A yes or no on this?
S Korea parents fined over rape
A South Korean court has fined the parents of a teenage rapist more than $60,000 (£40,000) for failing to supervise their son.
The 18-year-old, who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, raped a local seven-year-old girl in 2006.
The court said the boy had grown up watching pornography and had imitated a film he had seen, during the attack.
It said his parents could have prevented the crime with appropriate education, but neglected their duty.
For my part, something in this kind of justice seems to be fair, as it seemingly wants to correct a long historic development that has had the result of empowering the individual and weakening the family. The development is of the sort that begins well and ends badly. In the Western situation, which is now the global situation, it begins with the elimination of a Roman law that designated children as merely things and not as people as such. And what separates a thing from a person is that a person can impose his/her will on a thing and not the other way around. A thing that is owned is a thing that is not itself but the person who owns it. The child is then reduced to a pet (please refer to my post on dog ownership).
Christianity eliminated this kind relationship and began recognizing children as persons with rights that must be defended. For Christians it was a matter of protecting the rights of the child until they were of the age to possess them, like an inheritance. We find in the anti-abortion movement of today a continuation of this Christian concern with children and their rights. Indeed, in the pagan/pre-Christian Germanic family, the father had the right to kill a newborn he did not like the look of. The church eventually deprived him of that power. But the result of this gradual removal of powers and rights, now being extended to the domain of the unborn (no contraceptives, no sex education, and so on), has been the emergence of the impotent family.
The reason for my yes to this curious case in South Korea? By punishing parents for bringing up bad children, the state is in effect returning some power to the family.
please refer to my post on dog ownership
Y’know, with this fancy HTML thingy that’s all the rage, you can actually refer us.
Well, I understand that no parent can keep absolute track of their child’s every movement, 24/7/365. BUT, how many times in my short life have I seen young people fucking off and doing bad things because their parents never invested the effort to tell them to knock that shit off? Too many times. If you choose to bring a kid into this world, you have some responsibility to ensure that your offspring has the life skills to function in human society.
I don’t know Charles, something about this whole post rubs me the wrong way. I can’t give you a definitive yes or no on whether I think it was the “right” thing to do to the parents, because frankly there are several factors to take into account here. The “kid” is 18 years old, so he’s technically an adult (at least by most standards). He has ADHD, so perhaps the parents should have had an ever more watchful eye on him, but it’s not their legal duty to do so. Don’t get me wrong, parents are the providers and caretakers, but there comes a point where the [children] are independent and the parents can no longer be held responsible for their childrens’ actions.
Like I said, there are more factors to this story than usual, so to give a fair verdict as to whether the S. Korean courts made a just decision on the matter would require much more deliberation on my part, as well as others. Given that it’s Monday morning, and I don’t have time to research it any further (I’m at work currently), I will have to leave it at that.
tragic
If this punk had just been raised by two fine homosexuals this never would have happened.
i think you’re cultural and historical assessment is pretty warped. christianity is not the progenitor of human rights. it’s a factor in the evolution of western civilization that eventually provided the platform for individual rights based thinking, but it is not where concern for individual humanity derives.
of course, that’s pretty much irrelevant to the question you asked. my answer would have to be…blahf. it’s not a word, but i can’t decide where i stand on this. bad parents drive me nuts, but the kid was 18.
Charles,
Tough call. I can’t answer yes or no. Some states (Oregon?) hold the parents of their under 17 y/o children responsible for their crimes. There is more to this story than just this snippet.
By this logic, you’d be in favor of parental consent laws, yes? I mean, if you’re going to hold parents responsible for their teenager’s sexual activity, then they get to decide if their 16-year-old daughter gets to have an abortion, or not, right?
Or more specifically, in this little pre-christian Germanic utopia you’ve got going, a father gets a say over his teenage daughter’s body. Don’t pretend that Christianity invented the patriarchy–the church just created the whole theological justification for a practice that existed long before it did.
@3,
If he’s 18 now, he was 16 when he committed the crime.
7 stop it, geekgirl.
you’re making me really hot.
I say no.
It’s too idealistic to expect that parents are going to control their kids. And while I’d argue that certain people should be forbidden from having kids, that would obviously never pass.
Unless you give parents complete control over their kids (like geekgirl mentioned) then you can’t punish the parents for stuff the kids do.
When Koreans are born, they are age one. Everybody turns the next age at the time of the new year. Even if he was 18 when he committed the crime, he was still a minor.
You say “In the Western situation, which is now the global situation…”, but I don’t think you can necessarily apply that to this story. S. Korea, like most East Asian countries, already values collectivism strongly. The actions of the courts are merely reaffirming important social constructs in place over there, not doing something radically different as it would be seen over here.