Friday, February 13, 2004

HOW DELINQUENT CHILDREN ARE TREATED IN MODERN-DAY BRITAIN

They are put into local council "care" and then this is what happens at the institutions concerned:

"All of the children take drugs. If they didn’t when they arrived at the home, peer pressure ensures that they soon do. And there is perpetual sex and violence. In one home the going rate for a blow job was 75 pence. Then a new girl joined and undercut the price, charging only 50 pence. So the others kicked her head in. If you’re not appalled at the moral issue here, you might at least be outraged by such illiberal protectionism.

All the social workers can do is watch — they have no leeway. ‘There is absolutely no sanction. If they say they’re going out at ten o’clock at night, then we can’t stop them. We can ask them politely not to, but this, you know, doesn’t really work,’ said one residential care worker. So a 14-year-old rent boy is allowed to go out to meet paedophiles — as happens every night in one of the homes I’m dealing with here — and all the social workers can do is inform the police that there is a missing person and hope that he gets picked up before he’s turned another few tricks. But they rarely are picked up by the police.

‘We know this kid is in touch with a paedophile ring, a central telephone number he can call which will provide him with lots of work. We know this, but there’s not a thing, legally, we can do about it.’

There was the case recently of a promiscuous 14-year-old girl who was receiving letters from a paedophile serving time in prison for his activities. The social workers knew about the letters and so did the prison authorities. But the prisoner could not be stopped from sending them because this would infringe his human rights. And the girl could not be stopped from receiving them because that would infringe hers.

‘The letters said stuff like, oh, I’ve heard you’re a good shag, I can’t wait til I get out, here’s what I am going to do to you,’ said one of the social workers, shaking his head in exasperation. ‘And there is absolutely nothing that we can do about it.’

The greatest threat the staff can impose upon the kids is to withhold the use of the house PlayStation, unless a kid has pawned it for drug money (which was the case in one of the homes). Oh, and they can also stop up to two thirds of their weekly allowance (of up to £7.40). But a few blow jobs can sort that problem out pretty quickly, even at just 75 pence per go. And so the children laugh at such threats....

But the real scandal, of course, is the total absence of any means by which these children can be persuaded to change or modify their behaviour. A deliberate, institutionalised absence. Anything which might instil fear into the children — fear of opprobrium or sanction — is specifically outlawed.

‘When we were kids we would get up to all sorts of mischief but there was a line beyond which we would not go — because somehow we knew it was too wrong. These kids have none of that. None of it at all. There is no line.’ Another social worker explained: ‘The real problem is that the children are never identified, by society or, as a result, by themselves, as perpetrators. They are identified only as victims. And that’s how they see themselves. They can do no wrong, only have wrongs done to them. They have a peculiar, warped view of the world.’

All of the social workers I spoke to were united in one belief: that a ‘short, sharp shock administered very early on’ would possibly save them from their later, ultimately self-destructive behaviour. One social worker told me, ‘How about a boot camp for a few weeks? Instead of this, they get a nice house with a Jacuzzi, video player, PlayStation, guaranteed income and total and utter freedom. Why should they do as they’re told, if the greatest sanction we can hold over them is to cut their pocket money?’

Another social worker, who has been in the business for six years and has been a school governor for 14, blamed the heads of the social services departments. ‘There is no support from the senior managers,’ he said — just a conviction that one must adhere to an outdated and discredited ideology.

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