North Star Writers Group

The war on fat people has spread across the Pond to Great Britain, where Child Protective Services has proposed removing an eight-year-old boy from his family because he is obese.

One British health official even called the boy’s overweight condition “child abuse.”

Young Connor McCreadie weighs anywhere from 196 to 208 pounds, according to various news reports. He is at least three times the weight that is normal for a boy his age. Health officials have called his mother, Nicola McKeown, “negligent” for, they assert, feeding him a diet that has resulted in his obesity.

If a diet judged as “bad” is enough reason to take a child from his family, what’s next?

Should we remove children from parents who allow them to dress in a manner we find offensive, talk too much on their cell phones or insult their teachers?

Surely we ought to charge any parent owning and driving an internal combustion engine (also known as a car or truck) with “child abuse” since such engines are a major source of air pollution that causes respiratory problems and allergies.

And parents who spend what we consider “excessive” hours at work also must be charged at least with child neglect, and possibly child abandonment - fathers as well as mothers.

When and where does this insanity end? When will we stop trying to criminalize or ban any behavior, action or substance of which we don’t approve?

In proposing to take Connor from his family, British health officials are only too willing to enumerate the risks of morbid obesity - the increased incidences of heart disease, diabetes, etc. After all, such an action would be for the boy’s own good. And the officials, of course, have the data to prove their assertions.

It all resembles nothing so much as the magistrates and priests who once burned witches or tortured those charged with whatever contemporary authorities labeled as heresy. It was all for their victims’ own good, of course, and the tormentors naturally had scripture to justify their actions.

Control is control, whether it’s based on scientific data or religious texts, and this urge to abuse power to order other people’s lives is as old as the human race itself. And it’s still ugly and arbitrary, no matter what the justification.

After all, we would never think of criminalizing workaholic parents or car- and truck-driving mothers and fathers, even while we propose to penalize some of them for what they are feeding their children. Why is that? Why do some behaviors or actions with clearly negative consequences escape scrutiny altogether while others end up the evil du jour? (Think smoking or trans fats.)

Perhaps it is so because it’s easier and safer to beat up on individuals like Connor’s mother or smokers than it is to take on big business for demanding endless work hours or the large corporations that manufacture polluting forms of transportation. Picking on the small fry makes it look as though the civil servants are protecting public health when, in fact, they are ignoring much bigger transgressors. Again, it’s abuse of power.

In young Connor’s case, his mother says that her son steals and hides food, making it difficult for her to regulate what and how much he eats. According to Ms. McKeown, Connor can eat double or triple the amount a normal boy his age would consume, and if he doesn’t get enough at the evening meal, he whines and pleads all night for more.

The preceding certainly sounds like there is more involved here than diet/lack of exercise alone. There may be emotional factors driving Connor’s compulsion to eat, or genetic components to his weight gain or perhaps his body is unable to send his brain the full signal, leaving him feeling constantly as though he’s starving even when he is not.

Let’s hope that British health authorities fully investigate all possibilities before taking Connor away from his mother and sister, which could do as much emotional injury to him as his excess weight does to his physical health.

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This is Column #CT27. Request permission to publish here.