Kyle

I just thought this take on childhood was fascinating. It talks about the historical context of the concept of childhood. For example:

It is around this same time that another change was occurring - this one a shift in attitude. In the early seventeenth century, there did not seem to be the same emphasis on sexual decency and propriety that we see in later years (Aries, 1962). People were not shocked by coarse jokes and sexual games with children (e.g., attempting to grab a child’s genitals). Children under the age of puberty were simply not considered aware of sexual matters. Nobody thought that sexual references could corrupt a child’s innocence because the idea of childish innocence did not yet exist (Aries, 1962).

I originally wrote this as an email, but I think it deserves to be here:

It occurs to me to ponder… is mandatory reporting ever a good idea? Is it ever legal?

I mean, it’s easier to say YES if the first example you use is the most depraved crime you can think of, based solely on the strength of your repulsion for the particular crime. And children are an easy target because we, as a society, have a hard time with what, exactly, children are.

Are children people?

Does a person (say, a neighbor) have the right to refuse to report a crime he doesn’t think should be reported? Say, someone makes a left turn at a red-light, or violates a housing ordinance (puts up an un-approved fence, say). Is this right ever abrogated for a severe enough crime? If you see a gang-rape in an alley, should you be legally required to call the police? How about if a friend confides to you that her ex-boyfriend raped her?

Does mandatory reporting turn us into a Big Brother state where children are encouraged to tattle on their parents to the feds for disloyalty and unpatriotism?

How much power over your children should you get? You can put them to work without paying them, but only as their parent. You can force optional surgery on them, but only as their parent (read: circumcision). Should you be able to deny your child access to a polio vaccine or polio treatment because your religious beliefs demand that you avoid stymying God’s will by going to a doctor? How about denying your prematurely born child the respirator it/he/she needs in order to live? How about your abused child with broken bones—can you deny him medical treatment in order to avoid going to prison (5th Amendment says you don’t have to provide evidence against yourself)?

If your 13-year-old child walks himself to a medical facility with a broken arm and gets treatment, can you sue the hospital for not checking with you first?

Can your 8-year-old that’s afraid of needles refuses to get her rubella and tuberculosis innoculations, or can you force her? What about a 16-year-old that doesn’t want to get his prostate checked the first time?

If a 13-year-old got raped by her grandfather, can’t admit it to her family (they wouldn’t believe her), but manages to take herself to a clinic, can law enforcement take her medical records without her permission? With her permission? What if she just tore herself while experimenting with masturbation?

How come she could go to a Catholic confessional and explain this all to a priest and the government can’t demand that the priest tell anyone?

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This email was in response to recent events in Indiana where Planned Parenthood is/was fighting Medicaid because Medicaid was looking to enforce the Indiana state law mandating that doctors must report any evidence of sexual abuse (including molestation) in girls under the age of 14. In Indiana, any child under the age of 14 who is treated sexually in virtually any way is considered to have been molested. A complaint had been filed that Planned Parenthood was not following the law, so Medicaid requested all records of all patients under the age of 14 that Planned Parenthood had seen. Planned Parenthood refused.

I was thinking about this this morning, and I was realizing that (thinking about the intent of the law here) the youngsters that Medicaid really wants to know about are the ones that have gone to Planned Parenthood but have not gone to the authorities. Now, an argument can be made that perhaps by going to a doctor they thought they were going to the authorities, but bear with me. Imagine Indiana without this law. Going to the doctor and going to the authorities are two different acts. Of course, in rape cases, you should go to both and report your rape. …but for some reason many women do not go to the police. I think in many cases they probably regret this decision later, but in some cases I imagine they do not. But, for whatever the reason (privacy, guilt, love) some adult women do not go to the police when they are raped.

It occurred to me this morning in the shower that the law is essentially saying: in order for you (you being a 13-year-old who has had sex/been raped) to get medical attention, you must agree to report your activity to the authorities. Unless you agree to go to the authorities, you are banned from receiving medical attention. It’s not worded that way, of course, and I think they should go to the authorities… but is that the kind of punishment we want to mete out for those who are too scared or too in love or too something to report it to the police?

This takes thought in another direction: should not reporting a crime be considered a crime in and of itself, worthy of punishment? Because that’s essentially what this says: report the crime, or suffer the consequences of not being able to go to the doctor until all physical evidence of the crime is gone (however long that takes). This seems very similar to Good Samaritan laws, somehow: do something about the crime, or suffer the legal consequences.

Why isn’t this law in place for rape victims of all ages?

Should your doctor be a trusted advisor, or just another arm of the law? For example, if you went to you doctor in Virginia (or in the military) and asked about advice regarding anal sex with your wife, should he be required to turn you in for violating their sodomy laws? How about if your wife visits him?

But what gets me the most is that priestly confessions are considered sacrosanct, and priests have no requirement to turn over criminals. Why should doctors?

Something I’ve been nothing, and this obviously isn’t a serious problem on a system as small as the one I administer, is that spam bounces frequently fill up the queue.

What happens is that some spammer sends spam to one of my legitimate users (illegitimate users are rejected right away, which may make gathering legitimate names easy, but avoids illegitimate bounces). Some of my legitimate users have their mail forwarded to verizon.com, which enjoys refusing to accept email. Of course, my policy on MY email server is to accept all mail: my spam filters (e.g. spamassassin) can be wrong and therefore are only advisory. When verizon refuses to accept the mail, my mail server is stuck holding the bag: I can’t deliver it, and I usually can’t bounce it either. I’d like to just dispose of it, but my queue lifetime is 7 days, so I have to keep it in the queue for 7 days while qmail realizes that verizon is never going to accept it, and the return address doesn’t exist.

So here’s my thought: have two qmail installs, one with a queue lifetime of 7 days, one with a queue lifetime of 1 day. Then, put a script in the QMAILQUEUE chain that decides which qmail-queue to use (the 7-day one or the 1-day one) based on whatever I want (i.e. the X-Spam-Score header, or the $RECIPIENT envariable).

Probably won’t happen on the WOPR here, because, of course, people are skittish about that kind of fiddling (read: it’s a production machine). which means it’ll basically never get done. Oh well - but it was a thought.