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.

Limits to Care

I had the un-nerving experience the other day of meeting with someone who caught my attention more than usual. As you know I have a principal of not wanting to know what patients have done or have had done to them and this particular meeting demonstrated how useful that can be. We were able to meet, person to person, without too much of my anxiety getting in the way.

But the meeting has stayed with me. Where do my responsibilities to the patient begin and end as a Pagan chaplain, and why?

Christian chaplaincy offers a good starting point; they have experience that we don’t. Their theology suggests that they have a duty to visit everyone, perceiving Christ in every individual. Sacrifice is important in Christianity in a way that it isn’t in Paganism which will have an impact on the way in which Christian chaplains are with people who have lived in ways that will be difficult to come to terms with. They have a duty to serve rapists and torturers. I’m not sure that Pagans do.

If we have a concept of the Sacred Feminine beyond something other than a symbol then we have to think about what happens when that sacred feminine is purposefully defiled. If we have a thealogically-based understanding that the abuse of power is wrong then how do we respond when we meet someone who has grotesquely and perhaps over a long period of time abused their power? Do we, like the Christians, hate the sin but love the sinner? Since we don’t have a concept of heaven or hell, of salvation or damnation, but tend towards ideas of the progress of the soul, do we have a duty to ‘save’ anyone, indeed, can anyone be saved? And is there some kind of unspoken trade-off in that dynamic where the more we sacrifice ourselves to save others the more saved we ourselves become?

Paganism doesn’t have a thealogy of forgiveness. Popular writing on the subject encourages us to forgive for our own wellbeing, so that we can feel better, let go move on: forgiveness as self-healing rather than a courageous act to make the whole world a better place. The Shadows of New Age understandings of forgiveness aren’t explored. Forgiveness can certainly be used as a punishment, it raises the forgiver above the person being forgiven, a necessary and useful first movement all round, but a rather manipulative and shady way of doing things if that’s where it ends. Do we ultimately want to meet each other as equals or always remain in top- and underdog positions? Punishment has its place, atonement can be healing and if we deny people the opportunity to atone we can do as much damage as if we were to punish them inappropriately.

Paganism isn’t yet a religion that many of us are born into, it’s a positive personal choice. Whether that choice is made as a rebellion against Christianity (which is no real reason to enter into Paganism, but one that many people take) or whether it genuinely feels like a homecoming it’s not something that you casually decide to do. We research it, even if that means reading just one terrible book and almost all of those books, no matter how dreadful, will discuss personal responsibility. So Pagans know that we can’t go all post-modern about life, that although there may be good reasons for people to behave poorly the buck needs to stop somewhere.

Patients can learn from other people on the wards and the nature of institutions is that power is at the forefront of everyones behaviour. Paganism can be seen as the obvious way to get what you want which makes it an apparently simple choice for people who like to get what they want.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some people discover they’re Pagan soon after going to prison. The need to be seen as an individual; the need to be seen at all; the need to be different; the need to exert their difference may all feed this epiphany. My own experience suggests that being seen to be Pagan can be a way of demanding special treatment. In every case I’d say that every person should be given special treatment, it’s what our institutions tell us they’ll deliver, personalised care tailored for the individual. In almost every case, the Pagan patients I’ve met know very well that this is a load of nonsense; they’re very clear-sighted about abuses of power and rebel against cant.

In the lemniscate of complexity in people’s circumstances and motivations, and in our own, where do we find guidelines for ourselves around who we will and won’t deal with, safety considerations aside?

Personally, I don’t want anything to do with child or elder abusers or rapists. We all do things in moments of madness but rape and torture doesn’t come into that category. In the unlikely event of a Pagan vivisectionist ever finding themselves in hospital I wouldn’t want anything to do with them either. Child and elder abusers, rapists and vivisectionists have purposefully and for personal gain turned off their natural ethics and I dare say they can all give excellent reasons for doing so. I don’t agree with them. Since I hold strong opinions on the matter I’m unlikely to be of any use to them.

This is where my principal of not knowing can be both a help and a hindrance. Life being what it is I’m bound to find myself face to face with a deeply distressed child abuser, someone like Mary Bell who killed her first child when she was 11 having (inevitably) experienced abuse herself and didn’t leave prison until she was an adult. What happens then?

Who knows? My answers today may not be my answers of tomorrow. Looking outward for enlightenment has limited effect, we have to look inward, to our own resources and weaknesses, goodness and evil, light and dark, complexities that can be almost impossible to manage. Because, despite what the majority of druid and witchcraft authors may tell us, we all have within us the capacity to murder, rape, abuse and torture. When we deny our own dark we become as unbalanced as those who deny their light.

So I don’t have any definite and easy wisdom to pass on, other than, perhaps, to follow the Charge myself, to constantly seek answers inside and of myself as well as seeking for useful external help to guide my knowledge.