“Mother, do you think they’ll drop…my…chocolate?..oooh-aaaah”
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i don’t know how it is in the UK, but in the US opening someone’s mail is a federal offense (unless the govt does it, then they need a warrant.) and it doesn’t mater if the letter was from a child or to a single mother, the case is now between the US govt and the person who opened the letter.
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How much Dahl have you read? It ain’t all peaches and chocolate factories. Give The Twits or The Witches a try sometime.
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Correct, I’d say.
Although Cory Doctorow does a good line in recommending books. My daughters love them.
Although for some reason they’re becoming ill-disciplined and argumentative.
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William Golding’s Lord of the Flies isn’t a summer camp manual.
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That’s just wrong…
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Oh you just led me also to Cohen’s Law and Skitt’s Law. My, but the internetz are wonderful!
Edit: And now I’m on to webshites. I think I’m not going to get much sleep.
So what if the chocolate was in the form of Reeses Peanut butter cups and the reason for this is some kid might go into anaphylactic shock?
What if “chocolate” is code name for meth?
What if there was a totally different reason they wanted or the GIRL wanted to have someone come and pick her up?
Say that she was bullying other kids or she was painfully homesick but didn’t want to tell people that, the smuggled chocolate was simply the technical reason that the officials would use.
I’m trying to come up will all sorts of “So now you know the REST of the story” because I want to give people the benefit of the doubt first.
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“Wrong, sir! Wrong! Under section 37B of the contract signed by him, it states quite clearly that all offers shall become null and void if - and you can read it for yourself in this photostatic copy - “I, the undersigned, shall forfeit all rights, privileges, and licenses herein and herein contained,” et cetera, et cetera… “Fax mentis, incendium gloria cultum,” et cetera, et cetera… Memo bis punitor delicatum! It’s all there! Black and white, clear as crystal! You STOLE Fizzy-Lifting Drinks! You BUMPED into the ceiling, which now has to be washed and sterilized, so you get… NOTHING!!! You lose! GOOD DAY, SIR!”
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I’d really like to have more facts about this case. It’s unclear from the article (please please correct me if I’m wrong) whether the letter was actually honest-to-goodness-stamped-Royal-Mail or if it was just a “message.” To me, that’s pretty much the core of the case.
Going through the girl’s bags is clearly ridiculous and over-the-top, but some of the posts to the Telegraph’s forum claim the girl was a bit of a bully/misbehaved/brat/whatever, so it doesn’t surprise me that some punishment was directed at her.
It’s also not clear to me whether the mother was actually “forced” to come fetch her daughter. It just sounds like the girl wasn’t going to be allowed to participate in activities if her mom didn’t come to pick her up. That actually sounds like a very reasonable punishment, especially if the whole chocolate “issue” was the last in a string of problems.
In fact, there’s very little about this case that’s clear at all. But again, the whole reading her letter is definitely a privacy violation — but whether it was a legal violation is again, unclear. That said, I don’t have much sympathy for brats of any age — but even brats have the right to privacy, especially of the postal kind.
All that said, this still seems like a molehill is being made into a mountain. While on a school trip in high school, I got caught in the girls’ bunks with something… uh… a bit worse than freaking chocolate; and fortunately I didn’t have some dumb zero-tolerance policy or whatever wreck my life.
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Seeing as we’ve just had almost all legal aid axed over here, no, probably not. It’s exactly the kind of thing the Mail and every other tabloid rag goes mental over, mind. So there’s that.
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Wow. Really? Really?
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Meh. I’ve gotten lost, ferociously drunk and careered down a black-flagged ski-slope on one ski on various school trips. Never, ever, have I been subjected to demented bullshit like that. Christ, we got nicked making explosives in the bathroom (we’d melted a hole in the bath), but no punishments this barking mad were meted out.
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I have been wondering what was going on here and found some more in-depth stories:
http://swns.com/news/schoolgirl-11-home-dream-end-of-term-holiday-eating-chocolate-bar-37896/
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/5023786/Choc-n-nuts-Holli-sent-home-from-school-trip-for-eating-chocolate-bars.html/
http: [space] //www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/holli-mccann-girl-kit-kat-2067876/ [because the bbs doesn’t want me to link more than two articles]
Apparently the kids were allowed to have snacks on the trip, but the kids weren’t supposed to have food in the hotel rooms due to a policy of the hotel. As the hotel owner is reported to say in the first linked article:
“We ask school parties to keep fizzy drinks, sweets and chocolate in the downstairs areas and only allow bottled water in bedrooms. We are a hotel for schools for eight weeks of the year and a bed and breakfast for the rest of the year. If we get a bad review because there are sticky marks in the rooms we lose business.”
Okay, fair enough, though one would hope that the hotel cleans the rooms between the time the kids move out and the regular guests move in.
The third article quotes some local official where the school is located as saying, “The room was only searched with the child’s agreement. It is normal procedure to check the contents of a letter.”
Like her “consent” means anything in this context.
It all seems deeply bizarre. I can’t imagine the hotel was demanding that the kid be kicked out, and it demonstrably is not a “safety issue” – some have suggested maybe there was some severely allergic child on the trip. And obviously there was no danger to the hotel room once the chocolate had been confiscated.
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It strikes me as a distinct possibility that an event of this nature may not be an especially profitable one for the hotel and that the organizers may eagerly seek any excuse to terminate the arrangement. But this is more speculation.
I’ll bet if Holli’s letter had references to being mistreated by the school staff, it would have mysteriously disappeared.
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Wow, if you bend over backwards anymore you are going to break in half. Say uncle and retire.
She sure did pose for a lot of different ‘disappointed girl holding chocolates’ photos.
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“It was made clear that we were granting ourselves the right to behave like scum,” Hertfordshire County Council commented, “We continue to reserve that right.”
