I read an interesting
opinion piece in our provincial newspaper a couple of weeks ago.
Entitled "
Racist Parents, innocent children: What to do?", it referenced a
Court of Appeal decision in New Jersey where three young siblings, with given names of Adolph Hitler, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation and Honsztynn Hinler Jeannie (apparently "Honszlynn Hitler" is meant to honour
Heinrich Himmler, the Recihsfuhrer of the SS) were removed from their parents, with custody being transferred to the state.
Is anyone out there actually wondering what got Children's Aid involved in the first place?
Although a family court had previously found
insufficient evidence that the parents had abused or neglected their children, the three appeal court judges ruled that the parents had “
recklessly created a risk of serious injury to their children by failing to protect the children from harm and failing to acknowledge and treat their disabilities".
The children's names were not mentioned in the appeal decision and the court relied on other grounds to find the children were in need of protection (the ones noted in the news accounts being that both parents were unemployed and suffered from unspecified physical and psychological disabilities).
And I must say that although we don't have much detail as to the extent of the parents' "disabilities", it does seem rather strange that the state would be granted permanent guardianship solely on those enumerated grounds. Or, at least not until after extensive services had been put in place in an effort to help the parents remedy their deficits.
The New Jersey case mirrors a Canadian one where a young child in
Manitoba went to school with a massive swastika on her arm and other slogans on her legs, including references to Adolf Hitler and the slogan, “
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Photos of the markings were shown in court.
“The meaning of that is that black people don’t belong,” the girl later explained to the social worker.
The woman told court Monday she was stunned by what transpired during an hour-long interview with the girl, who frequently used the N-word to describe blacks and said she believes strongly in what her parents taught her.
The girl also gave a graphic description of how to kill a black person, telling the social worker about using a spiked ball attached to a chain and then “whipping them until they die.”
The worker asked the girl if those ideas “scared her.”
“No, black people just need to die. That’s not scary. This is a white man’s world,” she replied.
Although the case was argued as having "nothing to do with infringing on free speech or expression" but rather “longstanding family dysfunction” (including drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, neglect, and criminal activity and associations), some, at least, have read the court's finding that the child and her younger brother were at risk of harm from their Nazi-sympathizing parents as
proposing that the risk that the child would acquire racist attitudes was also grounds for removing them from their parents.
And the point has been
rightfully made that these children were not originally removed from the home the reasons enumerated above; in fact, they were removed from their parents long before these details came out. No, there's really no other way to spin it other than that they were taken because the children's aid workers didn't appreciate the racist beliefs of the parents.
