“Tomorrow’s potential troublemakers can be identified even before they are born, Tony Blair has suggested”.
Unlike most of my friends of the left-liberal persuation, I’m not automatically against the principle of ASBOs – there’s no denying that there are some people who make the lives of other people a misery through behaviour which isn’t actually illegal, and there should be a mechanism for dealing with them which has more legal weight than a stern talking to. If the mechanism is being abused in its implementation, that’s another issue.
But what this new ‘initiative’, branded as ‘Foetal ASBOs’ by the media, is planning on doing is looking at parents, and deciding in advance that their children are ‘bound to’ grow up as problem children – before they’ve even been born. Some people have branded the idea as verging on genetic determinism.
Back in the old days of usenet, it was always considered bad form to compare somebody, or an idea, to Hitler – basically it meant the discussion had run out of useful things to be said. In this instance, I think a comparison with the behaviour of the Nazi regime in 20th century Germany is not too wide of the mark.
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