Simply Incredible! A Societal Death Wish?

Sex and violence begin at 12 -- Rod Liddle says that children in care are out of control and social workers can do nothing about it

When they speak, it is with the lilting cadences of Jamaican street slang. And the vocabulary, too: bling, baad, bitch, ras, ho and, of course, inevitably, motherf***er. This would be understandable if they were Jamaican street children, or even black British street children. But they’re not, they’re white. Many of them have never seen a black person in the flesh. So where did the accent come from?

It’s presumably aspirational, acquired from the industrial effluent which passes, right now, for youth culture. It is one of the many little pleasures to be had from working with these kiddies. The children I’m telling you about are problem children; not inner-city problem children, but the benighted offspring of our market towns. They’re the ones who, aged between 12 and 15, are in what are inaccurately called local authority ‘homes’, at a cost of roughly £70,000 per year per child. I’ve been speaking to three residential social workers who have had, by now, enough. They want to help these horrid little people but they can’t — the law won’t let them. Everything they try to do seems to be an infringement of the children’s human rights.

All of the children take drugs. If they didn’t when they arrived at the home, peer pressure ensures that they soon do. And there is perpetual sex and violence. [. . . .]

All the social workers can do is watch — they have no leeway. ‘There is absolutely no sanction. If they say they’re going out at ten o’clock at night, then we can’t stop them. We can ask them politely not to, but this, you know, doesn’t really work,’ said one residential care worker. So a 14-year-old rent boy is allowed to go out to meet paedophiles — as happens every night in one of the homes I’m dealing with here — and all the social workers can do is inform the police that there is a missing person and hope that he gets picked up before he’s turned another few tricks. But they rarely are picked up by the police.

‘We know this kid is in touch with a paedophile ring, a central telephone number he can call which will provide him with lots of work. We know this, but there’s not a thing, legally, we can do about it.’

There was the case recently of a promiscuous 14-year-old girl who was receiving letters from a paedophile serving time in prison for his activities. The social workers knew about the letters and so did the prison authorities. But the prisoner could not be stopped from sending them because this would infringe his human rights. And the girl could not be stopped from receiving them because that would infringe hers.

[. . . .] But the real scandal, of course, is the total absence of any means by which these children can be persuaded to change or modify their behaviour. A deliberate, institutionalised absence. Anything which might instil fear into the children — fear of opprobrium or sanction — is specifically outlawed.

This sounds a bit like the situation in Canada in the schools. Certainly, there has been a concerted effort to prevent teachers from teaching students respect; anything that might curb students' self-expression or self-esteem--whether warranted or not--has been stifled. It is not a happy work situation as young teachers tell me now. Many want to get out of it. It is a thankless job where the teacher is treated rudely and undermined at the administrative and departmental level. Students appear to have rights; the teachers, few -- and the teacher's word counts little at all. This is no way to build a civilized member of the citizenry. I suspect the curbs upon social workers as described above in the UK are similar.