what would you say to someone who locked up a child, who imprisoned them from the ages of four to sixteen, from when they first learned to read to when they became legally entitled to marry, play the national lottery and join the armed forces, locked them up in rooms together, sometimes from dawn until dusk, who fed them food in canteens and allowed them an hour of exercise a day? who punished them if they did not turn up on time to get locked up? who, whilst they were imprisoned, undertook a vast and comprehensive and sometimes hidden course of rehabilitation, teaching them everything they need to know about the world that is waiting for them when they are eventually released and training them to do something useful? who, if the child did not respond well to rehabilitation or did not perform well enough in the tests they gave the child would punish the child in a variety of ways and who, if the child did not improve, would send the child somewhere far worse than the place they were already at?

what if, in the case of some children, that because the child had spent all living memory locked up and in this course of rehabilitation that when, at sixteen, they were told that they could leave if they wanted to, they were so scared of leaving, in fact did not even know what leaving would mean, that they chose to remain at these places even thought the doors were left open to them. and then what if two or so years later when all the children were told that they absolutely had to leave searched all over the country to find another institution that would take them in and continue the good work of the place they had spent all their lives in so far? actually arranged to be loaned money so that they could pay these institutions to let them go there? and the best thing about these institutes being that the children can stay there as long as they want to, for all their lives until they are so old they can't think or speak properly if they want to and some children will do this. but most will decide that they should leave and think finally it is time to leave I have been in places like this all my life and yet because they have been in places like that all their lives they have to go somewhere that doesn't exactly look like those places they'd been in all their lives but still do most of the things that the places they'd been in all their lives do. they will still be locked up for most of the day and they will still be taught things and they will still be punished for things they've done wrong and they will be paid a little bit of money to survive on because by now the children will have left their parent's houses, though some won't have, and some children will have children of their own, and as always they will sleep so that they are rested and prepared to go and do what they always will have done.

so yeah, what would you say to someone who does that to a four year old child?