Comment is free: We are all child-haters

The awful case of Eunice Spry – the sadistic foster mother who forced her three children to eat lard, dog food, vomit, their own faeces, and who hit them with metal bars and sticks, hides a truth that is far more common than we are prepared to acknowledge. The story of Spry, who was yesterday convicted of 26 charges of child cruelty, unlawful wounding and actual bodily harm, is not an exceptional one. Children in this country are routinely battered, raped, abused and all-too-regularly murdered.

Comment is free: We are all child-haters.

The Groan once more surpasses itself for crass comment and exaggeration. I wonder sometimes just where they dig their writers up from. David Wilson compares an evil sadistic child abuser with the rest of a society that would rather young people these days exercise some manners – well, I wish some of them would. The comparison spoils what would otherwise be a valid point and alienates those whom he would rally to his cause:

Even our public policy towards children gets in on the act, and childhood has become the most intensively governed and controlled space in human existence, where by dint of age alone you can be subject to local curfews which ban you from public view (ensuring that you remain in the place where you are most likely to be assaulted), and where the threat of the Asbo seems to be omnipresent. We now have more children in our penal system than at any time in our history, and not a day goes past without someone demanding that even more should be sent inside – often for behaviour that wouldn’t have warranted a police caution only a generation ago.

Well, quite. That does not mean that the comparison between the rest of us and Eunice Spry and those of her ilk stands. It simply does not. As one of the commenters, Waltz, points out:

Errr, yeah, she and her fellow sickos A LOT different to the rest of us. They torture children.

Exactly. I quietly fume when a badly behaved child is allowed to rampage through a railway carriage, jumping on the seats, kicking the back of the seats and generally creates mayhem, but I do not resort to violence and neither do the other suffering passengers. There is a difference; a huge difference; between intolerance of bad behaviour and systematic child abuse. David Wilson appears unable to tell the difference.

Eunice Spry is no different to the rest of us – she merely reflects a culture which has increasingly become, at best, intolerant of young people and at worst child-hating.

Not too stupid, then. Eunice Spry is nothing like the rest of us and I resent the comparison.