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Paedophiles convicted of serious sexual offences could lose parental rights over their children under a new law.
The proposed law change comes after the BBC reported the case of a mother who spent £30,000 in legal fees to stop her paedophile ex-husband getting access to their daughter.
After hearing the story, Labour MP Harriet Harman tabled an amendment to upcoming legislation.
It covers the most serious sexual offence - rape of a child under 13.
Speaking to BBC News, Ms Harman said paedophiles who were guilty of that crime in the future would be “automatically deprived” of their parental rights.
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It’s clarified in the subtext, but you shouldn’t use the word pedophile in the title, as it’s not all pedophiles, not celibate pedophiles who don’t act on their attraction which they cannot control to children, but only child abusers who are rightfully affected by this.
Unfortunately most people correlate pedophile and child abuser. It makes it hard for a pedophile who has done nothing to feel comfortable seeking help.
Worse: there are many stories of non offenders who sought psychological help only to have the therapist report them to the police. Then the investigations and job losses followed, all for doing nothing wrong at all.
The only correlate it because of the misuse of it just like in the title…
Waiwaiwait… We weren’t already doing this?
That’s exactly what I thought after seeing this
Even though I understand it, I find it disturbing that such a heinous crime as rape can then have additional depts of depravity.
I don’t know if I think it’s needed to put the bar for removal of parental rights at a sublevel of rape… “just rape” (what?! See how horrible this is) should be enough to remove parental rights. But I might be missing something…
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Drunk driving and murder are potentially dangerous for the child as well. I agree that it’s a very difficult topic to tie parental rights to one’s criminal records.
I wouldn’t say the issue is the slippery slope but rather who is going to raise them instead.
We have no solution to this problem and it often makes things worse.
It makes far more sense for these crimes to be used as a legal avenue for a relative or close family friend to assume parental responsibility.
Tossing children into a system that produces worse outcomes is just another of our thousands of short term solutions that ignore the long term outcome.
I don’t know what I personally think, but my guess about the justification is that the state intervenes when it’s in the best interests of the child. Its purpose is to protect and aid the minor when families can’t.
It is considered a harm to deprive children permanently of access to their parents, without showing that it’s more harmful for the kid to be around them. So crime doesn’t automatically remove access. Is the theory.
The state isn’t supposed to treat permanent removal of access to a child as another criminal punishment. One thing I do agree on, though, is that people who rape kids shouldn’t have unsupervised visits with their minor children, since they’ve proven themselves harmful specifically to children. Not even supervised, honestly.
I guess I’d want to see studies about outcomes of kids who are allowed around convicted adult rapist parents, vs those allowed access to parents convicted of nonviolent crimes. Or a study designed by people who know how to design studies well. Instead of my rambling suggestion.
I worry that our vibe checks get warped around kids, and we ignore what’s proven right vs what feels right. Like people who feel really strongly that kids need their parents specifically have warped the narrative on this issue, and I don’t want to warp it in a different way.
The problem with schemes like this is that they imagine a world where the now orphaned kid gets adopted into a loving Hallmark movie home. The reality is that they will end up in foster care where the abuse and neglect will continue, just at the hands of strangers. Or mom will shack up with the next abuser and the dad will have no ability to intervene. Better to leave them with their biological parent who, while a complete scumbag, at least has genetic similarity to hopefully check their worst excesses.
TL;DR - fix the social safety net instead of dumb feel good laws like this one.
If the biological parent is a confirmed child abuser, getting them to foster care is a lottery where the two potential results are ending up with another child abuser or with literally anyone better than that.
But that isn’t even the only option. The very case referenced by the article is that of a mother trying to block her pederast ex-husband from being able to meet their abused child.
My sister used to foster. The reality is usually closer to what the person you responded to said.
When it’s only one parent as in the case that allegedly inspired this law, that becomes less of an issue and i’d see it entirely as a positive. When it’s both parents… as fucked as this sounds, it’d probably have to depend on the details whether taking the child to a foster home would help, but usually probably not. They’re already traumatized at that point and taking them away from both parents would likely just traumatize them further.
Note: am not a psychologist this is mostly conjecture from what ive picked up
