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There’s a murderous mix in our inner-city schools
Last Wednesday afternoon Kieran Rodney-Davies was stabbed to death near his home in Fulham by a gang of boys who wanted his mobile phone. He was only 15, about the same age as his attackers, and he was out on an errand for his mother.
At one moment she had a sensible, charming, funny, loving son and at the next he was bleeding to death in the arms of a weeping friend.
This is the nightmare of every inner-city mother in the country. We have sons who have been menaced and robbed and beaten, in streets both rich and poor, by children not much older than themselves, often just for the hell of it. The streets of London are not safe for teenage boys.
One might assume from Kieran’s name and address in a smart part of London that he was a child of privilege. In a way he was, in that he came from a good home and had been brought up to be kind and helpful and to stay out of trouble, and such a careful upbringing is a privilege these days, especially for a boy whose mother is a single parent and lives on a council estate.
However, the truth is his degree of privilege made no difference; there is a terrible equality about the dangers of inner-city streets today.
After my first feeling of immense sympathy for Kieran’s mother, my second feeling was one of fury. It seems scarcely possible that Britain’s inner-city streets have in less than 20 years been allowed to become so disgracefully dangerous with little or nothing to anticipate it, to stop it or even to protest.
These days 25% of all street assaults and robberies are thought to be carried out by people under 18, increasingly including girls. Such children carry out more than 50,000 muggings a year in London alone.
My son and his friends have been threatened and mugged and stalked constantly. The first time it happened to my son was in daylight after school outside McDonald’s in Notting Hill.
He was 12 at the time. The time that school gets out is becoming increasingly dangerous. Bad teenagers get let out from the restraints of school, such as they are. Other even worse teenagers are hanging round the school gates waiting to prey on the pupils.
It is hardly surprising that people who can afford to get out of the inner cities are doing so as fast as they can. It’s a mistake to call this white flight, although it is predominantly white at present. Strictly speaking, it is rich flight and responsible flight — middle-class flight. It is a racing certainty that ethnic minority parents who have enough money will very soon and very fast be joining the queue to the burbs. I imagine Kieran’s mother might very well have preferred to bring her son up in a safe, leafy suburb with a good school had she had the option.
Tony Blair’s latest proud new initiative — yet another one — disclosed on Friday, was to entice the middle classes back into inner-city state schools by promising new improved facilities and standards in new improved city academies. This is just silly.
What’s wrong with inner-city schools these days, as he must know, is not so much the schools — the ideology or the facilities or the funding or the teaching — as the pupils. White flight is the flight of responsible middle-class parents from feral, violent, illiterate schoolchildren, who will terrorise their own children and wreck their education. Such parents can hardly be expected to put a sticking plaster of middle-class morality on the gaping wound of social breakdown.
The notorious comprehensive where I live has an exceptional head teacher, who is rapidly improving it, plenty of money, dedicated teachers and wonderful facilities.
However, I could not send my son there because of some of the other pupils. They are too dangerous. Others, while not precisely an active menace, are highly undesirable company by any standards.
The idea that a new IT block or some specialist music teaching would change my mind is laughable. The children are the problem, and their problem is community breakdown in a fragmented society.
Kieran’s horrible death reminded me very much of Damilola Taylor’s. Damilola, too, was stabbed near home by a group of schoolchildren and left to bleed to death. Both were good black boys killed by bad boys, black or white.
And the question behind Damilola’s death is the same, and remains unanswered. How did such a desperate culture develop among inner-city children in a rich and well-meaning society like ours, so that innocent children of all backgrounds live in fear and sometimes in terror? I’ve often thought that there are obvious answers and we’ve been busily avoiding them for many years.
Communities have been breaking down in inner cities because too many strains have been put on them, with little thought about what community is. Community depends on a degree of social cohesion and that depends on a critical mass of familiarity, shared language, shared tradition and shared moral attitudes.
What has happened in inner-city areas like those in London is that too many different people have been thrown together too fast in too many areas that were already deprived.
A degree of social diversity can be excellent. But extreme diversity is the enemy of community, as we have seen. Extreme diversity has stretched the bonds of community beyond breaking point in some parts of Britain. More diversity will be worse.
When Damilola was murdered in Peckham, southeast London, the ethnic composition of the area (according to the Peckham Partnership) was 43.4% white, 15.9% black Caribbean, 26.6% black African, 4.1% black other, 7.9% Asian and 2.2% other. The serious tension between some of these groups is well known, not least between Caribbeans and Africans.
The critical 1997 Ofsted report for my local comprehensive pointed out that there were more than 100 nationalities represented in the school, with the pupils speaking more than 70 languages and 58% of them learning English as an additional language; 300 were refugees or asylum seekers.
More than half of all schoolchildren in greater London are now “non-white”. And according to new figures from the Office for National Statistics, one in 12 people now living in this country (about 8%) came here as an immigrant, with a sharp increase since Labour took office.
Naturally enough, this does not count the numbers who have arrived illegally, which may be much larger, as an immigration official recently suggested in court. That’s to say, at the least 8% of people here are recent arrivals, not established British-born people of immigrant forebears.
We know now that the immigration system is widely abused and out of control. We also know now that too much diversity is dangerous, not least to children, and perhaps most of all to ethnic minority children. I wonder whether Blair has an exciting new initiative about that or whether he prefers still to hide behind accusations of racism.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 27, 2004 | Comments (0)
The awful truth: we may all be criminally irresponsible
For people who believe passionately in personal responsibility, last week was a bad week. Several strange and terrible stories came to an end, coinciding with the curious case of the “love gene” of the prairie vole. All these stories bring into sharp, unpleasant focus the old question of how far each of us is truly, equally, responsible for what he does, for better or for worse. And in me they have all tended to bring out the biological determinist.
Some of the worst news stories had to do with paedophilia. In Belgium on Thursday, Marc Dutroux was found guilty of unspeakable crimes against six girls, the youngest aged eight and the oldest 19. Even his own mother expressed her horror in court at her own “vile” progeny.
Dutroux himself showed no remorse and claimed that he was not a paedophile, “even if it is true that I slipped up with Sabine at a time when I was lonely and needed affection”. Sabine was a 12-year-old girl whom he kidnapped, kept locked, chained up and half-starved in a filthy cellar for 80 days and repeatedly raped. He says she’ll get over it.
Experts appear to agree with Dutroux that he is not a paedophile. My view is that it hardly matters what you call him. There is something profoundly wrong with him. A man who can want to do such terrible things, and then do them and then feel no remorse is not in charge of his behaviour or of his destiny and in that sense is not morally responsible.
I feel the same about Francisco Montes, who last week was jailed in France for 30 years for raping and killing the 13-year-old English schoolgirl Caroline Dickinson.
What struck me, too, from various details that emerged, was how bizarre and out of control his attitude was as well. It was not just that he did something incomprehensibly bad; his own view of what he did and his own later behaviour was incomprehensible, too, in ordinary moral terms.
Perhaps it is rather unfair to speak in the next sentence of the unhappy British crown court judge His Honour Major-General David Selwood, who was placed on the sex offenders’ register last week after admitting paedophile offences. His crime was much less.
He had downloaded 75 indecent images of children on his computer: the pictures were of naked and half-naked boys between eight and 14 years old. He tried, risibly, to justify this illegal interest by saying that he was curious to see how easy it was for somebody with limited computer skills such as himself to find such images on the internet; he maintains that he has no sexual interest in children.
One can only gape in wonderment. This wretched man must have been entirely aware of the terrible risks of visiting such sites, let alone downloading child porn on to his computer and storing it, long after his “curiosity” must have been satisfied. A lowly journalist with little honour or social standing to lose would not dare to do it — even in the name of genuine research — without written permission in triplicate from at least five chief constables.
But this man, despite the dreadful risk of losing everything dear to him — his good name, his job, his pension (neatly retrieved in the event) and the respect of his wife, children and grandchildren — surfed the net in many incomprehensible moments of madness, all for a few photographs. One can hardly guess at how overwhelming the desire must have been, especially in a man of nearly 70.
It might seem even more unfair, perhaps, to let one’s mind wander from this unhappy man to the sexual urges of the prairie vole, but there does seem to me to be a kind of link. Last week scientists at Emory University in Atlanta revealed that as far as voles are concerned, at least, there may be a single gene that transforms the most promiscuous and sexually driven creature into the most faithful and uxorious.
It seems that the prairie vole belongs to the tiny proportion of mammals (5%) that are habitually monogamous and is (by human standards) quite extraordinarily faithful to its mate. The meadow vole, by contrast, is the Don Juan of voles, habitually promiscuous with multiple partners.
It seems that this comes down to brain chemistry and a single gene. The virtuous voles have much higher levels of the hormone vasopressin and of its receptor in the ventral pallidum, a part of the brain that processes rewards, than the naughty voles.
In the Emory experiment the single gene for the vasopressin receptor was taken from the virtuous voles, bonded onto a harmless virus and transferred into the brains of the naughty voles to replicate. In this quite extraordinary experiment, the naughty voles switched from promiscuity to monogamy almost overnight. Vasopressin probably plays a key role in determining sexual fidelity.
In short, gene treatment stops frisky voles being love rats, as one headline put it. As Dr Larry Young, leader of the research team, said: “Our study provides evidence . . . that changes in the activity of a single gene can profoundly change the fundamental social behaviour of an entire species.”
Of course, men are not mice or voles. But as Young also said: “It is intriguing to consider that individual differences in vasopressin receptors in humans might play a role in how differently people form relationships.”
Intriguing is hardly the word for it. Experiments like this, and the many huge leaps forward in brain chemistry and genetics of the past 30 years, keep bringing one back to the same fascinating, painful question.
Is it still possible to believe that people are all equally responsible for their behaviour, when it is becoming clearer and clearer that in some powerful and specific ways biology is destiny, and also that in humans biology is unequal — and this is without even considering the powerful effects of traumatic childhood influences.
In other words, perhaps people who behave unspeakably badly or compulsively or weirdly are at the mercy of atypical biological urges. Perhaps, as so many wretched sex offenders say, they just can’t help themselves.
Vasopressin is also thought to be involved in autism, for instance. Anybody who knows somebody with autism, particularly with serious autism, will know the deadening feeling that there is very little that can be done, at least by psychotherapy. Such people are condemned by biology not to understand how to feel and to behave as others do.
To blame them for their antisocial behaviour would be stupid and cruel. And so, by extension, one’s sense of blame, of moral responsibility, is subtly eroded, starting from the extreme edges of experience but moving towards the centre ground of what we assume is normality.
Moralists are stern about any attempt to turn moral questions into medical (or scientific) questions, and understandably so; our entire civilisation, all our notions of equality and worth, depend on the idea of equal moral responsibility. But the awkward truth, in the light of the growing evidence, is that we are not all equally in the driving seat of our destinies. We believe in this equality not because we think it’s true, but because we think it’s good.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 20, 2004 | Comments (0)
You had to be there to see the Sixties didn’t happen
As my mother used to say in the Sixties, “there’s an awful lot less of it going on than people think”. She was referring to sex, but I think it was true of the Sixties too. There was an awful lot less of the Sixties going on at the time than people thought, or said, or proclaimed on exciting new television programmes made by razor-hipped young directors.
Life in Dorset, at least, carried on much as before, largely untouched by the sexual revolution or the style revolution or the political revolution. And I thought then, and think now, that life in most other places carried on much as before as well, except in the most sophisticated, vociferous and urban of circles.
It is true that all sorts of exciting new things were happening in the arts and in music, among these most sophisticated and vociferous circles, especially in America, which is why it’s always fascinating to have retrospectives because there is much art and music to choose from.
There were also huge cultural changes going on among a tiny elite, but for most people the Sixties didn’t happen then. They happened later, in the drab Seventies and glitzy Eighties. The paintings and the pop art and the fashion of the Sixties didn’t express a mass movement; they were (for all their mass prole chic) just an elitist beginning of something that would later become a mass phenomenon.
It was only later that the freedom, the sexual licence and the anarchy of the Sixties elite trickled down to the masses. It was only later that radical Sixties ideas about competition, class and family became institutionalised in public services, in schools and in universities. The mentality of the Sixties — “damn braces, bless relaxes”, in William Blake’s famous soundbite, the storming of “the doors of perception” and uninhibited glorification of drugs, sex and narcissistic self-expression — was still the mindset of an adventurous few.
The social damage wasn’t apparent when it affected only that minority, most of whom could pay their way out of any problems with drugs and dropping out and could somehow drop back in to bourgeois life and bourgeois privilege. The great majority — the masses of the people, as we with Trot-Mao leanings used to say — remained pre-Sixties in spirit, at least for a few more years. I think my mother had a point.
I was a schoolgirl in the Sixties, and a Sixty-Eighter too, in the sense that I was at Cambridge in the late 1960s and was there, so to speak. The usual cliché is that if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t there; if you had been there your memories would have gone up in the scented smoke of marijuana, or what we in our sophisticated way called “shit”.
What’s lurking behind this cliché is an aggressive assumption that if you were alive and young then, you ought to have been an active participant in the Sixties thing.
If you weren’t a participant, which included being stoned out of your mind quite a lot of the time as well being sexually very active and highly political, then you somehow missed the point of the youth of our generation.
That bullying, rather totalitarian attitude was obvious then and was very irritating. There was a triumphalism, a sanctimoniousness that upset me very much, even though I, from a sheltered provincial background, was myself intoxicated with the excitement of it all and keen to be part of it.
I was at the time most interested by the noisiest proponents of the Sixties thing, neglecting to my great regret later the many people who were much more interested in other things, such as directing operas or playing in orchestras or rowing.
I should guess that the great majority of people at Cambridge in those heady days did not try drugs even once. I know many who certainly didn’t then and haven’t since.
Although I myself was seduced into thinking that the most exciting, interesting people were the Sixty-Eighters, with all their energy and self-indulgent anger, there were countless other undergraduates who found it all rather dull or irrelevant. And looking back, they were right: some of it was simply silly.
True, some immensely important ideas were being hotly debated at that time, not only political ideas, but politics extended into everything — the nature of personality, the unconscious, family dynamics, mental illness, individuality and creativity. Yet all too often in practice those brave new ideas found some trivial expressions.
It seemed odd to me, for instance, that one of the first, most passionate demonstrations that the student activists got together — as important, apparently, as the Vietnam war — was about the syllabus.
There were other demonstrations in other places that quite obviously had serious purposes, such as the famous Grosvenor Square anti-American demonstration or the extraordinary, brief solidarity between students and industrial workers in Paris, or the extremes of the German student movement. Yet all that the cream of Cambridge Sixties activists could dream up as a major home-grown issue was the syllabus.
The forces of bourgeois repression were at work, it seemed, in excluding a few indispensable authors such as Heidegger from the examination syllabus, and nothing short of mass demonstration could put this dreadful wrong right.
In truth the great joy of English or philosophy there was that you were encouraged to read and study freely. Never can there have been a less rigid adherence to syllabus in the world history of universities. If you had a special interest you could ask for a special supervisor and submit papers on it.
But somehow, someone, somewhere, persuaded us, with our free-floating indignation looking for an outlet, that we must all go and have an angry sit-in, or sit-down, outside the Senate House. We were kicking and screaming for freedom, too immature to see that we already had it.
That was silly. But much worse than silly was what I observed the night before the Garden House demo (or riot) in February 1970. The Garden House was a hotel in Cambridge where a Greek trade delegation was staying, visiting the city in a spirit of small-town commercial co-operation.
Some student activists decided that their fury at the regime of the Greek colonels should be vented on these Greek burghers and their wives. And the night before the demo all sorts of nice boys from the home counties, with dirty hair and faux prole accents, explained to me that violence might be necessary and would be justified.
When students stormed the hotel, many people were frightened and a couple were slightly hurt. But even before that, the night before, my few remaining illusions about the Sixties went up in scented smoke. Marked not only by hope and energy and fun, but by hypocrisy, ignorance, self-indulgence and bad faith, the Sixties were suddenly over for me.
In another sense they were only just beginning. In the Sixties themselves not a lot of it was really going on.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 13, 2004 | Comments (1)
Islamophobia: the making of a nasty British myth
It is dangerous to cry wolf, as the little boy in the story discovered. When the frightened villagers found there was no wolf, they were angry with him. After that they ignored his cries. So when the wolf really did appear, disaster followed. In the same way, it is dangerous to cry Islamophobia.
Last week the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia (CBMI) published a report which did just that. What it said has, predictably enough, been exaggerated by others quick to jump on the bandwagon of righteous indignation. Jean Lambert, a Green party Euro MP, rushed to offer a public warning that Britain is “institutionally Islamophobic”.
“UK Islamophobia levels running high” was the headline on an internet news network, which claimed the CBMI warns that riots and extremism are more likely as Islamophobia continues to grow here.
The tone of the report is more sober, yet in the end those are pretty much its conclusions, though it gives no evidence of a rise in Islamophobia and concedes that quite a lot has been done to reduce it recently.
It quotes the Muslim Council of Britain’s view that very little progress has been made in tackling the horror of Islamophobia since it was brought into sharp focus by the CBMI in 1997 . . . “We strongly feel that the government has done little to discharge its responsibilities under international law to protect its Muslim citizens and residents from discrimination, vilification, harassment and deprivation.”
Islamophobia — dread, guilt-ridden word — is defined to include anti-Muslim comments and attacks on mosques right through to the “lack of attention to the fact that Muslims in Britain are disproportionately affected by poverty and social exclusion”.
“Institutional” Islamophobia is also defined to cover a confusing multitude of possibilities. Its most important feature is that it is “predominantly hidden”, which perhaps explains the lack of evidence. The bottom line is that British Islamophobia is breeding a generation of embittered, disaffected young Muslims who are “time bombs” likely to explode in future.
I wonder if those responsible for this report have any idea of how dangerous it is and how likely it would be to anger well-meaning citizens, if they knew about it. It makes me angry. The combination of serious accusation, muddled thinking and unreasonable demands is almost breathtaking and its superficially reasonable tone cloaks the mentality of the race relations thought police.
I do not for one minute want to deny that British Muslims suffer attacks of various kinds because of their religious faith, 9/11 or because of practices that some Muslims say are essential to Islam, such as the hijab. That is absolutely wrong and ought to be punished whenever it happens according to the many laws that deal with such crimes.
However, this report seeks to extend the notion of Islamophobia much further, to cover all kinds of grievances, including racial and cultural problems, that have nothing to do with Islam and which also affect many people who aren’t Muslims. Then, with Humpty Dumpty logic, it suggests that the existence of these problems among Muslims (though they also exist among others) is evidence of Islamophobia.
Islamophobia — in so far as the word has any meaning — must be an irrational hatred or fear of the religion of Islam and its practices. However, Islamophobia is not racist. However much activists might like to try to insist it is, it simply can’t be, because people of all races can be Muslims and you cannot guess from someone’s colour or bodily appearance whether he or she is a Muslim or not. The tragic proof of this is that British Hindus and Sikhs of Indian origin have been attacked in the aftermath of 9/11 not as Asians but (incorrectly) as Muslims.
Discriminating against a person because of his race or colour who just happens to be a Muslim is one thing, discriminating against him precisely because he is a Muslim is quite different. It suits activists, understandably, to promote confusion between the two, but it is a highly manipulative conflation and ought to be pointed out ceaselessly by people whose brains haven’t yet been addled by the circumlocutions of Anti-discrimination-speak.
Nor is discrimination against a person’s culture the same as Islamophobia or even — obviously — the same as racism, though activists and writers have long tried to conflate all three, and in the process shift the notion of race. So far, British legislators have resisted pressure to bring religion under race relations legislation, so that being against a certain religion would be tantamount to being a racist. But it is a fair bet the activists will succeed in the end.
The CBMI report states that British Muslims are more likely to be very poor, sick, unsuccessful at school, unemployed and underpaid than almost all other groups. Muslims are overrepresented in jail. One-third of Muslim children live in unemployed households and nearly 42% of Muslim children suffer overcrowding.
Yet in fact the operative description in these figures should not be Muslims but people of Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian origins (who make up two-thirds of Britain’s Muslims). Seventy-five per cent of Bangladeshi and Pakistani children live in poverty, that’s to say in households earning less than half the national average income. It is their origin not their religion that counts.
The poverty and disadvantage suffered by these groups is terrible and should be addressed. However, the explanation for it is surely not that other Britons dislike the Muslim faith (even if they do). It is, most importantly, that there are all sorts of cultural reasons why these groups are poor and seem to be stuck in ghettos where they cannot easily move beyond the difficulties of the first-generation immigrant into the confidence of the well-established second and third generation. A big factor is the practice of arranged marriages abroad (not a religious practice), often to illiterate spouses who speak no English and who perpetuate the cycle of deprivation and segregation here, as do some of the less-educated imams from abroad.
Until these cultural patterns change or are changed, these Britons will remain poor. To resist cultural reform under the misleading banner of Islamophobia is quite simply to keep these Muslims poor.
As for Islamophobia, it is a scary word used to silence criticism. But why shouldn’t one criticise Islam or any other religion or culture? Why shouldn’t one discriminate between one view and another? Actually, in the western tradition one has an intellectual and moral duty to discriminate. It seems to have become a universal article of faith that all religions and cultures are equal and must be shown equal respect. But nobody of any culture, I suspect, thinks that all religious beliefs and cultures are equal or equally respectable. That’s just a conventional piety, and a dangerous one. Denouncing Islamophobia where it doesn’t exist is likely to make people ignore it where it does. Worse still, it’s likely to increase it.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 06, 2004 | Comments (2)
