ADDICTION TO BEING PC CAN COST LIVES

"PARENT'S addiction is no reason to remove their children." I've been
hearing it for years, a comment so politically correct and nonsensical
that it sets your teeth on edge. But there are good reasons. "If they
know that their children are likely to be removed, addicts will not
seek help" - that's one, a tacit acknowledgement that having dependant
children isn't enough to stop them taking drugs. "Take the children
away and it will give the parents less incentive to fight their
addiction", that's another reason apparently, thereby condoning the
use of children as therapy for adults, simply because they had the bad
fortune to have been born to them.

Let's say for the sake of argument that there is a valid reason for
leaving children to be raised by parents addicted to booze and/or
drugs; let's accept that it causes the children no actual harm. So
addicts would be welcome as foster or adoptive parents then, would
they? No? I am shocked. Can this possibly mean that there are two
standards of childcare, one for foster/adopted children, and another,
less demanding one, for children who just happen to have been born
into the family? Unsuitable foster/adoptive parents are those who
smoke, are nervous of the dentist's drill, or have had happy
childhoods themselves and so haven't suffered enough. These people are
bad parents, stands to reason. Good parents, on the other hand, are
whoever had the equipment to conceive and give birth, and their
children shall not be removed from them unless and until years of
neglect and abuse have already rendered them so emotionally scarred
that their future is already compromised. Got that? Right.

Which brings us to the case of one Wendy Dodd, who last week pled
guilty to the wilful neglect of two eight-year-old girls, Jasmine
Neville and Charlea Fox, who drowned as she sat on a river bank,
drinking and smoking cannabis. The occasion was a barbecue to
celebrate Charlea's birthday, and Dodd had been left in charge while
Charlea's parents went into a nearby town in search of heroin. All the
adults involved knew that the children couldn't swim, had no buoyancy
aids, and that the river currents were dangerous, so it was probably
no great surprise when their bodies were discovered that night by
police divers in three metres of water. Dodd, the one left behind
during the great heroin hunt, was arrested and charged; the parents
were not. The partner of Jasmine's mother, not the girl's father, said
after the trial: "We are pleased that Wendy Dodd has admitted her
guilt. We are now looking forward to getting back to normal. We hope
people recognise the dangers of water and rivers."

Am I alone in thinking that parents have a responsibility to ensure
the safety of their children when they leave them in someone else's
care, and to be held to account if that person is a known addict? But
shush, even the thought is enough to have you arrested by the PC
police, it leaves you open to charges of being deliberately sensible
and concerned for the welfare of children, and we are here to be
liberal-minded where the parents are concerned, as long as they're
addicts.

The reason why addicts are not good parents is that the substances
they are addicted to, booze and/or drugs, alter their minds and
compromise their ability to judge danger, for themselves and their
children. That standard of child care, or lack of it, would quite
rightly not be acceptable in a prospective foster/adoptive parent, so
why should any child suffer simply because they share the genes of the
adult they have been born to?

And in a bizarre twist, last week also saw the launch of campaigns to
eradicate child poverty and abuse. Anyone who does not accept that an
addicted parent is by definition an abusive parent is leaning over so
far that they deserve to fall, hopefully with a very severe bump.
Causing a child to live with constant anxiety lest a parent dies,
fearful of where the next meal is coming from because all the money
goes on booze or drugs; that's abuse. Children such as the boy in
Stirlingshire who handed his teacher his mother's stash of heroin,
because it was killing her, children robbed of their childhood by
being obliged to care for their parents; that's abuse.

Addiction is not a disease which strikes randomly and
indiscriminately; it is a voluntary situation which those entering
have every right to choose. Children, however, have no choice. Water,
as the man said, is very dangerous, but being PC demands that we turn
a blind eye to drugs and booze, obliging the children of addicts to
suffer and sometimes die for the cause.