Evil and responsibility

Today's blog was gong to be a light-hearted look at ageing, but that was before the full extent of the Doncaster incident was published.  You might care to skip it, especially if you have young children, but if you want to see the entire narrative you can read it here.

David Cameron came in for a lot of stick for claiming this was a symptom of what he described as 'broken Britain' but, as with any such pronouncement from the human palimpsests that are our political leaders, there is a grain of truth in what he said, although whether the Tory or Labour parties will have the courage or will to do anything about the issue - apart from the usual, spurious, mealy-mouthed platitudes - is debatable.

What happened to the two boys who were attacked wasn't actually anything new. It was inhuman, degrading, monstrous, evil and conscienceless and it will leave the two attacked boys with serious mental and socialisation issues for the remainder of their lives, but it wasn't new.  It was simply bullying - the desire of the strong to dominate the weaker, and that happens throughout society.  What stops bullying turning into the appalling carnage that we're reading about is the action of the adult role models. In this case, that action wasn't simply missing, it was horrendously, obviously, deficient in every way.

Humans are unique;  no other species hunts for pleasure, yet this is exactly what happened to the young victims. They were hunted and nearly killed.  And every normal, decent parent on any estate knows exactly why some kids are completely out-of-control and warns their own children to 'steer clear'. But this isn't good enough. Parenting is a serious responsibility. When parents fail their children - and we all do to greater or lesser extent - they're almost always racked with remorse and guilt.  These parents weren't.  These parents were themselves evil, as evidenced by the countless reports that Doncaster Social Services failed to act upon.

There are those who would describe the assailants in this case by the epithets 'animal-like' and 'feral' but this serves only to categorise the uncategorisable and does a gross disservice to animals, while simultaneously allowing us to feel that these children were only aberrations.  But we need to be very clear about this. These creatures were not aberrations: their behaviour can be seen in every school yard in the UK, on every street corner, in every estate, on every street.  These monsters were not failed by the system, either;  they were failed by their biological progenitors, and as long as our society fails to grasp that, more and far worse incidents of this nature will continue to take place.

But there are solutions. They are drastic solutions, but they're solutions.

Parenting is a privilege, yet our society regards it as a right. China - in an effort to stem the tide of unchecked population growth - makes it very clear that it's a privilege, by issuing permits for the first child, then enforcing financial penalties for any more. We - of course - would have to forgo the delights of the European Court of Human Rights, but that might not be a bad thing.  We'd also have to be prepared to remove children from their birth mothers almost immediately, but there are literally thousands who are desperate to adopt and thus the children would almost certainly get a better home than otherwise.

The Doncaster incident was due to bad parenting.  The Jamie Bulger case was due to bad parenting. The Baby P case was due to bad parenting, because the assailants in that case had been brought up - in a manner of speaking.  We know what the problem is.  Every teacher and social worker knows the equation: bad kids=bad parents. Every social worker can recognise the appalling parents they have to deal with, yet their hands are all too often tied because of legislation, the media's frequently duplicitous attitudes, our political representatives' inability to grasp the nettle and the European Court of Human Rights.  Yes - rights are important, but more important are responsibilities, and there comes a point where a determination has to be made between the rights of the criminal, the rights of the victims and the responsibility for the entire problem.  Britain may well not be 'broken', but it is fracturing in places, and something needs to be done.  Anti-social behaviour, bullying, lying and what happened in Doncaster are all part of the same social issue.  Which party leader will admit to that and offer a truly effective programme to deal with the root causes?  Perhaps they should be asked.