Children's Rights and Solomon's Judgement.
I was intrigued by an article I read recently written by a residential care worker talking about Cumberlow Lodge, a home I was in for a short period. Underneath the article was the usual crop of comments.
Those who had been there in the 70s and 80s were remarkable for their vehemence. The passion rang out in their comments. ‘Held down’, ‘repeatedly raped’, ‘daily drugged’, ‘assaulted by staff’ – and the inevitable – ‘it has ruined my whole life’, ‘been in and out of Holloway’, and of course…..’I want to sue’.
Now Cumberlow Lodge was no picnic; it was a locked facility which took children from many diverse backgrounds. Some of them were physically, if not emotionally, mature and had had ‘life experiences’ as it is euphemistically referred to, which had left them profoundly damaged, both mentally and physically. In short, some of the girls were totally terrifying in terms of their likely response to situations they found challenging – like being told to do something they didn’t want to do. I was scared stiff of a lot of them.
The curious thing about these comments, though, is there is little mention of the antics of some of the more challenged girls – it is all about the alleged brutality of the staff. Brutality that I had no memory of, either to myself or indeed to any other girl. Pretty much the same staff, in pretty much the same buildings; had they all morphed into monsters as the clock struck 12 on the eve of December 31st 1969……?
Nobody had ever tried to forcibly drug me, or held me down, nor, God forbid, repeatedly raped me. Nor had I ever witnessed or heard of any such thing occurring.
Just like the Duncroft saga; those who had been there in the 60s seem to have dusted themselves down, said ‘thank God that’s over’ and got on with the rest of their lives. None of us enjoyed it, we may even have moaned to family and friends about how unfair it all was – but I don’t see the lurid accusations of ‘padded cells’ and deprivation that would grace an account of life in the Maze; I don’t see the bitterness nor the claims that it has ‘ruined us for life’.
What could have occurred as the 1960s closed that changed? What could have happened to those middle aged men and women that turned them into cruel tyrants in the minds of the children they cared for? What turned a room with a divan bed and nothing else in it, into something that could truthfully be described as a ‘padded cell’.
OR could it be that it wasn’t so much the staff or the buildings that had changed, but the children themselves, the range of problems that the system was being asked to care for, and their perception of how they should be treated?
There is a clue in the article. 1969 was the year of the Children and Young Persons Act. It was also the year that the social work template ‘Care and Treatment in a Planned Environment’ came into effect. Both had a marked effect, on those who had criminally offended, and those who were psychiatrically damaged as a result of their previous life or perhaps just ‘chance’.
No longer could you be sent to Holloway if you were under 16, no matter how serious the crime. You were a child, and Care and Treatment in a Planned Environment said you should be provided with ‘parenting’ – the essential characteristics of which are described as ‘care, comfort, control, and nurturing’. Laudable aims, with the best of intentions – but something of a mixed message to be sending to a strapping 15 year old who is quite old enough to understand that stabbing one’s step-father is something which brings consequences with it – and then finds that those consequences are billed as something akin to a mother figure clasping you to their bosom.
Little wonder they reacted so violently and bitterly to finding Bridie Keenan standing there with her bunch of keys – at least we were forewarned that we had ‘done wrong’ and however unfair we thought it might have been, didn’t have any expectations of Bridie or any of the other staff ‘parenting’ us.
Another group of children were affected by these changes – those who were clinically mentally ill. The Children’s Act said that since 16 was now the school leaving age, a full time education must be provided. If you were not prepared to accept treatment voluntarily in the freer atmosphere of children’s home or foster care, the local mental hospital was no longer an option – no education! Which was how many 70s girl’s found themselves apparently being ‘punished’ for their ill health by being incarcerated in Duncroft. Little wonder that they took a different view of their ‘jailers’ than the 60s girls. Little wonder that their resentment has taken a more derogatory view – their illness alone would predetermine their downbeat view of the same staff and the same buildings; even the same events.
So what should have happened? Has the ‘enlightenment’ of the Children’s Act actually caused more anguish than it sought to cure?
That argument is still not resolved. BBC Radio 4 has been running an article headlined ‘Hundreds of children ‘detained in police cells”. It seems that the police used one of their police cells as a secure ‘place of safety’ under the Mental Health Act for 317 ‘under-18s’, now officially designated as ‘children’.
Sarah Brennan, chief executive of charity Young Minds, described the situation as “really shocking”. “[Children and young people] need to have appropriate care in the appropriate setting and that should never be a police cell when they have mental health problems.”
A fine sentiment, Ms Brennan, but do you think the country should maintain an extra 317 empty beds in a ‘parenting atmosphere’ on the off chance that a policeman should come across a ‘child’ with immediate mental health problems’? Or perhaps you feel that the child should be given free rein, allowed to abuse drugs, alcohol, perhaps self harm, or entertain numerous sexual partners in the middle of the high street whilst obviously mentally ill – until such time as a suitable home with cozy parent can be provided?
The dawning of ‘Children’s Rights’ and Social Work theory have sent so many mixed messages over the past 40 years, I can’t help feeling that a lot of the moral paroxysms we are currently enduring are as a result of the perception of what ‘care’ should mean being misunderstood by an entire generation.
They may well have got the same treatment we did – they just saw it differently. Their glass was half empty.
What think you?
- GildasTheMonk
January 26, 2014 at 3:33 pm -
An excellent and telling insight
- Frankie
January 27, 2014 at 9:47 pm -
Seconded… There is something very wrong here, never mind the Duncroft saga.
- Frankie
- sally stevens
January 26, 2014 at 5:55 pm -
I couldn’t agree more. If the current mind-set of some of these women from Duncroft in the 70s is indicative of their then-perception, it speaks for itself. I was more abused at my posh boarding schools than at Duncroft, and in fact my Duncroft file actually indicates that there was a suspicion that I had been abused at my convent school – not, I should point out, sexually, but certainly physically and emotionally. I was pretty young (8-11) and some of the things that happened were not right for a child that age. What is different about the Duncroft 70s group is that they wish to be compensated for sexual abuse, because that sells newspapers, and they can pin their hopes of enrichment on the BBC’s deep pockets. I’m pretty sure that if someone had sat them down and explained that there was very little hope of recovery, and did they still want to go ahead, it might have been a whole different story, and one we could all have been spared.
- Eric
January 26, 2014 at 6:13 pm -
I think it is simpler. They are after money, they are lying through their teeth.
I reckon it is at least 95% fabrication and close to 100% tbh.
IMO about 70% of it is feasible exaggeration but almost certainly untrue (beaten up every night) and the rest is nonsense – gang rapes, satanic abuse.
One other commonality is the downplaying of their own behaviours – you would think they were harmless children – someone says they were sent somewhere for stealing something. This just isn’t true – to get to these sort of places you had to be pretty challenging. No offence intended, Anna. These places were expensive, you weren’t sent there on a whim ; as you imply it was almost an alternative to prison.
The ‘ruined for life’ claims relate to money ; if you can demonstrate that DLT ruined your life by allegedly groping you in 1975 you can have 30 years back pay for the Chairman of Shell job that you would have undoubtedly got otherwise.
In fact the whole thing relates to money. There are a few damaged people who probably genuinely believe they were assaulted ; the rest are lying, and they know they are lying.
- Robin Green
January 29, 2014 at 11:58 pm -
Of course, satanic ritual abuse doesn’t exist, full stop. It was a nonsense spread by fundamentalist Christians in the US, therapists and others in the 80s and 90s, and nothing was ever proven. Think of Monty Python’s “witch” sketch, and you will have some idea of these therapists understanding of falsifiability and the scientific method.
So any time someone claims to be a victim of satanic ritual abuse, that in itself should be a huge red flag. It may not be a case of them lying though, they may have been brainwashed by a “therapist”. And what a horrible thing to do to a person, and to their relationship with their supposed abusers. Horrifying someone by implanting false memories of things that never actually happened to them. It’s like something out of Nineteen Eighty Four. That should be a crime.
- Robin Green
- Roderick
January 26, 2014 at 7:47 pm -
Another chicken of the 1960s comes back to roost. The changes to education introduced by the move to “child-centred learning” have blossomed into “adult-imagined wrongdoing”.
- Margaret Jervis
January 26, 2014 at 7:53 pm -
Good stuff. But the chronology of legislation and changes needs to be recognised and amended. Will get back. If – as per Wittgenstein, – were one to distill a whole agonised and agonising history of care and control into a single word – it would be thus : compensation.
- Johnny Monroe
January 26, 2014 at 8:28 pm -
I was a child in the 1970s, one who attended five state schools. Some of the teachers I endured were borderline sadistic, but these were in the main old-timers careering towards retirement, ones who’d learnt their trade before the war and were largely Victorian both in their methods of teaching and in their methods of discipline. But no teacher, however frightening, came close to my fellow pupils in putting the fear of God into me. Some of the most nasty, cruel and unpleasant individuals I’ve ever met in my life were children. I’m never really shocked when a child is murdered by another child, for I can remember contemplating murdering more than one fellow pupil who made my life a misery as far back as the age of six, to the extent of how I would do the deed and where I would bury the body. Anyone old enough to remember Gripper Stebson, resident bastard of ‘Grange Hill’, will remember numerous real-life Grippers from their own schooldays; and I was never terrified of any adult as a child in the way I was terrified of certain kids I went to school with. Most adults appeared to operate within a society that had strict boundaries of behaivour and conduct, whereas children seemed to exist in a lawless vacuum, prowling the neighbourhood in packs and turning the route to school into the set of ‘Lord of the Flies’.
To hear of your experience of staff and residents of childrens’ homes, Anna, is a reminder that there appears to have been a collective rewriting of history when some adults today recall their childhoods, that the source of all distant trauma has now been retrospectively transferred to the adult because children are again viewed as virtuous beacons of saintly innocence and they couldn’t possibly have left deep psychological scars on anyone…could they?
- The Blocked Dwarf
January 27, 2014 at 2:57 am -
” Anyone old enough to remember Gripper Stebson”
Oh yes and your experiences mirror my own in state education…a Secondary School just a year or so after caning had been outlawed. I was bullied mercilessly by our own “Gripper” . On one occasion i was severely worked over for getting back up for a teacher (ie I ran for the headmaster) who was about to be beaten up by Gripper’s gang. I’ve had a few kickings in my life since then but that one still gives me nightmares, even 30 years later.
Worse than Gripper though were the Grippettes- as a fat shortsighted boy, a Roland, raised to believe that ‘boys don’t hit girls’ I suffered daily torture and humiliation at the hands of some of the girls.
Then one day the worm turned, something in me just snapped. I hammered one of the girl’s head so hard against a wooden desk that she had to be taken to Casualty with a suspected fractured skull and another joined her there with her head parboiled (I can still hear her screams as the boiling drinking chocolate from the vending machine went over her head). Strangely enough after those incidents other girls suddenly found me attractive and the male grippers tended to give me a wide berth.
- GildasTheMonk
January 27, 2014 at 9:51 am -
Good man. I suffered from systematic bullying at school, until one day I snapped too. I can’t say my rather feeble right hand to the chief bully’s face had quite the same effect, but shocked and amazed face was something I still remember, more than 30 years on. So I did it again. It stopped after that.
- Moor Larkin
January 27, 2014 at 10:14 am -
re. the Gripettes
Girls were never subject to corporal punishment in my schools, but nor were they ever a physical threat. I recall one girl being clumped on the head with a book by a teacher, which for a boy would have been merely an everyday interaction, but the girl’s parents visited the Head and the teacher made a sort of apology in fron of the class to her – which in hindsight, he must have been ordered to do by the Head, so as to placate the annoyed parents. Mind you, my scools were all unApproved so it’s all apples and pears.
- Chris
January 27, 2014 at 10:52 am -
Starting off school life (and indeed life in general) as a studious little boy soaking up everything from pop music and television to school lessons and reading (my ‘reading age’ at 8/9 was given as 16 IIRC), it was my natural sense of humour/mischief that carried me through what was an extremely mixed Junior School (lots of ‘ruffians’ from the local council estates mixed with us from more aspirational backgrounds).. The attitude of my father, bless him, didn’t help there much – he was a policeman and frequently would turn up at school to complain about something or someone, be it a teacher or another pupil, which saw me singled out by certain teachers (particularly the bulldog-faced chain-smoking Head) and (though less frequently) other kids. Going home for dinner every day also saw potentially ‘out of the loop’ a bit too. Some of those teachers there – the older ones – were absolutely magnificent.
On entering the local comprehensive I found I had to up the ‘playing for laughs’ in order to survive – the first year was miserable, but then again I wouldn’t be 12/13 again for any money as everyone is an insecure bag of fledgling hormones, the remainder of my school days played out mainly for laughs. As well as winning me friends, it allowed me to spend the remainder of my time there not having to dodge the various Gripper’s & Imelda’s.
At 9 years old I was the Top Boy at my Junior School, at 16 I left with just 4 GCSE O-Level equivalents – but this was the latter half of the 1980’s, a transitional time when so many of the teaching profession were disillusioned and there was so little of this ‘accountability’ they have now to pupils ability/results.
Question is – should I sue the bastards now 30 years later for failing me so miserably and, therefore, completely ruining my life?
- Chris
- Moor Larkin
- GildasTheMonk
- The Blocked Dwarf
- JuliaM
January 26, 2014 at 8:52 pm -
In modern England, it seems Victimhood is something to be desired.
- Eyes Wide Shut
January 26, 2014 at 9:59 pm -
Funny how that word “Victorian” keeps popping up. “Victorian values”, as who was it said ? Angelic children. At the moment our society believes children are immaculate, constantly at risk of pollution in all forms: from their food, from their education, from their environment and especially from sexuality. This is something that many adults have made such a hames of, it comes naturally to them to assume it is the main threat against their children. One touch – and they are utterly vitiated and fallen.
But I gaurantee you one thing: we’re two minute away from the opposite: demon seeds. Pendulum swing. Children’s innate badness, wickedness lying. Now we say “They must always be believed” – that’s just the flip-side of “Children can never be believed”. We’re very good at projecting all our effed-uppness on children.
This has nothing to do with the Duncroft cohort. Who knows what happened to them, or is happening now, but they are not children.
- Moor Larkin
January 27, 2014 at 8:18 am -
re. Pendulumns.
The imprisoning and ongoing demonisation of the Bulger child-murderers surely demonstrates that the Britain is not so much swinging as it is schizophrenic about what children are. There was a contemporaraneous and identical murder to the Bulger case in Norway back then and the Norwegians reacted totally differently to the British.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8577458.stm
- Moor Larkin
- John Ward
January 27, 2014 at 8:50 am -
I feel alienated in that I didn’t have any of these experiences good or bad, and I insist on digging up my parents as a mark of my anger at their abusively balanced parenting, and the concomitant life of achievement and silly mistakes that followed.
As Washington didn’t say (but he would now) “I cannot tell a lie, it was somebody else’s fault”.
Another thoughtful bit of dot-joining from Ms Raccoone-Hatte. But something in me still wonders: are there more staff lowlife around than there were in her more genteel yoof…..as well as more appalling inmates?
Just a thought based on the experience of my parents’ “care” homes in later life: most of the staff were diamonds, but one or two were paste.
Anyway Anna, whatever you do, don’t suggest trying to actually do something about our feral comrades….
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2014/01/26/underclass-policy-a-reader-response/ - right-writes
January 27, 2014 at 9:08 am -
Anna, I can’t empathise with any of this stuff, I was in a “normal” family home with two parents, one of whom used to hit me most days… She was so scarred by the war, her own sorry past of bullying by her brother, and the death of her mother at 8 years old… That she feared everything… So I can’t really comment on these places.
However, the same sort of people that passed those examples of “enlightened” legislation that you describe, were the sort of people that thought that paedophilia was perfectly acceptable…
Persons like Harriet Harperson, Danny Coen Bendit etc., so I am not surprised that the consequences of their acts have destroyed so many lives, whether that be retrospectively or actually.
- Eric
January 27, 2014 at 9:14 am -
John, you are right. No-one is saying that all staff were perfect. Some were bullies, some were lazy, some didn’t care, some were dishonest. Most people tried their best with difficult children.
If you’ve ever read any of these statements though, it is like the article above, everyone on the staff supposedly colluded, everyone was violent and abusive, people were starved and raped, and (most oddly) no-one ever mentioned any of this to any visitors, parents or anyone else at all until the compo solicitors turned up. Most of these places have endless visitors – parents, social workers, relatives, inspectorates, local authority people, it’s like a railway station some days. Supposedly nobody noticed and nobody told. Fat chance. Alternatively, they told these people but they all ignored them, which shows zero understanding of how things worked.
Working with tough kids can be very rewarding but it can also be very difficult, there are days when you just don’t want to go in the next day. But you don’t mind that, what hacks you off is when some scrounging XXXX tells a pack of lies twenty years afterwards for money, buttressed by implausible pseudo-psychological reasons why they didn’t say anything before some dishonest solicitor comes up waving money bags under their eyes.
- Fat Steve
January 27, 2014 at 10:40 am -
As always Anna, whenever you write about childhood in the 60s (and beyond) , you have that ability to get to the heart of the issues as no other can —a few have made movies that summon up that era well though perhaps one of the best being The Dead Poets Society. The legacy of a ‘good’ private education endures to this day in just about everyone I know who went to a private school. I suppose those who went to a state boarding institution at least had some protection in that the institution wasn’t a private domain. What I struggle to understand is why and how the system came about —was it the trauma of war? social engineering? a pessimism about humanity and children in particular? a last ditch attempt to produce a generation of colonial administrators in an empire that had died? an odd interpretation of Christianity (remember it was Christian Schools who claimed it was a human right based on Freedom of Religion to inflict corporal punishment on a child )? I don’t know though they had a chilling certainty they were right but few of our parents generation seem to have had good outcomes to their lives despite their certainties. My own experiences at school did little more than teach me how not to behave as an adult.
- rabbitaway
January 28, 2014 at 12:32 pm -
Great news – they are reopening TVC in White City – that is, programmes will be made there again in 2015 !
https://twitter.com/rabbitaway/status/428136075358240769 - Miss Mildred
January 28, 2014 at 12:33 pm -
Very pleased to see you back and on form Anna. These sad historical tales of sadism, nastiness and over strictness in childrens confinement homes are painful to read in the link provided. Egged on,currently, by trawling lawyers, victimhood could be a lucrative path for mature people who have failed to thrive in life. Someone must be to blame. Someone must pay. ? False accusations against approved school staff were made in Cheshire many years ago. Some staff did terrible crimes but prisoners colluded, and accused innocent staff of simmilar actions to get criminal injuries compensation. Again there was mismatching of timing, as with Duncroft, which let the husband of an extremely distressed friend of mine out of prison on appeal. This distress caused to this family was awful. Time in prison was scary. He did not survive long after release due to all the strain. One theory from an Oldie Anna. The teens of the sixties were young children of the fifties; Then children could not demand much, rationing and shortages, corporal punishment from parents and teachers the norm. Strict/firm parenting mostly accepted. Children reared through the sixties had a totally different scenario in earlier childhood. By the time they were teenagers , the sixties had blown away the buttoned up behaviour. A serious mismatch between parents and children/teenagers developed in the seventies. TV ruled the roost. Teds and Mods on scooters fighting at seaside resorts (in the late fifties). Chasing about after TV reared pop stars and DJs. Not too much of that in the fifties. From 1962 onwards WOW! Hysterical mass orgasms at airports! Where were the parents of these pulsating young ladies? The rules got changed in the more relaxed times. Maybe the laws of unintended consequences followed these so called more humane ways. They were not appreciated as more relaxed by a more freedom demanding set of teenagers. Possibly more drugs involved, but certainly more relaxed parenting, on the whole, may have had something to do with the perceived oppression by staff in these places.
- sally stevens
January 28, 2014 at 5:28 pm -
This link provides some interesting reading http://www.childrenwebmag.com/articles/key-child-care-texts/the-development-of-secure-units-in-child-care-by-g-j-blumenthal
- Bill Sticker
January 28, 2014 at 8:32 pm -
Re; the state school experience. Mine gels with other respondents. Routine bullying. mostly from classmates until I learned to fight back against at least two or three of the bastards. Playground fights were routine. Very little violence from the teachers though. Sarcasm was (mostly) their weapon of choice. Some more so than others. Then, and only after all other attempts to get your attention had failed; the cane, strap or slipper. Oddly enough, despite being caned and given a slap round the head a few times, sometimes (I felt) unjustifiably, I’ve never felt the urge to sue anyone.
I’ve always wondered about this Rousseau-derived belief in ‘the noble savage’ and that all ickle kiddies are angels, which is, in my child rearing experience, complete bollocks.
- JuliaM
January 29, 2014 at 8:49 am -
I wonder if all the chattering classes sneering into their mochas at theis story of Deep South backwards supertition pause to think that we are really no better?
Their police and social workers apparently believe in demons – but our police and social workers apparently believe in just as many unlikely things.
- Moor Larkin
January 29, 2014 at 7:20 pm -
Something that you might be better placed than me to judge is the relevance of the one thing that WAS becoming increasingly very different as the Sixties female generation gave way to that of the Seventies – and that was the age (statistically) you girls would have first have had sex…..
“What they had done in the paper was to survey mature women born in different years as to whether they had had sex before they were 20 and then ran the line as a percentage who said yes. The oldest women had been born in 1931 and the youngest, in 1971. I have reconfigured the data to show the percentages of young women first having sex by year (by simply adding 18 to the date of birth). It’s all a bit rough and ready but perhaps reveals what is obvious to anyone who was alive in the mid-20th century. From around 25% in 1949, the number had reached 80% by 1974, and was hitting 90% by 1999. During this entire process of a societal revolution however, the birth rate to young mothers actually decreased, due to the same reason for the rise in sexual activity – Contraception. Prudence had now got the pill and prudence in some ways, could be a thing of the past.”
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/broken-britain.htmlOne of the recurring themes in the Savile stories was that the women felt now that at the time they were “too young”, ” they didn’t understand”, they were “groomed” (seduced?), he promised he “wouldn’t go all the way”… etc. If they were brought up with the same “guilt complex” as you girls who were born in the forties (as part of the defence mechanism to stop you getting pregnant) then whilst they were behaving differently, they may have had deep misgivings inside because of the influences of their parents.
By the generation of the 1980’s none of this was applying so much any longer, because their parents had grown up in the 1960’s. My numbers only reflect those having sex for the first time when they were still under 20; It would be interesting to see figures for those perhaps under 16 over that two generations but I have no idea if such data is even available.
- Jacqueline Rousseau
February 8, 2014 at 3:27 am -
Anna, I appreciate your willingness to look at the other possibilities regarding the schools mentioned. I worked at Cumberlow Lodge from 1980-83. During that time I didn’t ever see a a girl beaten, drugged or sexually assaulted by staff. I did see girls restrained when they became assaultive, and I helped restrain some myself. We were not unnecessarily rough with them; a 14 stone young woman on the rampage takes several staff to hold her back! Although, with hindsight, I now realize that a lot of the adolescent girls were the victims of sexual assault, this was not discussed at that time. Awareness of it was not at the level that it is today and so interventions, validation and treatment were just not available. The times were very different. I hope that the now adult women can find the help that they need to deal with the events of their past.
- Deborah
May 28, 2014 at 2:01 pm -
I was in Cumberlow Lodge for about 6 weeks around 1969. I had been abused by a man who lived in our street growing up. I tried to talk to my mother about it and she would not let me speak. It was a difficult thing for a young girl of 8 to handle and when I got to my teens i felt very unloved and messed up. I was in a club underage and that’s how I ended up there when the police raided it. There was a lot of ritual humiliation – the first night I arrived there I remember being in a bath with two members of staff scrubbing me raw as if I was dirty. It was embarrasing being naked in front of strangers at that age (I was 15) You only had one set of clothes to wear and they were deliberately all mismatched colours. There were some very dangerous, disturbed young women there and I never felt that I should be there at all. I was not aware of any sexual abuse or beatings there. It was more upsetting for me that my mother had just abandoned me and not stuck up for me and I ended up there. It was totally unsuitable for me.
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