“The court has banned and ordered the dissolution” of the Martijn organisation, a spokeswoman for the civil court in the northern city of Assen, Luta van der Leij, told AFP.
The court said in a statement Martijn glorified sex with children as “something normal and acceptable, or as something that should be.”
“The court finds lobbying for these rights is a grave infraction of the values of our society,” it said.
Dutch prosecutors on May 16 in closing arguments called for the organisation — which has been around since 1982, to be banned and dissolved.
1982? That’s 30 years! What took so long? This group should have been banned within 30 seconds of its inception, not 30 years!
The policy of banning the application of sun block at school has been exposed as a complete and utter failure. When teachers are applying lotion on themselves and making comments about how the children are burning up, it becomes clear that this policy, as well-intentioned as it may have been, is cruel and must be repealed.
Michener says school officials have promised her the sunscreen policy will be changed by fall, thanks to a change in state law that gives schools new leeway on handling over-the-counter drugs. Shannon McMinimee, a lawyer for Tacoma Public Schools, said in an e-mail that the school board was expected to review the policy but would need to seek guidance from state officials and health experts first.
But sunscreen rules are common. They typically stem from state and local policies that stop kids from bringing any drug — including non-prescription drugs — to school, says Jeff Ashley, a California dermatologist who leads an advocacy group called Sun Safety for Kids.
Sunscreens are regulated as over-the-counter drugs, so many districts treat them like aspirin, just to be safe, he says.
It time for all schools in all states to follow California’s lead. This is a bad policy. Change it now!
Growing numbers of children are failing to develop properly at a young age because of the toxic pressures of modern life, it was claimed.
The powerful lobby of childcare experts said that many “commercially vulnerable” under-16s were spending too much time sat unsupervised in front of televisions, games consoles and the internet in their bedroom instead of playing outdoors.
Children are also among the most tested in the Western world after being pushed into formal schooling at an increasingly young age and more likely to be exposed to junk food and poor diets than elsewhere, they said.
The comments were made as a new group – the Save Childhood Movement – was launched today in bid to highlight the multiple threats facing young people.
I found the court ruling in this case quite extreme. I can’t work out why this mother wasn’t granted granted supervised contact with her children on the condition that she undergo ongoing therapy for her mental illness:
TO the outside world she was a loving mum who had a very sickly young son.
But after 115 New South Wales hospital visits in three years, she has been banned from contacting her nine-year-old child – and his three siblings – before they turn 18 amid grave fears that her behaviour could lead to one of them being harmed or even killed.
The “extreme” order was made after the Children’s Court heard the woman showed signs of Munchausen syndrome by proxy – a form of child abuse where parents repeatedly invent illnesses for their children because they crave attention and sympathy. She denies the claim.
The mother has also been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.
In the first case of its kind in the state, the court heard that while obsessing on her eldest child she neglected the others – aged three, six and seven – describing them as “side salad”.
Child experts referred to them as “forgotten children”.
When a court bans a parents of all contact with their children they need a very good reason.I am not convinced the reasoning here warrants the severity of the ban.
Do you believe this mother was harshly dealt with?
What kind of policy prevents young children from applying sun block? How on earth can schools proclaim to be looking after the welfare of their students when they would rather see them burn in the sun than let them apply lotion?
Two young girls had to go to the hospital with severe sunburns after a Washington state school forbid the sisters from applying sunscreen during an outdoor field day.
Jesse Michener said she was horrified when her two daughters, Violet, 11, and Zoe, 9, came home from school Tuesday sporting “hurts-to-look-at” burns after spending five hours outdoors with no protection, according to a post on the mom’s blog.
Michener said she didn’t rub sunscreen on her kids because it was raining when they left for school. She argued that even if she did apply the much-needed block, the school wouldn’t have let the girls reapply to maintain protection due to a “deeply flawed” school policy.
Children in all states except for California are not allowed to apply or bring the product to school, ABC News reports, partially because it is considered a medication.
Sunblock – a medication? So let me get this straight. The same school system that is going berserk when it comes to recommending children be prescribed ADHD drugs such as dexamphetamine and methylphenidate, prevent children from applying sun protection on the grounds that it’s a medication?
If I taught under such twisted logic I would risk my job over this issue. I would seek parental information regarding allergies and written permission from them to allow their children to put on sun block. No doctors certificate, no consultation with policy makers and hopefully, no sun cancers on innocent children raised under a stupid, incoherent and irrational system.
I have traditionally been against the installation of cameras in classrooms. My view was that such an initiative would show disrespect for the teacher and make them feel insecure and constantly scrutinised. I also felt that it would weaken the teacher’s authority.
But with the proliferation of secret cell phone videos that have made its way to YouTube, I wonder if it’s in the best interest of teachers and students alike to have cameras installed in the classroom. This will stop children from filming their teachers without their knowledge, it will pick up incidents where students are bullying their teacher and it will prevent predators from abusing children:
In the wake of school abuse scandals like the one involving Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles, some people think equipping classrooms with camera could protect children from predators.
Surveillance cameras are nothing new. They are in convenience stores and government buildings and even in bus stations.
But they aren’t in classrooms.
Mal Weisberg, the owner of a company that sells surveillance equipment, said this should change.
“These parents deserve to know what their kids are up to,” said Weisburg, whose company, Privacy Connection, has been selling such cameras for a quarter century.
I noticed while teaching students about persuasive writing how difficult they find it to form opinions of their own. It is almost as if children today do what they have learned to do without ever reflecting on the reasons why. This poses a significant problem when it comes to peer pressure. If you don’t have the tools to work out right from wrong, positive from negative, you can be very easily lead.
WHILE parents have been teaching their kids not to argue with adults for generations, new research shows it may have its benefits.
A study by the University of Virginia shows that young teenagers who are taught to argue effectively are more likely to resist peer pressure to use drugs or alcohol later in adolescence.
“It turns out that what goes on in the family is actually a training ground for teens in terms of how to negotiate with other people,” said Joseph Allen, psychology professor and lead author of the study, results of which were published in a recent edition of the journal Child Development.
Prof Allen said that parents are often “scared to death about peer pressure” but also frustrated by argumentative children.
“What we’re finding is there’s a surprising connection between the two,” he said.
Prof Allen said that teens “learn they can be taken seriously” through interactions with their parents.
“Sometimes, it can be counterintuitive to tell parents to let their teens argue with them,” said Joanna Chango, a clinical psychology graduate student who worked on the study.
In fact, learning effective argumentation skills can help teenagers learn to “assert themselves and establish a sense of autonomy”, she said.
I don’t agree with the assertion that we should encourage our children to argue with us. Instead, teachers and parents alike, should encourage students to question everything, to feel confident to form their own opinions and not to follow a crowd just for the sake of safety in numbers.
The parents of a third-grade boy have sued two Texas school employees, alleging that they forced their son to strip and shower in front of them because he “smelled badly, was dirty and had bad hygiene.”
The eight-year-old was singled out last November and taken to the nurse’s office at Peaster Elementary School where he was forced to remove his clothes, the suit alleges, the Courthouse News Service reported.
The two school officials then “began violently washing his body with a washcloth, scrubbing him over a large portion of his body, stuck cotton balls in his ears, all while ridiculing and harassing him about being ‘dirty,'” the complaint claims.
The child’s parents, Amber and Michael Tilley, said they lodged a police report over the incident but no charges were laid.
On Thursday, the Tilleys filed their lawsuit against Peaster Independent School District and Peaster Elementary School employees Julie West and Debbie Van Rite in federal court in Fort Worth.
“It’s terrible, and we don’t want anything like that to happen to any other children,” Amber Tilley told NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.
According to the lawsuit, the incident left the boy “visibly and severely distraught,” and he had to see a therapist after.
“He just kept on and on, wanting to take baths,” Amber Tilley said. “You know, he just felt so disgusting.”
She added that her son did not have a problem with body odour or cleanliness.
The school district and Peaster Elementary did not respond to calls for comments Friday.
It’s stories like this that cause me to rethink my idealism. I may believe that teachers sign up for the profession because of a desire to help all children reach their potential. However, when you read stories like this one, you wonder how on earth the teachers involved could have rationalised such a poorly thought out strategy. These are not the actions of proud and passionate teachers:
A Texas teacher will lose her job after ordering more than 20 kindergartners to line up and hit a classmate accused of being a bully, a district spokesman said Friday.
The teacher at a suburban San Antonio school is accused of orchestrating the slugfest after a younger teaching colleague went to her last month seeking suggestions on how to discipline the 6-year-old, according to a police report from the Judson Independent School District.
Both teachers at Salinas Elementary were placed on paid administrative leave, though the one who allegedly arranged the punishment will not work for the district next school year, said district spokesman Steve Linscomb. Prosecutors are reviewing the allegations and will determine whether formal charges will be filed in 30 to 60 days.
The police report alleges the teacher chose to show the child “why bullying is bad” by instructing his peers to “Hit him!” and “Hit him harder!” It also states that the second teacher intervened only after one of the children hit the boy hard on his upper back.
“Twenty-four of those kids hit him and he said that most of them hit him twice,” Amy Neely (pictured above), the mother of 6-year-old Aiden, told KENS-TV. She did not specify what injuries her son may have received.
Neely said her son is not a problem child and that this was the first she’d heard of teachers having issues with him. She said she wants to make sure the teacher who ordered the hitting does not work in a classroom again.
“She doesn’t need to be around any children,” Neely told the television station.
The mother added — and the police report confirmed — that some of Aiden’s classroom friends told him they didn’t want to hit the boy but did so because they were afraid not to.
It is terribly tragic to read of the number of children harming themselves on purpose. What makes it even more unsettling is that these children don’t take up this practice based on peer pressure, television, advertising or any other common triggers for unhealthy child behaviour.
When a child decides to cut themself, they are expressing deep and complex issues such as hopelessness, self-hatred, loneliness and anger. Often a child’s cuts goes unnoticed.
Studies have suggested about one-fifth of teens and young adults engage in self-injury at some point to relieve negative emotions or reach out for help, for example. But this report is the first to ask the question of kids as young as seven. Researchers found one in 12 of the third-, sixth- and ninth-graders they interviewed had self-injured at least once without the intention of killing themselves.
“A lot of people tend to think that school-aged children, they’re happy, they don’t have a lot to worry about,” said Benjamin Hankin, a psychologist from the University of Denver who worked on the study. “Clearly a lot more kids are doing this than people have known.”
Hankin and his colleagues spoke with 665 youth about their thoughts and behaviors related to self-harm. They found close to eight percent of third graders, four percent of sixth graders and 13 percent of ninth graders had hit, cut, burned or otherwise purposefully injured themselves at least once. In younger kids hitting was the most common form of self-injury, whereas high schoolers were most likely to cut or carve their skin.
Ten of the kids, or 1.5 percent, met proposed psychological criteria for a diagnosis of non-suicidal self-injury, meaning they had hurt themselves at least five times and had a lot of negative feelings tied to the behavior, the researchers reported Monday in Pediatrics. Youth who self-injure often say they do it to help stop bad emotions, or to feel something — even pain — when they are otherwise feeling numb, according to psychologists.
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