Dear Stan,
As a follow up to earlier posts:
Here is a typically superb article from Theodore Dalrymple in "City Journal", looking at the state of childcare in Britain. Part of it heavily overlaps with one of my earlier posts. Of course, his experiences as a prison doctor and a doctor in a grim inner city area of Birmingham colours his outlook, but you cannot accuse him of dishonesty. The state of physical neglect, emotional abuse and spiritual vacuity inflicted on helpless children by grossly inadequate or depraved parents beggars belief. The ultimate consequences can be seen in prisons where the dedicated workers find themselves helping prisoners who have no concept of family life and have never sat at a table for a meal.
Of course, many children suffer in a way which is not quite bad enough to force decisive action by social services and/or the police, whereby they are taken into care or subject to supervision orders. One of my friends works as a teaching assistant in a school on the west side of Reading. This school is by no means the lowest of the circles of Hell in British education, but in a "remedial class" she tries to teach 12 and 13 year old students who do not know left from right or simple concepts such as North and South. One of the pupils is visibly filthy with ingrained dirt in his skin. As children are notoriously merciless to any child who is slightly odd or different, you can imagine what his school life is like. Another teacher friend recalled how she used to wash a little girl as part of the weekly swimming lessons at school. Each week she took a fresh sponge because, after a thorough scrubbing down in the shower, the sponge was black. The poor child confessed how lovely it was to feel clean.
Of course, there have always been inadequate parents. And in the past children from otherwise good homes suffered terrible deprivation due to desperate economic conditions. But now that we have standards of living beyond the dreams of people 100 years ago, we still have large numbers of deprived and neglected children. A significant part of the problem, as Dalrymple clearly describes, is the attitudes of people in positions of authority. Plainly the lunatics have taken over the asylum when esteemed commentators regard grossly disordered families as a valid lifestyle choice. No one should criticise such choices and everyone, including the cruelly "judgemental", should be forced to subsidise them.
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_otbie-british_children.html
Of course, such "commentators" in the pages of the Guardian or Observer would regard incompetent parents as blameworthy only insofar as they had failed to use contraception or abortion to prevent the birth of children who they couldn't look after. Further to my recent posts on medical experiments, I remember the autobiography of A J Cronin, another of the distinguished company of doctor/authors, along with Dalrymple and Chekhov. Cronin wrote the "The Citadel", which was made into the 1938 classic starring Robert Donat. Robert Donat's dedicated doctor loses his way and by implication his soul when he moves to the big city and starts making truckloads of money treating the wealthy. Cronin was also the author of "Doctor Finlay", a huge favourite of my 1960s childhood when it was a long running BBC serial. It portrayed the lives of two Scottish doctors in a small Scottish town in the 1920s. Cronin recalled as a matter of undisputed fact how any doctor performing abortions was an utter outcast and pariah, a lost soul. Cronin was Catholic, but he was clearly describing the matter-of-fact professional assumption of his generation of doctors. How things have changed. Now movies get made about experimenters who conducted sexual abuse of little children (like Alfred Kinsey).
