In a new poll, nearly half of Canadians say they support the notwithstanding clause to ensure that schools tell parents if their child wishes to use a different name or pronoun.
In a new poll, nearly half of Canadians say they support the notwithstanding clause to ensure that schools tell parents if their child wishes to use a different name or pronoun.
That’s not quite the same thing.
My question is this; how many people would support outing a child if they knew, with absolute certainly, that doing so would cause the child harm.
Phrasing the question around the child’s feeling of safety allows people to dismiss it as a non-issue, because they simply do not trust children to evaluate threats accurately.
But when it comes down to it, very few people would willingly subject a child to harm in the name of “parents rights.” Not if they knew with absolute certainty that such harm would occur. And that’s why I think this hypothetical is important. In reality you would almost never know, with absolute certainty, that a child would be in danger. But what this question establishes is that, fundamentally, the child’s right to safety overrules the parent’s so-called “right” to surveil their children.
Having established that, the rest comes down to the simple fact that an educator is not in a position to properly and fully assess whether a child would be at risk from that information being shared. Lacking that knowledge, they should err on the side of safety, which means trusting the child to make the decision. Information can always be shared, but it can never be unshared.
I can agree that it’s not exactly the same thing. But I think the implication of the question and answer are what you’re looking for, and the direct question would skew the results because most people wouldn’t admit they support abuse outright.