Anyone would think that Sweden is trying to encourage a mass exodus of young families from their country. After the case of Domenic Johansson, who was snatched from his family as they were on a plane about to leave the country, we now have the government trying to lay down the law as to how parents should discipline their children.
KARLSTAD, Sweden, November 30, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A Swedish district court has sentenced a couple to nine months each in prison and fined them the equivalent of US $10,650 after they admitted to spanking three of their four children as a normal part of their parenting methods. Corporal punishment of children by parents was made illegal in Sweden in 1979, an early step in what a U.S. parental rights lawyer called the nearly total take-over of parenting by the state in Sweden.
Court documents, quoted by Sveriges Television, said that the parents, who have not been named in the press, “explained that they had used, what they themselves described as spanking, physical punishment as part of their methods for raising the children.”
There is no indication of abuse by the parents in the released documents, with the court noting that the parents “had a loving and caring relationship with their children.”
Nevertheless, the parents have been sent to prison and fined 25,000 kronor for each of the “affected children.” The children have been remanded to state-sponsored foster care since early this summer, and Mike Donnelly, Director of International Relations for the US-based Home School Legal Defence Association (HSLDA), told LifeSiteNews.com that it is “extremely unlikely” that the children will ever be returned to their family home.
Donnelly said that the case is typical of the stories of many families with traditional values in Sweden: “In the area of family rights in Sweden things really aren’t going well there.”
Read full article
Scroll down the Friends of Domenic Johansson page for more information on child abuse by the Swedish government and links. Particularly disturbing is Elin's story.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHi PDeverit, thanks for your comment and for your sensitivity in posting a warning regarding the links. This post is really about abuse of families and disruption of family life by an autocratic government rather than spanking. However, my own views on spanking are that it is a legitimate method of disciplining children provided, 1. it is not done in anger and 2. that the force used is only enough to convey the fact that you disapprove of the child's actions. The amount of force used is often the problem as seen by the photos in your link above. That is abuse not discipline. Discipline doesn't maim or injure, it merely corrects.
ReplyDelete