Pots and Kettles

The Irresponsible Amongst Us

Every so often editorial writers get hopelessly confused.  Here is an example:  an editorial in the NZ Herald made this statement of fact:

Domestic violence . . .  is perpetrated overwhelmingly by men against women and children.

Then, a few paragraphs later, the writer states:

Professor David Fergusson, who has studied the lives of 1265 people born in Christchurch in 1977, said his research suggested the rates of domestic violence by men and women are similar and in many instances involved mutual violence between couples. “Women do suffer more in terms of fearfulness and related outcomes,” he said, “but what we do find in our study is that violence is usually mutual and there isn’t a predominant aggressor.”

The writer then adopts the tone of a scold with respect to the Professor and his research:

It is hard to imagine a more irresponsible message to give to the sort of men who resort to violence against women.

What about women that resort to violence against men?  What are our responsibilities toward them. Ah, writes the editorialist, it’s not that bad.

Men have the physical advantage. It may be unfashionable to say so but it should not need to be said.

Male violence against females is really bad.  Female violence against males . . . not so much.  Try telling that to a male whose skull has been cracked by a cast iron frying pan.  What the editorialist is implying is that the public campaign slogan, “It’s Not OK”, which is an attempt to combat the plague of family violence in New Zealand, needs a bit of refinement.  It needs to read, “Family Violence: If You are a Man, It’s Not OK.”

The research by Professor Fergusson shows that the rates of domestic violence by men and women are similar.  Mutual violence between men and women is extremely common.  The study shows that males are not the predominant aggressor.  The aggression is gender neutral.  The editorialist simply ignores these claims.  Are they true or not?  Don’t care.  They are irrelevant.  Men are bigger and stronger.  Therefore, they need to bear the blame.  The focus needs to be upon the bigger and stronger perpetrator.

Actually, it matters a whole lot.  In most households there are children.  Both male and females–if aggressive–are both substantially bigger than children.  If you care about the most defenceless amongst us think of what an angry, drunk or drug-fuelled woman can do to children close at hand when she unleashes her vitriol upon them.  Think of the most profane, filthy, verbal abuse spewing forth from the mouth of an enraged woman as she mercilessly beats a defenceless child.  Not a problem.  It’s men.  That’s where the problem lies–at least according to the confused Herald editorialist. There are few more egregious examples of the fallacy of a false dichotomy.

If Professor Fergusson’s research is accurate, the editorialist has missed the point and begged the question.  By responding in a superficial, almost hysterical manner, he or she has been gulled by the political rhetoric presently swirling around this issue.  If the editorialist had been a bit more thoughtful, the concluding paragraph which reads:

Perhaps the campaign [against family violence] could be restyled, “It’s not manly”. If boys are brought up to respect their masculinity, women should be safer.

would have been recast,

Perhaps the campaign [against family violence] could be restyled, “It’s neither feminine, nor manly”. If boys are brought up to respect their masculinity, and girls are brought up to respect their femininity, both men and women and children should be safer.

Scolding researchers and their research as giving an “irresponsible message” simply will not do.  To respond that way is the real irresponsibility.  Such confusion is not helpful in the least. 

Letter From Europe (About Compulsory Child Abuse)

European Parliament: extremist “sexual health and rights” report to promote compulsory child abuse

Posted on | October 18, 2013 

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D.

Turtle Bay and Beyond

Dear Friends, in a recent post we informed you about an “own-initiative-report” on “sexual and reproductive health and rights” that will be voted at next week’s plenary session at the European Parliament. We informed you of the dangerous content of this draft report, which seeks inter alia to turn abortion into a “human right”, subverts the freedom of conscience of medical practitioners, negates the role of parents as primary educators of their children, and the right of children to know their biological parents.

MEP Edite Estrela: does she know what she is proposing?

All this is of course not new. Indeed, when the radical gay-plus-abortion-lobby pulls all is forces together to set up a wish-list, the outcome is foreseeable, and no one should be surprised about it.

It is only upon a second, more careful, reading that I have discovered how insidious this report really is. It is actually much worse than I ever expected, and I must give the author of the draft, the Portuguese radical-left MEP Edite Estrela, the benefit of doubt: probably even she is not fully aware of what she is proposing. And if she isn’t, then the vast majority of the (predominantly socialist, communist, green and liberal) Members of the European Parliament who plan to vote for this report are not aware either.

But such lack of awareness is not an excuse. As a member of parliament, you are responsible for the votes you cast.

In the draft that will be debated and voted by the EP’s plenary assembly, mention is made of a “report of the World Health Organisation Regional Office for Europe and the German Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) entitled ‘Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe: A framework for policy makers, educational and health authorities and specialists’, published in 2010”, to which the European Parliament, according to the 11th indent of the draft resolution, “has regard”.

Obviously, this “having regard” means that those Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe should be complied with whenever there is question of sexuality education.  And there is quite a lot that Mrs. Estrela’s draft resolution has to say about sex education. We are not going to reproduce it in full length here – instead, we recommend paragraphs 41 – 56 of the draft to the particular attention of our readers.
Perhaps the most astonishing of those paragraphs is § 47, according which:

“(The European Parliament) calls on Member States to ensure compulsory, age-appropriate and gender-sensitive sexuality and relationship education, provided in a mixed-sex setting, for all children and adolescents (both in and out of school).”

Thus we must assume that Member States should, according to Mrs. Estrela’s draft, not only provide for compulsory sex-education at school, but they should also make sure that “all children” get such education also outside school. In other words, this is a statement on how parents should educate their children at home. And if the words in this draft report have the meaning they usually have, then we must assume that “compulsory” really means compulsory, and that “all children” includes children below school age. If Mrs. Estrela and her friends have their way, then all parents should be obliged to provide to their children sexual education that complies with the aforementioned Standards for Sexuality Education.

But what do these ‘Standards’ foresee?  Here is a short excerpt:

Children aged 0-4 should be informed about: “enjoyment and pleasure when touching one’s own body”, “early childhood masturbation”, “different family relationships”, “the right to explore gender identities”, “the right to explore nakedness and the body, to be curious”, etc. and they should develop “curiosity regarding own and others‘ bodies” and “a positive attitude towards different lifestyles”.

Children aged 4-6 should be informed about “enjoyment and pleasure when touching one’s own body”, “early childhood masturbation”, “same-sex relationships”, “sexual feelings (closeness, enjoyment, excitement) as a part of all human feelings ”,“different kinds of (family) relationship”, “different concepts of a family”, and should develop “respect” for those different lifestyles and concepts.

Children aged 6-9 should go on learning about “enjoyment and pleasure when touching one’s own body (masturbation/self-stimulation)”, but they also should be informed about “different methods of conception” and “the basic idea of contraception (it is possible to plan and decide about your family)”

Children aged 9-12 should be informed about “first sexual experience”, “orgasm”, “masturbation”, and should learn to “make a conscious decision to have sexual experiences or not” and “use condoms and contraceptives effectively”.

The standards differentiate between “minimum” and “optional” achievements, but masturbation at age 0-4 is mandatory. In short, this is a programme for sexual initiation beginning at toddler age, and one seriously has to ask oneself whether this kind of sexual education is not in fact a form of systematic and structured child abuse, albeit under a pretext of “education” or “skill development”.

There is a conspicuous absence of any genuinely moral attitudes towards sexuality that should be transmitted to the child: no reference to chastity, no reference to conjugal fidelity, only a vague sense that “everything is ok if it feels good, is consensual, and doesn’t entail an unwanted pregnancy. That attitude, however, appears to be compulsory in the sense that it would appear to be in violation of these “Standards” if parents attempted to transmit to their children any genuine (and in particular Christian) moral values related to sexuality.

Vicky Claeys, IPPF Regional Director for Europe. Is she the true author of the “Estrela Report”?

It is no coincidence, perhaps, that these Standards for Sexuality Education are cracking full of references to documents published by International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), and that indeed “sexual rights, as defined by IPPF” are referenced as compulsory knowledge for the age group 9-12.

A friend of mine, attending a meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights, from which this draft report has emanated, overheard IPPF Regional Director Vicky Claeys boasting that she was the true author of the draft, for which MEP Edite Estrela has only given her name. This would certainly explain some of the report’s otherwise inexplicable contents – but it would also raise the question whether Mrs. Estrela is actually aware that her report promotes paedophile child abuse in the guise of “sexual education”.

Somebody should ask Mrs. Estrela that question. I really hope somebody does…

… anyway, whoever in the EP raises his hand to vote for this draft is a supporter of child abuse. And the abuse in this case is not merely tolerated or condoned, but it is made compulsory, obliging parents to sexually abuse their own children.

Letter From Australia (About Child Protection Apartheid)

End Child Protection Apartheid

Miranda Devine 

Sunday, July 28, 2013 (7:31am)
Daily Telegraph
 
IN response to last week’s column on tragic Kiesha Weippeart, bashed to death by her mother at six, a social worker contacted me. She wanted to add her voice to the chorus demanding an end to the child protection apartheid which condemns indigenous children to subpar care.

For fear of creating another “stolen generation” state and federal agencies persist with policies which keep indigenous children too long in abusive homes, and require indigenous foster carers, despite chronic shortages. In Kiesha’s case, a court overturned a decision she be kept in foster care for reasons which are shrouded in secrecy but which are suspected to include her indigenous heritage.

“We work with this every single day,” said the NSW Family and Community Services caseworker, who asked to remain nameless.
  “If little Kiesha was not Aboriginal she would be alive and well today, thriving and being cared for by loving carers. Her mother would not have been given the opportunity to murder her.
“Caseworkers do their best to keep families together but when this puts a child at risk of serious harm we have no choice but to keep that child safe and sometimes that requires removing the children from their family.

“[We] make recommendations to the court, but in the end that magistrate who has never met the children, and never seen the abuse they have endured, makes whatever decision they feel like. The fallout from the stolen generation and National Apology is a ridiculous. Aboriginal placement principle policy that we have to follow constantly leaves Aboriginal children in unsafe situations.

“This policy shows Aboriginal children that they are second-class citizens because the abuse and neglect they endure has to far exceed that of a white Australian child before we act. This policy restores Aboriginal children to unsafe situations or to family members that are not fit to look after a dog, let alone a vulnerable child, just because they are Aboriginal.  This policy removes children from loving, safe, secure foster families and places them back with ‘family’ just because they are Aboriginal.

“The same families that have generations of severe abuse and neglect are given the opportunity to continue this.  How can this be in a child’s best interests?”

Double Standards?

Dr Russell Wills
Children’s Commissioner

Dear Sir

We understand from media reports that Family Court judge, Dale Clarkson has referred to you a case of extreme dereliction of duty by the government agency, Child Youth and Family (“CYF”).  According to said media reports, CYF left vulnerable four children with known abusive parents for nigh on ten years.  

A judge has slammed the reckless actions of Child, Youth and Family workers who allowed four children to stay with their violent, abusive parents for more than nine years.  Social workers failed to respond to 20 warnings that the children were being abused and neglected by their father, a convicted child rapist, and their mother, who left them alone in a South Auckland car park.

The judge particularly turned her attention to the prima facie dereliction by CYF in this case:

“Quite apart from the disappointing lack of protection of these four children, I am left wondering if this is indicative of CYF’s practice.”  She said despite police, family members and teachers repeatedly bringing the case to the attention of the government agency, the children were left with their parents.  “Because I consider that the deficiencies in CYF’s performance in this case have been so serious, I propose to refer this decision to the Commissioner for Children for further investigation.” .  . .

Judge Clarkson said there were 20 notifications to CYF over nine years.  In October 2004, a family member made an anonymous complaint after one of the children – then aged 5 – was found with a cut to her head.  CYF found that the mother had abused the child but because the youngster was still in the care of the mother, “she was unable to be interviewed”, Judge Clarkson’s ruling said.  A “whanau agreement” was entered into but there were no records to show the result. 

“This response by the Ministry (of Social Development, CYF’s overseer) to what they recognised as established physical abuse on this child can only be described as reckless.”  On one occasion, three of the children were inside their father’s car when the mother smashed the windscreen and passenger window with a steel pipe.

As you investigate this case, Dr Wills we would ask you to concentrate upon one aspect in particular.  The media mentioned in its account a “whanau agreement”, which implies that this was a Maori “family”.  We  want to be assured that CYF has not fallen into a form of institutionalised racism, such that Maori parents are treated with a different standard when it comes to child abuse–in effect, a lower standard that is more tolerant and permissive than would otherwise be the case. 

We are not alleging that this is necessarily the case–but it is important that you investigate thoroughly and be satisfied that it is not the case, or that were it to be true, you would have the courage to report the matter. 

For decades certain sections of Maoridom have been arguing that Maori are different; they allegedly live by different conventions, rules, customs, social constructs, and culture.  Government departments, for their part, have bought into policy and practices that “respect the Treaty of Waitangi” and Maoris’ status as tangata whenua–whatever these may mean.  In this context it would be very easy for double standards to become institutionalised in agencies such as CYF such that CYF is more permissive and tolerant of child abuse amongst Maori families. 

We, therefore, urge you to consider this risk as you investigate this horrendous case.  If it were to be true we are very confident that the vast majority of Maori people, along with the rest of the community, would be horrified and insist that it be addressed. 

Salem Lives On

Modern Witch Trials

We have discussed previously the rash of unsafe prosecution and conviction of adults accused of child molestation–falsely and completely unjustly, as it later turns out.  In New Zealand we had our own horror trial in Christchurch (the Christchurch Civic Creche case) where adult caregivers were accused (and one convicted) of the most bizarre and horrendous crimes against children on the basis of child testimony.  It was all a crock.  (For the expose tour d’force, see Lynley Hood’s, A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case.  Publisher: Longacre Press, 2001.  Reviews of the book can be found, here.)

Yet at the time, and to this day, parents and others involved swear black and blue that the children were telling the truth (despite some of those children publicly recanting their testimony as they grew older).  This phenomenon was not isolated, but similar cases occurred in the United States, the UK, and in Europe.  Researchers have compared the hysteria to that on display in the witch trials of Salem in the seventeenth century.
  Funny how we used to think those folk back then were ignorant and primitive and prone to superstition.  Apparently that particular apple has stayed uncomfortably close to the tree.

Some time ago were were present during a court case where a father was accused of child molestation and the only witness was a five year old child. Some were flatly claiming that the child had to be believed because children do not lie.  It is that errant, ignorant belief which lies at much of the hysteria and subsequent injustice of these cases.

This, of course, is not to say that child molestation does not occur.  It does–sadly.  But it is to say that cases which depend solely upon the testimony of a child or children whose evidence has been coaxed out of them by “expert” adults are notoriously unsafe from the get-go.  The phenomenon has gone through a further iteration: now, as a result of the judicial abuse of accused innocently people, protocols and guidelines has been put in place for extracting more reliable evidence from infant accusers.  But that has only served to reinforce the conviction that children’s testimony is reliable and that “kids don’t lie”. 

The Guardian recently carried a review of a new movie on the subject.  It re-works the issues and makes the same fundamental points–something which we cannot hear too often, lest our own version of the Salem Witch Trials becomes perpetuated without end. 

The Hunt disputes the innocence of infants

Thomas Vinterberg’s account of small-town paedophilia panic troubles the idea that child accusers must always be believed.

Susse Wold and Annika Wedderkopp in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt. Photograph: Charlotte Bruss-Christensen

We didn’t need the McAlpine affair to remind us that our era sustains a witch-hunt of which the middle ages might have been proud. Since the late 1970s, successive houndings of supposed paedophiles have done little to prevent the recurrence of the phenomenon. Lord McAlpine got off lightly compared to victims of panics in Cleveland and Orkney, or the people who had their homes besieged by chanting mobs in Portsmouth, or the Newcastle nursery workers subjected to a nine-year campaign of vilification, prosecution, prison violence, mob torment and official denunciation before being cleared of any wrongdoing in 2002. The documentary Witch Hunt, produced and narrated by Sean Penn in 2008, describes a Californian frenzy that saw a carpenter spend 15 years in prison for abuses that never occurred.

The underlying phenomenon is well enough understood. Human beings seem to need to vent their collective ire on a chosen peripheral group. Our current mania is buttressed by the genuine harm perpetrated by real child abusers, but it’s reinforced by another characteristic. As in the campaign against Salem’s witches, the key accusers are children.

We accept that adults may lie, but in recent years, in a reaction against scandals in which children’s well-founded allegations have been disregarded, we’ve come to resist the idea that, on occasion, children can lie as well. Child-endorsed denunciations have thus become immune from the doubt that might otherwise temper our vengefulness. In the Newcastle case, demonstrators paraded with banners saying: “we believe the kids”.

When children’s claims of abuse are nonetheless shown to be unfounded, we refuse to accord them blame. Overwhelmingly, we’ve come to insist that false allegations by children are mainly the fault of adults.
Often they have been. The Orkney accusers eventually revealed that they were bullied into testifying by their interrogators. Penn’s film is an indictment of the coercion of child witnesses. As a result of such cases, it’s come to be accepted that children give false accounts mainly because adults ask them leading questions: suggestible youngsters are merely trying to please their elders.

Because of this, the way juveniles are questioned has been intensively scrutinised. Elaborate protocols have been devised to ensure that children’s testimony is uncontaminated by the prior judgment of adults. This has made the testimony that results seem even more irrefutable. So we’re now urged as never before to accept what children say. “If a child tells you about abuse,” the Kidscape website enjoins us, “believe in what you are being told.” But what if the child is making it up?

With The Hunt, Dogme pioneer Thomas Vinterberg grasps this unpleasant nettle. The film’s story, of a tight-knit community turning on the victim of a false allegation, has been criticised as routine. Its wronged hero is a boring saint, and the villagers act out obvious enough roles. What might have been the most interesting part of the tale, the communal healing that (almost) takes place, is simply skipped over. Instead, it’s the infant accuser who takes centre-stage.

Seven-year-old Annika Wedderkopp puts in an extraordinary performance as the even younger Klara, whose murmured allegation destroys the life of a nursery-school teaching assistant. Adults push Klara into firming up her story; they exaggerate it and reject her withdrawals as attempts at repression. Nonetheless, they don’t invent it. Like the Newcastle demonstrators, the school’s headteacher declares: “I believe the children. They don’t lie.” But like Briony in Atonement, Klara is indeed lying, to avenge rejection.

A nursery school may sound an unlikely setting for such behaviour. Nonetheless, between them Wedderkopp and Vinterberg make Klara’s behaviour seem entirely persuasive. It’s not just her original impulse that rings true. Klara displays a complex mix of pique, sly precocity, emerging but still half-hearted conscience, passivity as an avoidance strategy, inability to challenge an adult’s robust narrative, muddled memory and genuine confusion that seems altogether convincing.

Vinterberg himself seems anxious about what he’s done. He says he’s unhappy that some filmgoers come out of the cinema hating Klara. He’s called her lie “innocent” and insists that children who participate in abuse hysteria should themselves be seen as victims. Maybe so. Still, anyone who sees this film will find it hard to entirely endorse the Kidscape view of children’s allegations.

Letter from the US (About Child Murder in the UK)

State Infanticide in Britain

We are all too familiar with the murder of helpless babies within the womb.  Now it is being extended.  New born babies are being murdered in the UK–all “legally” of course, under the loving embrace of the National Health Service. One UK doctor has become a whistleblower.

This report is republished from The Blaze:

UK Doctor’s Horrifying Admission Reveals How Sick & Disabled Babies Are Put on ‘Death Pathways’, Deprived of Food & Fluid for 10 Days 

Sick children and even disabled newborn babies, are reportedly being discharged from NHS hospitals in England only to die  slowly at home or in hospices in an unfathomable manner. The innocent children are being put on controversial “death pathways,” once only thought to have involved elderly and terminally ill adult patients.

The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), an organization that facilitates end-of-life treatment, is behind the inhumane program. The Daily Mail has learned the process of “withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.” In other words, patients — young and old — are slowly starved and dehydrated to death.

(Photo credit: Getty)

One doctor, acting as a whistle blower, admitted to starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital in a leading medical journal. The doctor describes it as a 10-day process, during which the baby becomes “smaller and shrunken.”

Roughly 130,000 elderly and terminally ill patients reportedly die on the Liverpool Care Pathway, or “death pathways.” LCP is now being independently investigated at the orders of ministers in England.
The Daily Mail has more details on this tragic story:

The investigation, which will include child patients, will look at whether cash payments to hospitals to hit death pathway targets have influenced doctors’ decisions.  Medical critics of the LCP insist it is impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result the LCP death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of euthanasia, used to clear hospital beds and save the NHS money.

The use of end of life care methods on disabled newborn babies was revealed in the doctors’ bible, the British Medical Journal.  The previously mentioned doctor wrote of the pain of watching the slow, forced deaths of newborn babies. One baby’s parents decided to put their infant on the “pathway” because of a “lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies,” according to the doctor.

Here’s some of what the doctor wrote in the medical journal [emphasis added]:

The voice on the other end of the phone describes a newborn baby and a lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies. I have a growing sense of dread as I listen.  The parents want ‘nothing done’ because they feel that these anomalies are not consistent with a basic human experience. I know that once decisions are made, life support will be withdrawn.

Assuming this baby survives, we will be unable to give feed, and the parents will not want us to use artificial means to do so.  Regrettably, my predictions are correct. I realise as I go to meet the parents that this will be the tenth child for whom I have cared after a decision has been made to forgo medically provided feeding.
[…]
Like other parents in this predicament, they are now plagued with a terrible type of wishful thinking that they could never have imagined. They wish for their child to die quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped.  They wish for pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to their precious baby.

Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days. 

After reading the article in the British Medical Journal, Dr. Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St. George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London, wrote on the BMJ website: “It is a huge supposition to think they do not feel hunger or thirst.”

“The LCP was devised by the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute in Liverpool for care of dying adult patients more than a decade ago. It has since been developed, with [pediatric] staff at Alder Hey Hospital, to cover children. Parents have to agree to their child going on the death pathway, often being told by doctors it is in the child’s ‘best interests’ because their survival is ‘futile’,” The Daily Mail reports.

Obviously, not everyone agrees. Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice pediatric nurse, wrote to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health and blasted the use of death pathways for young children. “The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live,” she wrote. “It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a reasonable number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.”

She went on: “I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die…I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. This is euthanasia by the backdoor.”

For now the inquiry into the death pathways is ongoing. A Department of Health spokesman said that “End of life care for children must meet the highest professional and clinical standards, and the specific needs of children at the end of their life.”  But as Teresa Lynch, a spokeswoman for the Medical Ethics Alliance, points out: “There are big questions to be answered about how our sick children are dying.”

To read more of the anonymous doctor’s testimony in the British Medical Journal, click here.

Atheists and Your Children, Part III

 Propaganda, Child Abuse and the Gun

We have been considering a “reasonable proposition” put forward by distinguished psychologist, Nicholas Humphrey–to the effect that Christian parents who raise their children to know, understand, and believe the Christian faith are committing a form of child abuse.  He puts it in the same category as parents performing clitorectomy upon daughters.

Children have a right not to be taught myths and lies, he averred to his audience at Amnesty International.  The right to the truth overrides all parental and child rights.  It overrides all free speech rights.  He will defend free speech rights strenuously, but not in the home, unless children are being taught his particular world-view–which happens to be the dominant world view of our age.  Children must be taught and trained in the world-view of scientism, which to materialist and atheist Humphrey is the only truth.

We can see how purblind he has become in his own ideology and secular religion in the following quotation:

Belief systems in general flourish or die out according to how good they are at reproduction and competition. The better a system is at creating copies of itself, and the better at keeping other rival belief systems at bay, the greater its own chances of evolving and holding its own. So we should expect that it will be characteristic of successful belief systems—especially those that survive when everything else seems to be against them—that their devotees will be obsessed with education and with discipline: insisting on the rightness of their own ways and rubbishing or preventing access to others. We should expect, moreover, that they will make a special point of targeting children in the home, while they are still available, impressionable and vulnerable. For, as the Jesuit master wisely noted, “If I have the teaching of children up to seven years of age or thereabouts, I care not who has them afterwards, they are mine for life.”

In Humphrey’s evolutionist world-view the mark of a successful belief system is that it gains adherents.  It survives.  It is fitter than other belief systems.  The key ingredient to survival of dangerous myths like Jesus Christ and His Father, the Living God, according to Humphrey, is that the devotees are obsessed with education and with discipline: “insisting on the rightness of their own ways and rubbishing or preventing access to others.”

The self-serving hypocrisy of this argument is worthy of note in passing.  OK, so the success of a belief system has nothing to do with truth, but everything to do with inculcation.  Apparently.  So how has atheistic, materialistic scientism been doing, then?  How successful has it been?  For over one hundred years schooling in the United States and Great Britain and in the West generally has been thoroughly committed to inculcating Darwinian evolutionism into the hearts and minds of students.  How has that inculcation gone?  Humphrey tells us (although he misses the deadly indictment to his own position and of his argument):

A survey published last year showed that half the American people do not know, for example, that the earth goes round the sun once a year. Fewer than one in ten know what a molecule is. More than half do not accept that human beings have evolved from animal ancestors; and less than one in ten believe that evolution—if it has occurred—can have taken place without some kind of external intervention. Not only do people not know the results of science, they do not even know what science is. When asked what they think distinguishes the scientific method, only 2% realised it involves putting theories to the test, 34% vaguely knew it has something to do with experiments and measurement, but 66% didn’t have a clue.

The belief systems of scientism and materialism and evolutionism and atheism are not doing too well, since they are failing to produce a universal population of committed disciples, despite controlling state funded education at every turn.  But rather than face up to the implications of the signal failure of atheistic evolution to gain universal traction–which is evidence that his own belief system is inadequate at best, riddled with contradictions and irrationality at worst–Humphrey wants to shift blame to someone else–the parents of children whose households overtly and deliberately reject his belief system of secular atheism.  This gets to the nub of Humphrey’s case: public education is failing because parental influence is so strong.  Therefore,  parents need to be attacked, neutered and controlled.

The first obstacle to be obliterated is home-schooling.  The state–get this–the State must outlaw it. 

All sects that are serious about their own survival do indeed make every attempt to flood the child’s mind with their own propaganda, and to deny the child access to any alternative viewpoints. In the United States this kind of restricted education has continually received the blessing of the law. Parents have the legal right, if they wish to, to educate their children entirely at home, and nearly one million families do so.

Then, secondly, there are private schools and colleges which must be neutered as well:

But many more who wish to limit what their children learn can rely on the thousands of sectarian schools that are permitted to function subject to only minimal state supervision. A US court did recently insist that teachers at a Baptist school should at least hold teaching certificates; but at the same time it recognised that “the whole purpose of such a school is to foster the development of their children’s minds in a religious environment” and therefore that the school should be allowed to teach all subjects “in its own way”—which meant, as it happened, presenting all subjects only from a biblical point of view, and requiring all teachers, supervisors, and assistants to agree with the church’s doctrinal position.

So the State has to shut them down as well.  But it gets worse.  Humphrey acknowledges even then–even if home schooling were made illegal (as it is in Germany), and even if all faith-based schools were shut down– it would not be enough to ensure the successful inculcation of his religion of atheism.  Parents can influence their children informally, even if they are now restricted to secular atheistic schools to impart the “Faith”.

Yet, parents hardly need the support of the law to achieve such a baleful hegemony over their children’s minds. For there are, unfortunately, many ways of isolating children from external influences without actually physically removing them or controlling what they hear in class. Dress a little boy in the uniform of the Hasidim, curl his side-locks, subject him to strange dietary taboos, make him spend all weekend reading the Torah, tell him that gentiles are dirty, and you could send him to any school in the world and he’d still be a child of the Hasidim. The same—just change the terms a bit—for a child of the Muslims, or the Roman Catholics, or followers of the Maharishi Yogi.

So, its control of parents that Humphrey is after.  In the Soviet Union, parents were forbidden to mention anything about the God of the Scriptures to their children.  They could not include them in any Christian celebrations or ceremonies.  Their children were taken into indoctrination services, such as the Young Pioneers.  Children were encouraged to inform on their parents if they conducted any religious practices in the home.

Priests and their families were subject to severe persecution.  A priest’s children were barred from middle or higher schools or from state employment unless they renounced and broke off all connections with their fathers.  Priests were disenfranchised along with criminals and the insane.  They were also denied ration cards, often necessary for survival in periods of shortage. [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 180f.] 

Why would one connect Soviet totalitarianism and ruthless persecution of Christians with today’s secular materialists?  Both alike were and are militantly atheistic.  It should come as no surprise, then, that well respected scholars, such as Humphrey openly advocate state control over parents to ensure that all speech in the home conforms to secular materialist atheism.  That is why Peter Hitchens speaks of the “totalitarian intolerance of the new atheists”.  It is a fair representation. 

We are certain of this: materialist, evolutionist atheism can only succeed in human history by the power of the gun.  It is an inane, conflicted and barren ideology.  It is ultimately irrational.  Unable to win and maintain control of hearts and minds by peaceful means it must turn inevitably to the gun and to the power of a totalitarian state to gain and continue control.  Dawkins and Humphrey are channelling Lenin and Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.  It is one of the great ironies of the decade that Humphrey first gave this speech to Amnesty International–a group ostensibly dedicated to fighting against state oppression everywhere.  The fact that Humphrey’s propositions were not publicly repudiated on the spot tells us that they have lots of fellow travellers–in place where one would not expect them.

The course to violent overthrow and seizure of power tends to follow a well-trodden path: demonise something as oppressive, cruel, and destructive.  Promise that if the demons were removed, all our problems would dissipate or dissolve into facile solutions. Then, for the sake of peace, the sake of truth, and for the love of fellow men all the principled and courageous must stand up to fight.  Right now, the demon is Jesus Christ and His people are the enemy.  They are the pathological child abusers of our time . . . or so the propaganda runs.
 

Atheists and Your Children, Part II

Propaganda Redivivus

In a previous post we spoke of the allegations and indictments being levelled by militant atheists against Christians.  They have repeatedly asserted that parents teaching their children the doctrines and beliefs of the Christian faith is literally a form of child abuse.

Whilst some may assume that this is nothing more than a colourful rhetorical device, the insistence that such propositions and charges be taken literally lead one to think that what is going down here reflects the strategic and tactical position of a propagandist rather than a serious argument.  Propaganda, of course, is not interested in the truth per se, nor in truthful discourse.  It is interested in manipulation and ultimately control of mind.  It appears, then, that atheists want control over the children whose parents are Christians.  They want to control their minds.  They want to interdict any influence their parents might otherwise have and substitute it with their own form of religion.

Is this extreme?  Yes–but openly and seriously advocated nonetheless.
  Professor Nicholas Humphrey is a celebrated psychologist working at Cambridge–who is also an atheist and a materialist.  According to his Wikipedia bio,

He has been Lecturer in Psychology at Oxford, Assistant Director of the Subdepartment of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge, Senior Research Fellow in Parapsychology at Cambridge, Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research, New York, and School Professor at the London School of Economics.

A few years ago he gave a speech to Amnesty International.  The audience was and is significant: Amnesty, of course, is committed to advocating for and assisting people suffering oppression.  Humphrey wanted Amnesty to begin to pay attention to what he believes is one of the greatest forms of oppression in our time: children being raised in Christian homes.

He commenced his speech by asserting his strong commitment to free speech as a fundamental human right.  He noted that words can harm and hurt people.  Should free speech, then, be curtailed?  He flatly rejected the notion outright.

Should we be campaigning for the rights of human beings to be protected from verbal oppression and manipulation? Do we need “word laws”, just as all civilised societies have gun laws, licensing who should be allowed to use them in what circumstances? Should there be Geneva protocols establishing what kinds of speech act count as crimes against humanity?

No. The answer, I’m sure, ought in general to be “No, don’t even think of it.” Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to be meddled with. And however painful some of its consequences may sometimes be for some people, we should still as a matter of principle resist putting curbs on it. By all means we should try to make up for the harm that other people’s words do, but not by censoring the words as such.

Whew.  Great stuff.  An ally, then, against those atheists who are arguing that Christian freedoms and right should be curtailed.  Ah . . . . no.  Humphrey went on:

And, since I am so sure of this in general, and since I’d expect most of you to be so too, I shall probably shock you when I say it is the purpose of my lecture today to argue in one particular area just the opposite. To argue, in short, in favour of censorship, against freedom of expression, and to do so moreover in an area of life that has traditionally been regarded as sacrosanct.

I am talking about moral and religious education. And especially the education a child receives at home, where parents are allowed—even expected—to determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right and wrong.

Committed to free speech all right, but just not in the most sacred and protected area of free speech imaginable–that speech which takes place in a home, between parents and their children.  Now, of course, Humphrey would not object if a parent said to his or her child, “You are a f. . . . . idiot, a little sh . . . ”  That would be just normal, free speech to be protected and privileged along with free speech rights everywhere.  It is when parents speak to their children about the Lord Jesus Christ that Humphrey objects and wants free speech rights to be removed.

As you read the following paragraphs as he went on in his speech, think “Soviet Union” and “Communist China”.  Think of the nodding heads in the Politburo and the Central Committees.

Children, I’ll argue, have a human right not to have their minds crippled by exposure to other people’s bad ideas—no matter who these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no god-given licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children’s knowledge, to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.

In short, children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense. And we as a society have a duty to protect them from it. So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example, in the literal truth of the Bible, or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children’s teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.

Note the equivalence slipped in here: raising one’s children in the Christian faith is equivalent to knocking their teeth out or locking them in a dungeon.  Since we imprison parents for such things, the implication is . . . ?  Of course.  Christian parents should be indicted as criminals and imprisoned if they dare to speak to their children of the Living God and His Son, Jesus Christ.  This is exactly equivalent to what actually happened in the Soviet Union. 

But this is no raving lunatic nor political extremist nor ideological nut-job.  This is a celebrated professor who is lionised all over the world–amongst fellow atheists and materialists and evolutionists and champions of human freedom against oppression, such as Amnesty International.  One of his most recently published volumes is The Mind Made Flesh: Essays from the Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution, in which the speech given to Amnesty referred to above is republished as a chapter.

The book blurb says:

Nicholas Humphrey’s writings about the evolution of the mind have done much to set the agenda for contemporary psychology. Here, in a series of riveting essays, he invites us to ‘take another look’ at a variety of the central and not-so-central issues: the evolution of consciousness, the nature of the self, multiple personality disorder, the placebo effect, cave art, religious miracles, medieval animal trials, the seductions of dictatorship, and much more.

And reviewers opined:

“No other theoretical psychologist is so accessibly clear, and at the same time so provocatively philosophical.”–Lorna Sage

“Nobody else brings such an astonishing range of knowledge to bear on these issues.”–Daniel Dennett

“Humphrey’s distinctive prose is the golden bowl in which his ripe and shining theories are held.”–Antonella Gambotto

Right . . . Now the Christian position on the raising of children is is pretty straightforward.  Parents are given proprietary rights and responsibilities over children by God Himself.  This includes the duty to raise children in the truth.  But if parents do not, and raise them after their own idolatries and superstitions, the higher and prior rights of parents are not thereby annulled.  Free speech rights most certainly apply–and we would go on to argue, that if it were not so, then free speech rights–and all freedom rights–everywhere else would ultimately lapse.

Ultimately what this tells us is that Humphrey and his fellow atheists are not confident in their atheist skins.  They are not sure of their arguments.  They need the force of law, the threat of punishment over non-atheists to advance their cause.  It also tells us that when Humphrey and his fellow atheists speak of freedom they are really alluding to freedom within certain bounds–which they will define.  It is the freedom that holds amidst the conditions of an Inquisition.  It is the “freedom” of Orwell’s 1984.

Atheists and Your Children, Part I

No Rhetorical  Devices Here

It is no surprise to learn that militant atheists hate the Christian faith.  And hate is not too strong a word.  What else can be made of the assertions by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens that the act of parents teaching their own children about God and the Christ and the redemption of the world and the judgment to come is an act of child abuse?

Maybe, one wonders, this indictment should be regarded as rhetorical flourish or vivid hyperbole.  Dawkins, however, is firmly insistent that his words on this subject are neither hyperbolic nor a literary device in general.  He means them in a literal sense.  Here is Dawkins’s gloss on his indictment of parents who teach their children the Christian faith:

. . . in the question time after a lecture in Dublin, I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland.  I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.  [Quoted by Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 202. Emphasis, ours.]

 Nor was this an intemperate slip, later modified or partially corrected.  On a national TV programme he declared,

What I really object to is–and I thinks it’s actually abusive to children–is to take a tiny child and say “You are a Christian child or you are a Muslim child.”  I think it is wicked if children are told “You are a member of such and such a faith simply because your parents are.”  (Ibid. Emphasis, ours)

Child abuse in modern discourse is considered the most heinous of crimes, worthy of no mercy, exculpation, or defence.  It is the secular world’s last mortal unpardonable sin.

But is Dawkins really arguing that were parents to instruct their children in the faith of their fathers they should be criminally indicted and subjected to the most severe criminal penalties?  If so–if we are really to take him literally–he must have abandoned reason.  To make the crimes of physical or sexual assault of a child the moral and legal legal equivalent of catechising that child in the Christian faith, all the while asserting that one is to be taken literally, can hardly be an advertisement for rationality. 

So, since Dawkins is not mentally unstable, and since his assertions on child abuse and religion are not rationally defensible, there must be another explanation.  The most likely is that such extreme allegations serve the interests of propaganda.  Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and their co-belligerents are advocates of a secular, religion-free society.  To identify religious instruction of children as child abuse creates a “narrative” that parents are delinquent and punishable for teaching their children about the Lord Jesus Christ, which in its turn provides justification for State regulations and rules. 

There have been other empires, other societies which have made such a connection and engaged in similar propaganda.  The Soviet Union for one.  Communist China for another.  Both sought suppression and extirpation of all religion and its replacement with absolute secularism.  Both employed a massive effort in propaganda to achieve their goals.  Both sought to “rescue” children from the religion of their parents. 

Is this really what the New Atheists are about?  Is this their end-game?  The breaking apart of a parent from a child to ensure that the child is not exposed to the ideas and beliefs of “bad” parents?  And to ensure that this happens, of course, the State would have to intrude right into the home: to rule, regulate, listen, monitor, control, and punish.  It would have to replace parental instruction with its own. 

No, we hear you say.  If you allege that against the noble New Atheists you would be guilty of your own hyperbolic excess.  No-one is advocating that.  No-one.  Really?  Yes, really. 

Unfortunately, it is true.  Literally true.  No rhetorical devices within cooee.  We will take the saga further in our next post. 

The Uber Parent

 Beware Government “Help”

New Zealand, we are told,  has a high incidence of child abuse.  It was, therefore, entirely predictable that eventually the government would move to establish a national database of children of some sort.  The governmental authorities have a demonstrated record of incompetence in the area.  A most frequent failing is the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.  Too many children being “helped” by too many government agencies who are unaware of what others agencies are doing.

To address the “information gap” the Minister of Social Development is proposing a national database of at risk kids be set up.  It is estimated that 30,000 children will eventually be on electronic record.

Whenever Big Brother proposes something like this the issue of official abuse percolates to the surface.
  We have lots of databases about people in New Zealand.  We also have plenty of incidents of abuse and misuse by people authorised to access such databases.  Will the checks and balances be sufficiently robust and real to disincline abusers of the new proposed system?

We have been told that there will be protections such as access by passwords and monitoring of use.  That is positive.  What, however, will be the sanctions if someone accesses another person’s record in bad faith?  The only credible sanction is instant suspension leading to dismissal (if misuse is proven) and initiation of  procedures to strike off professional registers if found guilty of misuse.  If such sanctions are not up front in large typeface, we predict that abuse will occur–probably on a regular basis.

Private corporations which maintain lots of personal data about clients (such as banks) have extremely strict codes of conduct about staff access and use of client information.  Penalties are usually summary.  Everyone knows the score.   Banks employ investigative staff to monitor employee behaviour and access of client information.  Consequently, compliance is high.

Will the state set up similar compliance regimes for those accessing the at risk kids database?  We hope so.  We also expect to be disappointed.  As reported in the NZ Herald, the whole project at first glance appears to be too big, too broad, with too many government agencies and quango staff given access:

Teachers, doctors, community organisations, Child, Youth and Family workers and others will have access to the database and be able to add to individual children’s records. High-risk adults will also be added to the database so they can be tracked and an alert given if a child moves into their household.

Parents and caregivers will be “profiled”–which is a bit embarrassing since profiling is not PC is lots of quarters:

A “risk assessment tool” developed at the University of Auckland will identify the most vulnerable children based on data in this system such as previous findings of abuse or neglect, behavioural problems, single-parent families, parental ages and education, intervals between babies and multiple-birth children.

Such tools are always blunt and crude.  To be fair and just they need qualification and review; checks and balances are essential.  That leads to the second major problem–secrecy and lack of informed consent.

Social workers will be able to log information into a new centralised system described as “not a new database on children but a mechanism for extracting and combining relevant information on children (and their caregivers) from existing databases”.  “Information will only be pulled into the platform when a child reaches a certain threshold of concern,” the documents say.

Parents will not be told if their children are being put on the database and when they are “pulled on to the platform”.  This is unconscionable.  Apparently, parents can find out only by requesting the records under the Privacy Act, after their children have been put on the database.  But this would potentially be open to abuse of the worst kind by overzealous do-gooders.  If there were a protocol which required that parents or caregivers be notified when a child is being first put on the database it would help stop casual expansion of the records without due process.  And why ought not parents be informed?  If they are neglectful informing them would put the parents on notice.  The idea of a semi-secret database able to accessed by thousands of government and quango and private sector functionaries without notice is a scary thought.

Without doubt one unintended consequence will be a further weakening of the institution of the family.  Take, for example, the issue of parental discipline.  There are many parents now who fear to speak out against the current stupid, inconsistent and draconian practice for fear they would fall under the attention of Nazi-like government bureaucrats who are authorised to operate on a “guilty until proven innocent” mode, with the first intervention and sanction being the removal of children from the home.

Now another sanction will loom: if  you come to the attention of the authorities you risk your children being put on a national snooping database which identifies them as being at risk because you happen to be their parents.

As soon as a child is entered on the database you, the parents, are suspected of nascent child neglect and abuse–by definition.  Imagine your child falling down and breaking an arm.  You take them to the doctor who looks the child up on the “at risk child” database and you are identified as someone who puts their own children at risk.  Suddenly the broken arm can be seen as probable evidence of child abuse–and so it goes on.  The child protection agency may be called.  Would they be waiting for you when you return from the doctor’s.  Would they demand access to the home to ensure that your child is not being abused by you, the suspect parent.  Will there be protections against such abuse, misuse, overreach, and browbeating?  We doubt it.

Ironically, the extensive consultation has apparently made it clear to the government that the draconian approach used by CYFS has proved counter productive.

CYFS already refers less urgent cases to community social services, but many people are scared to ring CYFS because of its statutory power to take children off parents judged to be abusive or neglectful.

No surprises there.

Thirdly, if your children are put on the database, what will be the procedures and protocols for getting them removed?  We expect there aren’t any, or if there are they will be so difficult and costly to apply and action that they will be beyond the reach of any but the wealthy.

Fourthly, expect this database and intervention approach to produce a mammoth new initiative in government bureaucrats planning for your lives.  Each child “on the platform” will have a plan developed by the government for it and its parents or caregivers.

Each child and family referred to these teams will have a “whole-of-child” assessment of their physical and mental health, safety, housing and other material needs, cultural wellbeing, caregiving, family relationships and support systems, behaviour, learning and development. . . .

Regional directors will ensure that each vulnerable child has a “lead professional” who will be “responsible for developing a plan and ensuring the plan stays on track and is delivered” by all the agencies involved.

So, if you get on the list the implication here is that you will be showered with state help and state intervention all co-ordinated by your personal “plan”.  There will doubtless be thousands upon thousands of parents and caregivers who will do all they can to get on that database.  The prospect of more government help is a huge driver of behaviour.  Within a nano-second the underground network will be buzzing about the best ways to get on the list in order to get more help and money.  A bit more neglect of your children would do the trick quite nicely.

Such initiatives are always well meaning.  The actual outcome and the real-life fruits are often as bad or even worse than the problems they ostensibly seek to address.  Be warned.

Evolutionist Humbug

Creationist Response 

This Is the Creationists‘ Response to Scientist Bill Nye’s Viral Pro-Evolution Video Claiming They Harm Children

The Blaze

Scientist Bill Nye captured headlines last week after he lambasted creationists and proclaimed that teaching evolution is damaging to both children and society. Now, just days after Nye’s controversial Big Think video making these proclamations reached millions, Answers in Genesis (AiG), the Christian ministry behind the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, has responded with a clip of its own.

In an article entitled, ”Time is Nye for a Rebuttal,” Ken Ham, CEO of AiG, tackled Nye’s claims and announced the publication of the counter-video. Of particular note, the Christian ministry leader took offense at the scientist’s purported claim that those who teach creationism are, in a sense, “abusing” children.
“A recent tactic by evolutionists in their battle against creationists, one that is especially used by Richard Dawkins, is to employ an ad hominem argument—that creationists are committing a form of ‘child abuse’ when they teach creation to children,” Ham contended.

Here is the Answers in Genesis video rebuttal to Nye’s absurd allegations of creationist child-abuse:

CMI Creation Station in Canada also put out a vid rebutting Nye’s ridiculous anti-free speech position:

Easy Dupes, Our Bad

Breaking Silence, Part Deux

Macsyna King has been in the news again.  This time the context has altered somewhat.  The coroner investigating the death of her premature twins has placed the blame firmly upon her then derelict “husband”, Chris Kahui. It was impossible for Macsyna King to murder the children, the coroner concluded. By process of elimination, Kahui was the only one left to blame.  This must have come as a shock to a more than a few people.

Here was a woman who was vilified throughout the country as the indisputable murderess, a child killer, a swine, a monster, the lowest of the low, etc.  In fact, when Chris Kahui was charged it took the jury only a minute to declare him not guilty.

Homosexual Parenting as Normal

As “Normal” As Sexual Abuse of Children

The homosexual propaganda machine, along with its cheerleaders in the Commentariat, portray homosexual parenting as normal.  The impact upon children raised in such a home–by either homosexual men or women–is negligible we are repeatedly told.  The framing presents children raised in such homes as being no different in any significant respect from children raised in orthodox families. Ergo, homosexual parenting is normal.

One slight problem with this argument is new empirical data.

Unfit for Motherhood

A Woman’s Right to Choose

The New Zealand government is considering granting the courts power to sentence a serial recidivist child abuser to permanent childlessness.  The proposal is that if such a person were to bear subsequent children they would automatically be removed from the mother at birth.

The Commentariat is affecting outrage over the idea.

Evil and wickedness stalk the heart of every human being.  Human hearts are hearts of darkness.  So believed Dostoevsky, Conrad, and Faulkner.  So declares the Bible itself–the very Word of the Living God.  The heart of man, says the Scripture, is deceitful above all else and desperately wicked.
 

It’s not surprising then to find human society riddled with lust, greed, envy, hatred, quarrels, jealousy, and murder.  Many folk spend their lives trying to ameliorate the influence of evil and wickedness upon society.  One tool deployed is the law.  By changing the law, passing new laws, regulating, restricting, and punishing every thing wrong many believe evil will be overcome.  Peoples’ lives will be turned around, redeemed.  It is a naive and forlorn hope.  The law can only deal with the outside of man: it cannot cleanse the heart–the thoughts, motives, intentions, and will.  Evil, the Bible tells us, springs from the heart of man, not from his circumstances. 

The law can only restrain evil.  It cannot remove guilt. It cannot cleanse the heart.  It cannot make a new man. 

Another tool deployed is the milk of human kindness.  The proposition is that if you treat people well, if you are kind to them–caring, attentive, encouraging, and positive–they will respond by turning away from wickedness and reforming their lives.  Overcome evil with good.  But likewise, this requires that the wicked seize upon something good done to them and use it to self-transform their inner man, making their thoughts, motives, intentions, and desires more pure and holy. 

A fundamental flaw of this approach is that doing good to someone risks increasing their guilt, their anger, their hatred, and their sense of hopelessness.  The expression “cold as charity” has not come into our cultural lexicon without good reason.  Doubtless we should do good to all people as much as we can, treating them with dignity and respect.  But for the wicked at heart this often only serves to increase their guilt, anger, and resentment.  Our love cannot change the heart of another.  We are neither redeemers or saviours, for we too, who do good, have eyes filled with our own evil logs. 

Society works best when it faces up to the realities of human unrighteousness and to the extreme limitations of actually effecting change.  In such a society the intent of the law is not to reform, but to punish justly, and to protect the innocent from being preyed upon by unconstrained wickedness. 

In this light, the government’s proposal to allow courts to sentence a recidivist child abuser and/or child murderer to being a perpetual non-mother seems perfectly reasonable and just.  It is undeniable that we now have in New Zealand a class of abusive mothers who perpetually have children, accept the State’s welfare payments for child care, but so neglect and abuse their children that they end up malnourished, broken in limb and mind, or dead.  To grant the courts the power to sentence such “mothers” to perpetual childlessness is both reasonable and necessary. 

Some have protested saying that it does not leave room for the “mother” to reform her life and effect change.  Not necessarily.  But it should be up to the mother to prove to a court that she indeed has changed, has reformed, before she would be allowed to keep her latest child.  At present, the situation is the reverse.  The burden of proof rests with state authorities to convince a court that a new child born to such a mother should be removed. 

We have one caveat to add: children forcibly removed from such depraved serial abusers at birth must be adopted, not kept in the incompetent, bureaucratic perpetual embrace of a government department as a ward of the state.  That merely replaces one form of child abuse by another.  State as mother and father is just another form of child neglect.

Living Under the Curse

Ineffectual Laws

In New Zealand the occurrence of adults seeing, yet ignoring, the abuse of children is not uncommon.  There are many, many children living in “blended families”–a pathetic euphemism for broken dysfunctional casual associations of adults where children are an unwanted, unwelcome, unloved appendage.   But children are inevitably demanding: they are dependent, they need help, and they are also sinful themselves.  The resulting dysfunctional household cocktail is to inflict terrible abuse, even torture, upon little ones. 

It is often the case that when children are beaten, even to the point of infanticide, the adults co-habiting or associating with the children become tight-lipped. They swear Faustian covenants with each other to hang tight, and not say a word.  Police investigations are stonewalled.  The abusers and murderers are thus not brought to justice.
 

Now the government has made it an offence not to report child abuse when adults see signs of it.  This amendment to the Crimes Act came about as a kneejerk response to the “tight five” Kahui extended family that refused to co-operate with police investigating the deaths of Chris and Cru Kahui.  The NZ Herald summarizes the Act:

From today, it will be an offence for anyone over the age of 18 to fail to report child abuse they are aware of occurring in the household they live in, or in a family they are closely connected to. The law also applies to hospital staff who know a child is being mistreated.  Those who do not report child abuse they are aware of could face up to 10 years in prison.

We understand the intent of the Act.  We also grant that it is fundamentally just, insofar as to see a crime being committed, and do nothing is to consent to it, and become complicit with the act to one degree or another.  One of the characteristics of being wicked, according to the Living God, is to “see” a thief and be pleased with him.  Another is to “keep company” with adulterers. (Psalm 50: 18)  To associate with wickedness and wicked people is to be indicted by God as being wicked oneself.  It implies support and consent to evil. 

The new Act has been criticised because it will be ineffectual: the critics are probably right.  It will cause people living in dysfunctional, lose confederations of adults to be more secretive, more unco-operative, more underground.   The law cannot redeem people.  It cannot change them into new people.  Condemning them further, it will drive them into outer darkness. 

Should the law, then, not have been passed?  No.  It is a just and righteous piece of legislation.  But it will not stop child abuse.  Nor will it make it any easier to detect.  It may give leverage to police when investigating other “tight fives”.  They will be able to argue that it would be better for the associate to “confess” now to seeing and witnessing child abuse, lest they be subsequently charged.  But as Lorraine Smith has argued, this may have little effect:

“Some people who do see or suspect abuse, these people do report it,” she said. “The very people to whom [the legislation] is directed are often too damaged to have the capacity to report the abuse, because they know there are consequences if they do report it, and they know that the police won’t be able to protect them. This is the atmosphere that the abuse of children and vulnerable people happen.”  Ms Smith said those within the household where abuse occurs are often victims of the circumstances themselves.

“How is it going to help? How is it going to encourage people who are in a situation where they are living in a dysfunctional household and who themselves are often fractured and damaged and paralysed with fear about the consequences of reporting abuse?”

The brutal reality is that there is no silver bullet or magic key to “solving” the huge social and moral problems found in the underclass, which has now become multi-generational and is self-perpetuating.  All society can now do is mitigate the problems as best it can. 

The recent law change is nothing more than a mitigation–likely slight at best, comprehensively ineffectual at worst.  But it is a just law, nonetheless. 

The only effectual solution–our only hope–is the transforming Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.  It has occurred in our past: a sovereign transformation of an underclass through the irresistible power of the Gospel preached to the poor.  It characteristically pleases our Lord to look with favour on those Unbelief despises.  Even so, Maranatha: come quickly, Lord.  

Baby Farming

A Dirty Little Secret

One of the worst experiences of my working life was practising law as a staff solicitor for a law firm in South Auckland.  Part of my role was to make applications on instructions from CYFS staff for care orders, guardianship orders and adoption orders for children under the care of the government.

I became increasingly uncomfortable with my part, not just as a professional doing my job, but as a human being.

Sadly, my experience was that the primary motivator for most of the adults involved with these children was money.
  Money to the psychologists for their reports, money to the lawyers for their documents and court appearances, and ultimately money for the people in whose care these children were placed.

Not one of the people who were putting up their hands to take on the care of these children, in all the files I worked on, were self-supporting.  All were beneficiaries.

The care orders–or if one is being cynical, the control of these young lives–were simply a means to a notch up on the benefit ladder, a means to quicker state housing, and a means to ensure continued access to taxpayer-funded systems supposedly in place to ensure the wellbeing of children. 

The calibre of these people was, to be brutally honest, often so inadequate I would hesitate to leave my pets in their care, let alone a child.

The “whanau” preference, as set out in legislation, is failing miserably.  Sadly, the best thing for many children at risk, brown skin or white, is to get them as far away from their “whanau” as possible, until such time as those children have had the opportunity  to experience life without abuse, violence, poverty and welfare dependence.  Without that opportunity they do not stand a chance, and neither do their children, or their children’s children.
Carmel Claridge, Kohimarama
Letters to the Editor
NZ Herald

Prophetesses of the Age

It’s Not My Fault

As chutzpah goes, this was as big as it can ever get.  A despicable woman had systematically tortured and abused her children in the worst way–including ripping off toe nails and pouring salt and boiling water on the wounds–and justified herself by saying it was the fault of the state.  The government had not helped her enough. 

This grand effrontery was taken up publicly by the woman’s lawyer, Lorraine Smith:

At her sentencing yesterday, the mother’s lawyer Lorraine Smith criticised Mr Key and Ms Bennett, from whom her client sought help with her daughter months before police discovered the badly abused girl.  “The Prime Minister and the Minister of Social Development failed both [the girl] and her mother.  “CYF was not engaging with the family at all.”

To correct the record, we would lay down a few more accurate observations justly arising from this cowardly monstrous behaviour:

Firstly, it illustrates that human depravity is alive and well on Planet Earth.  The one group of people who will have mixed emotions about the woman will be Christians who well know that the same depravity on display lurks in their own hearts.  This does not lead to excusing the woman in any way.  Rather, it involves an attitude spoken about by songwriter Eric Clapton, “Before you accuse me, take a look at yourself.” 

Secondly, it exposes the feminist lie, so often promulgated in the eighties and nineties heyday of feminism, that men were more violent and depraved than women.  We were told that women were more sensitive, caring, loving, nurturing–well, more human really–than men.  An evidence was the preponderance of men in jails.  No, women are not more deadly, but as deadly as males.  Depravity is not gender specific.  All men and women, descending from Adam by ordinary generation, are born in sin, under sin’s reign and dominion.  That is why we all desperately need a Saviour, the Saviour.

Thirdly, it shows where our culture and established religion are heading.  Cowardice prevents our people from facing up to the truth about our moral condition.  Ever since the Garden of Eden, man has sought to shift the blame from himself on to others or circumstances.  When indicted by God after his rebellion, Adam lamely said, “The woman Thou gavest to be with me, she . . . “.  For her part, Eve did precisely the same, “The serpent . . . ”  Fast forward to this very hour.  Both the depraved mother and her lawyer agree: it was not her fault.  “The government we have over us failed . . .”

Here is the problem.  Our culture systematically and formally and ideologically agrees with the woman’s proposition.  Everyone is now a victim.  The government, the Great Redeemer, is at consequently fault and blame for everything wrong.  The monstrous mother and her lawyer are actually prophetesses.  They proclaim the spirit of the Age.  It is arguably a bigger act of chutzpah not to acknowledge them as such. 

When Social Development Minister, Paula Bennett reacted so powerfully and viscerally rejecting the allegations that the government had failed the “poor woman” we doubt not that the vast majority of the country’s viscera moved in approbation.  It was the mother that had failed that child.  

But a sometimes emotional Ms Bennett vehemently dismissed Ms Smith’s claims yesterday.  “That child was so deeply failed by those parents that were supposed to protect her,” she said.  “So it’s fine to sit back now and try to blame someone else or a government while in the meantime you are dehydrating, starving and beating your child.

“I don’t stand up and take responsibility for that. She should stand up and take it herself.”

Bennett was asserting something not often heard today: that parental responsibility trumps government authority over children almost every time–until parents start abusing their children, and then the state–as the ministry of justice to punish evildoers–legitimately intervenes.  Nevertheless, despite the gut-reaction of both Bennett and the nation as a whole–she presides over one of the largest ministries of government which implicitly denies and undermines parental responsibility. 

It asserts that social development (including parenting and family life) is the responsibility and purview of the State–a proposition our forefathers would have found bizarre.  If she were consistent with the very responsibilities and existence of her office, she would have agreed with the allegation of failure.  So, sadly the abusive mother and her lawyer have a point, albeit it noxious and poisonous and ultimately false.

Finally, we are thankful that the Judge in sentencing the woman pulled no punches.  He categorically asserted that there was nothing, no mitigating circumstances, no government failures, no background of abuse suffered by the mother that could justify what he called, “sustained abuse, amounting to torture.”  The buck stopped with the parent.  If only our perverted, blame-shifting culture consistently thought the same. 

None So Blind . . .

 What Our Culture Will Not Admit

Laments and dirges are becoming more common in our society.  We see more and more articles in the media like this:

A 6-month-old shaken and hit in the head so hard he could not see any more.

A 2-year-old struck so hard in his tiny tummy that one of his major organs split in half.

A 5-month-old with a liver injury so severe the organ later ruptured and killed him.

All three dead. All three in the care of people that were supposed to protect, love and nurture them. And all three are part of the very tip of the iceberg that is child abuse in New Zealand. For a small country, New Zealand has a shocking record of child abuse. And the numbers are looking worse than ever.  But why are our babies dying? Why are our toddlers bashed and bruised? Why are our children, society’s most vulnerable members, being subjected to these sickening acts day after day?

When faced with the scourge of horrific infanticide at the hands of ostensible care-givers, the nation collectively wrings its hands and says, “Something must be done”, by which it means, the government must legislate and spend the problem away.  Some of the things the government has done are just plain naive and stupid–and entirely misdirected.  The anti-smacking law is an example.  A lot of febrile heat, but definitely no light. 

We will see more of this guilt-driven, knee-jerk stupidity.
  Hopefully, over time, the truth will emerge and will be widely accepted.  Not likely.  But possibly.

The truth is that there is no answer, no solution to family violence within the reach of mortal man.  All the aid programmes, all the educational programmes, all the government interventions and agencies of state imaginable are not going to solve this problem.  In desperation, the populace might turn to more and more strident measures, to various forms of oppression that will create much bigger problems than any solution offers.  The “end justifies the means” is an easy seduction when faced with attempting to combat the horror of child abuse and infanticide. 

Most well meaning people look for a cause.  But their world-view prevents them from seeing the cause.  But it is as plain as a pikestaff.  Society has become certain that marriage is nothing more than a relationship of convenience, subject to the desires and inclinations of the moment.  The rights of individuals have been elevated over the sanctity of the marriage covenant and of family, so that marriage has become easy come, easy go arrangement.  It is on a par with “partners”, folk that live together out of personal convenience. 

Naturally, over time the cohabitants have children.  But as the “partnerships” break up and new partnerships form, children are pulled from pillar to post, into constantly changing, blended families where the adults in the house neither cherish them, nor are particularly interested in caring for them.  Moreover, the adults–having gone through several or more relationships–are emotionally, morally,  and volitionally incapable of loyalty and commitment to other human beings.  Consequently they are incapable of loving and cherishing children–whether they are of their own blood or someone else’s.

But to focus upon this as the root problem is to strike at the very foundation of Unbelief’s culture–its religion.  It is to animadvert against the “rights of the individual man”.  And that is blasphemous.  Modern Unbelieving society cannot deny itself, its very being, its foundations–without crumbling from the inside. 

Consider a recent case, profiled in the media this past week:

Baby Cezar died in his loving father’s arms after being violently shaken and dropped on his head by his mother’s boyfriend.  The boyfriend, James Hemana, showed little reaction today as an Auckland High Court jury found him guilty of murdering Cezar. Hemana had earlier pleaded guilty to failing to provide the necessities of life. . . .

During the trial, the court heard how Victoria Taylor, at the age of 20, had three children, baby Cezar being her youngest. She broke up with Mr Clarke before meeting Hemana and renting a home in Mangere.  Mr Clarke looked after the baby until Cezar was five months old.  Ms Taylor had been looking after her one-year-old daughter Wikitoria but in June she and Mr Clarke swapped children and Cezar moved into the Mangere home.

Ms Taylor said everything was fine for the first week but Hemana began getting violent. She said Hemana would hit her in the arms and legs and on the body. He would also get angry when baby Cezar cried for his bottle.  “He would tell him: ‘Shut the f*** up’, take him into the lounge, put him in his walkie and stand there and smack his head into the walkie because he was crying.” 

Ms Taylor said she tried to intervene. “I said: ‘What are you hitting my son for? He’s only crying because he’s hungry’. [He replied:] ‘I don’t give a f***, he woke me up’.“

The Crown said Hemana violently shook Cezar on two occasions in July last year but it was the second occasion which led to the baby’s fatal injuries.  Ms Taylor said Hemana picked up the child by one leg. “He lifted him up, shook him, dropped him, picked him up, shake, shake, shake and dropped him.”  On the third occasion, the baby’s head collided with a cabinet before hitting the bed.

She said Cezar had been an alert, talkative baby but his condition changed after the attacks.  “Come Tuesday, he wasn’t moving much, just sitting around … As the week went on, he couldn’t look and couldn’t see. He looked like a zombie.”  Ms Taylor said Hemana stopped her from taking baby Cezar to the hospital and she had to stay home and “watch my baby look dead for a week”. 

Her brother, Russell, said Hemana referred to the baby as “Zombie Boy” in the last days of his life.  He said he also heard Hemana call baby Cezar “lazy, that he was always tired and flickered his eyes … things like that.” (Emphasis, ours)

The vast majority of infanticide at the hands of adult “care-givers” occurs in this kind of “blended family”.  But it is the big, big elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about, because two sentences later the very foundations of our pagan society will be exposed for all their rottenness. 

Mark it well.  All these horrors are but the beginnings of a society coming under the curses of the Covenant of Grace.  When a people turns away from the Living God–as our nation has done–the consequences of sin are allowed to run freely.  Everything goes wrong. Nothing works any more.  Even the good we intend ends up exacerbating the problems and evils. 

Our only hope is to return to the God of our fathers, in humility and repentance.  We fear that we have miles and miles to go before that day, for the arrogance of our culture is prodigiously monstrous.  In the meantime, as the vultures gather around the carrion of modern society, the response of God’s people must be faithful to Him and steadfast in the way. 

To the remaining detritus of our culture, we say this: “Choose you this day whom you will serve.  But as for me, and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  We Christians will pick up the pieces as best we can–but the only genuine solution we can offer to the horror of your Unbelieving culture is Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten son, our Lord.  For the moment, His gracious invitation still stands: “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take My yoke upon you, and learn of me, for I am gentle and humble of heart.” 

Historically, when a people come face to face with the horrors of Unbelief they can be prepared to listen to His voice.  His yoke can suddenly seem by far the better way, for it has become patently obvious that it is either His way or destruction. 

Sadder, But Wiser–Part IV

Cover-Ups Not A Legitimate Option

Breaking Silence: The Kahui Case is considerably more than a whodunnit tell-all.  Author, Ian Wishart has endeavoured to put the death of the Kahui twins in a broader context–in particular, the matrix of public paediatric health services.  What we had forgotten before Wishart reminded us is that the Kahui twins, Chris and Cru were still four weeks premature when they died. These babies were at risk from the day they were discharged.

Macsyna King’s babies were born in March 2006, three months premature.  That they were twins made their survival all the more marginal.  Macsyna was soon discharged from hospital whilst the twins were kept in the neo-natal unit at Middlemore Hospital where they were cared for.  King and Kahui visited and began distance-care for their children as best they could.  The twins were discharged early May, two weeks before the fatal injuries were inflicted.  Even if the twins had been discharged to a devoted, monogamous, nuclear-family-couple, living in a stable family, with no alcohol abuse or degenerate whanauism they would still have been highly at risk.  They would have required far more care, attention, devotion, observation than normal, full-term babies, let alone twins.  Anyone who has raised multiple children, including twins, will know the truth of this. 

It is undeniable that the Kahui twins were vulnerable and at risk–through no fault of their parents.  Now this in no way excuses any subsequent lack of care, nor does it justify any physical abuse.  But it is still worthwhile to understand how public health policy is currently applied to such cases in New Zealand.  Hindsight suggests that these twins should likely never have been discharged so early. 

Well, some may say, if the twins were OK why oughtn’t they be discharged?  Plenty premature babies are.  Wishart does excellent work explaining the extent of the risks.  But we also need to be clear: the public health system did not just let the twins go.  A community care programme swung into effect.  The King-Kahui household did have plenty of support.  One of the intriguing things is that by all accounts the twins appeared to be doing well.

One of the facts established by the post-mortems was that the twins had broken ribs–older injuries, already healing.  The inference was immediately made in the media/public that King had been responsible for this “abuse”. It turns out, however, that this is a red herring. 

 It wasn’t just nurses who failed to detect even one sign of abuse or the historical fractures and head injuries.  At one point–the hospital confirms it was mid May and Macsyna thought it was early June–the twins were hospitalised with bronchiolitis. They were under specialised paediatric care for two nights and two days, and Macsyna stayed with the twins in hospital.  Not one Middlemore paediatrician or nurse reported finding any hint of the injuries the forensic experts insist were already there.

In truth, there were “five nursing visits, two social worker visits and three other arranged visits, and in total 12 interactions or attempted interactions by phone and with the family,”  in the space of just four weeks.  Medical professional and social workers were crawling all over the twins, and no one saw anything wrong.

On June 7, 2006, just a week before being admitted to hospital with fatal brain damage, family GP Dr Gopinth Nayar gave baby Cru a “thorough” check over.  A number of Cru’s ribs were fractured, but Nayar detected nothing–no pain response, no sign of abuse.  Ian Wishart, Breaking Silence: The Kahui Case (Kaukapakapa: Howling At The Moon Publishing, 2011), p.111.

 That’s curious.  No signs of pain or abuse.  Whence the broken ribs: it can occur via ordinary handling–and is not uncommon in babies born prematurely.  Moreover, we know that at least Cru was subjected to CPR in the hospital before release.  That may have caused broken ribs in one so tiny and vulnerable. 

And then there are the traumatic head injuries–historical injuries, inflicted allegedly days before the actual death of the twins (raising again the spectre of the an evil mother secretly, systematically smashing the heads of her twins over a period of four weeks).  Wishart makes the following, startling, albeit puzzling revelation:

The problem at a forensic level is that when the actual post-mortem was performed, none of the skull fractures was found to exist.  The one at the rear of Chris’s head appears to have been a natural deformity in the skull.  Nor did the autopsy find any evidence of a “high right parietal fracture”.

Adding corroboration to this, radiologist Sally Vogel conceded under cross-examination that she could find no evidence of any soft-tissue swelling over the supposed fracture sites–no bumps on the head. There was indeed a bruise on the back of Cru’s head, so he’d suffered some damage anywhere up to a week or two prior to admission.  The bruise did not match any suspected fracture site.  So skull fractures?  They couldn’t find them.  Breaking Silence, p.161. (Emphasis, ours)

Yet both babies died of severe brain damage.  And the real cause of that brain damage does not appear to be striking or physical impacts, but the breath holding or apnoea (similar to the effects of a stroke) that followed whatever impacts there were on that fateful Monday night.

Another curiosity is testamentary evidence that baby Cru suffered an apnoea attack while still in hospital.  Apnoea attacks where babies stop breathing and need to be revived are no uncommon in premature cases.  In fact, it occurs in 85% of premature babies born six weeks premature or more.  So, it would be “normal” for at least one of the twins, if not both, to have had at least one apnoea attack whilst in hospital.

Macsyna King was told by hospital staff (confirmed by Chris Kahui and an independent witness) that Cru had suffered an apnoea attack and he has been subjected to CPR to revive him.  It was apparently touch and go.  This would mean that at least Cru had increased risk and vulnerability when discharged.  Normally, monitoring equipment and breathing equipment would have been supplied.  None was.  In fact, there are no hospital records of any apnoea attacks upon the twins whatsoever.  Curious. 

We can only speculate as to why.  Wishart speculates that it may have been an ex-post cover-up on the part of the hospital.  If Cru suffered an apnoea attack requiring CPR–and that attack nearly killed him–whilst in hospital–and no special care and equipment was deployed after his release that raises lots of questions about hospital competence in this case.  But–and this is material–it would have put an already vulnerable five week prem baby in an even more vulnerable and risky space. (Remember, the damage to the brains of the twins was caused by apnoea–some time on that Monday night, the twins stopped breathing for a period, during which subsequently fatal brain damage occurred.)

Finally, Wishart raises another systemic issue:  whilst still in hospital, the twins were subjected to the “routine” immunisations before they were sent out into the big, bright world.  He suggests it is highly likely the twins were suffering from scurvy–caused by vitamin C deficiency–and which only now is being recognized as afflicting infants.

Scurvy weakens the wall of blood vessels, making them much more prone to haemorrhaging.  The weakness of the capillaries “is the result of elevated blood histamine levels, which occur with even mild ascorbate (vitamin C) depletion”.  Those raised blood histamine levels can ultimately cause both retinal and subdural haemorrhages, as well as general bruising–all classic signs of abuse.  Breaking Silence, p.246. 

Immunisations increase the histamine levels still further, which can cause much more damage.  Wishart reviews international evidence of scurvy, its effects, and the likely damage of immunisations when administered to a scurvy-afflicted infant.  In New Zealand paediatric public health policy, immunisations are standard; scurvy is ignored, and vitamin C deficiency is not on the radar screen.  As so often is the case, the preventative (immunisations to vulnerable, still developing, premature babies) appears to be much worse than the ills it is designed to prevent.

These systemic public issues are startling–and Wishart has done us a great service to raise them. 

All-in-all it implies that Chris and Cru Kahui were far more at risk when discharged than anyone–including the health professionals–realised.  But how many more children are being exposed to the same risks?  These are important questions, needing to be asked and answered–not defensively, but carefully, with open minds.  The issues are too important not to.

Let’s not forget–the mob wanted this book banned.  Spare us. 

Sadder, But Wiser

Macsyna King, “Breaking Silence”

OK, so it’s time to fess up.  We have read the book.  Yes, the book.  The banned book–banned by the Star Chamber of New Zealand public opinion. The one some are calling the most appalling book ever to be written (even though it has yet to be released).  You know, the one a Facebook instant crowd of 40,000 New Zealanders tried to ban when news of its imminent publication surfaced.  We are referring, of course, to Ian Wishart’s Breaking Silence: the Kahui Case, subtitled Macsyna King and the Real Story of the Murder of Her Twins.

A notorious woman, Macsyna King has been arraigned, tried, and condemned in the hallowed court of public opinion.