For Shannon's sake, let's keep interfering
Television would not make up Karen Matthews but it made up a lot of her life.
She is the very unfunny Vicky Pollard.
The kidnapping of her own daughter was falsely rumoured to have been inspired by Shameless, but that show has warmth and wit as well as criminality and despair.
Matthews didn’t and spent her life watching Jeremy Kyle or her partner playing on his Xbox. In private, we presume, he watched child porn.
Lies: Karen Matthews, who was found guilty of the kidnap and false imprisonment of her daughter Shannon this week, has become a poster girl for a broken Britain
Her lies, her play-acting, her looks, the neglect of her own children speak only of hopelessness and detachment.
She is now the grim poster girl for broken Britain, a life gormlessly lived on benefits, producing children that are in turn treated as goods to be bartered.
We speak often of the commodification of childhood but this case shows that, for some, children really are commodities.
I mention TV because the coverage given to the McCann case seems to have been the inspiration for the kidnap plot for which Matthews and Michael Donovan have been convicted.
Now there will be even more time for them to watch TV in solitary confinement in prison.
There will be another inquiry but if it ends up as yet more witch-hunting of hapless social workers, I see little point.
Pinning blame on individual failure does not change a system that is not fit for purpose.
We already know social workers get it wrong.
This is not to excuse them but the armchair justice meted out on the back of recent appalling child-abuse cases is self-serving.
Just as there are no-go areas for police in some cities, there are no-go areas for health visitors, midwives and social workers. Shall we arm them?
There are a class of people on drugs, in debt and despair.
We can argue about whose fault that is but we cannot deny their existence or their capacity to reproduce.
Twenty-five years ago almost three-quarters of those who lived in council housing worked full-time.
Now fewer than a third do.
The Right argues that the welfare system itself has produced this culture of worklessness and an underclass dependent on benefits with children drugged on Ritalin or, in poor Shannon’s case, anything that would keep her quiet.
Those howling about this situation are the same people who demand less ‘State interference’ in family life while asking why such children are not removed.
Removed to where exactly?
The statistics for what happens to children who grow up in care are pretty bleak. Most social workers aim to keep families together for this very reason.
By coincidence, when I was young I used to work with children in care for Haringey Social Services.
Even children who had been severely abused would cry every night because they wanted to go home.
These things are not as simple as they are made out to be.
Karen Matthews could not put the needs of her kids above her own. This is not so unusual.
This narrative of community breakdown is not new. Fred and Rosemary West had neighbours, remember?
People knew that there were a lot of odd goings-on in their house. No one stopped them.
We now live in a culture of technological surveillance and CCTV cameras which further prevents us from keeping an actual eye out for each other. Someone else can step in.
For kids like Shannon we have to ask the tough question: Do we want the State to interfere more?
The uncomfortable answer is Yes.
It is better that teachers ask why kids are dopey, that doctors ask innocent parents about children’s injuries, that we get suspicious when youngsters draw pictures with explicit sexual content.
Social services are not equipped to deal with what they are meant to deal with.
The increasing inequality in this country now means that many now live in a metaphorically gated community with the barbarians at the gates, their children abandoned.
We don’t need another inquiry to tell us we require an overhaul of social services.
We just need the political guts to do it. Whether we call it the State or society, someone has to intervene in the lives of children like Shannon.
Because we know what happens when they don’t.
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