It shouldn’t be a crime to be a bad parent
By Jon Holbrook, Spiked online:
The criminal law is powerful: breach it and you can lose your liberty. In a parenting context: breach it and your children can also be taken into care. So, it is a cardinal principle of a free society that criminal law is restricted to dealing only with behaviour that should properly be criminalised. Yet by expanding the offence of child cruelty to embrace emotional harm, the UK government’s so-called Cinderella Law will criminalise many aspects of normal family life. When the Cinderella Law is enacted, the line between the innocent parent and the convicted parent will be at the discretion of a law-enforcement officer. And that is a horrifying prospect.
There is little doubt that the ominously titled Serious Crime Bill, currently working its way through parliament, will significantly expand the definition of the offence of child cruelty. It may be nicknamed the Cinderella Law, but it will criminalise behaviour falling far short of anything experienced by Cinderella. Clause 65 of the bill, in particular, will make two changes to the offence of child cruelty.
First, it will enable prosecutions to be brought where a child, although not physically harmed, has been harmed in other ways. Any form of emotional, psychological or intangible harm could be caught by this new definition of ill-treatment: ‘physical or otherwise’. This reform will overturn a House of Lords decision from 1980 that confined the offence of child cruelty to cases involving a child’s physical needs. This specifically excluded other aspects of harm, such as a parental failure to meet moral, educational, spiritual or emotional needs. That the government’s proposal now includes such forms of intangible harm will mean that children and their many one-eyed advocates in the child-protection industry will find it all too easy to bring normal incidents of parenting within the scope of the criminal law.
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