Thursday - October 01, 2009

The betrayal of white working-class boys and the death of normal society.

This is one of the articles I was referring to in my last post. This is law (lack of) and disorder (LOTS of) in modern day England.
And the populous is UNARMED.

Now then, a natural supposition of those opposed to guns in homes is that, should they be that easy to come by then the bad guys will be just as well armed.  Well, that may be so but that argument misses the point that firstly, criminals are already armed for the most part.  People who advocate gun ownership have never to my knowledge suggested that ANYONE should be able to buy a gun merely by walking into your local grocery store.  Frankly, I don’t know how that would work out here in the UK if gun ownership was allowed. And how many people answer a knock at their door with a gun in their hand?  (ok, I once did but it was very late at night, beyond any expectation of nightly visitors and the outside light was not on. Turned out to be a songwriter friend from England visiting Nashville who decided to pay a surprise visit. ) Anyway people, the older ya get the more vulnerable one feels because, you are.  And btw, based on the things I have read about here, if we had access to guns, there’s no way that under some circumstances I would answer the door unarmed. 

I’m not implying that this unfortunate mother would have had a gun even if allowed.  But in many other cases, I’m certain lives could have been saved had the victims been well armed.  The punks and street rats are perfectly willing and proud to use violence.  And why the hell not?  There isn’t anyone or anything in place that they’re afraid of.  They have little if anything to lose. Or at least, nothing they place much value on.
Except of course their own lives and their own well being. But unless that’s threatened in some way, they own the streets.

33 separate complaints to the police

By Harriet Sergeant
October 1st, 2009

Already we are beginning to forget the horror of the story of Fiona Pilkington and her 18-year-old daughter Francecca.

We heard this week how bullying neighbours tormented them for ten years, finally driving Fiona to burn herself and Francecca, who had a mental age of four, to death.

What made matters so much worse was that she made 33 separate complaints to the police - yet was all but ignored.
Simmons family

How bitterly ironic it is that the police are now visiting her street in huge numbers, providing protection to the Simmons family who allegedly helped drive Fiona Pilkington to such a desperate act.

What scant consolation it must be for Fiona’s grieving relatives that her death has at last stirred the police into action.

I will never forget that photograph of the Simmons family. There is nothing particularly wicked about them. And that’s the horror. The four sons are smiling, relaxed, leaning affectionately against each other and their father. Their clothes are clean. They are posing, for goodness sake, in front of flowered wall paper.

Yet this is the family who allegedly tormented a woman to such horrific extremes after enduring a decade of terror.

I have spent the last ten months interviewing teenage boys in poor neighbourhoods. The Simmons boys are no worse, and even a lot better, than many of those I met. Like a lot of adolescent boys they did the reprehensible because it was fun - and because they could.

As one of the boys chillingly told Fiona Pilkington’s 72-year-old mother: ‘We can do anything we like to you and you can’t do anything about it.’

In any normal society those boys would have been pulled up short - by their parents, by neighbours, by the police, by pillars of the local community - the first time they threw an egg at the Pilkington household.

BUT WE NO LONGER LIVE IN A NORMAL SOCIETY. No one censured them, so they were able to continue their reign of terror in Barwell in Hinckley, Leicestershire, for up to a decade.

The sorry truth is we live in the twilight years of a social experiment that has failed. The Pilkington family has paid the worst possible price for that failure.

In the caring, sharing culture of our social services, one fact gets forgotten. In order to protect the vulnerable, you have to take a stand. But our Government and our institutions are uncomfortable at exercising authority. And in the vacuum that this creates, bullies like the Simmons family move in.

As one policeman remarked to me: ‘Sometimes it’s not enough to be all pink and fluffy. You’ve got to be nasty sometimes. You’ve got to be getting stuck in there.’

The failure to get ‘stuck in’ by social services, schools and the police means they have the blood of people like Fiona Pilkington and her daughter on their hands.
Fiona Pilkington and her daughter

Failed: Fiona Pilkington and her daughter were let down by the authorities

Take the local community. In the old days, a neighbour would have seized boys urinating against a house and clipped them around the ear - or worse. Now what happens when a grown-up tells off a gang of youths? Those community-minded individuals risk getting stabbed or beaten or are themselves arrested by the police.

The Pilkingtons’s neighbours complained. ‘We tried our best to stop what was going on,’ they said. They contacted the police and council. ‘But our pleas fell on deaf ears.’ Our local communities have been totally emasculated.

What about schools? What role did they play in socialising and directing the youths in Barwell? White working class boys like the Simmons brothers do worse at school than any other group. At 14, 65 per cent of them have a reading age of seven or below.

Schools today appear incapable of exercising the discipline and moral authority so clearly needed by teenage boys. In fact one of the Simmons brothers, Alex, boasted he has twice been expelled from school for ‘fighting with teachers’.

So what kind of punishment can a school inflict? They can hold a boy in at break time or, of course, with the appropriate procedure and letters to the parent, after school for a few hours. None of the boys I interviewed looked on that as a life-changing experience.

When authority is ineffectual, bullies flourish. When one mother at a North Yorkshire school complained her son was being persecuted by a group of boys, his headmistress replied: ‘There is nothing I can do about bullying.’ At least she was honest.

Indeed in the topsy-turvy world of our ineffectual institutions, victims of bullying often find themselves cast as the villain simply for demanding justice. Many parents told me that if their child complained, they were the ones who suffered and were forced to withdraw the complaint or even move school - not their tormentors.

Normally on a story this long I’d edit and provide a link. But not this time. The whole article is here and continued below.

Posted by peiper     on 10/01/2009 at 12:14 PM   
Filed Under: • Crime • CULTURE IN DECLINE • Daily Life • Environment • UK •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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