NOW AND TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW / 514

In 2031 AD. Bethany Bayne will celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday. Possibly she may have been married that summer just before her birthday. She will be a tall slender fair-complexioned young woman with flaxen hair that has darkened with maturity. She will have accomplished so much already in her life. She will have graduated recently from university and she will be a talented pianist. She will have a full and wonderful life to which she looks forward. Bethany will remember her youth and childhood as wonderful and happy years within the love of her family with a mom and dad who have cherished her. The first few years of her life will be a distant blip about which she recalls only what she learned from the stories she heard.  

Contrary to Judge Crabtree’s 2011 decision on March 2^nd, Bethany and her siblings do not need protection from her parents. She needs her parents.

It is not okay to hit a child. It is no more okay for an adult to hit a child than it is for the adult to hit another adult in a lineup at the Canadian Tire cashier line, or to hit one’s spouse or a fellow employee. I say that because there was a line of thinking in this country for too long that seemed to excuse hitting a child. In truth, it is far worse for an adult to strike a child, a smaller, vulnerable and defenseless person and one who is learning from even this bad example of adult behaviour.

Hitting a child for the purposes of discipline has only gradually become unacceptable and outdated. It isn’t that long ago that our society endorsed striking a child. Corporal punishment in school was accepted practice. I recall in grade three receiving three powerful strokes of a thick leather strap across the palm of my two small hands because I was playfully wrestling with a friend on the way home from school. Apparently we had contravened a rule not so well communicated that we should not get out of the line as we children filed to the stop light to cross the street. I don’t think that punishment was deserved. Reprimand of course. BIG Mrs. Campbell administered the strokes. Then in grade six I was strapped again, this time for throwing a stone at a girl that was pestering me. This time punishment was deserved, but not this. Three lashes on the hands again but this time from Mr. Petkau, a towering man with mighty arms. I couldn’t use my hands for five days to deliver my newspapers.

Too many adults have little control over their impatience and anger. Too many children suffer bruises, lacerations, black eyes, fractures, burns, head injuries and some have even died because adult discipline that uses corporal punishment has gone too far. Do I think that children need to be protected. Yes I certainly do.  

Did Zabeth and/or Paul willfully harm their seven week old daughter in the autumn of 2007? A medical opinion guessed yes. The MCFD bought that and have stuck to it. That was the foundational diagnosis and claim. Judge Crabtree said NO! At least they didn’t shake her.  And there was no evidence that they physically did anything else that was harmful to her. Yet they were still deemed to be a risk, modestly so, 10%. Conjecture has characterized this case against the Baynes from the first day and sadly it didn’t stop with the Judge’s ruling in March. So, now, Paul and Zabeth are living a very demanding few months as they engage in seriously intrusive tests into their histories, beliefs, daily thoughts, marriage, housekeeping, dreams, hopes, everything. They are being subjected to a level of scrutiny that might frighten many of us. But they will do it, and the assessors of the gathered data will at last learn that Paul and Zabeth are trustworthy and reliable individuals who want nothing more in life than to be able to have the remaining years as their children grow into adolescence and adulthood.

And one day to watch with pride as their beautiful daughter embraces her own future at the side of her chosen life partner.