Topic came up here.
So far the attempts to cut down on child abuse and child neglect have been focused on deterrence, but the threat of facing a taste of one's own medicine; and then some, depending on the prison; has not been enough to scare parents into only having kids they intend to raise properly. We could up the ante, but we could only up the ante so far. Death penalty might actually backfire if some parents would rather die than encounter other prisoners as a convicted child abuser, and would rather be executed than be remembered as suicidal.
So why don't we shift the focus to prevention instead? Why don't we have parenting licenses? The usual response I hear elsewhere is that the government could misuse this authority. Well, the government could also theoretically misuse laws against abuse and neglect by only prosecuting dissidents who abuse and neglect their kids while leaving non-dissidents who do the same alone. Nevertheless, we have standards on parenting, answerable to a plurality of voters rather than just the individual parents. Why not try to predict how likely those standards are to be met by the parents, and if that seems unlikely, give the kid to one of the many would-be adoptive parents out there clamoring to take on that role if the child is still in the infancy stage, to make abuse and neglect less likely?
