STUDENTS at a Gold Coast primary school are being warned against hugging a move some parents say is political correctness gone mad.

They say children at the William Duncan State School in Nerang are being punished with detention for hugging or touching their friends boys or girls, the Gold Coast Bulletin said.

Father of five, Ross Kouimanis, labelled the decision "an absolute joke".

''What on earth are we turning our kids into?'' Mr Kouimanis said.

''Kids hug all the time. My high school daughter hugs her friends. It's perfectly normal.

''It's perfectly innnocent and I can't understand it.

''It's political correctness gone mad. Banning kids hugging? It's ridiculous.

It is a bit silly - and I am sure this sort of action aimed at young people has a lasting effect.

I do, however, disallow hugging in my workplace...not because I am being 'politically correct' - have you seen the people I work with????? ;)

When was the last time you gave away a hug?

Sylvestor

Under Sarkozy, France is moving to a more proactive enforcement model that removes or blocks content at the source, rather than being content to go after lawbreakers. As a consequence, however, France will now have one of the toughest censorship regimes of any robust democracy in the Western hemisphere—though Australia is giving France a good run for its money on the worldwide stage.

Journalists in neighboring countries have been quick to pounce. Germany's Der Spiegel wondered if France was becoming the "Big Brother of Europe" and notes that LOPPSI2 will give "the state unprecedented control over the Internet." The paper also suggests that the government is pushing the law because elections are coming up soon, and Sarkozy hopes that "fear of criminals will convince voters to come to the polling booths."

In the UK, feisty tech publication The Register also plays the Orwell card, saying that France "leapfrogs past Australia in Big Brother stakes" and that it's "becoming the first western country to make even Australia look liberal when it comes to state powers of Internet censorship." (The UK has a non-mandatory child porn block list run by the Internet Watch Foundation.)

As for France, plenty of heated opposition can be found there as well. Jérémie Zimmermann of Internet rights group La Quadrature du Net said last week, "Protection of childhood is shamelessly exploited by Nicolas Sarkozy to implement a measure that will lead to collateral censorship and very dangerous drifts. After the HADOPI comes the LOPPSI: the securitarian machinery of the government is being deployed in an attempt to control the Internet at the expense of freedoms."

Censorship... it's not just for authoritarian states anymore. Such issues are increasingly part of the discourse in democracies, including Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority democracy. The government there is working up Internet censorship rules to crack down on sites that offend "public decency," including pornography (child and otherwise).

Tracey Spicer

The Daily Telegraph

September 21, 2009 07:00am

Naomi's drawing shows her father watching as she is raped.

A PAEDOPHILE lives in Sydney's East Ryde*. He doesn't have a facial tic or a stutter. He doesn't look like the sex offender from central casting. And his name is not Dennis Ferguson.

He is one of tens of thousands of paedophiles, living in the suburbs, who don't walk around with big signs on their foreheads.

In about 90 per cent of child sex abuse cases, the perpetrator is a family member or friend, not some rock spider who abducts kids in the street.

"Offenders look like everybody else," Carol Ronken from Bravehearts, a support group for child sex victims, said.

"We need to be vigilant within our own four walls."

Six year old Naomi*, who drew the picture, left, is among the one-in-five Australian children who have been molested.

There's no way of sugar-coating this.

Firstly, this is not a happy story. It is quite a disturbing and sad story. I don't want to trivialise this in any way whatsoever. I feel for the child and her mother. The systems clearly fail another victim, as so often happens.

It reads true; and sadly, begins to sound a familiar story.

But frankly, and honestly, this poor child is a victim of a criminal, and, honestly...Senator Conroy...are you truly under the impression that you are going to stop this sort of thing happening in future?

Get a life and get real. System Fail! Yet again!

Sylvestor
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