Fiona MacKeown should be questioned...

[BoredBloke]

For goodness sake, I've told you twice to exclude scenarios precisely like the one you are banging on about. Try think of a scenario where no civilised person would refuse to help.

Perhaps your car has crashed, you can't move, and a complete stranger with room for one passenger offers to take your child to the hospital? Does your fear of strangers outweigh your concern that your child may need urgent medical attention? (A bit contrived but the best I can do at a moments notice. And no you can't assume there are other options such as the accident is in Britain therefore it's reasonable to wait for an ambulance.)

This is one (admittedly far-fetched) example where an irrational fear of strangers would compromise rather than enhance your childs well-being.

I guess not allowing your child to visit friends after school would be a more subtle example.

Your argument simply doesn't work because you are still making the assumption that every stranger would say yes to the prospect of looking after your kid - I'd agree that the risk would be low if this were the case but it simply is not. If you are only going to focus in on the group that would say yes, then you have to exclude the bulk of the population. That leaves a greater concentration of nutters in your pool of strangers and a greater degree of risk to your kid.

A better example would be this. Your kid is walking home from school and it starts to rain. A car pulls up and is driven by somebody your kid does not know. Would you tell your kid to accept the lift to avoid getting wet.

Your friends example does not hold water as by definition they are not visiting strangers, they are visiting friends so a certain amount of their background is known.

[IR35 Avoider]

Fancy Me goading IR35 into a sucker trap like that eh!


Still, it livened things up for a while

Well, let keep things lively then. Going all the way back to what the thread was originally about, I haven't read much about the case, but based on what I've seen, I think the outcome for Scarletts mother is far more bad luck than bad judgement.

I think some people are assuming options she may not have had. How easy is it to absolutely prevent a 15-year-old from taking drugs or drinking to much?

Perhaps the real failing was not brain-washing her against this sort of behaviour before she reached that age? How easy would that have been? Not a rhetorical question - I genuinely don't know.

I was quite an emotional basket-case at that age, If I hadn't been imprisoned in a boarding school I don't know what would have happened to me. (Probably not drink or drugs, but I might have gone off the rails in other ways.) On the other hand, if I wanted to be expelled, all I had to do was to be caught smoking, not even taking alcohol or illegal substances, so maybe I wasn't in as bad a way as I remember.

In one of the newspaper articles linked to at the start, the headmaster of the childrens school appears to have the same opinion as me. (I don't usually go for arguments for authority, but in this thead I need all the help I can get!)

Regarding her life on benefits - I don't blame her, if the system allows her to do it, I blame the politicians that create and maintain the system.

[Lucy]

Regarding her life on benefits - I don't blame her, if the system allows her to do it, I blame the politicians that create and maintain the system.

And who allows the politicians?

[IR35 Avoider]

you are still making the assumption that every stranger would say yes to the prospect of looking after your kid - I'd agree that the risk would be low if this were the case but it simply is not.

I agree with you in every example you have given, and you agree with me in the sort of scenario I'm imagining. So we're in complete agreement in all scenarios.

(Yes, I know that you don't think we are, but I'm giving up now.)

(Perhaps it would be fairer to say that you simply can't imagine the kind of scenario I'm talking about. To be fair, I was arguing in the abstract, so haven't particularly done so either.)

[IR35 Avoider]

And who allows the politicians?

I've never voted Labour.

Edit: Or did you mean people like her do? In that case, I do condemn her for that!

[SueEllen]

And who allows the politicians?

They work for you.

(If you make them do work that is.)

[Churchill]

They work for you.

(If you make them do work that is.)

Modern Politicians are no longer "civil servants", they are self-serving!

Anyone with ambitions to be a politician should immediately be precluded from being one.

[IR35 Avoider]

Blimey, do you have any concept of risk, or indeed any contact with nannies or teachers?

My point wasn't that nannies and female teachers were dangerous, but that (if anything) a randomly selected female adult ought to be less dangerous. (In practice I think the differences in risk would be negligible.) Because I believe nannies and female teachers are not dangerous, I conclude that it is pretty safe to leave a child with a randomly selected adult female.

(I only restricted myself to female teachers and adults to make a fair comparison with nannies, who I assume are female.)

Before Tony English butts in, let me repeat that a scenario where the randomly selected person has a non-negligible likelihood of not helping is automatically excluded by definition of the word "random." In that case the person who accepted would be part of a self-selecting group, which means they are not a random adult any more.

[BoredBloke]

Before Tony English butts in, let me repeat that a scenario where the randomly selected person has a non-negligible likelihood of not helping is automatically excluded by definition of the word "random." In that case the person who accepted would be part of a self-selecting group, which means they are not a random adult any more.

And now I'll butt in again to mention that this self selecting group would obviously include the nutters who want access to your kids for all the wrong reasons.

look at it this way. if there were 1% of the population who wanted to abuse kids then in a sample of 10,000 people 100 would want to cause harm while 9900 would be classed a normal people. Of these normal people, 9000 refuse to look after a strangers kid - as the majority would. So this self selecting pool would contain the 900 normal strangers and the 100 nutter strangers. You now have a 1 in 10 chance of landing your kid with a nutter. The simple act of asking a stranger to look after your kid increases the chances of landing it with a nutter simply because the vast majority of normal people would refuse while the nutter ranks would always agree.

Obviously it's not 1%, but it makes the sums easier.

[SueEllen]

I've never voted Labour.

Edit: Or did you mean people like her do? In that case, I do condemn her for that!

People like her don't vote. They are too busy ripping off the state and the kiddies fathers/grandparents, and saying they are hippies.