On 3 and 4 June The Christian Institute were in Scotland’s highest court, the Inner House of the Court of Session, fighting to protect parents from the Named Person scheme.
In late May a senior civil servant said: ‘Every child deserves to have positive well-being’ and noted – in a bizarre twisting of 1 Corinthians 13 – that indicators of wellbeing to be used by these state guardians could include ‘love, hope and spirituality’.
Concerns have been raised as to the ‘swamping’ of people like social workers with unnecessary work and thus prevent vulnerable children getting the help they need. In early June the BBC reported on the result of a Freedom of Information Request on local authorities and the number of girls who are pregnant and boys and girls who are in prison who were under the care of the local authority. The figures were hugely disproportionate to the numbers of children in care thus showing that the state is already overwhelmed with genuine care problems without routinely being responsible for every child in the nation.
The future?
Christian and Muslim parents should be very concerned by a judge’s decision to remove a seven-year-old boy from his mother over her Jehovah’s Witness beliefs, a commentator has said.
Frank Furedi, husband of the head of the British Pregnancy Advice Service, Ann Furedi, said the ruling was not simply about the mother’s actions, but her beliefs. ‘More specifically it raised questions about the rights of a parent to bring up a child in accordance with their beliefs’, he added.
The social worker in the case noted that the child’s problems were not primarily related to his religious upbringing.
Furedi, an atheist, noted that while it is always difficult to be certain what is in the best interest of a child, the mother was on trial for her beliefs, rather than her behaviour.
‘In this case the right of a mother to rear her child in accordance with her moral outlook is trumped by a court’s decision to determine the religious parameters of the boy’s socialisation’, he said. ‘If exposing a child to religion causes emotional harm why not to secular moral education? Once the ideals or ideas of parents become associated with emotional damage they become in effect both medicalised and delegitimised. In effect the authority of parents to determine the values that underpin their children’s socialisation is called into question because of the damage that they can allegedly inflict on their offspring’, he commented.
