Eideard

An Australian woman has been accused of child cruelty after she forced her young son to sit in public wearing a sign that read: “Do not trust me. I will steal from you as I am a thief.”

The boy, believed to be aged 10, was forced to wear the sign and a pair of Shrek ears in a busy park in the northern Queensland town of Townsville while his family ate lunch nearby.

The treatment of the child prompted outrage among other families in the park, who accused the woman of publicly humiliating him.

Diane Mayers was so disturbed that she called the child safety hotline. “The boy just kept his head down and was staring at the ground,” she told the Townsville Bulletin. “The parents had gone to all the trouble of printing two copies of the sign – one for the back and one for the front – and laminating them. A lot of work had gone in to it.

“A lot of people walked past and were laughing at him, including boys who would have been his age…”

However, the boy’s mother, who has not been named, has defended her actions, saying they were a last resort intended to shame him into giving up stealing. “We’ve had a process over the last three years of him shoplifting and stealing whatever he can get his hands on,” she said.

“I have taken him to the police station, had the police officers take him around, shown him a paddy wagon [police van], shown him all the cells, shown him the process of being charged.”

Nothing had so far worked, she said..

I don’t know what to say. Not a lot of detail and I wonder if this sort of public embarrassment achieves anything this side of gratification for the parents.

Sooner after, she took him out of public school and sent him to the nearest Catholic school where he could be “properly” disciplined. I always wondered how he ended up.