Dialogue: Ode to a teenager robbed of a future

The response from readers to my musings on political correctness and children's so-called rights has been greater than to any of these columns published in the past four years or so, and nine out of 10 of them have been of the "hear, hear" variety. Two in particular deserve a wider audience.

The first is from a grandmother who, in her despair over a grandson, penned this ode to the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act:

"I am a child. I am the product of this act. It has given me rights - the rights to do as I please. If I don't choose to stay home with my family, I don't have to; if I don't choose to go to school and be educated, I don't have to. The law says I must, but who will make me?

"If I choose to steal and to live with friends or on the street; if I choose to abuse my body with alcohol, drugs or solvents; if I choose to play space games all day or just hang around; if I choose to be undisciplined and accountable to no one, who will stop me?

"If I choose to have unsafe sex; if I choose to refuse counselling though I may need it badly; if I choose to swear at and abuse the police and ignore the courts; if I choose to ignore or deceive the social welfare officers and my family, who will stop me?

"If I choose to associate with criminals and end up one myself, who will stop me?

"I may start at the age of 10 but until I am 17 and judged to be an adult no one will force me to do what I don't choose to do. I have rights, I am a child.

"By the time I am 17 I am uneducated and undisciplined, I have no family bonding, no allegiance to anyone, no money, the clothes I stand up in, and I will never get a job because I have no qualifications.

"I have poor health from abusing my body and could get HIV-Aids through a lot of sexual contact, and I have absolutely no self-esteem.

"I was only 10 and didn't understand that I would be allowed by you adults and your act to ruin not only my own life but, through stress and pain, often my family's life as well.

"I am 17 now and I, like thousands of others, have been abused by you and your act. I should have had an education and a future to look forward to. Why have you deprived me of this with your stupid laws and practices?

"I am a child with no future, but, remember, I am, with my friends, the next generation and we should have had rights - the right to be brought up with firm but loving guidance, the right to have a future rather than the threat of jail."

Though he was in trouble from the age of 10, wrote the grandmother, "he was allowed by Child, Youth and Family Services [in a previous incarnation] to run rings round everyone and learned no lessons on being responsible for his actions. It took him 10 long years to come right.

"If he had been made to be responsible for his actions at 13, he might have had to suffer the consequences immediately and might have learned some valuable lessons."

The other reader writes that he is convinced that "the politically correct Judas sheep will one day lead the PC flock to slaughter." Well, they're certainly doing their blind best.

He encloses an excerpt from an address given by Mr Justice Megarry to the British Institute of Legal Executives which he found in a magazine. It, too, deserves a wider audience:

"In a permissive society, the permissionists have unlimited rights and no duties, while the rest of us have unlimited duties and no rights.

"For example, there is the permissive right to take drugs. This is balanced by the duties of doctors and lawyers to lend their aid when the taking of drugs has got out of hand.

"There is the right to the freedom of sexual intercourse. This is balanced by the duty of society to provide the treatment for venereal disease and the termination of pregnancies that so often are required.

"There is the right to drop out of the world. That is balanced by the world's duty to supply the permissionists with the food, the medical, dental, legal and other services that their society cannot provide.

"In the permissive society, each member claims the right to what he wants, whatever burdens others may have to bear as a consequence. This one-way permissiveness is what used to be known as selfishness."

Thank God there are still people who can see through the plausible palaver of human rights, children and young persons, race relations, privacy, Treaty of Waitangi and other politically correct legislation to the harsh realities they impose on us.

There is hope for us yet.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz