An Unholy Trinity

There has been some rather awful news of late and it has centered around children and the abuse and neglect thereof. I hardly need to remind anyone reading this in the UK that the investigation surrounding the disappearance of five year old April Jones is now a murder investigation (at the time of writing her body has not yet been found, although a local man has been charged with her murder).

There has also been rather a lot of press coverage online, in newspapers and on the television of allegations that a once-revered (by some) star of children’s television had spent his downtime in his long and successful career in television and radio sexually abusing children. It should go without saying that these allegations have not been ‘proven’ in a legal sense (yet), but given the tidal wave of accusations along with the revelation that he was in fact interviewed under caution in 2007 it would seem unlikely that his memory will emerge unbesmirched from this scandal.

However, another story also broke last week, which also concerned the neglect and eventual death of a child. In the borough of Westminster, a baby boy, who has been reported as ‘child EG’, starved to death alongside his mother, who died of a brain infection and was unable to feed him, having become destitute as a result of delays in transferring welfare support from Home Office services to local authorities. The family had 'successfully' claimed asylum in the UK. This actually happened last year, but has only surfaced as news just now, following a letter being sent to the social housing news hub, Inside Housing.

I’ll just condense that to something a bit simpler, shall I? A child of no fixed abode starved to death in Westminster last year.

I think we can all agree on how absolutely shocking that is? This is not fucking Dickensian London, people. This is not a developing country with a weak social service infrastructure where some familes are forced to eke out a marginal existence in vast slums on the edges of megacities. This was happening within a stone’s throw of Parliament, for as those of you who know London know, Westminster is one of the smaller boroughs, sandwiched as it is between the larger sprawl of Camden and Old Father Thames. Somewhere behind the door of a bedsit a woman and her child starved to death right here in the UK. I wonder if the  blinds were down every morning?

I want to talk about these three news stories together because on the face of it they share some Venn-diagram like similarities: the complete and utter dismissal of the rights of children, the lethal danger of abuse and neglect, the localised nature of child abuse and so on. These are crucially important issues and they need to be addressed – why, for example, was a suspected paedophile allowed to go on for decades operating in plain sight, when his crimes were an open secret not just within his primary institution but in the rest of the media and, as it seems, to the local constabulary? Why is the narrative of abduction always one of ‘stranger-danger’ when in many cases the abductor is local (and sometimes known) to his or her victim?

However, there is another question which nobody seems to be asking: why do the first two stories receive blanket, intricate and in-depth coverage from the national press, broadcast and online media, while the third receives...crickets? I found that third story from a retweet on my Twitter feed. Google “Child EG” or “Westminster child death” and your screen will not exactly be inundated with links. It was reported in the Guardian but not, as far as I can see, in many other places (a search of the BBC site has drawn a blank – please update me if Google and I are wrong).

There is a lot to unpick in this. There is most obviously the inherent racism in the massive discrepancy of coverage between a story about a dead British child and a story about a dead immigrant child. There is also the refusal to confront the idea that neglect is as damaging as abuse (sexual abuse and murder are concrete crimes which can be identified by individual actions. Neglect is harder to pin down, especially when it is being committed by the state). Which brings me to my main point – stories like that of Child EG do not get as much focus and attention as they should because they do not fit the narrative that Britain wants to tell itself – that we already do so much for immigrants, that we are a soft touch, that our reputation for humanitarism has left the doors of our sceptred isle wide open to anyone who would like to come in. We all know these rhetorics, we are entirely familiar with them as they appear in popular press and out of the mouths of politicians on a daily basis. We should also be questioning them.

I was having a conversation by email the other day with a friend of mine who works for End Child Detention Now (and y’all should go read his stuff on Open Democracy, because he is righteous and awesome), which went as follows:

 

Myself:

It’s nice to see that it doesn’t take much to work up some outrage about this kind of thing. Just, y’know, DEAD CHILDREN. Jesus. Also, has anyone realised how fucked it is to need a ‘solution’ for appearing to be humanitarian? I mean what in the actual fuck.

Himself:

I know – guess it just goes to show how effectively the Mail, Sun, Telegraph, etc. have managed to peddle the ‘Britain is a mug’, ‘immigrants take advantage of our better nature’ bullshit to get people thinking that being humanitarian is something contemptible.

...because that’s the thing, isn’t it? The media narrative is so completely fucked up that we don’t even question why cases like this don’t get reported, because we have learned to start thinking that being humanitarian is something contemptible. Our outrage for the victims in all of the above cases should be equal, and it should be equally reported. As Women For Refugee Women wryly, and sadly, tweeted at me yesterday: “We hate to say it, but refugee children often not seen as quite as important as other children”.

What we need to ask ourselves as a nation is: why, the fuck, not?