A Texas family law judge, Judge William Adams, was secretly videotaped beating his 16 year old daughter, Hilary, who suffers from cerebral palsy because she watched video games. Warning! This is a truly shocking video but must be shown because it illustrates the inhumanity of the 'child protection system'.

This judge is a fitting representative of the cruel industry set up around child protection. Supporting the judiciary are the incompetent, uncaring and profiteering social workers, so-called 'expert witnesses' and a foster industry. These are all now being challenged by our new initiative.

See the judge beating his daughter here.

There is also excellent background reading in a paper 'Family courts and how incompetent (but highly paid) so-called experts are failing children' by Professor Jane Ireland, published in March 2012 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2114616/Family- courts-incompetent-highly-paid-called-experts-failing- children.html#ixzz1p5zUOj3A)

Comment on the video from Ben, our psychoanalyst.

The video made me weep.

Moral guardians like Judge Adams have helped see to it that essentially non-violent people, who are guilty of nothing more than entertaining private erotic fantasies, are permanently banished from the human community they once served, and then forced into a netherworld of lifelong abjection. They must 'address their offending behaviour' and learn to 'empathise with their victims' by compulsory attendance on coercive and intimidating 'treatment programmes' before being consigned to a life of obligatory unemployment and unremitting poverty, while the good judge and his like-minded fellows move on to the next judgement, raking in lucrative fortunes as they proceed.

The poisonous ideological edifice that stalks Anglophone western countries under the preposterous name of 'child protection' is sorely in need of a popular uprising and a resolute demolition. It is the most pernicious, paranoid and punitive of all discourses in our midst. Years ago, before the expert's discourse of 'mental health' was challenged by those who it incarcerated, drugged and surgically mutilated, being classified as 'mentally ill' was to be consigned to tyranny. But the discourse of mental health now has important (if insufficient) legal protections built into it, thanks to these challenges: people who are compelled to become psychiatric inpatients, for example, must be subject to regular review, in which their voices and those of their representatives can at least be heard, and they may not be left to rot for decades in impenetrable institutions.

No similar protections currently exist in child protection ideology, which operates largely beyond public scrutiny in secretive family courts in the UK and has an elaborate machinery of revulsion-generating propaganda to fuel it, from the police to innumerable other agencies like the 'charities' NSPCC, Barnardos and Kidscape. The French Marxist, Louis Althusser, would have recognised all these as Ideological State Apparatuses, agencies designed to sustain and reproduce the State's dominant ideology.

Fostering the paranoid fantasy that adults are always suspect, that they are always potential dangers to children, is deeply destructive and corrosive. Adults are a vital resource, a necessary source of wisdom and support, for the young. The pernicious and unassuageably paranoid ideology of child protection presided over by Judge Adams and his ilk needs to go; it's time for the generous intergenerational solidarity and mutual affection already being practised by the Intergenerational Human Rights Initiative to take its place.

There is, however, an irony here. The great hypocrisy of Judge Adams and his brutal concentration camp behaviour was exposed only because his defenceless 16 year old daughter secretly and, possibly in anticipation of the beating she was about to receive, turned on her video camera. Thus we, the world, were able to witness a great example of child abuse and, of equal importance, evidence of the perpetrator in action, even though it took seven years for her to acquire the courage to release it. How ironical then that we criminalize those who through curiosity or accident obtain similar evidence of child pornography, to the point that, even if both child and perpetrator are identified, bringing such evidence to the attention of the police would result in prosecution and probable ruin for the reporter.

It seems to me that looking at coloured pixels on a computer screen, even pixels depicting a couple of horny nude teenagers, is rather less heinous than beating your terrified and helpless daughter for ten minutes with a strap. That the person who commits the latter is paid to sit in judgement on the former is surely an absurdity, if a tragic one.

If a revered and 'honourable' judge can, in the privacy of his own home, unleash hellish abuse on his defenceless daughter, we might question the wisdom of a common practise in UK law courts. Judges presiding on 'indecent images' cases are routinely invited by the prosecution to privately view the offending material before passing sentence. They always emerge outraged and disgusted, 'decently' attempting to temper their spontaneous human indignation with the restraint the law imposes upon them.

But with examples such as the venerable Judge Adams before us, how could anyone possibly trust that an apparently outraged judge who passes a life-shattering sentence has not been secretly titillated by the images he has just viewed? Disgust is a great alibi for secret erotic stirrings. As the editor of Inquistion21 once aptly commented, we are supposed to believe that judges do not get erections. Well, they certainly seem to fly into psychotic rages when they think they're in private. Conduct they would condemn unreservedly in others is apparently OK for them if they do it in wealth-insulated secrecy.

Judges should keep their noses out of other people's intimate affairs unless real violence has been committed and concentrate instead on real abuses, such as the coolly brutal conduct of our rulers in launching illegal wars on defenceless nations or the looting of our economy by unaccountable fiscal gamblers. But they never have in the past and they won't in the future unless forced to do so. Liberty can only be won; it can never be granted or conferred (that's merely 'permission'). One way of thinking about the rule of law is to consider it the right of the powerless to challenge the powerful, rather than the rule of judges and policeman.

Work to be done

Obviously there is much work to do in the UK where several volunteers are ready and waiting, but first to Ireland.

No better place to begin than to access and study what appears to be the only resource for those abused by the child protection service, mainly parents. This is a forum called CPS Victims.

The people involved in this initiative (IHRI) have some experience of dealing with social workers and family courts in the UK, where the situation is probably worse than it is in Ireland. We also unfortunately, have experience of dealing with equally bad probation officers and a lot of experience with poor solicitors and corrupt expert witnesses. Indeed, the latter are amongst our favoured targets as it is often so easy to see through their incompetence and dishonesty.

Here is one way we see of tackling the problem in Ireland and we can do this either on our own or in conjunction with others.

First we advise the distraught parent or parents under assault to demand whatever rights they are due to see a documented account of the reasons behind the measures been taken against them. Where required we will write the letter demanding this. Our special expertise is knowing when actions by officials breach rights laid down in either (or both) the Irish Constitution or the European Convention on Human Rights. Once we begin to explore this you can be sure that the officials will begin to tread carefully.

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