Deborah Orr: Society can easily hide the likes of Karen Matthews
Is Matthews evil or a product of our broken society?
Which is it, then? Is Karen Matthews, found guilty this week of kidnapping her own daughter, "pure evil", as one policeman has said? Or is she a typical product of our broken society, as some commentators have suggested? If she's both of these, then we really are in trouble. Actually, it is pretty easy to label Karen Matthews. She is a classic sociopath, or, if you want to use the current diagnostic term, she has "antisocial personality disorder". The condition is incurable, although symptoms fade with age, and treatment in childhood of what is widely seen as its diagnostic precursor, "conduct disorder", can be successful.
Only one thing might have arrested the development of Matthews's condition, good old "early intervention". Instead, her behaviour was not curbed until she'd had seven children of her own, and subjected not just her daughter Shannon but also all of her family to the sort of gross psychological torment that itself is viewed as a possible trigger for the disorder. Thankfully, Matthews is not typical. But it does perfectly illustrate something abject, that really is a worry for all of society. The way many people live now provides easy camouflage for the seriously disturbed.
Much was made, even before her exposure, of the fact that Matthews had seven children, in quick succession, by five different men, none of them, as it turned out, is the one she had been living with for four years. The men always left Matthews, she says. That's probably true. Sociopaths find it easy to form relationships, and hard to sustain them. They are often promiscuous. They always blame others when things go wrong.
What's really grotesque is that neither the stream of men nor any other interested party appears to have viewed Matthews's indiscriminate breeding as a red flag. Before she was arrested, Matthews's "lifestyle choice" was even defended. These are nothing less than attempts to build a taboo against taking a view about people who take social liberalism to such extremes that they are also recognised symptoms of possible pathology. They are perilously dangerous erosions of the protections offered by the maintenance of social norms.
The extravagant level of Matthews's lack of empathy or guilt admittedly did not become fully apparent until it emerged that she had used her own daughter so callously in order to pursue an improbable fantasy of a "reward".
Yet she had already, again and again, shown total disregard for the welfare of her children, just by continually moving new boyfriends into her home, and having with them yet more children she could not care for. A 2003 psychological report commissioned by the local council, Kirklees, found that Matthews was unable to put the needs of her children above her own. Yet the children were still removed from the at-risk register. No "early intervention" for them, either, until Mum staged an abduction. More widely, however, other issues offer camouflage to people like Karen Matthews. Concentrated deprivation, such as that endured by the wider community in which Matthews lived, means that people are used to excusing bad behaviour, because they understand that life is unforgiving. They stick together defensively, because their ramshackle community is all that they have.
If the people of Dewsbury and the institutions that served the community really did fail to spot "pure evil" in their midst, then it is not so hard to understand why. Individuals looked at the flamboyantly abnormal, and persuaded themselves that it was normal, because a lot of the behaviour they saw was not so very uncommon.
In recent years we heard a lot of grand talk about "draining the swamp of the failed state". Yet, during our great boom, under our caring chancellor, even the "failed estate" wasn't "drained". Now, as Prime Minister, he insists that society isn't broken. It looks pretty badly cracked to me.
Independent
