Guest post: Withholding food and water from children for 15 hours a day
Originally a comment by Theo Bromine on Mubarak dehydration month.
I was wondering about the rules for kids, and found the following:
1. Children before the age of seven should be encouraged to fast (without fasting the full day) and to love these acts of worship. They can pretend what it is like to fast for an hour, for example.
2. After seven, it is recommended for the child to fast, but not necessarily for the full day nor everyday. The emphasis on fasting should be increased until the child reaches ten.
3. At ten, the child should be expected to fast.
Other sites quoted scholars saying that a child over 10 “should be made to fast and told to do so. And he should be smacked if he does not do it, so as to train him and make him get used to it, just as he should be made to pray and told to do it.” (Though some of them were quick to point out that the prescribed hitting was just for discipline and not supposed to actually hurt the child.)
Here in Ottawa, it’s 15 hours from sunrise to sunset (and will get longer). If I found that my next-door neighbour decided to withhold food and water from their 10-year-old for 15 hours every day for a month, I think that would properly be considered child abuse. But if they are doing it because their imaginary friend told them to? Somehow that changes everything…
Still hopefully legally child abuse, at least when it comes to water.
Oh no. It’s obviously not treated as child abuse. It’s “religious freedom.”
Because Canada? I seem to recall they have even less willingness to have the government protect kids from religious abuse/neglect, like refusing chemo for kids with cancer.
In the chemo cases, the judge (and various commentators) stated that for historical reasons it was important to be sensitive to the First Nations culture/religion, and that it would be more harmful to subject the girl to “Western” medicine against the will of her family. (The fact that the actual “treatment” she took was at a Florida alt-med clinic with no apparent connections to native medicine seems to have been largely ignored.) Then there was a case in Quebec of a girl from a Muslim family who was permitted to wear a noise-cancelling headset at school so that she would not be subjected to the singing and music that was part of the kindergarten curriculum (http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/muslim-kindergartener-permitted-to-block-out-music-1.742248)
It’s child abuse, but it’s not confined to just Islam. Jehovah Witnesses are often in the news for refusing blood transfusions and such. There have been a number of J.W. cases in which the lives of children were placed at risk by parents just riddled with silly superstitions.
@4
Yeah I remember that case here. What on EARTH do these people do when in a supermarket, shopping mall or any other place with muzak?
It must be just harrowing.
I’ve noticed that courts are often willing to order transfusions for infants and young children from JW families. But sadly, some of the refusals (appear to) come from the JW adolescents/teens themselves, who have been indoctrinated to believe that having their physical life saved by a transfusion imperils their immortal soul. (If Yahweh weren’t such a psychopathic narcissistic jerk, maybe he could just not give the kids cancer in the first place.)
BTW: Ophellia, thanks for the guest post – I’m honoured.
(And my humble apologies for the extra “L” in your name – I’lll bllame my gllasses.)
The mitigating ‘rules’ are hopelessly inadequate. AND it appears that the fast has become an ostentatious gesture of piety. So much so that people supposedly exempt from it die by thousands every year. Diabetics are not supposed to fast, but they do anyway in order to conform.