I have decided to call my work Contemporary Primitivism. Technically it should be called Contemporary and Historical Primitivism, as so much of the work is about exploring my past experiences and the past experience of others. I am calling it Primitivism because my work is unskilled and primitive although much of fashionable contemporary art is synthetic in that it is not actual created by the artist concept originator but by commissioned craftsmen.
I watched an important new drama part of the new series of police detective stories with Marin Shaw as Inspector George Gentry. The story appears to have been inspired by the situation discovered last year at the site of a former Channel Island Children’s home. In the first of this four part second series an old man is found murdered, and the story which emerged is dark but all too familiar.
The former head of a children’s home, (not for once run by a local authority but by an independent organisation prior to the creation of local authority Children’s departments in 1948) is discovered murdered and later to have raped and sexually maltreated young girls in his care and encouraged and organised for other members of the management committee to indulge their paedophile inclinations. One of these is a police Inspector who we learn liked young boys.
The similarity with the publicised real event is that there is a basement chamber in which children were raped and repeatedly sexually assaulted and where in one corner there was a bath in which children were immersed in water as a punishment and to gain their cooperation. At one point as in the real life event there is a search for a body although the body in question turns out to be still alive, the former victim of the police inspector, who was adopted by him and become a local police detective and link officer to Gentry and his assistant and who deliberately misleads. Why? Because he is one of the three local survivors. One, a girl, has become a property developer and has acquired the site of the home to demolish it which she does in a symbolic gesture as the film ends. At one point she is harassed by the former head and the film brilliantly communicates the nature and the extent of the hold he once had over her. He is killed by another victim of the police inspector, more out of protection than homicidal intent, a man who was so traumatised by his experience that he has ceased to be able to speak directly and illiterate is he full of frustration except with those who shared his hell.
These three represent the victims, about five are shown in a photograph kept in a file held by the county archives of the whereabouts of the children when the home was closed,
Although in the cause of good drama within a 90 minute slot the reality of such situations and the investigation is shortened it contained all the essential ingredients and raised all the essential issues.
Some two thirds and more of the police forces in the UK have investigated allegations of rape, physical and mental violence and cruelty by former children in residential care during the period 1948-1997 when the investigation period commenced on a large scale. As it is several years since I studied the published information I do not know if any quantative study was undertaken of the total number of individual complaints, the number of former children traced, the number who requested contemporary investigation of their complaint and who were willing to present their recollections to the police for a formal investigation with a willingness to go to court if the public prosecutor thought there was likelihood of a conviction or one of the perpetrators or colleagues was willing to give evidence against others. Similarly I have no information on the number of alleged perpetrators named, the number of homes, the number and percentage brought to a criminal trial and convicted. I would be surprised if the number did not accumulate to thousands of children, thousands of alleged perpetrators and only a few percent of convictions. The number of civil actions is likely to have been similarly small because although the evidence test is less, in addition to believing or not the testimony of former victims evidence was required that the managing authority or agency had received complaints at the time and had not effectively investigated them or had been corporately negligent in some way in failing to detect and report the crimes to the police.
A reoccurring issue in the media and in at least two published enquiries has been the allegation of some organisation involving the head of the home or other senior and experience staff and outsiders, influential individuals who were allowed to commit crimes against the children. None of these claims have been substantiated in terms of the reported criminal proceedings, yet they persist as was the situation in this fictitious episode.
A similar claim has been made about cover up and pressure put on individual investigated historical allegation to either drop the investigation or limit their work. In this episode it is the fictitious chief constable orders Gentry to stop his investigation once he has identified the most likely suspect for committing the murder, even if with the absence of motive or evidence it is unlikely that a conviction will be obtained. Gentry persists and the Chief Constable is appreciative yet the outcome is the same as there is no prosecution and therefore the available evidence does not become public and surviving individuals shamed if not brought to justice, and the community in which they live, rather like the holocaust. Obviously the scale is different but the sense of people knowing and doing nothing while children were marked for life, becoming general criminals, spending periods in psychiatric case, committing suicide, and indeed becoming abusers themselves.
However the reason given in the drama why the matter did not go to court is a good one. The Identified victims were either unable still to talk about what happened to them or did not want to face reliving the experience, recounting the experience to investigators and prosecutors and reliving in open public court in the presence of the media. There is also the problem of witness credibility and corroborative evidence unless there is some record of the complaint being made at the time and of the investigation or subsequent lack of it.
Understandable the film concentrated on three individuals or were currently and immediately available. The police aided by central and local government went to great length to track down former children and former staff. Central government and not local authorities had the responsibility of registering and monitoring non local authority establishments and for monitoring local authority establishments until in the 1980’s local authorities commenced to establish their own formal inspection and complaint monitoring systems. One Labour Health Secretary of State went on record to say that were it legally possible the government should have been prosecuted for parental neglect, and the man did not survive long in a government post afterwards.
However there is also good reason for these matters being investigated and dealt with outside the public courts and media watchfulness. This concerns the impact of media attention on all the victims past and children in care at present. I am only too well aware of the impact, the feeling different from other children and of being made to feel different and in addition to having to admit to being in care or known to be in care children then have to suffer the taunts about being abused and bearing stigmata which affects their applications for employment and personal and family relationships in the future. I still remember the sense of embarrassment and humiliation at filling in an application form for a job, at a bank in the city of London as I was about to leave school at sixteen years and knew afterwards that asked about the occupation of father I had written father diseased instead of deceased and father as father.
Yet the dilemma is that without public exposure the risk is that further crimes are committed and individual perpetrators are allowed to continue.
There are also thousands of men and women with a deep sense of having lost their childhoods, having been betrayed and with a burning sense of injustice.
On the bright side that the overwhelming majority of crimes against children, other than driving crimes, and in a time of war, are committed by individuals known to the child: parents, extended family relatives, siblings and friends, and other carers, step parents and step relatives, foster parents as well as residential home workers, means that almost all children are safe from strangers, either the serial paedophile, the lunatic at large or the opportunistic and random attack or abduction. With this knowledge it is understandable that the police and other authorities always focus on those closest to a child rather than on the probability of stranger.
It was interesting that this episode was shown on a bank holiday weekend when families were likely to be watch the TV together.
Sunday had been a glorious Midsummer’s day whereas Monday was freezing cold and wet in places. On Saturday I enjoyed a Greek salad full of feta cheese and green and black olives with a small baguette followed by a good coffee. In my motel room in the evening I enjoyed two salami filled rolls with mustard after a society cuppa soup and followed by strawberries and an apple turnover with coffee. I awoke early as planned on Sunday having a chocolate croissant. Lunch there was a tasty fish starter, Roast beef and York pudding followed by a lemon and vanilla cheese cake. There was more cake for tea and in the evening a concoction, the remaining Salami roll with mustard, a small tins of baked bean cold, a Danish pastry and coffee. On Monday there was three more salami filled rolls and coffee and for tea an apple turnover and the rest of the coffee. For a later evening meal there was vegetable stir fry and a small piece of steak with strawberries. It was all enjoyable but did nothing for my weight loss intent
The two flasks bought for £5 have had had a mixed christening. The Blue one used for cold served its purpose well but the red used for hot turned out to be a dud. On my way home this morning I stopped at a supermarket and bought a smaller version of the traditional vacuum flask which fits better into my back pack but still provides two normal size cups of coffee which is the most I will drink during a day before it cools. There is usually a solution for every problem although these usually involve additional expense.
No comments:
Post a Comment