Thu 29th May 2014 @ 9:28 pm
In answer to Murray. I have observed that some women teachers who carry their “inferiority” complex towards men into their teaching. Physical cruelty? I cannot remember any particular cases in the classroom. In regards to women in society I suspect but do not know that real cruelty is about evenly spread between the sexes, males tending to be one off events in regard to violence but for women the “violence” is less but far longer and continuing and tends to be emotional. Both sexes can show some horrible characteristics in their treatment of weaker humans. However I believe that Beatie is wrong by characterizing emotional abuse as a male preserve, in fact I am sure it is commoner from females.
Comment by andrew — Fri 30th May 2014 @ 7:53 am
Taken from the child’s point of view, mothers tend to be the safety net, the loving arms; so in terms of what a child might naturally expect from a parent, the same a circumstance from a mother probably has a greater impact on a child than it would coming from a father.
I also think this plays a part in parental alienation, where an abusive mother, drives the children into the fathers arms, who then becomes the singular emotional parent.
The mother then realises she has lost their attachment and sets about poisoning the mind of the child against the father to get it back, or get revenge.
Comment by Downunder — Fri 30th May 2014 @ 9:29 am
In all the events of my schooling, including occasional strapping and caning from male teachers, the experience that remains in my mind as being truly damaging to me was having a female teacher at Intermediate School who showed intolerance, verbal and emotional hostility and ridicule towards me. When I and other boys did not fit into her little model of female-approved young men-to-be, interested in poetry and acting, able to sit quietly, meekly and studiously for long periods of time, her disgust was palpable. It wasn’t a matter of bad behaviour or under-achievement; this was the top class academically and I was usually at the top of that class. But instead of celebrating my abilities and fostering in me a sense of adequacy and acceptability, perhaps teaching me usefully about social etiquette, restraint of exuberance etc, this woman was unable to appreciate that boys might not conform to her preferred design and her mission was then to humiliate and extinguish any flame of self-confidence. Boys’ sexuality at that sensitive age of adolescence of course was a horrible inconvenience to her, something she never talked about and she was incapable of helping boys to grapple with and understand. The adolescent girls had special girls-only sessions where they were helped to understand their periods, how to manage them, how to manage their developing instincts, and no doubt how to interpret (as predatory) and to protect themselves from boys’ sexual advances. No such guidance for boys though, only a disgusted nose in the air and a filthy look of derision at the ugly prospect that boys would develop sexually at all.
Comment by Man X Norton — Fri 30th May 2014 @ 12:28 pm
Dear Downunder, the assumption of the mother as the primary attachment figure has rarely been checked.
Women’s groups, including familycaught$, have pushed the accountant’s rule, that attachment is proportional to the number of hours spent with the children. Accountant – knows the price of everything and the value of nothink.
On the basis that most children were cared for by a mother and the rest were abnormal in some way (victims of disease, horse and car accidents, crime or desertion), the remainder of children were not considered seriously by researchers. The latter group were seen more as pollutants of research on healthy families, so by ignoring them in early research, you would be more likely to gather worthwhile results.
Attachment research has moved on from the early days, it is now 70 years old. However, many researchers have not thrown off the shackles of early assumptions. I don’t believe that John Bowlby ever intended his early work to bed these assumptions in so heavily.
A NZ psychologist Glen L. Harding wrote a Master’s thesis Infant Attachment to the Father in 1974 on relative strength of mother and father attachment, at 12 months.
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Curiously, that thesis hasn’t been referenced in any other psychology papers, as far as I can detect.
In my opinion, a large number of fathers seriously underestimate the value to the children, of the relationship with them.
In part, this may be out of respect for the mother’s role, in perhaps providing most of the hours of care.
In part, society doesn’t sufficiently respect the value of caring for children. I can only support complaints made about this by women.
More critically, the familycaught$ dangerously undermines fathers, in their value to the children. This serious derangement on their part corrupts not just the decisions that they make, but also has a negative impact onto the quality of decisions made by both mothers and fathers whom they uneducate.
Father’s lack of awareness of their critical role in the upbringing of children, unwittingly leads many of them to tolerate situations where the children are being seriously disadvantaged, by the time restrictions placed by jealous, hazardously under skilled mothers.
The important issue is that sensible, constructive, safe decisions can only be made using an accurate and fair assessment of the value of all of a child’s relationships.
In my opinion, we should respect the children’s relationship with the other parent, respect its difference from the relationship with ourself – to do anything else is just relationship vandalism – it adds nothing but heartbreak to the world.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Fri 30th May 2014 @ 12:52 pm
I wasn’t intending that to be read on the basis of attachment, but from the point of view of loss.
What the child has taken away from them, that being dependant on the relationships that have already formed.
I’ve seen the abusive mother at work and I’ve seen the damage.
The abusive mother is not necessarily unable to bond and attach, but lacks self control and empathy, which becomes more obvious as the child becomes more independent, questioning and demanding of time on the basis of what they want to do, i.e. the toy doll is growing up.
We recognise abuse because of the effect on the ‘victim’. (We encourage the reading of victim impact statements in court.)
It would be easy for some people to conveniently see ‘male abuse’ as being worse (As this keen copper says, “I know a father”) simply because a male is alleged to have committed the offence, when what we should be looking at is the impact.
But that would run contrary to the domestic violence mantra and it would end up being the subject of more bogus research all in the name of the Patron Saint of Emotional Abuse and protecting woman and children.
As for getting some of these women into parenting programmes – good luck with that one.
Comment by Downunder — Fri 30th May 2014 @ 2:28 pm
Dear Downunder, my main point was that too many fathers undervalue themselves, due to misinformation and manipulation.
The unfortunate end result is that their own decisions don’t protect their own children as they would want, as they have been conned to think that they may be unimportant to the children (by people who likely are relatively unimportant).
It is more important that you pay your [spousal and] child support, than that you spend time with your children!
I have seen many fathers put in the situation where the child [and spousal] support payments severely curbed the time that they could afford to see their children.
The diabolical dishonesty that a few coins was worth more than their time with the children!
Surely, only an accountant or child [and spousal] support staff member could say something so stupid and socially destructive!?
This is one of the most dangerous perverse effects of legislation in NZ
Although you separate abuse and bonding issues, more often than not they are causally correlated, in my $0.02.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Fri 30th May 2014 @ 3:05 pm
@Murray If we are talking about legislation; how would this work?
Parent makes statement.
Statement deemed abuse, because it could have a psychological effect on ‘a’ child.
Parent guilty?
Parent makes statement.
Did that statement have any negative effect on the child?
Yes or No.
How much damage was done.
Enough to justify further intervention.
Who determines these issues?
We’ve seen psychologists in the Family Court whitewash female abuse for many years, what would change once they get more access to the family home in the name of the child.
We’re coming at it from two different perspectives.
Comment by Downunder — Fri 30th May 2014 @ 3:50 pm
I cannot see how legislation based on psychological abuse could work in any way other than be abusive itself. (I think we agree on that?)
Similar of course to the present DV Act and almost every aspect of familycaught$.
Satisfactory operation of any caught$ needs to be based on evidence, that is relevant to the alleged crime. If such abuse cannot be reliably measured at the time, then it is not possible to have the caught$ respond proportionally to the offence. To respond non-proportionally – is abuse.
Life is abuse, without actions, nothing ever gets done.
Conversely, nearly everything that the familycaught$ does, is an abuse. I don’t believe that these abuses serve anyone at all, in a real sense, least of all children. It only serves people who value damage to others, who shouldn’t be served anyway.
Although in theory, psychologists should be able to contribute towards decisions made in familycaught$, this doesn’t seem to work in practice.
Possible reasons why psychologists are relatively ineffective in familycaught$:
a. clinical psychologists are trained for treating the presenting patient, not for reporting on parenting resources, skills and relationships, thus not particularly relevant to task at hand.
b. educational psychologists are trained in “normal” psychology, whereas in familycaught$, the behavioural dynamics reflect psychopathologies and lack of parenting skills that result, thus not particularly relevant to task at hand.
c. To be fed, the psychologists are not allowed to report unfavourably on women’s mental health and parenting skills, even after incidents which show these problems in concrete form. Conflict of interest with personal values and proclivities of judges maintaining approved psych lists.
d. psychologists training is years out of date, in the area of effects of parental psychopathologies onto parenting skills and consequences for the children.
Comment by MurrayBacon — Fri 30th May 2014 @ 5:08 pm