Asking The Wrong Questions

Two children are in court today being sentenced for their violence against other children.

There’s been endless handwringing over social service failures in Doncaster, over the identity of the two children, some lingering and luxuriating over the injuries and sexual assault of the other children, and the inevitable yapping about how awful the mother and her feral children are.

Politicians, social workers and psychiatrists are now asking what can be done to avoid a repeat of the horrors of Edlington. How, in an affluent society, can children emerge as savages? And what can be done to stop them?

Let’s take children into care. Actually, lets take children from families on state benefits into care. Because we don’t hear anything much about the children of the middle or affluent classes. This is very clear-cut. Children who are brought up in environments of generational poverty are more likely to become feral. As anyone whose ever had anything to do with the children of many middle class families know, when they go off the rails it’s all a bit cosmetic. A bit of Amy Winehouse-apeing and they’re almost certainly going to fall back into the arms of their family to effect a miraculous recovery, to recall their ‘wild’ days with neurotic effect. Their antics takes the piss out of people who live this life forever.

Every single person I’ve met who’s had enduring and dangerous mental illness has come from a financially deprived background. Every. Single. One. Social workers, the NHS, the entire health and psychiatric business, politicians and those parts of society that are not poor need the poor. The poor create and sustain jobs, and act as a radical Other to serve the political system: if it is so shameful to be unemployed, if it is entirely proper to hate the unemployed, then you’d better stay in employment, eh?

Doncaster was castrated and disemboweled in the 80’s when people who voted for Margaret Thatcher were responsible for the mines and other industries being violently closed. Since then, the levels of poverty in Doncaster have improved, which is to say it’s not the depressed sinkhole it once was. And it’s still, very, very poor.

Never mind sports facilities and colleges and Sure Start and taking children into care: address the cultural attitude that says it’s just plain evil to be poor while the issue of middle class child crime is entirely overlooked. I’ve known a number of middle class families whose behaviour and that of their children was considered entirely fine, a bit of a lark. In a poor family leaving children alone for the weekend, underage sex, consumption of illegal drugs by children and child alcohol abuse brings in the police, the courts, social services and the media.

The questions are not “How do we contain feral children?” but “What creates feral children?” Not, “Why doesn’t social services work?” but “Why do so few middle class families foster children?” We know how to contain violent and dangerous children: we bung them into prisons and psychiatric hospitals. We know why social services don’t work: it’s not a job that many aspirational parents want for their children. But addressing this is far more challenging, and has far greater potential for reducing personal affluence than taking the children of the poor into the loving care of the State and allowing some other kids to be battered.

As a society we demand personal safety. And we also don’t want to fund what creates personal safety: quality social housing maintained by half-interested social landlords, that cannot be sold into the private market; the best nursery workers and school teachers heading for the most deprived area; huge shame and upset that a developed country accepts that some people must be deprived; psychiatric services run by people who currently work in neonatal units and other high-status areas. The market-driven society is not a human given, you and I have chosen it. Whilst it’s just wonderful for those of us who live in affluence it has, self-evidently, created a dangerous underclass. People who have any concept of community, of the interconnection of all things need to live up to that ideal. When children are raped and smashed over the head with a sink, we are all responsible.

UPDATE: Central government is finally taking control of Doncaster after the Council finally fell apart. The Mayor, an English Democrat, is entirely unsuited to and unskilled in running anything other than a mildly racist micro-party. (Hilariously, his tagline is "Things Happen When you Vote English Democrat.") Local councilors have remained silent throughout about corruption and incompetence perhaps because they seem to be knee deep in it.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/vote_2010/government+to+step+in+at+ampaposfailingampapos+doncaster+council/3619487

The Audit Commission said politics at the council were "dysfunctional", and demanded the elimination of "bullying and intimidating behaviour".

Every member of the Council was voted in.

Institutional Evil

This week has been contaminated with more revelations about child abuse by Catholic priests, an abnegation of power by the police and epic arrogance from the Catholic hierarchy

Evidence given to the Chilcot Enquiry about Gulf 2 suggests that world leaders conspired to create war. Not unusual, but still loathsome.

I’ve written before about The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo’s research on ‘What leads good people to engage in evil actions.’



I propose that in trying to understand how power, abuses of power and personal responsibility – our own and others – weave together, there first has to be a consensus on what reality is. Reality is slippery and feeds into our desires for a peaceful life and personal power. If it is reality that a hospital passes quality assessments and fulfils performance indicators then we can assume that the majority of the staff will be professional, compassionate people. Managers will be doing an excellent job. Patients will be served well. This reality can exist at the same time as a disproportionate number of patients are dying because staff are slovenly and managers don’t care. People who do care feel disempowered to act, are treated with contempt or themselves abused. (Google ‘hospital whistleblower’ for a depressing litany of examples.)

Peter Vardy and Julie Arliss write clearly about this in The Thinkers Guide to Evil

It is almost always easier to identify institutional evil in retrospect. When a person is part of the institution, many things are taken for granted that may later be seen as unacceptable.

The institutional evil of the Third Reich was clear but it was made up of millions of individual Germans who went along with a system many of them must have known was wrong. At the end of the day institutions are made up of individuals and it is individuals who are morally accountable and responsible if they fail to stand up to the evil in which they participate.

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When I trained as a nurse there was a rite of passage that happened when, in the second year, you were judged to be responsible enough to carry the keys. A large bunch of metal attached to a huge safety pin was handed over and worn with pride, hanging in but not resting inside of a pocket, so that they made a rhythmic clashing noise as you walked. The keys were, and remain, a symbol of authority in a highly regulated, hierarchical institution. Now, nurses are expected to wear special belts to contain keys so that a ward doesn’t sound like a prison, and still too many nurses wear this emblem as a mark of status. There’s often a link between this behaviour and not wearing a name badge. They are often more institutionalised that the people they should be caring for, secure and settled in an environment they have made their own. Challenge that comfort and you will encounter venom.

It is far easier to keep your head down, secretly despise this behaviour and, 6months later, discover that you are complicit in it. No one is actually physically harmed – not dealing with droplets of blood on the curtains surrounding a bed, or unpleasant toilets, or lying staff doesn’t actually involve physical contact.

Patients move on, or are considered, always, to be exaggerating or malicious in any complaint they dare to make. The only way to get on is to befriend and mollify the person who abuses their power, and often that means joining them in their behaviour. The purpose of the institution, whether that’s a hospital or any other multi-million pound business, is to sustain the institution. Make no mistake.

It’s not possible to avoid harm in this situation. If you don’t speak up the harm continues. If you do speak up you will become subject to harm, and you will cause harm to other individuals. It’s easy to refer to ‘Keep pure your highest ideal; strive ever toward it; let naught stop you or turn you aside.’ But the consequences of that can be dreadful. The consequences of not keeping high ideals can be even worse.

Is there a Pagan thealogy of assisted suicide?

All 5 Law Lords agreed that a clarification of the law on assisted suicide is required following by Debbie Purdy’s successful challenge in the House of Lords today. The Director of Public Prosecutions made some very clear and very compassionate statements on the issue taking into account people who will wish to die between now and September when there will be a public consultation. It’s not a change in the law, it’s an understanding that the law is unclear and needs clarity.

Off on a slight tangent my friend Jane in intensive care is in a pitiful state. When we last visited I had a dreadful memory of the Little Brown Dog, a mongrel in 1903 who was passed illegally from vivisector to vivisector and eventually killed, again illegally, in front of a room full of medical students. The suffragists, Louise Lind-af-Hageby, and Leisa K. Schartau, were there too, the only women allowed into the vivisection lab and the only people who objected. Riots occured, statues were erected.

We were with Jane less than 5 minutes when a team of people in scrubs arrived and ‘asked’ us to leave. 4 of those people, all women, none of whom had any ID or name badge, didn’t meet our eyes and seemed entirely disinterested in our existence. The one that spoke to us smiled, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. Jane, meanwhile . . . well who knows, she can’t speak or move anything apart from her head, and she’s under light sedation so that she doesn’t remove all the lines and tubes. What I felt from her was profound disgust and sorrow. They may be my feelings. Knowing that Jane has consistently discharged herself from hospital whenever she’s been able it’s very hard for both of us to observe the activity of whomever the scrub-clad people might be, and increasingly maddening to watch her other visitors maniacally bounce around talking about getting better and coming home and going on holiday and all the other fantasy.

I know they’re fearful and I’m losing respect for their feelings. Their feelings have always taken precedence over what Jane might want. I don’t know what Jane wants and no one seems very interested in finding out. 7 years ago Jane was given months to live, the will to live through a shocking childhood now seemed to preserve her and I’m sure the medics find her very interesting and a fascinating challenge. I asked what their plan for her might be: “When she comes off the ventilator she’ll be moved to a medical ward.”

No one can see into the future but I think there’s a fairly good chance that Jane will not leave that medical ward and I don’t see what’s been achieved other than the absence of death which will reassert itself in short while, perhaps as soon as Jane becomes able to take some kind of control over the matter herself. She won’t be able to discharge herself now; she’ll not walk again. Is the absence of death a satisfactory result?

I’ve spent some time thinking hard about a theology of a Pagan response to assisted suicide and it seems to me that at the heart of the matter is the use and abuse of power. Jane-the-person disappeared as soon as she was made mute, all of us are projecting our interests on to her. I fear my own loss of power over my own life and death, I fear the clinical interest and the personal disinterest that I saw in the blue-clad ones. I fear that the people I love will not do what I want them to do when I begin to die but will treat the event with terror and denial and in doing so, abuse me.

So I have to relinquish all desire when I visit Jane and visiting has become very difficult. Perhaps the theory is that I will pass through some kind of trial and find resolution after which I will feel relaxed and enlightened. I’ll let you know. But right now I’m watching a woman, mute and paralysed, in a state of terrible physical and emotional distress, and there seems less interest in her as a person than there was in the little brown dog.

There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.

Everyone is disgusted by the pictures that came out of Abu Ghraib, somehow we’re surprised that men and women who had been trained to kill might get around to abusing their power. I’ve just finished reading an article by a therapist about her visit to Rwanda that has an editorial tag of ‘Thinking the Unthinkable.’

Neighbours killed neighbours, friends killed former friends and their children, and trusted authority figures like priests and teachers turned on the people who looked to them for safety.

Laurie Leitch Therapy Today, Feb 2009

Unthinkable!

And of course it’s not unthinkable. Unless we believe that a great many Hutus/Nazi’s/Serbians/Sudanese/Cambodians/Bangladeshis/ Americans/Angolans/Ethiopians/Iraqis/British/French and people from every other nation are fundamentally different from us in some way, then we are all pretty much capable of acts of vicious violence. These acts, whether they’re Josef Fritzl raping his daughter for 24 years or the bombardment of Gaza, become headline news because we want to know all the details

I was rounding the bread aisle in Sainsbury when I came across three young women in mid-conversation. “He ripped off his fingernails,” said the first. “And nearly pulled off his ear,” added a second. “Who could do such a thing?” said the third, and they all shook their heads in what's-the-world-coming-to despair. But their eyes were lit by other emotions: excitement, titillation, glee.

Baby P and the pornography of child violence Janice Turner Times. November 15 2008

I’d suggest that when we are confronted with the accounts of such violence what we feel is excitement, anxiety and ultimately fear, and that this fear is the knowledge that you and I are capable of terrible acts.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7657000/7657461.stm

Everyone is capable of everything, according to Goethe and I tend to agree. We all have within us the capacity if not the ability to behave horrifically, and only in understanding and accepting this do we have a chance of looking carefully to the uses and abuses of our own power. If we believe that we’re not capable of behaving horrifically then we will see all our acts through the warped pink lens of silliness, egotism, and pompous pseudo-benevolence. Through this lens looked Jeremy Bentham, a Quaker philanthropist, whose prisons drove prisoners insane; looked people who tortured and burned heretics to save them; looked Harold Shipman, the doctor who euthanized scores of elderly women.

Pagans, knowing that we do not come from Atlantis or the Pleiades have the opportunity to look through a clear lens to the natural world for inspiration in our understanding of our own natures. It means that when we meet people who have done shocking things we know that they too are human rather than some weird aberration. We don’t have to like them, absolution is not part of our theology, but there is a part of us that can meet a part of them, and perhaps, from that part, help bring them closer to the world that the rest of us live in.

Serving Two Masters

Matt 6:24 "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Putting to one side the business about slaves Matthew has a point. Institutions, particularly caring institutions like hospitals, are notorious for their numbing effects where everything would work very well if only the ‘service user’ would go away. There’re a myriad of issues here: why people are attracted to caring in the first place, what purposes caring institutions actually fulfil, the deep seated (even if rebelled against) needs for leadership, control, hierarchy, personal responsibility and accountability, and who we are accountable to.

The first analysis is straightforward. As a chaplain I am accountable first and foremost to the Goddess, one percentage point above the person I’m visiting, and the institution comes somewhere further down the line. In my opinion, when this is not the case this is what can happen.

Mrs Waller and her husband Richard, 35, claim they contacted the hospital on several occasion but were refused permission to bring their daughter back in and instead referred to a child psychologist who told them 'not to worry'. She became so thin she could not walk on her own and was found dead in bed on December 2, 2005 - two weeks after leaving the hospital. She weighed less than four stone.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1139905/Girl-8-phobia-dentists-refused-open-mouth-traumatic-visit--starved-death.html

The parents hoped that the hospital would do something and felt powerless to act. The psychologist knew best. The nurse who rang to tell the parents not to come in took no responsibility and wasn’t expected to. No one felt responsible for anything and a child needlessly died. Now an inquest has begun and various policies will be tiddled with . . . you know the story, we heard it as soon as we became aware of the media and we’ll continue to hear it for as long as we live. A terrible inversion of purpose occurs again and again, the intent of the job is actually to tick boxes, fulfil policy and protect oneself and ones employer not just from litigation but also from adverse publicity. And yet anyone who’s ever spent more than a couple of days near a hospital knows that abuses of power, unkindness and thoughtless behaviours (as well as good practice) are fairly standard. Don’t pretend it’s not so! The very basis of institutions is the wielding of power.

I used to work in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. After having studied philosophy, I wanted to see what madness was: I was free to move from the patients to the attendants, for I had no precise role. It was the time of the blooming of neurosurgery, the beginning of psychopharmology, the reign of the traditional institution. At first I accepted things as necessary, but then after three months (I am slow-minded!), I asked, "What is the necessity of these things?" After three years I left the job and went to Sweden in great personal discomfort and started to write a history of these practices [Madness and Civilization]. It was perceived as a psychiatricide, but it was a description from history. You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from the lazar house, he becomes infuriated.

Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault - October 25th, 1982.

From: Martin, L.H. et al (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. pp.9-15.

(Practices have changed in hospitals, psychiatry and even in prisons yet their basis’ remains the same, it cannot help but do so: if they were to change they couldn’t continue to exist. In turn those practices are founded on basic human impulses, including yours and mine, which also remain the same. The classic demonstration of this is the Stanford Experiment

http://www.prisonexp.org/

where a group of students were randomly allocated 'prisoner' and 'guard' roles. You can guess the rest. I've often wondered how life would be if our police, prison guards and traffic wardens uniforms were a light pink and they had to wear flower wreaths rather than caps.)

So. I am personally responsible for not reporting the abuses of power I may witness, from terminally disinterested staff to 4 large adults piling on top of a frail childs body. If I was to report everything I’ve seen in the decades I’ve been involved in hospitals I’d be admitted to psychiatric care myself. I don’t report everything because weighing up the benefits and detriments of doing so I’ve concluded that more often than not it will cause more trouble than it’s actually worth. I take responsibility for that which means not only that I trust I will stand in court and admit my failure if needs be, but also try to remain alert to the likelihood that I am losing interest in giving a damn.

I have the luxury of not being a member of staff employed by an institution and so am less institutionalised. As a visiting chaplain I’m very clear that beyond answering to managers or following policies I’m ultimately answerable to the Goddess. For me, the Charge is the first written source I look to for guidance, stressing freedom, love and balance and particularly personal responsibility.

Let there be beauty and strength,
power and compassion,
honour and humility,
mirth and reverence within you.
And you who seek to know me,
know that the seeking and yearning
will avail you not,
unless you know the Mystery:
for if that which you seek,
you find not within yourself,
you will never find it without.

But it's not always easy to be certain who benefits from my seeking for balance . . . my life is easier all round if I ignore bad practice on the ground that nothing will be done in any case, or that staff will learn not to trust me and so make access to patients less straightforward, or that patients may use me to manipulate a situation. We just try to do the genuine best we can. Knowing what's genuine is harder than it seems.

Image of Hekate by Robin M. Weare, 1995.