For many years, those of us who have been writing
about the potentially catastrophic effects of epidemic family breakdown
have been warning that its impact won’t be limited to damaged individuals
or a rising crime rate.
If it is on
a large enough scale, it is also likely to cause the destruction of
civilised values and even the most basic human instincts.
One can’t
help but think in these terms when reading about last week’s appalling
court case which heard how a mother, Zara Care, from Plymouth goaded her
two toddlers into fighting each other like dogs — and filmed their ordeal
on a camcorder in front of her mother and two sisters, who in turn were
egging on the children to ever greater violence.
On the
film, the women were heard laughing as the two-year-old boy and his
three-year-old sister were encouraged to hit and punch each other. The boy
was seen crying and trying to hide after being punched in the face by his
sister, but was told by one of the women ‘not to be a wimp or a faggot’
and to hit the girl back. At one point, someone threw a hairbrush at him
to encourage him to hit her; at another, he was given a rolled-up magazine
with the spine on the outside for more impact.
Such
behaviour towards very young children by their own mother, not to mention
their aunts and grandmother, would strike any normal person as wholly
unnatural. Far from showing love and care to these children, they
displayed cruelty and sadism as they turned them into instruments for
their own vicarious aggression, taking pleasure in their distress.
Some of us
found it difficult even to read such a sickening account of the tormenting
of two toddlers. Their mother actually filmed it.
A healthy
society would show its revulsion at such behaviour by jailing these women.
Instead, they were each given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to
do 100 hours of community work. Yet on the same day, another court sent a
man to jail for staging a real dog fight in his house. Is the welfare of a
child assumed by the English courts to be of less importance than the
welfare of a pit bull terrier?
In letting
these women walk free, the court displayed once again the feebleminded
sentimentality with which so many judges tend to regard the state of
motherhood in particular and women in general.
Judge
Francis Gilbert — who described the women as ‘cruel and callous’ —
nevertheless said the two aunts had children of their own to look after,
and that Zara’s biggest punishment was that her children had been taken
out of her care. Such remarks suggested this judge just didn’t grasp the
significance of what had taken place.
If women
can be so ‘cruel and callous’ to a tiny nephew and niece, how can anyone
assume they will look after their own children properly? If a mother is so
devoid of appropriate feelings of love and care for her children, how can
one think that taking them away from her constitutes any real punishment?
According
to the children’s paternal grandmother, out of ten supervised visits that
the mother has been allowed since the children were taken away, she has
turned up to only five.
The mistake
the judge surely made was to assume that somehow these women had normal
maternal instincts. Clearly, they did not. On the contrary, they regarded
these children as if they were no more than fighting animals.
There was
no instinct to protect them from harm. They treated them with the chilling
detachment of those who do not identify at all with the suffering of other
human beings.
If this
involved just one sadistic woman, it might have been considered a one-off
case of mental imbalance. But no fewer than four took part. This was the
product, it seems, of at least three generations of abusive family
relationships.
The
grandmother, Carol Olver, had a violent partner. One of her daughters had
attempted to kill herself over failed relationships. And Zara Care — who,
according to her mother-in-law, was regarded by Carol as a kind of child
benefit cash cow for the Olver household — had separated from her husband
by sending him a text message.
There are
tens of thousands of such women the length and breadth of the country
giving birth to children who will repeat the same patterns of gross
inadequacy, neglect and abuse.
There are
whole areas populated by female-only households without a committed father
to be seen; where the children are wild and violence is their first
instinct; and where many of the women are bitter, truculent and
aggressive. The grandmother in the Plymouth case was unrepentant since she
thought the children’s dog fight would ‘harden them up’ — and said she had
done the same with her own children.
What we are
seeing is nothing less than a cascade of abuse and neglect down through
the generations, so that the instinct that makes morality possible — the
ability to feel someone else’s pain, so there is a desire not to hurt them
— is wholly absent.
This has
given rise to the emergence of two Britains. The division is not between
North and South, nor between rich and poor. Instead, it is between those
who adhere to the basic rules of a civilised society and those whose lives
are characterised by depravity and disorder. Our culture is now deep into
uncharted territory. Generations of family disintegration in turn are
unravelling the fundamentals of civilised human behaviour.
Committed
fathers are crucial to their children’s emotional development. As a result
of the incalculable irresponsibility of our elites, however, fathers have
been seen for the past three decades as expendable and disposable.
Lone
parenthood stopped being a source of shame and turned instead into a
woman’s inalienable right. The state has provided more and more
inducements to women — through child benefit, council flats and other
welfare provision — to have children without committed fathers.
This has
produced generations of women-only households, where emotionally needy
girls so often become hopelessly inadequate mothers who abuse and neglect
their own children — who, in turn, perpetuate the destructive pattern.
This is
culturally nothing less than suicidal. A society reproduces itself by
nurturing and protecting its young. If it abuses and harms its children
instead, it will end up abusing and harming itself.
If we lose
the ability to care for each other, we will lose any sense of a common
humanity and stake in a shared future. That is, indeed, what we are doing.
Stable and
healthy family life, where children are raised by their mothers and
fathers, is the building block of society. It is no coincidence that those
primitive societies where fathers happened to be excluded remained
primitive or died out altogether.
The
philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw the world as a war of all against all. This
gave way to the modern belief that society could be improved by
encouraging good behaviour and discouraging the bad. This was the basis of
Western progress. It was also the basis of social justice and progressive
politics.
We seem to
be going backwards in time to a more savage, pre-modern era. The Plymouth
case sounds a warning to us all. This is the way a society dies.