People outside the UK may not have seen the unfolding stories about the Jersey Hammer Children’s Home of Horror.<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There are 40 suspects. 40, ffs.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

My point here is how do you stop this sort of thing happening? Some lessons that seem blatantly obvious.<\/p>\n

(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.<\/p>\n

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

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

(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.<\/p>\n

(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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Let’s learn to recognise how children express rage and reward them for expressing justified rage in words.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n