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Children with a murderous destiny
Last week three shocking trials came to an end. At the Old Bailey in London on Wednesday, a gang of four young delinquents, one of them a girl of 14, was found guilty of beating a man to death on the South Bank and recording the start of the attack on a mobile phone to watch later.
Also at the Old Bailey, on Thursday, a young man was found guilty of the brutal murder of the banker John Monckton and of a ferocious attack on his wife. On the same day in Liverpool crown court an 18-year-old boy was convicted of battering a 10-year-old girl to death a few hours after playing cricket with her, without any apparent motive.
All these crimes are disturbing in themselves; in the case of the four young people who kicked and beat David Morley to death, purely for pleasure, it is also shocking that they were convicted not of murder but of manslaughter. To the woman on the Clapham bus this makes no sense. These four young people — two of them too young to be named in court — were members of a vicious gang and regularly went looking for people to attack for the hell of it. Morley was not their only victim. What is savagely kicking and stamping on a harmless stranger, who ends up dead, laughing all the while, if not murder?
The lord chancellor said last week, in connection with a different killing, that “there is a lack of clarity about the circumstances in which a case should be reduced from murder”. How true.
What shocked me much more about all these cases was the background of the killers. These children and young people were disasters waiting to happen. I do not mean to excuse what they did. I admit that plenty of children from harsh backgrounds avoid murder and mayhem and grow up to lead ordinary lives. All the same, there are plenty of children — and these were some of them — who give clear warning signals. Someone should have paid attention to those signals. Someone should have tried to intervene before those children went to the bad. If their families couldn’t, or wouldn’t, and if school didn’t, then the welfare state should have done so.
That surely is the one essential function of the welfare state — the one duty that justifies its intrusion, its huge size and its immense cost. If nothing else, the welfare state should be there to protect and guide the children of the underclass and prevent them coming to harm and harming the rest of us.
People use the word feral too freely, but in the case of the young people who smashed up Morley, it is the proper word for their wild street life. Their stories are almost Dickensian. They were dropouts in every way, roaming around looking for trouble in attacks they called “all-nighters”. People knew about them. Why was nothing effective done about them, or for them?
Reece Sargeant, the 21-year-old gang leader, was not academically bright or at least did not appear to be. He went to a special school and left without qualifications. He did not manage to hold down a job. These days someone with no qualifications at all is almost unemployable. To be a strong, aggressive young man and unemployable is in itself to be in harm’s way and someone should have been watching out for him: he was well known locally to be a menace. This is surely what armies of social services “outreach” and youth workers are supposed to do,
The aggressive young girl in his gang is the child of an alcoholic father and a drug addict mother who had abandoned her. She was in care, then fostered. Judging from her diary she is barely literate. Of an earlier attack she wrote: “Yesterday I done an allniter wiv BARRY Darren and reece. It was joke aswell we went (?) places. Them lot bang up some old homeless man which I fink his badmire (?) even doe I woz laughen after doe.”
This girl’s co-defendant, Darren Case, was also in need of care and attention. Seventeen at the time, he lived with wheelchair-bound grandparents, had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and had not been to school since he was 13; he was said to be constantly in trouble with the police.
Similarly in the case of the 18-year-old boy convicted in Liverpool of murdering the 10-year-old girl, he too had dropped out of school at the age of 13 because of his psychological difficulties with other children. The efforts of the local education authority to arrange teaching for him had petered out so by 16 he was antisocial, isolated and difficult. At the time of the crime his family was away on holiday.
Damien Hanson, who killed Monckton, was excluded from primary school at the age of 10; even his mother called him “the devil’s child” and by 16 he had four criminal convictions. Despite his youthful criminal record, prison sentences and finally a conviction for attempted murder, he was let out of prison on early release. This was done in defiance of an official assessment that he had a 91% likelihood of re-offending.
One could, I suppose, take the laisser-aller view that in any society there will always be damaged people and bad people and little can be done about them apart from locking them up or building gated communities and hiring private patrols.
That is not the view our society takes. New Labour came to power promising to be tough on the causes of crime as well as tough on crime itself and I believe that even people well to the right of the political spectrum have considerable sympathy with that approach. We know the jails are disproportionately full of young people who are illiterate or who have been in care, or both, and with people who are mentally ill or intellectually impaired — all of whom have been let down by public services as well as by their families.
It is astonishing that in a rich, supposedly civilised society such as ours there should be so many horribly neglected children in the midst of plenty who are let down by their broken families, let down by their failing schools, let down by incompetent social services and health services and constantly moved on and on, from one hardship to another, like Jo the crossing sweeper in Dickens’s Bleak House, until something terrible happens.
They could be identified, early in many cases, and helped; all too often they are not. By 10 it may well be too late. It is a sobering thought at Christmas.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 18, 2005 | Comments (0)
They’re desperate to kill the magic lion
There has for several days been a tremendous fluttering in the dovecotes of the liberal intelligentsia; this twittering and squawking has been caused by the dramatic appearance of Aslan, the Christ-like lion in CS Lewis’s children’s story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; the multi-million-dollar Disney film of the book was released here last week to huge publicity. Several prominent members of the commentariat have felt moved to express their contempt and indignation at something that will give huge pleasure to millions of children. If it were not so repressive and censorious, this would be comic.
The problem for liberal intellectuals is that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, like the whole Narnia series, is overtly Christian, for those that have ears to hear, and therefore religious propaganda and therefore a bad thing. Young minds might be perverted by this insidious stuff. The flames of this indignation have been fanned by the fact that the film has been eagerly taken up by the American Christian right.
The Mission America Coalition has invited church leaders “to consider the fantastic ministry opportunity presented by the release of this film” and the governor of Florida, the president’s brother no less, is arranging for every child in the state to read the book. In this country Disney has appointed Christian Publishing and Outreach, an evangelical group, to promote the Christian ideas behind the film to British congregations. The liberal establishment is reaching for the garlic.
Actually, the film makers and distributors are somewhat nervous about the Christian effect over here; what sells in Christian America might not sell to post-Christian Britain. Some of the cast have been making what sound like secular disclaimers about finding religious allegory anywhere if you want to look for it, as if to distance themselves from any hint of evangelism. However, the fact remains that the story is without a doubt Christian and meant to be so. Lewis said so quite explicitly more than once and any adult with a basic knowledge of Christian lore could not fail to spot this obvious point, not least because to adult minds the allegory is distinctly crude.
To a child’s mind, however, the world of Narnia is a subtle, magical creation enhanced by his or her own imagination. I have never forgotten the intensity of the moment when I first read about Lucy going through the fur coats in the wardrobe out into the snow of Narnia, as if I were Lucy myself. I must have been exactly the right age and I was entranced. I could not understand why my agnostic mother was so dismissive of it.
Now as an adult I understand what she meant; like her I now think the Narnia stories crude, cobbled together in a clumsy pastiche and sometimes distasteful or sententious (a view to which Lewis’s Catholic friend, JRR Tolkien, was also inclined). I rather agree with some of Philip Pullman’s furious blasts against them. But then The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seemed and was magical.
It is one of the odd facts of the life of the mind that books — and illustrations — that are not very good often give the greatest pleasure to children whose imaginations can be passionately inspired by extremely little. Children often love the second-rate. The Harry Potter stories are a case in point; derivative, pedestrian and clumsy, they nonetheless seem to do the business.
Children are surprisingly indifferent to quality and they are usually impervious to message as well. As a child I did not see that Aslan was Christ, or that he sacrificed himself for wicked Edmund, even though I had had a strong Christian education. Aslan might be Christ crucified in a doctrine you might dislike, in a religion you might reject, but at another obvious level he is just a magic lion in a fairy story.
Given all this, I cannot understand why there is so much antagonism to this film. Why should anyone mind about it one way or another? After all, Disney regularly produces a great deal that is infinitely worse, infinitely more manipulative, sentimental and saccharine. Nobody has to go and see it and most of those children who do will miss any evangelical point, given how ignorant children today are of basic Christian teaching.
Above all, I can’t help wondering why the instincts of secular liberals should be so repressive. It is odd, when one considers that a major part of post-enlightenment secularism is supposed to be enlightened tolerance. Their response strikes me as similar to the response of the British Muslims who burnt The Satanic Verses or the British Sikhs who demanded that a play offensive to their religion be closed.
What both groups have in common — one extremely religious, the other extremely opposed to religion — is a reductive cast of mind. They all suffer from extreme literalism. This is perhaps understandable with religious fundamentalists, including Christians; they all see themselves as people of the book and of the literally true word. With secular fundamentalists it is harder to understand; they have no book or word to refer to; they have no cultural excuse.
To be literal minded is either to be credulous — to believe that ancient writings (and self-contradictory ones at that) are the very word of God — or it is to have a repressed and repressive imagination. In the life of the free mind, by contrast, things can have many meanings at once; things can be true at different levels of the imagination. There are archetypes and myths that are found in all cultures, differently expressed in each, and anyone not oppressed with literal mindedness is free to let them play upon his or her imagination in his or her own idiom.
For instance, it is not necessary to be a Christian to respond to the great artistic achievements of Christian culture; Bach and Mozart and Donne and Caravaggio, as well as poor old Lewis in his way, all still have meaning to the infidel. For unbelievers, religious truths in art are metaphors for other truths. But literalists are the enemies of metaphor and therefore the enemies of art. One might, of course, say that hardly matters; in my experience, art lovers tend to be rather overrated just as philistines tend to be rather underrated. But it is a curious position for members of the enlightened intellectual establishment to find themselves in, along with the fundamentalists. It is rather disturbing, too.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 11, 2005 | Comments (1)
The inspectors who praise bad schools
If Her Majesty’s inspectors were to assess the progress of Her Majesty’s government in education honestly, they ought by rights to give it an extremely bad report. National literacy strategy — failed. Sure Start programme — failed. Achievements for children in care — very poor indeed. Planning — weak and inconsistent. Spending — ill considered.
Two major reports published last week have shown that both the national literacy strategy and the Sure Start programme for young children have proved to be worse than useless. In particular they have failed the most vulnerable 20% of children, whom this government had most intended to help. It is hardly an exaggeration to call this a national scandal.
Unfortunately, however, one cannot rely on Her Majesty’s inspectors to give the most objective of reports. One of the many unpleasant facts to emerge last week about the mess the government has been making of our children’s lives is that Ofsted has failed to sound alarm bells. On Thursday Jim Rose’s eagerly awaited literacy report pointed out that Ofsted has somehow managed to find no fault with some of the country’s worst-performing primary schools.
On the contrary, Ofsted inspectors have heaped praise on the dozen primary schools at the bottom of the performance tables. Schools at which only a tiny minority of 11-year-olds achieved the standard expected for their age were described as effective and good value for money. None was listed as seriously weak or in need of special measures — a list that Ofsted has been under government pressure to reduce. As I said, it is hardly an exaggeration to call this a national scandal.
To be fair to the government, it did, presumably when panicked by educational realities and the outrageous cost of the remedial reading recovery programme (£2,500 per child), commission this review. The Rose report has overturned 30 years of fashionable and failed orthodoxy, and new Labour’s botched attempt to reform it through the much vaunted national literacy strategy. Rose recommends a return to phonics, now rather irritatingly called synthetic phonics, to distinguish it from less effective phonics teaching. It simply means your child learns to read by decoding words, putting each sound together as in th-a-t.
Many people have imagined that the national literacy programme was doing this. No, it was undermined from the first by squabbling, and reduced to a hodge podge of different methods used all together, none of which is teacher-proof or child-proof, and all of which fail to teach the simple, essential skill of decoding words by sounds. Today 30% of children fail to learn to read properly by the age of seven, which almost every child ought to be able to do, if correctly taught, including the very slow learners.
At the same time, reports by various authors at Birkbeck College (coyly sneaked onto the internet at the same time as the headline-grabbing Turner report on pensions) argued that the ambitious Sure Start scheme to provide care and early education for children from conception onwards has harmed more children than it has helped.
Either Sure Start has made little difference, or in the case of children from problem families — teenage mothers, single mothers and jobless parents — those who have been through Sure Start scored worse on verbal ability and social competence, and higher on behaviour problems, than similar children who hadn’t. It defies belief. More than £3 billion has been spent. Many billions are earmarked for future spending.
Given new Labour’s high ambitions and good intentions for children, its failure to “deliver on” its promises — to use its annoying expression — is all the more remarkable. The government is failing in its top priorities and not for lack of spending. Child obesity is worse, truancy is shocking, classroom disruption and bullying are shameful, exam standards are collapsing, the brightest children have been failed as well as the least able, testing is at best dubious and the illiteracy level, masked by years of ill-conceived testing, is simply unacceptable. Nothing could be more disastrous.
To send a poor child into the contemporary world illiterate and ignorant is like sending him naked into a Dickensian storm. It is to push him into unemployment, poverty, rage, crime, drug abuse, Asbos and jail. An illiterate girl might just as easily fall into all that and into single motherhood as well, condemned to breed more underclass babies and antisocial teenagers.
There is a perfectly obvious connection between social fracture like this and the killers of Anthony Walker or of Stephen Lawrence or of baby James Bulger; all came from broken, troubled, dysfunctional homes, from the overlooked, under-educated underclass. It is perhaps unfair to blame the government for every social evil, but one can truly blame it for the failure of its education policies and the contribution of that failure to wider social problems. The central question for new Labour now is, or ought to be, what went wrong? And will it go expensively wrong again?
My view is that the problem has been old-fashioned ideology, so long a-dying, and the government’s failure to recognise it, or when it has recognised it, its moral failure to stand up to it, not least because various cabinet ministers have shared the ideology.
Synthetic phonics was condemned by the “progressive” orthodoxy as regimented, repressive, uncreative, old-fashioned and involving grouping according to progress. In practice it has been almost impossible to fight this orthodoxy. Even now most local authorities are unwilling to accept independent new synthetic phonics programmes with clearly proven success records, because they are “commercial”.
Similarly with Sure Start, the need to “target” the most needy was undermined by the terror of “stigmatising” them. As usual, the mothers and children in most need have got least out of it, and indeed have been rather wary of it, whereas the aspirational middle classes have taken full advantage. Sure Start has distracted professionals from the most needy, enticing them into brightly coloured and comfortable Sure Start centres, and away from the hard-to-find families in need in the mean streets.
If the government cannot find ways to bypass left-wing orthodoxy, it is condemned to more of the same disgraceful failure.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 04, 2005 | Comments (0)
