It’s easy to snipe at folks who raise a complaint when it doesn’t affect you

CHALLENGE for Empathy

There is an ongoing, seemingly intractable issue for many residents in Loughborough. The issue is noise at night, on the public highway pavement, after dark when folks are either sleeping, or want to get “peaceable enjoyment of their homes”, as the Human Rights Act phrases it.

Not just any noise. Not the natural sounds of heavy rain or the man-made issue of traffic; such noise exhibits an audio spectrum character that most folk can screen out.

It is the excessive levels of human voices shouting or singing, that people are programmed to react to; at levels loud enough to go through double glazing and then be as loud as the radio or TV in the room; noise from human voices that is too loud.

Noise that correlates almost precisely with the university term-times.

It is easy to snipe at folks who raise a complaint when it doesn’t affect you seriously.

It is easy to accept changes that make the issue worse, or refrain from effective mitigation to carry out given responsibility when there is no significant negative outcome if you don’t.

The common theme is a lack of empathy with those who are having their Human Rights infringed on a regular basis. It is that empathy gap that needs challenging or better, bridging.

One way to bridge it would be for those who tolerate, snipe, create or have responsibility to remove the issue, to directly experience it as much as those who bother to report unacceptable events.

To have a set of loudspeakers mounted outside their homes, calibrated and powered in such a way that they would receive the same volumes of sound at their windows as the complainers do at theirs; say, between 9pm and 4am every term-time night/morning.

Would they be up to that challenge?

Would they be up to the how their neighbours would react to them bringing such to the neighbourhood?

Would they and their neighbours be able to ignored it and/or sleep through it?

Might they start to understand why those who complain say the issue needs addressing?

Would they shy away from such a challenge?

Ironically, some of those with the least responsibility have the greatest empathy.

While Coun Parton’s approach may not be suitable for numerous political reasons, at least he shows willing to listen to those who have their human rights regularly infringed, and doesn’t just assign them with derogatory labels.

This contrasts with the university vice chancellor, who thinks it appropriate to withhold specific action unless those who are on the receiving end of such problems, as well as casual vandalism during term time, install video cameras to provide clear facial images to prove that the perpetrators are students (Storer and Ashby Road Residents’ Group meeting 23/05/2017); this being backed up by the Community Police Officer in attendance at the same meeting.

Of course, should any resident be stupid enough to follow such advice, and go to the extreme efforts to make their home into a police-state surveillance post to procure such evidence, and then seek to correlate a logged image against the University database of student facial images to proceed with the vice-chancellor’s suggestion, then it would be interesting to have a sweep on just how quickly there would be an invocation of the Data Protection Act to refuse using such information to make such an identification.

Probably as it should be. Such data should not be available to members of the public, highlighting how ludicrous the notion that residents themselves should provide evidence to the University that the miscreants are students. Were they to be independently able to do so, victims could take the evidence straight to the police as criminal evidence. Fortunately we do not live in such a police state, despite the vice chancellor’s exhortation.

But the biggest empathy gap is from the few students who either do not know or do not care how loud they are as they pass by on the pavement while those in the nearby houses are trying to sleep or access “peaceable enjoyment of their homes”. As is incessantly pointed out, most students are not such. This is borne out by the numerous students who pass quietly along with the noisy ones, sober, drunk, or otherwise intoxicated.

There is an element of connivance by inaction among the great majority who witness the behaviour of the minority that continue to give students a bad name, but perhaps understandable, given the uncertainty of remonstrating with loud and outwardly aggressive persons in a largely unpoliced situation.

But the few who do cause such disruption are like raindrops. Interaction with one does not make you wet, but a large stream, without sufficient interval, can soak you to the skin.

Facing being soaked two or three times a week, every termtime week, is not just “moaning and whingeing” (phrase used 18/10/2017 Echo letters).

It deserves empathy. Plus validated metrication and meaningful mitigation.