Yes, Brad illustrates an interesting problem here. I remember around 1993 after the UK government, loosely, incorporated the concept of Children's Rights (actually the 'paramount interests of the child') into its 1989 Children Act, that it led to some spectacular incursions on the rights of parents, and people who work with children (teachers, care- workers, social services etc).
My point is that these attacks were made largely from _within_ the discourse of feminism, and of the defence of minorities, resting on arguments that the family was a site of repression, and that children had to be protected from their parents, who were assumed to be malevolent towards them.
There were a series of raids and child abductions organised by the Social services in Cleveland, the Orkneys, Oxfordshire and elsewhere. Children were taken from their homes not in ones or twos, but in scores. Those children were subjected to obscene interrogations, often lasting much longer than they were up to handling, in which social workers persistently tried to force them to make vile sexual allegations against their parents. In Cleveland, doctors subjected scores of children to the (now discredited) 'anal dilation test' - and all this done in the name of 'child protection'.
Predictably this hysteria over the 'abusive' or even 'toxic' family quickly spilled over into a witchunt against sexual deviants. Gay men working with children were particularly subject to harrassment. All child care workers were subject to police investigations that would be unnacceptable in any other sphere. Violent assaults against suspected paedophiles (who often turned out to be simple cases of mistaken identity), and in at least one case a girl was burned to death in Glasgow, because a mob thought her father was a peadophile.
Now, consider this:
The panic about child sex abuse did not emanate from the right.
The principle critics of child sex abuse, and proponents of these extraordinary measures against families and child-care workers were feminists or leftists. In this country the principle orchestrators of the child-sex panic were Beatrix Campbell, former Communist Party member and feminist writer, Dr Marietta Higgs, academic Gideon Ben-Tovim another fellow traveler of the Marxism Today journal, Sue Lees of the University of North London unit investigating domestic violence, and so on.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. A concern for the problem of the 'repressive family' drove these leftists to believe the worst of people, and to presume widespread abuse where in truth it was exceptional. Their over-riding concern to prevent abuse, made them apologists for the most profoundly oppressive intrusion by the state into people's private lives. -- Jim heartfield