Many of us have been saying the two parent family as the bedrock of
modern civilization is essential, and the Judiciry giving sole physical
custody to moms, in Canada over 90% of the time, is resulting in
generatuions of children lacking a moral compass, often inspired by a
dad. The recent London riots have given rise to the proof of these
assertions. Given we are unlikely to impact the divorce rate without
governments encouraging families to stay together, getting equal/shared
parenting is essential in order to keep fathers and infrequently moms in
the lives of their children after divorce.
It's ironic
the Judges involved in the prosecution of the looters are asking where
the parents are. Some of these same judges may have been responsible
for separating the children from their fathers and not enforcing access
when he tried to see them.MJM
Now we have proof that abolishing parental
rights and encouraging single-parent families was disastrous: the
disaster has happened
What was done by design can be undone the same way. But will there be enough political determination to do it?
A 12-year-old boy leaves Manchester magistrates court last week (PA wire)
Last Thursday, in an
article
snappily entitled “Why didn’t the looters’ parents know where they
were? Why didn’t they teach them about right and wrong? Answer: society
has undermined the family”, I quoted Fr Finigan
saying
that “For several decades our country has undermined marriage, the
family, and the rights of parents… Now all of a sudden, we want parents
to step in and tell their teenage children how to behave”, and Melanie
Phillips pointing to “family breakdown and mass fatherlessness” as one
of the principal underlying causes of the riots and looting of last
week.
I concluded (and I don’t apologise for returning to this theme
now: a lot more needs to be said about it, and now is the time to say
it) that of all the things the government now needs to do, “it’s the
married family which is the institution that needs rebuilding most
urgently”.
I am as certain of that as anything I have ever
written, and I’ve been saying it for over 20 years: I was saying it, for
instance, when I was attacking (in the Mail and also the Telegraph) as
it went through the Commons the parliamentary bill which became that
disastrous piece of (Tory) legislation called the Children Act 1989,
which abolished parental rights (substituting for them the much weaker
“parental responsibility”), which encouraged parents not to spend too
much time with their children, which even preposterously gave children
the right to take legal action against their parents for attempting to
discipline them, which made it “unlawful for a parent or carer to smack
their child, except where this amounts to ‘reasonable punishment’;” and
which specified that “Whether a ‘smack’ amounts to reasonable punishment
will depend on the circumstances of each case taking into consideration
factors like the age of the child and the nature of the smack.” If the
child didn’t think it “reasonable” he could go to the police. It was an
Act which, in short,
deliberately weakened the authority of parents over their children and made the state a kind of co-parent.
There
are, of course, many other causes for the undermining of the married
family (which David Cameron says he now wants to rebuild). Divorce, from
the 1960s on, became progressively easier and easier to obtain. Another
cause has been the insidious notion (greatly encouraged by successive
governments but particularly under New Labour – Old Labour tended to be
much more traditional in its views on the family) that the family has
many forms, that marriage is just one option, and that lone parenting is
just as “valid” (dread word) a form as any other. If you thought that
voluntary lone parenting should be discouraged, rather than (as it was)
positively encouraged by the taxation and benefits system, you were
practically written off as a fascist.
Well, all this relativist
rubbish has now been comprehensively shown by its consequences to have
been dangerous drivel all along; and I am discovering that to be able to
say “I told you so” is under the circumstances not at all as enjoyable
as I had thought it might be: any satisfaction is of a very grim kind.
But
it is now beyond any doubt, and we need to say so now, to nail the lies
that have been spouted for the last 40 years once and for all. The
conclusive proof of the existence and the effects of the widespread
breakdown of parental responsibility (even where there are two parents)
and also of the catastrophic consequences of the encouragement of lone
parenting was to be found on the front page of the Times on Saturday, in
an article to which I can’t give a link since you can’t get it online.
I will have to summarise and quote extensively.
The headline was “Judge asks: where are the parents of rioters?” and it opens as follows:
Parents
who refuse to take responsibility for children accused of criminal
offences were condemned by a judge yesterday who demanded to know why
the mother of a 14-year-old girl in the dock over the looting of three
shops was not in court.
District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe was
incredulous when told that the girl’s parents were too busy to see their
daughter appear before City of Westminster magistrates after she was
accused of offences during the violent disorder in London this week. She
said that many parents “don’t seem to care” that their children were in
court facing potentially lengthy custodial sentences.
Her
comments echoed those a day earlier by District Judge Jonathan Feinstein
when he highlighted the absence of parents at hearings in Manchester.
“The parents have to take responsiblity for this child – apart from one
case I have not seen any father or mother in court,” he said.
The
Times had been conducting an investigation into the cause of the riots,
and interviews with young people and community workers on estates
across London revealed “deep concerns about the lack of parental
authority”. Youth workers said that mothers (presumably in such cases
there are no fathers) are “too terrified of their own children to
confront them and often turn a blind eye to cash or stolen goods brought
home”. Lone parenthood, it emerges, is in fact a primary cause of the
August riots (as they are beginning to be called):
An
analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that,
among other factors linking the 18 areas worst hit by public disorder,
is a high rate of single-parent families and broken homes.
And in
an interview with the Times today, Shaun Bailey, a youth worker recently
appointed as the Government’s “Big Society” czar, argues that
childraising has been “nationalised”.
Of the defendants who
appeared before magistrates in Westminster yesterday accused of riot
crimes across London, half were aged under 18, but few parents attended
the hearings, even though their children had been in police custody for
up to two days.
One member of the court’s staff said: “I can’t
recall seeing any of the parents down here”… A boy of 15 was accused of
looting a JD Sports shop in Barking, East London. A 17-year-old student
from East London was also accused of receiving £10,000 of mobile phones,
cigarettes and clothing looted from Tesco. The items and small quantity
of cannabis were discovered in his bedroom at the family home…
community workers admitted that broken families often led to children
taking to crime.
One youth worker, who has helped children in
Lambeth, south London, for 20 years, told the Times that single mothers
were often scared of their sons. “They would not challenge them if they
came home with stolen goods,” the worker, who did not wish to be named,
said.
“In some cases these young men steal more than their mother
earns or gets in benefit. They become the father figure, the main
earner.” Young men echo the lack of authority. “My mum can’t tell me
what to do,” said Lee, 18, from Copley Court, an estate in West Ealing.
“It’s the same with young kids. Most of their dads left early on and
they don’t listen to anyone.”
There isn’t much more to be said: all one can do is repeat oneself. We now
know
what rubbish it is to deny that lone parenthood should be avoided
wherever possible. As for marriage, study after study has shown that
from the point of view of the child it is the best and most stable basis
for the family. In the 50s, everyone, including governments of all
colours,
knew that marriage was the foundation of social
stability: and a man whose wife stayed at home to look after the
children didn’t pay any tax at all until he was earning the average
national wage.
That whole dispensation was blown apart by the
accursed supposed “liberation” of the 60s, and by political ideologies
of various kinds, not least by radical feminism. There was nothing
inevitable about it: it was done by deliberate political design. And
what political design can do, political design can undo. It’s more
difficult – much more difficult – of course and it can’t be done
overnight. David Cameron, to be fair, does seem to see some of this (IDS
sees even more).
But does he have the political determination
actually to do it? We shall see. I am hopeful; I always am at first. But
I greatly fear that as month succeeds month, even my own tendency
towards sunny optimism will begin first to flag and then to die. And
this time, I
don’t want to be able to say “I told you so”.
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