www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conser...heresa-May-told.html

'Helen Reece, a reader in law at the London School of Economics, called on Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to relax rules which automatically ban sex offenders from caring for children, saying that this could breach their human rights.'

“The Vetting and Barring Scheme and other legislative measures single out sex offenders for unfair special treatment and they destroy the principle that a prisoner pays his or her debt by serving their sentence before re-entering society on equal terms.

Rather than presuming that everyone is a potential risk to children and must therefore be vetted, any vetting or barring should be based on very strong evidence that they are a risk. This would represent a victory not only for human rights but for protecting the best interests of children.”

Peter wrote:
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conser...heresa-May-told.html

'Helen Reece, a reader in law at the London School of Economics, called on Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to relax rules which automatically ban sex offenders from caring for children, saying that this could breach their human rights.'

“The Vetting and Barring Scheme and other legislative measures single out sex offenders for unfair special treatment and they destroy the principle that a prisoner pays his or her debt by serving their sentence before re-entering society on equal terms.

Rather than presuming that everyone is a potential risk to children and must therefore be vetted, any vetting or barring should be based on very strong evidence that they are a risk. This would represent a victory not only for human rights but for protecting the best interests of children.”

You can be turned down for adoption "just because" anyway, so I dont think there is much chance of a known paedophile being allowed
to adopt no matter what the law says, but it might protect children from daft decisions like the one mentioned in the article, where a teenager might have had a slightly underage girlfriend, or a twenty-two year old man with a twenty year old boyfriend, and those who have convictions for sunbathing or swimming naked etc.

I don't agree that sex offenders should be allowed to adopt.

By the way, this article is from a few years' back. Helen Reece unfortunately passed away of cancer early this year.

It’s a measure, I think, of the sheer toxicity of the term “sex offender” that no one (myself included) has written in defence of the argument informing Peter’s post. Is this because no one believes it has at least some merit, that it isn’t worthy of even a moment’s reflection?

I began to sense that, at least far as I was concerned, far from there being no defence to speak of, I was simply avoiding the issue, preferring to file my discomfort with the use of the term “sex offender” in that private, securely locked part of my mind marked “Heresy.”

It seems to me that we would be well-advised to become especially cautious and sceptical when we come across this phrase. In media-land, it has come to mean something akin to the word “Devil” or “Witch” in the medieval era. In other words, it’s a term of dehumanisation, just as its synonyms have become (“paedo”, “beast”, “monster” etc.). When we start feeling ourselves becoming like a medieval zealot reaching for the nearest torch and pitchfork, it might be saner to pull back from the brink and ponder what’s happening to us. Terms of dehumanisation pave the way to vigilante violence and even murder.

What is a sex offender/paedo? A psychopathic or impulsive, personality-disordered bully who has raped a child, unable or unwilling to regulate his aggressive and sexual drives? Some under this label undoubtedly fall into this category. Or might it refer to some essentially gentle, mildly depressed bloke who has foolishly watched prohibited internet pornography in a doomed effort to resuscitate his dying libido? Or a naïve nineteen-year-old boy who has had a sexual liaison with a fourteen- or fifteen-year old? The fact is that the phrase covers all of these categories of people and more, rendering it useless and meaningless, certainly from a clinical perspective.

Instead of lumping disparate people together and forging them onto a spurious unity called “sex offender”, it seems to me to be a fundamental principal of enlightened justice and clinical ethics that each person be assessed individually. No two people are identical. People aren’t even identical with themselves. Transposing someone out of human fellowship and into a state of abject banishment until it’s time to shuttle off the mortal coil because he or she has been impaled by a politically-charged label seems to me to as unjust as it is cruel and violent.

I would share profound concerns about a sadistically violent child rapist being permitted to adopt, but not necessarily the naive nineteen-year-old or the sad fool who looked at the wrong type of porn.

If a term is used principally to

dehumanise someone,
to impose a falsely simplistic and life-destroying identity upon them (bogeyman, monster, beast), erasing their other positive human attributes
to create the illusion that bad guys are being rounded up,
to persuade us that we’re all safer as a result and
to make us feel better about our imagined virtues by permitting us to project all our darker desires onto a socially sanctioned scapegoat

it’s wicked and fit only for the project of political scapegoating of the most dangerous kind.

It seems to me that assessing people as individuals is the only ethical option, whatever wrongs they have (or are imagined to have) committed.

Helen Reece put it rather well:

Rather than presuming that everyone is a potential risk to children and must therefore be vetted, any vetting or barring should be based on very strong evidence that they are a risk.

Yes Pete; very much why I chose to adopt the term Vile Pervert; by taking ownership of it I weaken the use by tabloids and brain dead.
We shall never beat the morons; there are too many of them and they rule by numbers. Most simply don't bother; it doesn't concern them; there are more important questions like what's for dinner?

Any decent, kind, tolerant people should be allowed to adopt, be they single, couples, straight, ex murders or rapists or loonies - as long as they are intelligently vetted and checked. We've all made mistakes; everyone can change; orphans need care and love.

Sorry folks, my mistake for only seeing the recent 2017 date at the top of the telegraph link, and not noticing 2010 further down. That is what happens when one is too hasty!

Pete's view: 'It seems to me that assessing people as individuals is the only ethical option, whatever wrongs they have (or are imagined to have) committed' is particularly sensible in my opinion. Unfortunately assessing people as individuals assumes those individuals are human and part of society.

Until sex offenders cease being punished years after prison release, and until paedophilia is accepted as just another strand of human sexuality, those same individuals will continue to be treated as sub-human and excluded from society.

It seems common sense to me that sex offenders, child abusers and killers, whether of adults or children, should not be allowed to adopt.

Jo wrote:

It seems common sense to me that sex offenders, child abusers and killers, whether of adults or children, should not be allowed to adopt.

I have become extremely sceptical about common sense, Jo. It’s not quite the same thing it was when Tom Paine was writing about it in the eighteenth century. There were no powerful multinational media corporations peddling myths about invented biopolitical monsters across the Anglosphere back then, and no dodgy State-backed agencies like CEOP and the NSPCC with a massive interest in sustaining a state of panic.

Vast numbers of people were not subject, as they are now, to the perennial spewing of oceans spurious, if not frankly disinforming, advocacy research, which these organisations depend upon to sustain a sense of permanently smouldering panic. The latter in turn enables them to justify ever-more draconian punishments in addition to ever-increasing funding and growth, much of it from the public purse (which means that it is unavailable for other areas of public policy such as health, education, transport, infrastructure, investment in productivity upskilling, etc.).

Common sense in Paine’s day was based on the widely-shared sense of injustice and repression that essentially law-abiding people experienced, very deeply, toward a pitiless and arrogant junta. This was what they had in common and it contributed to a shared common sense of necessary justice. They were not being fed paedo-panic propaganda en masse on a daily basis courtesy of CEOP, the NSPCC and their friends in the corporate digital media. They were instead using their own rational faculties to make up their own minds about their lived experiences under the junta.

It seems to me that CEOP and the NSPCC with their media allies have invested a vast amount of time and effort in disseminating fear-and-loathing propaganda deliberately aimed at creating a new common sense, a common sense concocted by privileged, well-remunerated agents of the state aiming to continually expand their income streams, their influence and their prestige. This is a top-down common sense wholly at odds with Paine’s ground-up common sense.

I dislike the ideological creation of biological monsters. Nothing good ever comes from this. Lynch mobs, vigilante thugs and cash-and-publicity-hungry propagandists serving their own interests are the only beneficiaries.

I consider it profoundly unethical and unjust to assess people on the basis of spurious categories such as “sex offender”. The life-long restrictions and punishments imposed on such individuals for the most trifling of “offences” do not apply to serial granny-bashers, drug gangsters or incorrigible burglars. And I would be utterly opposed to such blanket measures if they did.

The individual and the specific circumstances and nature of their crime should be assessed, not the category of criminal they are presumed to be. Jean Genet was an unpleasant thug and a ruthless thief as a youngster, yet became one of France’s greatest 20th century writers. Given the chance, while some people will fail, others can and do change and grow from their errors. No one should be pre-emptively denied such chances in a rational and humane justice system.

When I referred to "biological monsters" in my earlier post, I actually meant "biopolitical monsters" - bogeymen created to regulate and manage public passions. My spellcheck automatically 'miscorrected' it to 'biological.'

Pete, you have written with grace and understanding. Such thoughtful contributions. Would that more people thought like you. Or that your words should be presented to a much wider audience. Inspiring. We're not all life-long monsters. And some of us appreciate words such as yours. Thank you.

Very kind words, Nonesuch, thank you.

It’s just that I lament and loathe the subversion of the justice system in relation to one category of offending by postmodern PC victimologists, who always want limitlessly savage penalties for the most piddlingly insignificant infractions of their rigid ideological code.