Is common sense the commodity in shortest supply? Are there limits to how far the UK is willing to follow the US down foolish roads?

Our Macau correspondent Gordon points us to an article concerning a tendency to hysterical response in the US that is coupled with true neglect - on the issue of child protection. Is this a variation of Michael Moore's conclusion that the appalling number of deaths through guns in the US is a function of the cynical manipulation of fear by the government and media?

The article in question concludes:

'The tragic irony is that the panic over sex offenders distracts the public from the real danger, a far greater threat to children than sexual predators: parental abuse and neglect. The vast majority of crimes against children are committed not by released sex offenders but instead by the victim’s own family, church clergy, and family friends. According to a 2003 report by the Department of Human Services, hundreds of thousands of children are abused and neglected each year by their parents and caregivers, and more than 1,500 American children died from that abuse in 2003—most of the victims under four years old. That is more than four children killed per day—not by convicted sexual offenders or Internet predators, but by those entrusted to care for them. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, “danger to children is greater from someone they or their family knows than from a stranger.”

If journalists, child advocates, and lawmakers are serious about wanting to protect children, they should turn from the burning matchbook in front of them to face the blazing forest fire behind them. The resources allocated to tracking ex-felons who are unlikely to re-offend could be much more effectively spent on preventing child abuse in the home and hiring more social workers.

Eventually this predator panic will subside and some new threat will take its place. Expensive, ineffective, and unworkable laws will be left in its wake when the panic passes. And no one is protecting America from that'. http://www.csicop.org/si/2006-05/panic.html

Is this a 21stC equivalent of Victorian England that purported to be so moral whilst drawing a veil over dreadful abuse of children and women?

If fear manipulation is the issue then political nous and a deepening of understanding of how the media is used is the answer. But the deeper needs lie in education of what it is to be human, in care for others and in facing and dealing with the dark side of human nature.

One way to see abuse is as a want of connectedness, of empathy and compassion and other-centredness. Predator panic as the author, Bejamin Radford, says is to (deliberately?) miss the 'blazing forest' situated where we will not look.

 

Care and trust is an interpretaion as well as a responsibility to be enacted.

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SunWALK is a framework to help you articulate your model of (holistic) education & evaluate others.

My own work, using the SunWALK framework suggests

a spiritualizing (or humanizing) pedagogy of human education as:

the storied development of meaning, which is constructed, and de-constructed, physically

mentally and spiritually, through

Wise & Willing Action, via Loving and Knowing – developed in Community, through

the ‘Dialectical Spiritualization’ of Caring,

Creativity & Criticality processes, all undertaken in the light of the ‘Sun’ of chosen

higher-order values and beliefs, using best

available, appropriate content.

SEE http://www.sunwalk.org.uk/_sgg/mu_1.htm

What then is the real difference between the 'holistically minded teacher/practitioner' and the 'non holistically-minded teacher/practitioner'?

After thinking about this for the last 14 years my best answer to date is that;

the holistically minded practitioner is trying to do each particular thing, theoretical and practical,

with consciousness of connections with, and between, all pertinent contexts - environmental

context, social justice context etc. - right up to and including some sense of the Whole.

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