How can you try to help someone you disagree with? That's like saying "how can you love your enemies?" If you only help people you agree with you'd end up only helping yourself.

Quite rightly good people will want to protect people who are abused by people who are stronger than themselves. But sometimes it gets more complicated, because there can be more than one victim.

In this case there are two. There's a mother who has snapped and done something stupid and wrong, and nobody is denying that. And there's a community of people who have been discriminated and persecuted in various ways over the centuries, and the mother belongs to that community, and if InOBU is right, the way this thing has been dealt with has been coloured and distorted by that.

There's a suggestion that violence towards children is more prevalent among Travellers than it is among the rest of society. This is a suggestion that can comes from two directions - it can come from people who are demonising them, and it can come from people who might seek to excuse the behaviour as culturally conditioned or something.

But the truth, as I understand it, is that, if anything, violence towards children is less prevalent among Travellers than it is among what you can call the mainstream. That would definitely have been true a couple of generations ago - but there has been a move away from that way of treating children among mainstream people, and maybe we've caught up a good way.

Slapping a small child around the head is deviant behaviour among Travellers - and yet the authorities chose to remove the child from her whole family and community. That suggests inaccurate and prejudiced stereotyping to me. And reading what some of those "experts" have been saying reinforces that suspicion.