The thing is, and spaw illustrates it, there's a big gap between "this is what I feel like doing" and "this is what I think ought to be done".

It's when that gap gets eroded that awful policies get smuggled in, and awful things get done.

When cruel and wicked things are done to people we are close to, it's the natural and probably the healthy things for us to feel the impulse to strike out. But that's a long way from incorporating that impulse into a legal framework of institutionalised violence.

Just one thing - kat said Nobody ever checked. It wasn't really their fault, they were and still are swamped with too many and too few people to handle things and not enough foster homes. And that says to me that some fault lies with the decent people who vote to cut the services, and deprive them of the resources and the people they need. And then they blame the people, social workers and such, who fall down in doing an impossible task (and who all too often give up on doing even what they could do because they've lost their way in the system, and are just day labouring ("hireling shepherds").