Save the Children

I must be just one of many Manx parents relieved that the Department for Miseducation and Child Abuse have dropped a controversial attempt to introduce a ‘Children's Bill’ which would have given numerous halfwits carte blanche to snoop, tittle-tattle in secret and in general screw up the lives of Manx children even more than they do already.
In a press release put out last thing yesterday in the hope nobody will read it until next week (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/childrenbillwill.xml) we learn that:
“The then Department of Education consulted the public over the Bill last spring and there were 76 responses, with views submitted by Tynwald Members, Government Department and Boards, local authorities, teachers and teaching unions, church groups, organisations and individuals.
Eddie Teare MHK, Minister for Education and Children, who extended the consultation period when he took over at the Department midway through the exercise, today announced that with 76 per cent of those who responded against the Children Bill, and a further 10 per cent having reservations about it, he wouldn’t be proceeding with it.”
The thing that hacked most off – which we only found out about due to the efforts of a determined local civil libertarian, Tristram Llwellyn-Jones - were the plans for a secret database to log information about children, which would have been comprised solely of contributions from cretins who no sane parent would allow in the same room as a child. This database, linked to sweeping new powers which social workers and other, equally unschooled, busybodies intended to award themselves, had the capacity to break up families and put kids in care, yet no child or adult mentioned on the database could have challenged the information - or even discovered what lies had been spread about them.
Sadly though, this is not the end of the matter. What the Manx Kinderstasi cannot get by public consent, they still intend to get by a legal process which none of us will have the chance to object to.
There is a hint of this when the press release mentions, almost casually, that:
“..the Department of Education and Children will, via a new Education Bill, proposed for some time after September’s General Election, establish an alternative to the Safeguarding Board, if it’s considered appropriate, and may use the Bill as a vehicle to establish a post similar to that of commissioner to look after the rights of children.”
Actually, given their past record for ‘protecting’ children so well that a double murder took place in a state children's home (run on the cheap by criminally incompetent godbotherers, which they dealt with by appointing another bunch of even less competent godbothers to take over the contract, for even less money), the only serious thing the Manx government could do to protect local children is to issue a shotgun to every parent. Then they could give a legally binding pledge that if a politician, civil servant or any other drain on public funds comes within a mile of a child parents can blast away with impunity.

Remember Du'a Khalil Aswad

Two years ago today Du'a Khalil Aswad , a girl of 17 from the minority Kurdish Yezidi religious group, was stoned to death by a group of eight or nine men in the presence of a large crowd in the town of Bashika, near the city of Mosul, northern Iraq.
Du'a Khalil Aswad's murder is said to have been committed by relatives and other Yezidi men because of her relationship with a Sunni Muslim boy and her absence from her home for one night. Her death by stoning took some 30 minutes and was recorded on video film, which was then widely distributed on the internet. The film shows members of local security forces present but failing to intervene or arrest those responsible.
In remembrance of Du’a, the International Coalition Against Honour Killings is making 7th April each year a day of action.
This year they have asked the public to contact the the Kurdistan Regional Government asking what progress there has been in finding and prosecuting Du’a’s killers, and what they intend to do to reduce the rate of ’honour’ killings in Kurdistan. There have been at least 300 other victims since Du’a’s death.
In the UK you can do this by e-mail to uk@krg.org or by letter to

KRG Representation in the United Kingdom
Winchester House,
8th Floor 259-269 Old Marylebone Road
London
NW1 5RA

But Kurdistan is not the only culprit. For example when NATO forces hand regional power to traditionalists as a means of sidelining the Taliban the first effect is increased violence against women, often justified by religious courts. And Channel 4’s recent Unseen World programme on Turkey revealed around 200 ‘honour killings’ in the last year - this in what is effectively an EU country!
Amongst recent victims in other countries there have also been at least two British citizens, but the UK government did nothing. Perhaps the victims were neither white, rich nor photogenic enough, or perhaps our politicians just think a tankful of petrol means more to us than a human life.
Then again, the phenomena is coming closer than that too. An International Womens Day conference in London this year heard that a hotline for victims of honour crimes and forced marriages set up by Cleveland Police in November 2007 had taken over 300 calls, while even sleepy Cambridgeshire cops averaged 30 calls per month when they did the same.
I'm sick of the way that when a dog gets mistreated Manx folk react like it's a war crime, yet we've turned a blind eye to domestic violence and child neglect which can even lead to death for decades because it's a 'tradition'.
So where does it stop? In future years is burning your kid alive for wearing make-up or answering back going to be passed off as 'tradition'?
Actually, it's not so far off that now, and I'm not talking about new residents or minority religions either.
Just a few months ago there was a tragic case involving friends of my small daughter. Their mother was self-harming badly and in serious danger of topping either herself or her kids due to the mental cruelty of their fundamentalist throwback of a dad. Not wanting to inconvenience a 'well respected' churchgoer, Manx social services did the obvious - sectioned the mum and left the kids with Dad. As if he even noticed their existence due to his 'preaching commitments'.
The MHK Quintin Gill showed the way a couple of months back, introducing a Bill to end an anomaly which, bizarrely, meant female genital mutilation was not previously a crime on the Isle of Man.
If enough of us speak up we can stop all this faith-based lunacy, before it leads to a local tragedy even our courts and social workers cannot hide from the world.

Judgement Day

I was tipped off that there would be a judgement today in an extraordinary Manx court case. Extraordinary for one thing in that a Manx judge finally broke ranks and admitted the Manx legal system was itself capable of nasty, illegal acts against someone who went to it hoping for justice.
I don’t know the full history of this case – due to it progressing in such a way that it couldn’t be publicised for one thing. What I do gather is that an order from a Lancashire court preventing a Manx resident seeing his kids was upheld by a Manx court – even though there is no equivalent law over here and so the Manx court had no power to make such an order. I also gather much of that was because some in the legal profession passed judgement before anyone entered the court, and seem to have thought like redneck preachers rather than trained lawyers.
It’s been suggested to me there’s some similarity between the way this case went and the sorry way Andy Kershaw was told by a Manx judge not to speak to his kids even if they met by accident in the street. In both cases you have an assumption that a guy who takes a broken relationship hard and maybe initially overreacts is an animal, gets driven into a corner by the legal system, inevitably hits back in sheer frustration and is clobbered with the full weight of the law – in the process losing all hope of a future relationship with kids he loves.
It’s also been suggested to me that much of this fundamentalist Manx attitude is because godbotherers are gaining power in the social services. The problem dates back to the 1980’s, when many local authorities privatised training of social workers to cut costs. The most ‘cost effective’ mickey mouse courses were offered by US evangelicals – the kind who tell students in all seriousness that wearing black T shirts is evidence of Satanism. As the Manx government hates to bear the costs of training anyone locally, it was only a matter of time before these semi-literate kneejerkers started moving over here for a quieter life… and so it goes.
I always thought the job of family courts was to find a middle road for troubled couples, something that gives kids a chance to know two parents and leaves the door open for all in case, with time, the old wounds heal. So even if the family doesn’t get back together at least everyone’s talking.
OK, that’s never going to be easy, but if you have a situation where not only social workers but, over here, even legal officers see everything in Old Testament terms where one protagonist is good and the other evil it’s not going to happen. Period.
The guy at the centre seems to have lost so much faith in Manx barristers that he fought the case himself – which put up the backs of their mates and stacked things even more against him. Good to see that not only did he not give up, but that eventually at least one Manx judge was willing to give him a proper hearing.
The judgement is at http://www.judgments.im/content/J906.htm .
Bear in mind this is our so-called legal profession talking about themselves, so they’re not likely to speak plainly in a place where even us oiks can discover it. Still, if you can plough your way through the legalese you may well worry that our courts are a mess and Manx justice mighty thin on the ground.