People outside the UK may not have seen the unfolding stories about the Jersey Hammer Children’s Home of Horror. You probably don’t want to know about it, if you are a sentient being, but I’m going to bring it to your attention anyway.

Over decades, any number of staff committed horrific abuse of children they were supposed to be caring for. At least one child’s body has been found. Who can even guess how many more supposed “runaways’ ” bodies will turn up.

Every day, a more disturbing detail is released. The dungeons in which the kids were kept for really heavy abuse are being unbricked. Repellent items, such as shackles, that speak volumes by their very nature, have been found in them.

Over the years, many children went to seek help from the police and had all been ignored. One man was interviewed on television sobbing about what had happened to him there decades ago.

There are 40 suspects. 40, ffs.

These &&&&&&s – the English language doesn’t have words strong enough for me to use – got away with it because their victims were disposable. Nobody missed them. They could disappear and no one cared.

They were already damaged kids and everyone finds damaged kids too hard to deal with. The &&&&&s were presumably perceived to be doing a public service, by coralling lots of kids that people were afraid of (in the weird way that kids are now seen by many people as so intrinsically dangerous that it’s acceptable to use subsonic weapons to keep them at bay.)

People who’ve been through the child “care” systems almost always seem to bear horrific mental scars. Luckily (if you can say that) most are just scarred by being dumped in an environment in which the people who look after you are only doing it for the pay. But a disturbingly large proportion are scarred by physical and sexual abuse.

My point here is how do you stop this sort of thing happening? Some lessons that seem blatantly obvious.

(1) Stop putting “care homes” for vulnerable people in the middle of nowhere. The worst events seem to be in institutions that are miles away from the rest of society.

(2) Reward staff who speak against any practices. The newest, most inexperienced member of staff may be the only one with any residual humanity.

(3) No one paid attention to the kids who tried to speak up, in the Jersey case. So, lets start actually listening.

(4) Make the job of looking after kids more attractive – pay, conditions, status. Only recruit people who can convince a good selection of children and child advocates that they are trustworthy. Over a reasonable time. Keep them on probation for a couple of years.

(5) Teach kids that they have rights. Teach them to stand up for themselves and to tell lots of people when they are harmed by anyone. Include self-advocacy in the national curriculum.

Children need anonymous forums where they can tell the truth. I don’t just mean the Internet or phonelines. I mean providing real-life, physically present, advocates for “looked after” children, with no other role but to listen to what they say, find out what they need and take it seriously. Make them available in schools, community centres and, above all, in bloody “care” homes.

Let’s learn to recognise how children express rage and reward them for expressing justified rage in words.

The media keeps stressing that this particular care home was closed 20 years ago, as if the years between the 1940s and mid -1980s were in some long-forgotten medieval era, in which such behaviour was possible. No such luck.

If anything, things are getting progressively worse for kids in the 21st century. As UNESCO observed, British children are the most miserable in Europe. Compared to Dutch kids, who can discuss things with their parents and aren’t pressured at school (but who somehow manage to grow up speaking half a dozen languages and being able to argue rationally…) British kids are miserable.

Just take the standard baseline level of misery of so many children and multiply that by a factor of 100 and you might just approach the misery level of a “looked after” child. I can’t even match this guesstimate with any realistic figure for the extra level of misery that a kid that ends up as prey for these monsters feels.

And yes, I know this is a humourless diatribe. I apologise but have no excuses. If our society can’t even begin to protect its most vulnerable members, we really should just give up all pretence of being human.

What a tosser Peter Hitchens is. I’ve just read his 16th February column in the Mail on Sunday First, he spits bile at Shami Chakrabati, Dwain Chambers and Rowan Williams. (About Rowan Williams – he says

“while the chief of the Church of England speaks up for Muslims, it is increasingly difficult for English Christians to follow their consciences in face of politically correct laws undermining marriage and punishing those who express doubts about homosexuality. Who will speak for them? “)

(Splutter. Precisely which “politically correct laws undermining marriage” are these, then? What punishments are inflicted on “those who express doubts on homosexuality”? You’ve guessed it. They don’t exist. He made them up. Even if these things weren’t invented out of whole cloth, what on earth would stop Christians “following their consciences”, if that feat – so difficult to achieve for most of us, whatever our beliefs or lack thereof – can be so easily achieved by marrying and not being gay? So, what on earth is he demanding of the Archbishop of Canterbury?)

But the real gem is the bit where he tries to make readers draw a subliminal connection between Barrack Obama and the Third Reich. (Yes, you read that correctly. He really does.).

I’ve recently read blogs in which Barrack Obama is called a communist. The justification for this assertion is, at one and the same time, so offensive and so ludicrously argued, that – as usual given the naivety that has followed me all my life – I assumed it’s a spoof. No, it isn’t.

Similarly I thought that his opponents presenting Obama, to a pretty well Islamophobic USA, as “really” a muslim, because his surname rhymed with Osama, was a childish joke. However, pictures of Obama in traditional dresson a visit to Kenya, are now used as more “evidence” that he’s a secret Muslim.

All this starts to strain even my determined optimism about human intelligence. There’s a whole edifice being built that is intended to work at a visual and instinctive level for political ends.

Politics is dirty. New-model politics seems to be developing a whole new face of “dirty” in the Information Age. Subliminal smears. Subliminal smears that play on people’s terrors by manipulating imagery and juxtapositions of unrelated items, to build up unexamined mental pictures.

Hmm, not unlike the (more amateurish) propaganda that was used to support the European dictatorships, in the mid-20th century. But, ironically and, almost incredibly, although Peter Hitchens’ column is presenting a subliminally racist worldview (out of 4 targets of his ire, only one is “white” and he doesn’t get a picture. Equal opportunities invective, my bum), he has decided to use that exact “mid-20th century dictatorships” imagery to portray Obama as a Nazi. I kid you not.

I quote from the demented one himself:

Obama worship has echoes of the Third Reich

This Barack Obama frenzy is getting out of hand. A Left-wing friend has emailed me a YouTube Obama propaganda video that reminds him – in technique – of Leni Riefenstahl’s Hitler-worshipping film Triumph Of The Will.
I see what he means. To an insistent beat, impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women endlessly repeat the slogan “Yes, we can”, in a disturbingly mindless way.
The thing contains no thought, no argument – just Obama worship.
Compared with this cult-like stuff, Hillary Clinton’s clumping old-fashioned Leftism is almost reassuring.

Hmm. Where to begin? It’s like a semiotic treasure trove. I’ll stick with the glaringly obvious.

An “insistent beat” (music, I think that means), “impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women “? You mean, like in almost all adverts? For everything from Coca-Cola to CPUs?

No, he doesn’t mean that. He means like Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films. For Hitler… Well, I’ve not seen Triumph of the Will but her Olympia had ranks of impossibly beautiful people, beautifully shot. That was indeed a powerful aesthetic, in the service of a vile cause. However, it’s not normally the first image that springs to my mind when I see beautiful people in adverts. But then, I don’t write for the Mail – still notorious for its admiration of home-grown UK fascists in the 1930s, and with an anti-Nazi record that even its admirers – if they exist – could hardly see as stellar.

By definition, the one thing that wouldn’t have appeared in a Nazi propaganda film was “impossibly beautiful, multiracial young men and women “… Even Mail readers can’t be so dumb that they don’t know that the defining characteristic of the Third reich was the ideology of “race”, used to gather support for a power-hungry group by playing on people’s prejudices.
So what’s your point then, Peter Hitchens? Despite its being labouring the obvious, I’m still going to spell it out. It is a deliberate attempt to create subliminal associations in the (laughingly named) “mind” of the average Mail reader.

Hitchens piles up negative verbal images of non-white people, throws in a couple of pictures, just in case the subliminal effect isn’t working properly and the Mail readers are too dumb to make the negative associations on the text alone. Shami Chakrabati’s valid concern that directing uncomfortable sound devices at children contravenes human rights is presented as “whining”.

When Archbishop of Canterbury is presented as being pro-Muslim, pro-gay and anti-marriage, I begin to suspect that Hitchens has a tick-box of Mail reader triggers and he’s going to make sure that every possible Mail hate-figure (gays, Islam, black people, civil libertarians, rowdy youth, socialists) gets a name check.

Then wham, after the Mail reader’s mental hornet’s nest of fear and rage has been suitably stirred up, Barrack Obama’s name gets dropped into the mix.

You are wasted in the UK, Hitchens. Using all the dirty tricks in the propagandist’s Big Book of Dirty Tricks. But, even Mail readers don’t have a vote in the US elections. You Yanks really don’t appreciate how lucky you are, sometimes.