Gender change at 12? And now 9? Has the world gone mad?

Yesterday's Sun carried an article about a 12 year old boy who turned up o school dressed as a girl, and with a girls name.

Today the Sun has another story about a 9 year old in the same circumstances.

This is nuts.

If you read this website set up to help children and adolescents with gender identity issues you will note that very few of these cases are actually resolved by a gender change.

There is no doubt that these children are both confused and unhappy. Many "right on" people will think that it is great that they have parents and schools who are trying to be supportive. The problem is that these boys are just far far too young to understand the decisions that are being made. No one can make this sort of decision for them, and they are definitely far far too young to decide themselves.

When I said that the schools was trying to be supportive, I did not actually mean they were actually succeeding. They could not have announced it in a more cack handed way if they tried*. Meanwhile parents who are voicing concern on the Internet are being threatened by police. Its a bot of a shame there were none about to help out Fiona Pilkington and her family over 7 years of abuse, but then they were not a "right on" type of case.

Hat tip to Manwiddicombe for the link in the Sun.

State abduction of children and spam (Or unsolicited commercial email)

This may be two subjects where you can see absolutely no connection what so ever. Fair enough. There is though, and I will get to it.

I read in today's Sunday Telegraph, of the case of a man who because he had security concerns about his circumstances asked to pick up his daughter from inside the school gates. This led to social workers turning up, refusing to show ID, and then him getting arrested and for a while sectioned.

Read the article, I really suggest you do. You can also read this from Manwiddicombe from whom I have got the link.

Right. Read those?

Now cast your mind back to baby P, or rather baby Peter. I wrote at the time that knee jerk reactions were no good.

The problem seems to be this: That if children die at the hands of parents then social services need to be harsher or if children are taken into care unreasonably they need to be easier.

This is where the link to spam comes in. One of the things the company for which I work sell is an anti spam solution. I personally do a lot of work on it.

We can move the goal posts in terms of score at which emails are considered spam or not one way or the other, catching more or less spam as spam and generating more or less false positives as a result.

Surprisingly* this is frankly not good enough. The customer who does not want spam does not want to lose an important email because it now score high enough. What the customer actually wants is more discrimination between what is unsolicited commercial email and what is not, rather than some individual binning their email on an arbitrary rule change.

Our response has to be raising our game to write better spam busting rules. The question then is, why can't the state? The case of baby Peter is instructive. He had half a finger missing. All you need is a medic or social worker who can count to 10 and do fractions and they would have noticed something amis. No need for harsher rules, just better discrimination between those that need intervention and those that do not.

*Actually, it is not that surprising at all really.

Gay adoption again

Or rather, forget about the gay adoption issue for the moment, as you read this story on the front page of today's Daily Mail about grandparents who were forced through lack of cash to give their grandchildren up for adoption because social services said they could not look after them.

Now answer me this:

You are young, your parents either can't or won't look after you, or are dead.

Who would you rather be looked after by? A close family member like a grandparent, or indeed parents, or some stranger?

Why the hell is this sort of thing going on? Have Edinburgh social services got so few pottential baby P's that they have to spend years grinding a family into the dust on the grounds that the grandparents are not in the best of health?

Sharon Shoesmith sacked!

Sharon Shoesmith, Haringey head of children's services has been sacked with immediate effect according to Ed Balls the children's minister, after what he has described as a devastating interim report into the death of baby P, who as you will know died of persistent horrific long term abuse.

Makes you kind of glad she did not resign. I do hope she does not get some kind of massive payoff.

I am also pleased, that unlike Gordon Brown, Ed Balls has not tried to use this case for party political advantage but seems to have done the right thing.

The BBC has this.

More later when the situation is clearer.

Baby P and the dangers of a knee jerk reaction

Whilst it is clear to me, and no doubt all of you, that with the benefit of perfect hindsight, baby P should have been protected, what we have to remember is that we do not want a knee jerk reaction. Children brought up in care have very low life chances, (for a whole number of reasons) and we do not want to condemn children to that fate without good reason.

It does, however seem to me odd that alarm bells did not ring. If you read this from the Independent on Sunday, you will see what I mean. It is clear that there were plenty of warning signals.

I am a bit concerned about the involvement of Baby P's father and indeed the father of his three sisters.

Baby P spent a night with his father in late July according to the Independent report.

Did his father not notice? If not, why not? If so why did he not act?

Did the fact that you can no longer get legal aid in family matters on a routine basis mean that he could not afford to ask the courts to give him custody?

One thing I have learned in the British courts is that we have the best justice money can buy. Did that contribute to killing baby P?

Baby P and Gordon Brown

I don't want to make this party political, because clearly it isn't. Instead I want to make this personal.

Gordon Brown is a tit.

I have just watched yesterday's Prime ministers questions, in which he failed to agree with Ed Balls, the children's secretary, that it was not good for a department head to investigate whether their own department had failed.

Gordon Brown was crash in suggesting that David Cameron was making a party political point.

Gordon Brown kept saying that the executive summary of the self report or Haringey council had said that there were failures in the system, and those would be looked at.


The problem here is that the head of the department that potentially messed up not only commissioned but was heavily involved in a report which said her department did nothing wrong, and that there is a problem with the "system".

Is there? How come despite 60 visits over 8 months, no one spotted the abuse? The missing fingernails, fingertip, gauge to the head, broken ribs and broken back?

What system can there be that is so fool proof that if individuals fail to spot these things the system can be blamed?

The report also highlights the difficulties of "lying parents".You jest surely? If a parent abuses a child they will first of all lie to themselves, convincing themselves that what they are doing is not abuse, after that they will obviously lie to anyone else. very seldom will an abuser confess to a social worker.

At least Ed Balls has some balls and has called for an urgent inquiry. That said on Channel 4, whilst Michael Gove was broadly supportive of Ed Balls, Ed did refuse to answer the question, "are children safe in Haringey tonight?" Rather obviously no one could confidently say they were.

The BBC has the full PMQ's here, comment here and news of Ed Ball's inquiry here.

The sad case of baby P

We do not even know his name, apparently for legal reasons, but we all share the horror at hearing how baby P died.

He had 8 broken ribs, a broken spine, was missing fingernails and a fingertip and had bruises all over his body.

I pray for him.

However we have to ask why this happened?

The government has ordered a review of child protection. This, whilst well meaning is ridiculous. The faults are clear, that the existing rules were not followed and people did not do their jobs.

No amount of procedure can compensate for not following procedure.

What is needed is not so much a general review but a close review of who did what and did it meat the procedure.

The other issue of course is Haringay council. They seem to have cropped up too often here. Is there a systematic problem.

The BBC have this.

A Woman's place is in the home: Official!

Hold on, don't shoot the messenger, I am only commenting on this survey conducted by Professor Jacqueline Scott of Cambridge university.

It seems that attitudes to working mums has begun to change back to thinking that perhaps it is better for women to be at home.

That is an interesting change and what is more it has begun to swing as more parents put their children with minders and go out to work.

From a personal point of view I can see why attitudes are changing and in some ways that is no bad thing. There seemed to be a building disdain for women who stayed at home to look after kids and it is also a job which is under appreciated.

However it would be a very bad thing if people started feeling constrained by others. After all people do need to make their own decisions. In quite a few cases it can make more sense for the man to stay at home for example. I am not sure it does make sense for both parents to work full time at the same time thus having their children in full time care though sometimes that is necessary.

Any way, I think I ought to shut up now before I did an even deeper hole for myself!

The BBC has this.

Labour to support Marriage in the tax system?

Andy Burnham, Labour's Chief Secretary to the Treasury is flying a kite in today's Telegraph. He has given an interview saying that marriage will be supported in the tax system. It is hard to believe that Gordon Brown was not aware of this development before it happened, though a report in the BBC adds the caveat that these are Andy's personal views. Perhaps this is just kite flying by Labour?

The funny thing is that so many Labour ministers have some out against Conservative proposals in the same area, and refused to say that marriage is a better structure for children. At the Labour party conference Gordon Brown even said:

"I say to the children of two-parent families, one-parent families, foster parent families; to the widow bringing up children: I stand for a Britain that supports as first-class citizens not just some children and some families but supports all children and all families," he said.

"We all remember that biblical saying: 'suffer the little children to come unto me'. No Bible I have ever read says: 'bring just some of the children'."

Can they really pull this off as a U turn? If they try I can imagine David Cameron quoting back the bible about heaven rejoicing when a sinner repents!

It seems that Labour are so bereft of there own ideas that they have to use ours wholesale. One panelist on last nights News Quiz on BBC Radio 4 said that Labour should be forced to give its pre budget report before the Conservative party conference whilst another suggested they should pu it in a sealed envelope instead.

Marriage, Telling it how it is

Yesterday on Newsnight there was an interview with David Cameron, my favourite economics correspondent and the daughter of one of my favourite musicians, Stephanie Flanders.

From my point of view it told me nothing new, but then as I am a Conservative, you would hope I had a clue about the thinking of the Conservative party.

Opinions have varied as to whether David Cameron came off well or not. Most say he did.

The one point in question is when Stephanie Flanders said that she had a child, and asked if David Cameron if he thought she should be married.

We do not know by whom she had this child, nor the relationship she has with the child's father.

David Cameron laid out in fluffy language what the Conservative party position is.

I would have been somewhat more direct.

My position would have been this:

The Conservative party believes that marriage is the best option.

If elected we will make it clear that marriage is the best option.

We will, if elected reduce the penalty of getting married.

What you, as an individual do with your own life, is your own choice.

End of discussion.

Newssnight's infuriatingly hard to link to what you want to web page is here. I would link direct to the show or any articles written about it there, but obviously the person who runs that website is a muppet.

The rights of cohabiting couples

Well, the law commissions report on the rights of cohabiting couples is making the news again, so I will say what I said before:

The Law Commission has been sticking its nose where it does not belong in this area for some time.

The issue is that people think that if you live together for 3 months, 6, 12, 2 years or so many full moons you have the rights of a married couple.

You don't.

In fact you have no rights at all. The only place where complications arise is where property is in the names of more than one person, as either tenants in common or joint tenants.

In the former case the proportion owned by each party is a complex balance of who put in what whilst in the latter an equal split is assumed, regardless of the number of joint tenants.

In principle the fact that an intimate makes no legal difference to a case. So it does not matter if you share a bed or not, but rather obviously it does make a bit of an evidential difference.

According to this report in the Times, the Law commission proposes giving unmarried couples the same rights, dropping requirements for a time limit, but adding ones for financial disadvantage.

However the article at almost its last gasp says this:

"Research shows that few people are aware of their lack of rights and many wrongly believe that cohabitation makes them “common law” spouses with rights similar to those of married couples."

That is certainly true, but that only applies to some unmarried couples not all, so the ignorance of the many is being used as an excuse to change the relationship of the rest without dealing with the real problem which is that most people have got it wrong.

It only takes an afternoon to get married in a registry office and it need not cost a lot of money. The issue is that people don't know, and even if they did they would not always want to get married. Getting married carries obligations as well as rights. These proposals seem to confer rights where they did not exist before without adding the rights.

The rules the Law Commission want to bring in appear to be applied to same sex couples as well. What I found interesting is the hostility to these new rules from the gay community who fought for and got the right to have same sex relationships recognised in law who object to the changes because they can see that if you want those rights, you can go and sign up for them today with no change in the law.

All this happens against the backdrop of London becoming the divorce capital of the world. Ellee Seymour has this excellent article highlighting why.

Family split as they can't afford to stay together

Sunday's News of the World carries this story of a family, married mother and father and a baby son who have split up because when the father takes a new job they will be worse off. What is more, they will be much better off if they split.

The article says:

Sean Ash and wife Chloe agreed to break up after realising they would lose out even MORE when he takes a new job.

They spoke in the wake of a major political row this week, sparked by Tory leader David Cameron's tax-break pledge to give married couples an extra £20 a week.

Sean and Chloe, who have both been on benefits, explained why they decided to join what Mr Cameron called "our broken society".

As a couple, they had a joint net income of £1,702 a month. But after the split, Sean now gets £1,184 and Chloe £1,396—making a total of £2,580.

And then goes on:

That means they are £878 a month in benefits better off leading separate lives.

Sean, 25, soon expects to start a job with London Underground earning £22,000 a year. But he says he had to leave his wife and one-year-old son Dylan three weeks ago when it became clear that him working would bring their joint income down to £1,472 a month.

Bonkers isn't it? The problem here is that the costs of living of single parents are met whilst those in relationships appear to be able to go hang.

One of the major considerations of course is housing benefit. A single parent or a family with no wage earners working 16 hours a week or less gets it whereas anyone working over 16 hours a week does not. Of course the situation is that a two parent family can't get away (rightly) with two people not earning full time on the state unless there is a good reason, and one of them wanting to work does not cut it, whereas being a single parent, it is not unreasonable (again rightly) to say they don't have to work full time as there are chores to do.

This is of course where Unity is a F*ckwit not a Ministry of Truth as he would have us believe, as he showed in this article entitled "He’s not the Messiah… he’s a fuckwit!"

The problem with Unity's lack of thought lies with this remarkably stupid one sentence assumption:

Instead of taking Mad Frankie at face value, lets look at a more realistic scenario - a two parent family with a single wage earner in the same minimum wage McJob, with all other factors (housing benefit, child benefit, etc) being treated as equal and, therefore, excluded for simplicity.

The problem is that Unity is a fuckwit who does not live in the real world. If you have two adults in a household one of them will have to work unless their is a good medical reason not to, and that will have to be full time unless there is no work, and in reality there is work in most parts of the country and that means the work more than 16 hours a week. that means they DON'T GET HOUSING BENEFIT.

I have run across this problem with people on benefits before. The cutoff is sharp in the extreme. You can't feed a family if you have no kitchen to cook the meal in, and you won't get one of those unless the accommodation is paid for.

Got it Unity?

Beware of the Baby Snatchers part II

The secret family courts and social services are at it again. I reported on this in the Telegraph a short while ago where family courts sitting in secrecy were putting children up for adoption even where the parents had been cleared of any charge of abuse and indeed on the worrying rise of under one years olds taken into care and adopted.

Well now the Sunday Telegraph reports on the case of a couple who had their daughter taken into care on suspicion of sexual abuse followed shortly after by her sister just after her birth.

The police after exhaustive investigation have concluded that there is not sufficient evidence to bring charges against the parents. In many ways that would be fair enough, but the parents need to be exonerated and they never can be in such circumstances.

The situation has of course moved on. The children have been in care so long that they have now been placed with potential adoptive parents. It seems the weight of the system is against the parents as the courts are likely to take the view "that it is in the best interests of the child" not to change the status quo.

This makes me so angry. Parents who have done nothing wrong will not be banged up for 10 years, but will be deprived of their children for life, whilst at the same time the children will be denied their biological parents for life despite all the evidence indicating that is the best relationship.

The family courts need a kick up the backside and secret hearings need to be ended yesterday.

Scratches head? What about family policy?

Well, there is some discussion at least over the family and marriage, inspired by Ian Duncan Smiths report on "Breakthrough Britain".

It highlights the reasons for the breakdown of British society and indeed some suggestions for solutions.

I will have to read quite a bit more (and already have a long reading list) before I comment in detail. It is interesting to see how Ed Balls feels fully able to comment without having read it though.

Here are some links:

We have to report here, Nick Robinson on the politics here and this in the Independent urging David Cameron to stick to the path without using the dreaded "M" word, marriage.

What is irritating though is that the news is just quoting sound bites where there are none.

Conservative home has this, which seems to have more lefty posts than usual.

Beware of the Baby Snatchers and the Secret Courts

According to figures obtained by the Sunday Telegraph the numbers of babies less than 1 week old taken into care has risen by 3 times since 1997 to 900 a year whilst the total number under 1 year old have risen from 970 to 2,120.

These cases then go before the Family Courts which operate in complete secrecy. To give you an idea how bad it is a Solicitor concerned about one such case (Sarah Harman) was suspended from practicing for three months for showing papers to the then Solicitor General, Harriet Harman (her younger sister).

These cases can't be discussed beyond a very narrow group of people, breach of this secrecy counts as contempt of court. So we don't know what goes on in these courts. What is more they rely on expert evidence which is frequently from one source.

It gets worse than that though. Unless you can find evidence to prove the expert wrong there is no point in appealing, it takes time and money to find new expert witness evidence and both are frequently in short supply as young children end up being put up for adoption fairly quickly. Once adopted that is it. No appeal will get the children back. They are lost and gone forever.

There was a case of a family from Norfolk who had had 3 children taken into care on the footing that it had suspicious broken bones, and without any need to prove who did what the children were taken into care. When the fourth child was on the way they went on the run and got as far as Ireland. Regrettably they were sent back. However they eventually scored a victory as their council backed down and accepted that the child whose broken bones led to their children being taken into care did in fact have a medical condition which led to that. By this time of course the 3 other children had been adopted so no appeal will get them back. This is a full life sentence for a family convicted not beyond reasonably doubt, but on the balance of probabilities with no appeal, no time of fro good behavior or anything else and all done in the strictest secrecy.

Some say that the numbers are going up because of the incentives for councils to get more children adopted, and it is a lot easier to get a new born adopted. Obviously this has been denied.

There is however a real problem here. Children are being taken away from their families, and once adopted there is no recourse to law, that is it, the end. This happens in secret so there is no scrutiny. This is patently unjust and wrong, even though the secrecy is supposedly there for the best of reasons, to protect the anonymity and best interests of the children. It seems to me that the secrecy now only benefits the system by hiding the injustice and absurdity of some of the decisions.

John Hemming MP has a blog and frequently raises this issue. In this article he links to a Times law report of a judgement in the Court of Appeal which came to the conclusion that as the law currently stands if a child is taken into care and it now should no longer be in care, that if the judge views it in the best interest of the child then that child will be adopted.

The Sunday Telegraph has this.

To name the Father

A Labour think tank, the IPPR has come up with the idea of making it compulsory to name the father on birth certificates.

The reasoning is that children who have an early involvement of their father do better than those who don't. This is a key fact that has been missed by the family courts for years even after the passing of the 1989 Children's Act. In principle the act gave the children the rights (for example to have a relationship with both parents) and the parents the responsibilities. Regrettably it still does not work that way in practice.

The policy would have safeguards in the case of abuse and rape.

It seems that campaigners for single mothers object because it would make life difficult for mothers.

All I can say is get with the program, this is not about the mothers it is about the children.

The BBC has this.

Tax Credits, The Telegraph catches up with this blog!

Alas, no one else seems that bothered.

On the 27th of May I wrote this article after watching Frank Field MP for Birkenhead on Straight talk with Andrew Neil.

I said:

A single parent with two children working 16 hours per week will get about £480 per week, after tax credits. A married couple with two children (he didn't say it but I presume both are on the minimum wage) would have to work 116 hours to get the same money. He is not surprised at how many single parents there are, but how many married ones there are.

Today the Telegraph says:

The figures are stark and astonishing: because of the huge bias in favour of single parenthood that prevails in the tax credit system, a single mother with two children under the age of 11 who works 16 hours a week on the minimum wage, receives, largely thanks to tax credits, an income of £487.

A two-parent family, on the other hand, also with two children under 11, in which either one or both partners works for the minimum wage, would have to put in a total of 116 hours a week to take home the same income.

So there you have it. This government has built a system either by accident or design that hates families yet the same cretinous bunch of halfwits shout us down if we try and redress the balance.

The big question is though, why are other news outlets not covering this?

At this time the full report by Frank Field is not yet available online, but I will post a link when I locate it.

Update 11:24

Frank Field's website now carries this press release with this link to a report on the Reform website.

Children must have more accidents, Official!

We have heard much of how we are wrapping our children up in cotton wool far too much, in fact I wrote about the subject here. However I bring you news that ROSPA, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents thinks that children should have more accidents!

Their press release reads:

"RoSPA believes that children can learn valuable life-long lessons, particularly about risks and how to deal with them, from playing in the natural environment, and that parents have to accept that their children may get injured. Bumps, bruises and grazes are not serious injuries and are part of growing up."

So there you have it.

So why do we wrap our children up in cotton wool? There are two reasons, one is an unreasonable fear of risk, and the second perhaps is fear of the baby snatchers.

Law Commission to recommend Cohabiting Couples get the same rights as Married ones

The Law Commission has been sticking its nose where it does not belong in this area for some time.

The issue is that people think that if you live together for 3 months, 6, 12, 2 years or so many full moons you have the rights of a married couple.

You don't.

In fact you have no rights at all. The only place where complications arise is where property is in the names of more than one person, as either tenants in common or joint tenants.

In the former case the proportion owned by each party is a complex balance of who put in what whilst in the latter an equal split is assumed, regardless of the number of joint tenants.

In principle the fact that an intimate makes no legal difference to a case. So it does not matter if you share a bed or not, but rather obviously it does make a bit of an evidential difference.

According to this report in the Times, the Law commission proposes giving unmarried couples the same rights, dropping requirements for a time limit, but adding ones for financial disadvantage.

However the article at almost its last gasp says this:

"Research shows that few people are aware of their lack of rights and many wrongly believe that cohabitation makes them “common law” spouses with rights similar to those of married couples."

That is certainly true, but that only applies to some unmarried couples not all, so the ignorance of the many is being used as an excuse to change the relationship of the rest without dealing with the real problem which is that most people have got it wrong.

It only takes an afternoon to get married in a registry office and it need not cost a lot of money. The issue is that people don't know, and even if they did they would not always want to get married. Getting married carries obligations as well as rights. These proposals seem to confer rights where they did not exist before without adding the rights.

The rules the Law Commission want to bring in appear to be applied to same sex couples as well. What I found interesting is the hostility to these new rules from the gay community who fought for and got the right to have same sex relationships recognised in law who object to the changes because they can see that if you want those rights, you can go and sign up for them today with no change in the law.

All this happens against the backdrop of London becoming the divorce capital of the world. Ellee Seymour has this excellent article highlighting why.

Killing childhood

According to a report by the Children's Society children are being smothered too much and not being allowed out to play and explore on their own. This results in child development problems and the inability to build deep friendships.

I remember as I child roaming far and wide and at all times of day in Beirut, where I grew up. I also did the same when we came back to the UK, at first in Croydon.

Parents it seems are worried about the safety of their children. In many ways I think this worry is misplaced. The likelihood of a child being abducted is no greater now than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Clearly there is real no danger there.

Where there may be of course is what may be regarded as general bullying, robbery and such like that seldom appears on either officially recorded crime, or the British Crime survey which excludes the young as victims.

Clearly we have two problems here, one is that fear is in one case beyond reality, whilst there is a huge crime wave in youth on youth crime which is is not being dealt with. We need to deal with this as it is killing childhood.

The BBC has this.