Suffer the Children

It's two-tier policing, I tell you!  This persecution of Kirstie Allsop by social services for allowing her fifteen year old son go travelling around Europe, unsupervised and unaccompanied by an adult, is just another example of the way the authorities unfairly target posh people.  I mean, enough is enough!  Where will it end?  Working class kids seem to be able to run riot all summer, gathering aimlessly in shopping centres and parks, looking sullenly at passers-by without the police rounding them all up and arresting their parents for negligence - but if they were middle class, you can guarantee that we'd have riot police being called in to beat them up.  At least, that's what the likes of the Daily Mail would have you believe, conveniently ignoring the fact that, if it had been a working class mother, especially if they were from an ethnic minority, who had allowed their teenage offspring go off like this, then the paper would have been screaming 'negligence' and demanding the intervention of social services.  But while I expect this sort of nonsense from the likes of the Mail, I was somewhat surprised by the number of letters from their readers printed by The Guardian, going on about how, in 1948, at the age of fourteen, their parents had allowed them to cycle solo to Germany, or that, in the fifties, they and all of their friends were regularly allowed to travel around unaccompanied all summer holidays - and it did them no harm!  Yeah, and chimney sweeps used to send even younger children up chimneys instead of using brushes - and it did them no harm.

Quite apart from the fact that the world was a different place back then - let's face it, young people were safe in Germany post war as most perverts and child molesters had been exterminated by the Nazis on the grounds that that sort of thing should be the sole preserve of party members and those in the SS had been shot by the allies - just because you did something like that and didn't get bum-raped by some gross continental perv doesn't mean that it wasn't happening to other kids.  Thankfully, we've moved on from that bleak post war world where people were so desensitised by the carnage of World War Two that they accepted the possibility of violent sexual assaults and death for their unsupervised children as normal.  It's now generally accepted that safe-guarding your off spring is the most important aspect of parenting - trying to avoid exposing them to possible dangers because you can't be arsed to supervise them isn't the sign of us living in some kind of namby pamby woke world.  Let's face it, kids are exposed to enough potential hazards even when properly supervised, but that's the point, to teach them to recognise these risks and how to negotiate them.  Just letting them wander off and find out for themselves by trial and error isn't a sign of 'liberal' or 'enlightened' parenting - it is irresponsible negligence.  Which is where those pesky social services come in : if you won't exercise your legal obligations with regard to safe guarding your kids, then they'll intervene and exercise their legal obligations too safe guard children.  The moral of all this being is that if you are going to act irresponsibly with regard to your child's safety, then don't boast about it in the media.