Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by SilverElfin 281 days ago
[flagged]
1 comments

No they are not. If you abuse them you can be put in prison and unlike property you can't sell them or use them as collateral. Propertarian ideology is delusional.
I used the word “property” in quotes because I am just repeating the word the earlier comment used. I’m not suggesting you can sell people. You’re attacking a strawman.

Regardless - my point stands that children belong first to the parents. Using words like “abuse”, which aren’t applicable to this situation at hand, is just a way to appeal to emotion rather than acknowledging that states taking over parental judgment is explicitly authoritarian.

Not giving your child medical care is abuse.
It is for parents to judge what medical care is appropriate. You’re making it seem like everyone must consent to injecting whatever the government tells them, which is dystopian.
No, children are not dolls for parents to neglect as much as they want with no legitimate justification. Are they allowed to withhold food too? Keep them from getting school? Marry 12 year olds off?

Oh, woops, the GOP do support that last one.

If they want to homeschool, yes that is their fundamental right. Not everyone has to share the same culture or knowledge or way of life. As for food - do you think all Arab households should behave their children taken away when they withhold food for religious fasting?
They're very much applicable to the situation at hand. Abusive parents are a common enough phenomenon that it can't be handwaved away, and istm that abusive behavior is just taking this ownership idea to its logical conclusion, since there are few/no restrictions on exploiting or even destroying your own property as long as it doesn't impact others.
Abusive parents are extremely rare. It should be hand waved away to give most parents the freedom to parent that they fundamentally deserve. Withholding a vaccine isn’t abuse - it’s just a legitimate decision to live differently and judge risks and benefits differently. What you’re arguing for is a highly controlled authoritarian culture with no room to think differently from the powers that be. Free societies value individual rights above societal ones exactly to avoid this basic authoritarian trap.
> Abusive parents are extremely rare.

The people who actually study this say you could not be more wrong. They probably also say you should stop randomly making things up and should consider what else you're also wrong about.

"Approximately 1 in 4 children experiences child abuse or neglect in their lifetime ... 91% of the time, the perpetrator is a parent." - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK470337/

"Child abuse and neglect are common. At least one in seven children experienced child abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States." - https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/index.html#cdc...

"Statistics provided by the Department of Children and Families (DCF) ... show that in about 82% of substantiated abuse cases the alleged perpetrator was the birth parent." - https://www.cga.ct.gov/PS98/rpt/olr/htm/98-R-0509.htm (adoptive parents are in there too but counted separately, in case you're wondering)

I don't care how you slice the numbers, there's no way to get from 23% of children (90% of 25%) in the US having abusive parents to abusive parents being "extremely rare" unless your definition of "extremely rare" here is utterly insane.

Searching for things that confirm your view isn’t the way you find answers.

As an example, your first link isn’t even a real study. Hosting some text on a .gov website doesn’t make it correct. And Statpearls is basically a low quality scammy source. But you don’t need to know that about its reputation - just reading your own link’s content would make it obvious that it is REALLY low quality - in this case written by a couple random grad students.

Since we’re cherry picking things, I’ll quote this from your own source, which shows that even when you use very broad definitions, abuse is extremely rare:

> In the United States, Child Protective Services estimated that 9 out of 1000 children are victims of child maltreatment.

Consider what else you're also wrong about.