Nod.

"As long as this gets repealed right away."

"Uh huh."

He makes a Portkey.

Poke.

Canada.

Requisite stealth magic.

Aitim gets the door.

"Hello again."

"Hi! Timothy didn't mention he was bringing several guests, I'm not sure if I have enough food. Come on in."

"Don't kidnap my brothers and sisters you reprobate."

"- are you expecting that it will be impossible for your parents to restrain themselves from beating them badly enough to leave visible injuries?"

"It's none of your business!"

"..."

"It isn't! You wouldn't be making anything better by taking them away - or making our parents think of other things, when they sent me to the convent I wished they would have just whipped me -"

"I'm aware that there are other ways to hurt your kids, and part of the reason we didn't do this sooner was because we wanted to have shelters and vocational trade programs and the acquiescence of the church to releasing nuns who don't want to be nuns. But beating your children is really, really bad, really bad, and I do believe most things that parents come up with instead will be less bad. We're doing different things in different places, so we'll see pretty fast, converge on the policies that minimize child abuse."

"Escalating immediately to losing the children means anyone who wants to take chances on your enforcement having gaps loses everything instantly if they're wrong and it's not an unambiguous favor to the children."

"There are a lot of kids who won't report abuse if their parents will find out that they were reported and be in a position to retaliate."

"You can make unconditional no-takebacks children's shelters that is a different thing."

"I think there are maybe a couple different problems worth separating, here. One of them is 'it's really scary for people when the aliens assert willingness to take their children', which is a real cost but pretty much unavoidable as soon as we start protecting runaways and removing babies with welts from a belt all down their back and so on. Another one is 'it's particularly scary when there's ambiguity about what the aliens will take children for', which sort of competes with giving judges discretion and allowing victims control over the situation. Another one is 'we want policies that give abused children and people who know about abuse of children incentive to report it', and I'm happy to defend our current policies in those terms. And another one is 'is it actually extraordinary valuable to prevent the beating of children, such that this is a worthy goal to put resources towards in the first place". Which of those do you think that we actually disagree on?"

"I think you're mistaken about how separable various categories of beating children are. It's all well and good to frame it as victim choice thing but that is in no way how the law reads - if you go try to take Rebecca's siblings you are not going to be unanimously greeted as liberators. It's sudden, it escalates instantly instead of making people take parenting classes or have one of those color-coded orange people hang out in the house ominously for a week first even if the children don't want to leave, I can see how your policy works better in cases where the children don't trust you to keep them safe and stay at home to mitigate the fallout they expect to occur anyway but if you had decent statistics on how many cases in humans are that I think you'd have mentioned them already, and you may be underestimating how much variance there is in how damaging people find it - our magic school beats kids and it is neither character-building nor a very useful deterrent most of the time but it is not a leading cause of trauma."

"And - and where would you put them, if you took them, would you bother trying to send them to me or Elizabeth who's also married and moved out now or would you just take them and we'd never hear from them again the announcement doesn't say -"

"We are not under the impression that children are going to be universally or even typically glad. We have lots and lots of data, both from back home and specific to humans, we've been collecting data from the minute we got here, but it's not convenient enough to point unambiguously to a class of children who require rescue and a class of children whose parents require parenting classes, let alone to suggest a way to reassure the former they won't be left with abusers who are furious with them while making the latter confident they can report without getting taken from their parents.

Again, this is a very hard problem. Some children absolutely need to be removed from their home, and will not tell anyone there is a problem unless they are completely certain they will immediately be removed to somewhere safe. Some children are suffering horrendously but prefer it to an uncertain fate with the aliens and won't tell anyone if there's the slightest chance they'll get removed from their homes. We have talked to lots and lots of people across every civilization on earth about this and the ratios are still hard to guess. What does seem to be the case, though, is that once 'removed from home' is a possible outcome lots of people hesitate to report, and that once 'left alone with parents who have learned that their child reported them' is a possible outcome lots of people hesitate to report. The penalty from it happening more frequently or in a larger share of cases is much, much smaller than the costs from having it on the table at all in the first place. And I do think 'removed from home' needs to be on the table at all in the first case. That means I have already bitten the bullet that many victims won't report, I pay that price up front, and whether to remove all of them or only some of them is a question of whether to also pay the second price and alienate the kids who will only report if they'll definitely get out of their home situation when they do. 

The minimum length of time of a removal is ten days; contact with parents via the internet or via supervised court-ordered visitation is permitted and encouraged in most cases; we preferentially place kids with relatives.The schools talked with all their students about this today, our people have been briefed and can answer questions on it, there's a place to ask them online, there are social workers going around talking with people, the announcements are no longer anything resembling the primary channel of communications."

"You didn't warn Timothy and we don't have anyone of ours attending your schools."

"I honestly thought we'd be on the same page about 'beating children bloody is bad', you didn't complain about the domestic violence laws and children are even more vulnerable."

"It is absolutely bad! I even think it should in fact be illegal! The law as announced - which was our exposure to it - is just more costly and less nuanced than you were indicating an understanding of."