This week it was revealed that an 11-year-old girl who slipped into unconsciousness in her primary school classroom, had for weeks been smoking heroin bought from a woman in a shopping center. The girl thought what she was doing was “normal.” It is estimated that in Glasgow, where this grim revelation took place, another 50 young children could be similarly addicted.
Last week, it was revealed that Chelsea O’Mahoney, just 14 when she took part in a fatal attack in London on David Morley, had been found wandering in the streets at night aged three, and had been under the care of social services since then. Her latest foster parents had believed she was staying with friends, when she was instead out at night with three boys, attacking people and filming the violence.
Two weeks ago, it was announced by the Home Office that while the number of prostitutes working in Britain has doubled in the past 10 years, it remains the case that most of the women will have started selling sex as children, often after being sexually abused. That week, it also emerged that a young girl had pleaded to be allowed to sit for a baby, and had then allowed her older boyfriend to rape the baby and take photographs of the attack.
These terrible stories conjure childhood in Britain as a dark pit, full of demons and danger. We all fear for our children, and worry that these evils, the barely acknowledged birthright of the socially excluded, the neglected, the deprived, might creep out from their usual haunts and taint our own precious children too. What we might not realize is that in Britain under Blair, it is government policy to target families with children, and to threaten to remove those children from their parents, unless they do the government’s bidding.
The result has been that many such families are choosing instead to live “underground,” thrust by government policy into those very hinterlands that are for most of us only a nightmare. According to the Red Cross, even pregnant women have been put in this situation, and have had their babies “underground.” The piece of legislation that causes such appalling misery and danger is Section 9, a ruthlessly tough clause in the Asylum & Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc) Act 2004. It sanctions the removal of housing support from failed asylum-seekers unless they sign an agreement that they will leave the UK. If parents refuse to sign, then they are made homeless. If they are made homeless, then their children are taken into care. Essentially, it pressures asylum-seeker parents into deciding whether to give up their claim or give up their children. The children’s commissioner for England has criticized the provisions because “separation of parents and children where this is not in the child’s best interests is simply unacceptable.”
It is awful that Britain is subjecting people to such psychological torture. It is awful too, that this torture doesn’t even work. A year-long pilot scheme has tracked the progress of 116 families in London, Leeds and Manchester. So far one family has indeed left the country, three have signed up for voluntary return and anywhere between 32 and 35 families have disappeared “underground,” depending on which refugee charity you take your statistics from. The rest are either staying with friends, or have placed their children in care.
All but the luckiest, therefore, find themselves on the fringes of society, unable to access education, health and social services, and for families who have disappeared, at risk of destitution and malnutrition, and perhaps at risk of trafficking, sexual exploitation or child labor. Goodness knows what their parents might be tempted to do in order to provide for them. Since the stress of asylum appeals in general, and Section 9, leaves 80 percent of co-respondents with mental health problems, anything is possible.
Wednesday, and quite predictably, a test case was launched, challenging the right of the government to apply such inhumane pressure, and arguing that it amounted to a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The vehicle for the test case is a destitute mother of three from the Democratic Republic of Congo, known as K, who claims her daughter, 7, was sexually exploited by security forces.
Plenty of people might be tempted to suggest that K ought to accept the judgment handed down by the British courts and return to her home. That’s because it is easy for us to ignore exactly what it is that K and her children have fled from. Richard Brennan, the author of a study of the civil war in the Congo described it as “the deadliest crisis anywhere in the world over the past 60 years.” The study found that Congo’s war claimed 38,000 lives every month in 2004, and estimated that in total, since it began in 1998, the war has claimed the lives of 3.9 million people, many of them from starvation and disease.
This certainly explains, I think, why so many people from the Congo seek asylum abroad, and why, more generally, people tend to choose a hand-to-mouth existence in the black economy of Britain rather than a return to their home country. Figures, again from the British Red Cross, estimate that around 33,600 destitute asylum-seekers live extremely rough lives and doing what they can to survive on the streets of Britain.
We hear occasionally of a body being found in the bowels of a hotel, or of a group of people drowned on a holiday beach. Then there is sorrow and sadness. Sometimes an asylum-seeker will commit a terrible crime, and there will be outrage. Mostly, though, it is in everyone’s interests — particularly the government’s — to make sure these people stay as far from sight as possible.
We look at newspaper headlines, and we see that there is a hidden society in Britain that is brutal and primitive and lacking in moral norms. Yet this legislation, delivered by a government that boasts of taking up “the center ground,” is thrusting children toward that shadow society of which we are so afraid, swelling its numbers and teaching children from a very young age that survival and only survival is their aim, and that they can expect help from nobody.
There are people in Britain too, who will be appalled that K and her lawyers are having their day in the High Court, spending Legal Aid money like it’s water, and having the arrogance to make demands. The real shame though, is that such a case needs to be brought at all, that our government believes that a draconian feat of emotional blackmail such as Section 9 is acceptable in a liberal democracy.
This bureaucratic sleight of hand abuses children and the bond decent parents feel for their children. How our elected representatives were unable to see how wicked Section 9 is, and what further damage it is likely to cause any already damaged society, is the real mystery here.
