Words fail me ... but the VIC govt failed this little girl

In a shocking case of child neglect we can see that non-government care workers did more for this baby girl, than Victoria's Department of Human Services.

“A baby suffered serious electrical burns, witnessed repeated acts of domestic violence and lived in horrific conditions for 22 months before Victorian welfare authorities finally took her away from her drug-addicted mother.

The state's Department of Human Services was first notified of concerns for the girl in March 2001, when the child was three months old.

Despite the mother's first child being removed from her care in 1999, the second child was not removed by the department until January 2003.

The full horror of the girl's first two years of life have been detailed in a judgment handed down by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.”

The mother is Aboriginal. I wonder whether Andrew Bolt is right about political correctness causing government-run departments to act more slowly than they should because of the desire to avoid the appearance of being heartless jackbooted racists - rather than just being heartless ribbon-wearing cowards. As Andrew says:

“Is it because she was Aboriginal? Is it because, as I’ve warned so often, that we leave Aboriginal children in grave danger that we would not tolerate for children of any other race because we are so terrified of the “stolen generations” myth?”

Personally, I think the mother's racial background had less to do with the problem than her family history.

“When the mother was three, her older sister had been murdered. She was placed in foster care but suffered repeated sexual abuse there.

She lived on the street from the age of 14 and had convictions for theft and robbery from the age of 15. She also took heroin.”

I think the guilt felt for society's failure to protect her as a child, led the case workers to try and be lenient with her own failings as a parent - thus perpetuating the damage from one generation to another. We need more grace-based intervention to save these kids before they have their own children and pass on the horror, we need a robust idea of love as something that involves discipline, not some wishy-washy acceptance that it's everyone else's fault.

Grace is a free gift of love, not license to do whatever you want. If you want to learn about grace, go study Christianity, have a robust conversation with your local priest, pastor or minister - or get Christian non-government organisations involved in caring for people - like the ones that made a difference here.

UPDATE: Added link to Andrew's post.

Europe - the home of the wrinkly teenager

Mark Steyn's CD Kemp Lecture has been re-printed in The Australian, and makes for some interesting reading. He takes a swing at Europe for its declining society:

The Continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those 17 Europeans countries which have fallen into “lowest-low fertility”, where are the children? In a way, you’re looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café listening to his iPod. Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the world’s wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912 – before teenagers or record collections had been invented. He understood that the long-term cost of a softened state is the infantilization of the population.

From: It's breeding obvious mate (emphasis mine)

More disturbing is this piece towards the end:

...As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.

The advantage Australians and Americans have is that most of the rest of the west is ahead of us: their canoes are already on the brink of the falls. But Australians who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world in which ever more parts of the map fall prey to the reprimitivization that’s afflicted Liberia, Somalia and Bosnia.

If it’s difficult to focus on long-term trends because human life is itself short-term, think short-term: Huge changes are happening now. For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs and ever less civilizational confidence, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then western civilization will go the way of all others that failed to meet a simple test: as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1870, “Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.”