Order Only: We have a situation here

[alt_arthur]

Frank and I arrived at Maldon to speak with Bellatrix Peploe's parents, and I'm afraid things went downhill quite rapidly. As in, Frank has both parents in a petrificus totalus and is continuing to plead with them while I'm writing this.

I think it's quite safe to say they didn't pick the name `Bellatrix' because they're interested in astronomy.

They support the regime 1000%. We've seen all sorts of reactions when telling parents that their child has magic, but this one we've never witnessed before. When informed that Bellatrix was a witch, the father astounded us by immediately attacking his wife. In fact, he tried to choke the life out of her, all the while yelling that she must have been the one to 'steal the magic.' We were so surprised that we fumbled with our wands for a moment before blasting them apart, but fortunately we stopped him before he managed to crush her larynx.

Our usual script, of course, is completely out the window at this point. They aren't going to give us permission to take her. In fact, I'm afraid that unless we separate the father and the mother (by which I mean I'll have to arrange to have them assigned to different work camps), he'll just attack her again once we're out of sight--unless we memory charm them to forget our visit altogether. But if we leave the baby with them, little Bellatrix is doomed to be outed as a mudblood eventually. If I send off the mother by herself with the baby, what's to prevent her from hurting the child, once Bellatrix's magic manifests? And if we don't bring her to Moddey Dhoo, what do we do about the Book?

Frank is arguing privately to me that we have to take the baby and memory charm the parents so they think she has died.

Can anyone come up with a better idea?

Comments

[alt_poppy]

It seems to me you are saying that Muggles have a right to make decisions as long as they make a decision you approve.

And we've no idea what those parents would do if they'd not been surprised by a pair of ham-fisted baby snatchers who popped a piece of information on them out of the blue.

By the time the child's magic would have manifested the parents' reactions and the parents' situation would be different from today. We don't know what they'd do, no. We don't. And now they will never have the chance to make those choices for themselves. No chance to live those months with their child. And the child with them.

We've made their choices for them. Abruptly. Because we wouldn't want to put Frank or Arthur in danger by taking time to educate or persuade or even to consider what to bloody do in a case we didn't anticipate.

So in our panic, what did we do? We swished our wands and hexed a Muggle couple, used force on them, plundered their brains and stole their child.

In the name of the child's interest, yes, but it needn't have been accomplished this way at all.

[alt_alice]

Things always do tend to clarify from a distance.

Frank and Arthur have ten years of face-to-face experience working with parents. So I don't think it's a matter of their abilities to approach the situation with understanding, but we must recognize that this was a very unique circumstance. They had to make a quick decision, and the decision they made was for the immediate safety of the child.

But now that we know about this new possibility -- even though it might be rare, Muggles have been fed propoganda for so many years that it might crop up again -- we can certainly come up with a plan for the future that would respect the parents' rights and work in multiple contacts to give them as much opportunity as possible to fully understand what we're asking of them (and sort out fully whether the child would be safe). We're living in a poor substitute for an ideal world, and the important thing is to make sure this doesn't become the standard to which we hold ourselves, but an exception that we can learn from and handle more evenly in the future.

And we've respected parents' rights before, Poppy. The Creevys for one. The Swithins, too. They chose to keep their children. This is different.

[alt_poppy]

Alice, I apologise for speaking intemperately before. And I quite agree with you that this is a miserable substitute for an ideal world. And you are right, Alice, that what's done is done save for the lessons we may draw from it.

I don't entirely agree that this situation was different from the others in theory, but I was not present, so I cannot judge the pressures Arthur and Frank faced in the moment, nor can I evaluate, except from their description (which was offered for our advice), the danger posed by the father to the mother and perhaps to the child.

I do think this episode shows that we need to re-evaluate our methods for springing this information on unsuspecting parents. I don't believe we've any right to assume that the father would have reacted violently in other circumstances, at least not without giving him the opportunity to show himself responsive to a better-gauged approach.

Perhaps it wasn't possible today to have handled things differently, but I agree with you that we now have an opportunity to learn and prepare and to respond better ourselves to nasty shocks when they spring up against us.