Commentary: Missing Johor girl – resist the urge to blame parents when a child is in danger

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“WHAT DID THE PARENTS DO?”

Why do people feel inclined to judge or blame a victim?

Enter the Just World Fallacy, which posits that the world is fair, just and orderly. This belief implies that individuals get what they deserve – essentially, bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people.

This mindset helps people navigate their physical and social environments as if they were stable and predictable. So instead of attributing a bad turn of events to bad luck, forces beyond someone’s control or nefarious actors, people tend to look at the individual’s behaviour as a source of blame. This leads to the belief that innocent victims of accidents or attacks must somehow be responsible for or deserve their misfortune.

Where parents and children are concerned, because of the protective role we ascribe to parents and the helplessness we accord to children, the positional power differential is great.

An op-ed by Ashley Frawley in British news website UnHerd titled Stop Blaming Parents For Everything reflects that it is inevitable for us to want to hold parents accountable for virtually everything that goes wrong.

Frawley jibes that we have been raised to believe that “parental behaviour management (cures) all manner of social ills”.

“The good parent was beatified as one who is aware of every risk and acts accordingly. And woe betide the ‘lazy’ parent who does not. In doing so, they pointed the finger squarely at parents for nearly everything that goes wrong.”

The statistics track: A 2021 global survey by Ipsos on parental perceptions showed that 82 per cent of respondents feel judged by others as a parent. Singapore ties for top spot with the United States at 92 per cent.

Their perception is real and not imagined: The same survey showed that 81 per cent of non-parents globally do indeed judge parents. Respondents in Singapore came in at a staggering 87 per cent.

It’s no wonder then that the online judging of parents is sometimes deemed a “national sport”, as penned in The Atlantic. After all, “what real-life mother could possibly measure up to a vision of motherly perfection”.

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Commentary: Respiratory illness surge in China can’t help but trigger COVID-19 memories

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This goes beyond professional expertise—the root of the respiratory diseases in Beijing and Liaoning was quickly determined—but even transparency and global cooperation. &nbsp,

However, perceptions of China’s transparency will continue to be clouded for some time due to its privacy and delays in providing information to WHO during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, which fueled the contentious debate over a” Wuhan lab hole” or an pet origin for SARS-CoV-2. &nbsp,

On November 22, WHO used China’s International Health Regulations system to ask China for more information regarding the current rise in pulmonary disease. The requested data were provided during a conference between WHO and Taiwanese health officials the very next day.

We will be better prepared for potential epidemics the more for reporting and accounting is normalized.

Misconceptions AND Artificial NEWS CAN RUDE RIFE

However, this incident also highlights how difficult it is to combat false information, especially in the social internet environment. &nbsp,

An excerpt from Taiwanese television station FTV News that has been condensed, edited, and machine translated was posted on the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases ( ProMED ) website on November 21. It brought attention to an “outbreak of asthma in China,” with universities “on the point of expulsion,” children’s hospitals in Beijing and Liaoning “overwhelmed with tired children,” and parents “questioning whether the government were covering up the epidemic.”

The first caution on COVID-19 was issued by the global disease surveillance system ProMED, which is run by medical professionals. In the end, the WHO responded, which fueled additional speculations and studies in the international media.

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