IN the Sunday National there was a call, both in an article (“Pressure mounts to end care stigma in Scotland”) and in an editorial (“Tackling care stigma takes actions as well as words, both February 17), for enhanced rights for, and an end to stigmatisation of, children and young people who are or have been in care – the “care-experienced” being numbered at an estimated 250,000 in Scotland.
Unfortunately – but all too predictably – neither article contains a single word of regret or dismay that so many children have been taken from their parents, even though the number has risen by 75% since 2004, with a small decrease last year. The call is to “reduce stigma”, which no-one could object to, since no person should be stigmatised, but never to reduce the breaking-up of families, or indeed, the stigma on the invisible, bereft parents whose inadequacy or positive fault is simply taken for granted in this account of the situation.
READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon backs campaign to end care stigma in Scotland
According to the editorial, “Now is the time not only to educate the public to show more compassion, but to ensure there is also a legal framework that allows all of Scotland’s young people to have their human rights realised”. Fine, but how about a legal framework that allows all of Scotland’s parents to have their human right to family life protected, with no child taken from them without the same due process of law accorded to persons accused of crime?
In supporting the campaign under discussion, the First Minister, who in speaking to an adoring audience of young people rather blood-chillingly nominates herself “your chief corporate parent”, has her own agenda of normalising the state upbringing of children in line with the Named Person scheme which she promotes.
But there are no corporate children – only biological ones, produced by biological parents through the biological mechanism of sex, together with biologically evolved emotions of love that the state can never replace. As one young person recalls of her residential home: “I was not allowed to be hugged by those that cared for me”; but of course the reformers might solve this problem by writing a prescribed number and conditionality of allowable hugs into the institution’s rules.
We can observe here an alignment of Sturgeon’s support for what might seem a mere “identity” issue, namely gender self-identification (whose advocates deliberately confuse it with gay and trans rights), with the undermining of parental rights. If there’s no natural sex, there’s no natural family to obstruct the state when it exercises power over people’s lives.
How sad that the mainstream of the left and centre, which still seems to view “the family” in terms of 1950s patriarchy, should accept the corporatisation of so many children, only looking beyond it as far as some attitudinal and procedural reforms.
Katherine Perlo
Forfar
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