My children are not sausages - they have rights!

My children are not sausages. They do not need to be grilled.

All children have rights.

All children have a right to be safe...
from barely literate uncomprehending over-stretched ticky box faceless cold bureaucrats who dare to judge anyone else on anything. You failed my child when she left school in tears, dreading the next day of school, terrified of some other children, wanting to be dead rather than schooled. I will keep her safe from you.

Judge not lest ye be judged.

My children have a right to be protected...
from social workers unable to distinguish abuse from real family life. We are not perfect parents. We don't smack our children (which you have failed to ban) and we don't lie to our children (like you do in your Bad Home Education Review) and we don't listen to them just to ignore what they say. We will respect our young people for they deserve respect, and that is a right they have a right to.

"Adoption targets were brought in seven years ago, when Tony Blair was trying to persuade social workers to find adoptive homes for more children.The then Prime Minister set targets to raise the number of children being adopted by 50 per cent to 5,400 every year.He promised millions of pounds to councils that managed to achieve the targets. Some have already received more than £2million for successful adoptions.Campaigners say the number of babies under a month old being taken into care and then adopted has risen from 500 in 1997 to 1,300 a year. Last year a BBC investigation discovered more than 100 claims of miscarriages of justice by parents whose children were taken by social workers for adoption.The Radio Four Face the Facts programme quoted social workers who admitted they are under pressure to take children because of Whitehall targets to increase adoption.Last night Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, who has been campaigning against inappropriate adoption of babies, said: "Councils are in a big rush to take babies at a very early stage because it is makes it easier to break the attachment that naturally forms between baby and mother over time."This case illustrates again how the system is not working in the interests of the children or the families, it's working in the interests of the bureaucracy. "What's unique about this case is not the unlawful removal of a child, but that some lawyers have sufficient backbone to make the right application to the court to have the child returned to its mother."Mr Hemming added: "There are financial rewards - a fund of about £35million - for getting children adopted. Admittedly, it has been proposed that adoption targets are scrapped on April 1, but clearly there are still problems."Layton Bevan, co-founder of Families and Social Services Information Team, a support group for families frustrated by social services' actions, said: "It's obscene the way some social services can take children away from parents without the proper paperwork."We are aware of this happening in hundreds of cases a year through the sheer incompetence and organisational failure of social services departments."If they need to meet adoption targets they will do it by taking children from vulnerable families."Worryingly, the social services involved seem to have no accountability and ride roughshod over the law and the parents and children involved."

http://www.fassit.co.uk/judge_orders_social_workers.htm

Children have a right to an education...
now that the masters have closed the mills and the mines where they used to get their 'education' where do they go?

"Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest."

http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm

Children have a right to live, learn and exist in peace in a society...
which doesn't see them as human capital, human resources, or economic units forced to run and run ever faster to fabricate wealth for someone who is already obscenely wealthy, and who doesn't even know their names.

"In the UK, 1 per cent of the population owns appoximately 21 per cent of the UK's marketable wealth, and 50 per cent of the population owns only 7 per cent of wealth."

http://www.esrc.ac.uk/ESRCInfoCentre/facts/index35.aspx

Children have the right not to be seen as objects...
to be weighed, measured, grilled, interviewed, assessed, experimented upon or otherwise abused by a society that should treat them and their parents with honour.

"Children's independent mobility and access are routinely undermined by the structures and constraining values of contemporary urban environments. Although they are major users of their local areas, children are conspicuous by their absence in discussions about transport, planning and environmental health and there have been few attempts in the UK to modify the urban environment so that children's needs are met. Instead, behaviour modification approaches have predominated, in which children are seen as objects to be fitted into the adult constructed world. In place of such victim blaming approaches a new public health analysis would emphasize environmental and social influences on children's quality of life. Manipulation of the urban environment rather than the child offers the best prospects for creating cities that are healthier—for children and consequently for other vulnerable users. In this process the views of children themselves need to be heard, so that policy makers make realistic decisions about how urban environments are designed and managed."

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VH5-3VW1SCY-4&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=91d2f292e4a39dc46c6bc6a060913daf


Children have a right not to be forced into prison...
because their parent is unaware of the creeping evil of the Every Child Matters rhetoric which makes strangers, who don't provide food, roof, bed, clothes... everything for them, judges over the minutiae of their lives.

"The Government's aim is for every child, whatever their background or their circumstances, to have the support they need to:
be healthy
stay safe
enjoy and achieve
make a positive contribution
achieve economic well-being."

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/about/aims/aims/

Children have a right to their own ambitions and dreams...
and the right to achieve them or not as is their destiny and their desire.

"Kate needs all the help she can get when she encounters the Lanky Man. He's mean and heartless, and he wants to steal children's dreams."

http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/index.php?main_page=index&filter_author=115&cPath=388&filter=author&level_1=388sort=20a

Children have a right to be treated as sentient, able people and not patronised by officials who wilfully and totally disregard everything they say.

The Home Education Review

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/_download/?id=6080