We associate torture with war but two chilling examples of torture made the news in Britain this summer that had nothing to do with war — or at least with war as commonly understood. One concerned a vulnerable young man named Kevin Davies who was held captive in a Gloucestershire garden shed by three ‘friends’ and who died after being starved and beaten and forced to appear in a hostage-style video insisting on how well he was being treated. The other story concerned a couple who systematically abused a retarded 39-year-old man before precipitating him to his death from a great height. Reportedly, Sarah Bullock, aged 17, laughed as she stamped on the hands of Steven Hoskin while he clung to the edge of Cornwall’s St Austell viaduct 100 feet above the ground.
It might be thought that these gruesome cases of social pathology would provoke much national hand-wringing and self-questioning, yet in the event they have occasioned scarcely any comment at all. It is not that violence has become a matter of public indifference in Britain. The apparent escalation of gun and knife crime is the subject of endless media coverage and pontification. Instances of gross gratuitous cruelty, however, seem harder for the news media and pundits to cope with. The official response is altogether more muted. Could this be because facing up to the implications of such horrific acts might mean acknowledging the possibility that they are only the extreme end of a spectrum of de-sensitised behaviour that is steadily encompassing much of mainstream society?
What few would dispute is that something has gone badly wrong with the way Britain brings up its children. It is plain that alarming numbers of Britons are reaching adulthood without having learned how to express themselves adequately or how to relate to their fellow human beings. There is, in short, a crisis of civility in Britain, albeit one that is part of a wider Western malaise. It is a crisis which may be said to have its roots in the diffusion of American ‘values’, in the triumph of the free market, rampant individualism, widening socio-economic divisions and the prevalence of family breakdown, not to mention the alienating impact of mass communications and technological stimuli. Like twenty-first century America, twenty-first century Britain is becoming a breeding ground for de-socialised, dysfunctional individuals with scant verbal skills and a corresponding potential to turn to violence.
There may even be a certain inevitability about the fact that Britain and America are not only exceptionally committed to free market economics but are both pursuing aggressive foreign policies, for these are societies that seem in particular need of a safety valve to externalise their own inner turbulence. It seems eminently possible, incidentally, that the torturers of Kevin Davies and Steven Hoskin were influenced by the horrors that have flowed from Anglo-American military action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Given all this, it is rich that under Prime Minister Gordon Brown, as under previous leaders, Britain continues to presume that it has important moral lessons to teach the rest of the mankind. It seems especially rich that a society where the basic unit of civility, the family, has suffered such attrition, should preen itself still on its superiority to Muslim countries, with their comparatively flourishing family structures. The melancholy truth is that the British are having to re-learn the most basic lessons about what makes for a civilised society. All too belatedly, there is at least a growing recognition of the need in Britain to address the problems of child-rearing that have emerged in recent decades and which have produced such dire consequences.
There are those who would dearly like to turn the clock back.
The organisation Play England is founded on the principle that too many of today’s children no longer get the chance to go out and play in their neighbourhood.
Last week, it organised a National Play Day. Play England reports that only 21% of children now play in the street — a stark contrast to the way things used to be and an illustration of the neurotic fear of allowing children to roam in public spaces that pervades Britain, particularly among the educated classes. Many middle-class parents would rather that their children remain indoors watching television or playing computer games which cater to violent fantasies than freely associate with their peers. To a degree that would astonish earlier generations, such children increasingly spend their time locked in their own private electronic worlds.
Meanwhile, the ones who do play in the streets are apt to be so-called ‘feral’ children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Certainly, Play England will have a job to recreate the environment in which children learned about the art of social interaction by virtue of routinely mixing with other children from a wide range of backgrounds.
Believing that fewer and fewer children enjoy healthy upbringings, writer and consultant Sue Palmer has no illusions that the past can be revived. In her book Toxic Childhood (2006), Palmer reported that while there are rising numbers of children with specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, there are also many who suffer from vaguer but nevertheless characteristically contemporary disorders: limited attention spans, lack of self-restraint and insensititvity to other people’s needs and interests.
She doubts if there is one factor behind the dramatic changes in children’s behaviour, which are hardly confined to Britain, though not least among the toxic influences she identifies on today’s youngsters are the literally poisonous ingredients of the junk food which that is consumed by Western children at large but especially by the offsping of the poor and ill-educated. If one thing above all is militating against optimal child-rearing, it is, in Palmer’s view, the mismatch between the sheer velocity of technological and social change and the essentially slow pace of human development.
Palmer argues that governments and big business alike must make tackling ‘toxic childhood syndrome’ a top priority if Western countries are not to be afflicted by anti-social behaviour on a scale besides which current social ills will pale into insignificance.
Gordon Brown maintains that the British people have good reason to be proud of their country’s historic record as a civilising force across the world, but the nurturing of children is a vital issue issue about which latter-day Britain has much to learn from cultures which have yet to experience the dubious blessings of modernity.
