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Description
YET ANOTHER BATCH of deaths of children in the care of obviously dysfunctional families and of the various state departments entrusted with the safeguarding of such children once again makes clear that we have a serious social problem affecting the youngest and most vulnerable members of the community. And so far no government seems to have the faintest idea what to do about it. Worse, the officials charged with dealing with the problem are underfunded, over-bureaucratised, and in the grip of the remnants of the ideologies of the 1960s, obsessed with a few slogans and determined to resist any change in thinking. So children continue to die under appalling circumstances, often beaten or starved to death by parents who seem beyond the reach of any ordinary understanding of civilised behaviour.
Drugs and alcohol are a large part of the problem. So is the feckless begetting of children by men who, cuckoo-like, lay their eggs in the nest of the welfare system and move on, leaving the mothers wholly dependent on the state for support either by preference of by lack of opportunity to work. The mothers, equally feckless, often enough have no notion of contraception or perhaps no interest in it, and it is not infrequent to find a series of children by the same mother but by different fathers no longer on the scene. Not surprisingly, successive partners of these women feel they have little or no responsibility (and, all too often, no affection or even sense of duty towards the children by earlier partners-and not too much even for those they themselves father). They again move on, repeating the cuckoo pattern. Such a situation is surely a sign of serious breakdown of social conventions and the family, and hence of society as a whole.
But it is always unwise to forget that such signs of social breakdown have been observable in earlier times. There has always been a miserable underclass in various guises, in which poverty, waste and irresponsibility are endemic; nor is there anything new about the abuse of children. In earlier eras these phenomena were generally ignored (they were certainly not the... |
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