Wrong people were locked up
When I was a kid, parents threatened children with Child Welfare if they played up. You’d think they knew just how terrifying it would be to fall into the arms of the state, and maybe some did know. We’re a strange and gothic country of gloomy secrets and suffering as well as sunny skies and sheep.
In my home there were no illusions. My grandmother fostered children at one time and recalled the small children of a local housekeeper who she said were kept beautifully dressed in clothes their mother made them. That was high praise from her, a skilled knitter and seamstress herself.
The man the woman worked for was the children’s father, a dismal story as old as time. He wouldn’t marry her. She couldn’t keep the kids and be unmarried. I expect the case came to Child Welfare’s attention because it was paying my grandmother. A self-righteous social worker then decided it was her job to take the kids away and put them up for adoption.
My grandmother had to take the scared children to catch the bus out of town in the care of the social worker, who handed them over to goodness knows what fate. My grandmother felt terrible about her reluctant involvement. The injustice and the crying children preyed on her mind all her life.
I don’t know what happened to the children’s mother, but I hope the heartless old father suffered. And the children? Don’t count on a Disney ending.
The past is seldom benevolent if you investigate it as we’re now doing with the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. The present is at times just as cold.
I could hardly believe it when a (male) spokesman for the prison service calmly explained the other day that staff have the choice to keep female prisoners in labour shackled based on the risk they think they present. He didn’t seem to grasp that he was describing a barbaric practice that had no place in a birthing room or anywhere else. Besides, a woman in labour making a run for it? Hilarious, if in a bleak way.
Iremember a teenage girl my family knew running away from home and being caught by police. The welfare officer told her parents that she’d make sure the girl spent the night in police cells to teach her a lesson, and my old relations, who I was fond of, nodded their approval. It didn’t occur to anyone to ask what the girl was running away from. Nor would anyone have believed her if abused people currently testifying are any guide.
I don’t like thinking about this stuff, but we need to make sure we don’t put kids in harm’s way and forget about them again.
It’s a while since corporal punishment was banned in boys’ schools, a move bitterly fought by some teachers and older men with military haircuts who claimed that being caned and strapped had made them the men they were today.
Unfortunately, I guess they were right. There would be a long list of such men who were later revealed as sexual abusers and sadists in positions of unsupervised power. Some were even awarded gongs for their charitable work with unfortunate young people. Hypocrisy goes hand in hand with sly deceit.
People used to talk angrily about juvenile delinquents, but the adults that kids were delivered to in state care were way beyond delinquency and into outright crime. Society turned its back, little knowing – evidently not caring – that it was the adults in the misnamed ‘‘homes’’ who should have been locked up, not the kids.