Thanks. Here is that post. The legal sequence was as follows.
- Bob rapes his 3 year old daughter.
- Evidence of the rape is discovered, by chance, by a nursery nurse.
- The nurse calls the ‘Friends of Babies’ organization.
- ‘Friends of Babies’ knock at Bob’s door and start asking him questions. Bob starts getting nervous, but denies it. Friends of Babies are confident in their assessment that Bob’s lying, so they break into his house and forcibly remove the child from him.
- Bob calls his PDA, telling them an evil gang has taken his child away from him, for no good reason.
- Bob’s PDA investigates. There’s a trial. If Bob is found innocent, ‘Friends of Babies’ are guilty of child kidnap. If Bob is found guilty, the libertarian court declares that, by raping his child, Bob loses the right to continue bringing it up. Rape is not consistent with homesteading the right to bring up a child, so Bob’s right to bring up his daughter is declared abandoned. The court awards the right to bring up the child to the other claimant: the Friends of Babies organization.
- The Friends of Babies organization rehomes the child, perhaps with a relative, or finds adoptive parents for it.
- Friends of Babies publicizes the fact that Bob is a child rapist. He is added to all the (privately-produced) sex offenders registers. Voluntary actions, such as boycotts of Bob, make Bob’s life a misery.
This covers the practical issues of how parental child abuse (and neglect) will be approached by a libertarian court and how enforcement would likely work in anarchy. The definition of what is consistent with homesteading the right to bring up a child will be determined by the norms held by the individuals in society and those norms will be discovered and exercised through a free market in law.
I am not sure whether the libertarian court can go further, and allow force to be committed against Bob. In particular:
- When the child-victim has reached full adult status, can she use retaliatory force against Bob (either to attain restitution or retribution)?
- Can anyone (and who?) use force against Bob while the child-victim is not yet capable of giving, or not giving, consent to that use of force?
E.R. - How are you defining “self-sustaining” (roughly) and how is the distinction useful? Send me a private message if you prefer.