The dismal roll-call of children who have been battered and tortured to death by their parents has recently had some well-publicised names added to it. With the trials and sentences of the batterers complete, the next stage is the process known as An Enquiry. which should more properly be called How To Make (almost) Everyone Happy By Missing The Point. These cases of child abuse did not appear unexpectedly out of happy, united homes; in each case the child was imprisoned in what is known, in the Town Halls of this country, as a Problem Family, which usually means that a local authority social worker had the job of keeping a protective eye on the child. And that, of course, means that when the child's miserably agonising death revealed too late that all was not well there were, in the personal shape of the social worker and the bureaucratic shape of the local Social Services Department. some scapegoats conveniently to hand. In the popular press social workers now rate, in the league table of denunciation. a little above football hooligans and a long way below professional killers in the armed forces and social and economic parasites like Princess Michael. The press love cases of child abuse for the copy they provide; nothing sells newspapers like an apparent official malfunction which can be given an indignantly human angle in two-inch front page type. Then everyone — the judges, the politicians, the media hawks, the Sun readers — can feel better, provided they can forget the fact that nothing has effectively been done about an extremely nasty problem.
Given the essentially defenceless appeal of a child, it would be strange if cases of battering did not arouse some powerful emotions. The media exploits these responses with demands for vengeance plastered up with some sort of assurances that something will be done to prevent it happening again Racist mumblings were also heard when two of the recent cases — Jasmine Beckford and Tyra Henry — involved black parents but there is no evidence that a coloured skin makes for a neglecting, violent parent. A few days later a white mother was given life imprisonment for the murder of her white child and one of the most notorious cases of recent years, which resulted in the establishment of a set of rules for social workers, police officers, doctors and the like, was that of Maria Colwell, a white child who was beaten to death by her white stepfather. If there were a disproportionate incidence of child abuse in black families it would be readily explicable by the extra dimension of social alienation in their overall poverty — which makes a useful starting point in any discussion of the subject.
The cry for revenge on the child batterer is answered — perhaps if there is enough public interest in the case — with long prison sentences. Punishment does not end in the court room, for it is no ghoulish myth that violent treatment is meted out by other prisoners — female as well as male — to anyone convicted of such offences. The people who were sent to prison in the cases of Jasmine Beckford. Tyra Henry and Christopher Stock will probably count themselves lucky if they complete their sentences in undisturbed isolation behind a locked cell door. Of course the prisoners are not supposed to take matters into their own hands in this way — in fact officially they don't — but they probably need some reassurance that, no matter what they have done to get themselves into prison, there are others who are held in even lower esteem.
It is, after all, a relief to have a scapegoat to ease any nagging doubt about where the responsibility lies for a situation too stressful to be openly faced. Sometimes a family needs the common cause of a sick or wayward child to plaster it into unity; in the same way this society needs its deviants and criminals to provide a diversionary explanation for its inherent inadequacies. The parents of a battered child fall easily into that role and close after them are the people who in many cases have legal parentage — the local authority social workers. It is not unknown for social workers to be custom-built for the type of media assassination which is based on professed outrage at the alleged laxity of present day morality. Many are comparatively young, recently qualified, female and single, with no experience of parenthood themselves. In the case of Jasmine Beckford there was something else, an added piquancy — the social workers came from abroad.
Whatever impression may be gained from the columns of the gutter press, the life of a social worker is not all drinking coffee, sitting in at long meetings and composing jargon-laden casework assessments. When they are involved in child care cases they are immediately faced with a dilemma. The parental rights which have passed to the local authority, and which the social worker is paid to administer, are in conflict with capitalism's concept of the family, in which parents have not only the obligation to raise their children into profit-making members of the working class but also some rights of possession over them. This ideology has its own mystique and when a child is taken into care it is usually on the assumption that it would be healthier, and that the case could be closed, if it were eventually returned to its parents. This course often involves a risk, which the social worker is not always discouraged from taking although of course the real risk-taker is the child, who rarely has any say in the matter.
This illustrates another dilemma of social work, which is that its function is to reconcile people to the irreconcilable. Members of the working class — those who depend on employment for their living must endure varying degrees of deprivation which, if they become identified as social casualties by falling sick or getting old or simply being inadequate. spiral down into destitution. Social workers move among the most serious casualties to bandage them up and send them back into the fray, which rarely means anything more hopeful than returning them to the conditions which they were originally unable to cope with. For social workers and their clients, progress is often measured in the ability to pay all the bills out of a state benefit giro, to learn the knack of survival almost like Royal Marine Commandos on an endurance exercise in the wilderness. Social workers operate at the sharp end of poverty; their working life is largely a succession of slums, malnutrition, mental and physical disablement, social conflict. To come through it they need to be like commandos themselves, especially as their wilderness becomes more threatening under the government's policy of spending cuts.
And that brings us to the question of what the scapegoats are protecting the rest from. Child abuse existed a long time before the first lady social worker ventured a sensibly shod foot into a graffitied council estate. It has not been unknown in the ruling class. In the late nineteenth century the wife of the ninth Earl of Carlisle, whose home was at Castle Howard, bore eleven children and then, with her fanaticism and antagonism, drove them all away from home; two became alcoholics and all five sons came to an early death. The future twelfth Duke of Bedford was made to stand silently on one side while his parents ate. until his father dismissed him; he later committed suicide, like another of that dynasty of disturbed, unhappy people. There is some evidence that child cruelty is a repetitive problem, passed from one generation to another. As an article in Community Care (27 June 1985) said: "So many awful things may have happened to the parents that emotionally they are still children". A 1973 study Born To Fail (National Children's Bureau) — showed how some children were born into conditions of social adversity which affected every aspect of their health, family relationships and education. Another, similar investigation published in 1982 followed up this work with conclusions no more optimistic. One common result is that:
Many of the families have not been able to remain together through their difficulties and the children have been received into care of the local authority. (Children In Adversity, Peter Wedge and Juliet Essen.)
So it was not surprising when the NSPCC recently stated that there is a connection between the increase in unemployment and that of child abuse. Poverty pressure is very destructive of human relationships; the Marriage Guidance Council believes that unemployment puts an extra strain on marriages already in difficulties; two specialists at a Glasgow hospital have reported that children in the deprived districts of that city are up to 100 times more likely to suffer diseases serious enough to need hospital treatment; the Nuffield Centre at Leeds University has said that the evidence of a link between unemployment and suicide is "overwhelming".
Families which are sick, worried, sliding into the sort of desperation with which unemployment flavours their normal poverty are not serene, optimistic, healthy and they are therefore unlikely to be able to deal with what are accurately called the everyday problems of life. Accurate because under capitalism life for the vast majority of people is not an experience of joy or fulfilment but a grinding problem which they face every day. One of the sharpest elements of stress in a suffering family is its children, who have not yet been conditioned into acceptance of a world where adults have to produce wealth which they can't get at. even though they need it desperately and where a few people can be born into riches beyond measure while millions suffer deprivation. The very dependence of children makes them especially vulnerable to, and expressive of, the stresses of poverty. To an adult who has been driven into a pitch of frustration and an angry cynicism about human interests and safety children are too easy an outlet for despair. Like capitalism's other social problems, child abuse cannot be separated from its context.
What then of the family? Why doesn't it protect a child in peril, rather than acting as its prison and. perhaps, as its execution chamber? The apologists of capitalism tell us that the family is a protective, caring organ (remember the Tory campaign about supposed Victorian morality?). In fact an important part of the family's role under capitalism is to socialise its children to brain-wash them into accepting that, like their parents, one day they too will go out to work to provide for their own family. The child's real talents, its basic emotions, its need for expression, quickly become strait-jacketed into that stifling ideology. In the process the child is taught that its parents should be its protectors and confidantes; but many of them find that working-class existence is no preparation for sensitive parenthood.
What it amounts to is that the family, far from being protective, is perilously fragile When it fails, its very privacy exacerbates the problems, sometimes to the point at which a child is killed amid an angry conspiracy to conceal the awful truth that it was all too predictable and avoidable. This then is a plea for a new look at the problem of child abuse. Not just another solemn enclave of ministers and councillors and managers; a great deal of that went on after Maria Colwell was killed and out of it came an elaborate machinery of consultation and buck-passing which did not save those poor kids who have died recently. Whatever reforms are introduced are overwhelmed by the inhuman crush of capitalism's events.
So this is a plea to the people who suffer the frustrations and indignities of capitalism, who mostly come through heroically but who sometimes lash out blindly in some unspeakable act with such terrible consequences. It is a plea to turn away from scapegoats and towards an examination of this society and at what it does to human beings. It is by our decision, that the world is organised as it is. By our decision we can change it. into a great place to grow up in.
Ivan
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