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Drop Bears (for Anne)

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(Thanx Tom!)

"Children who kill never had a chance" by Johann Hari (April 2009)

Mary Bell

I have met children who became killers several times in my life: in the warzones of the Congo and the Central African Republic, and in the grey Young Offenders’ Institutes of Britain. When I read about the events that are alleged to have happened last weekend in South Yorkshire, I kept thinking about their small, paranoid eyes. Two brothers – aged ten and eleven – have been charged with torturing two other, younger kids. The victims had been hit with bricks, burned with cigarettes, and slashed with knives in a wild field.

We are a long way from knowing what happened in that field that afternoon, or who carried out these acts. But the visceral temptation when any children face accusations like this is to brand them as inherently evil demons who should be locked far from us for life. But the most famous case of child-on-child killing in British history – that of Mary Bell – shows us how flawed this initial reaction is.

In 1968, in the sagging streets of the poorest part of Newcastle, a ten year old girl strangled two toddlers – Martin Brown, and Brian Howe – to death. She then cut their bodies, and with her best friend, a mentally disabled thirteen year old, she left notes in a nursery saying: “We did murder Martain brown, fuckof you BAstArd.” She was reflexively described in the press as a child who had been “born evil”, a “monster” and “demon.”

Now we know what happened to her to make her into such a child. Mary’s mother, Betty Bell, was a severely disturbed alcoholic who had been sectioned at least once. She worked as a prostitute specialising in sado-masochism – whippings and stranglings. The first thing she said when Mary was placed into her arms after giving birth was: “Take the thing away from me!” She rejected her daughter and repeatedly tried to kill her by feeding her an overdose of sleeping tablets. But eventually, she did find a use for Mary. Once she turned four, she began to pimp her to paedophiles.

Mary never knew who her father was, but she suspected her mother had been inseminated by her own dad. Later in life, she asked her mother point blank if this was the case. She didn’t deny it. Betty simply said quietly: “You are the devil’s spawn.”

When she was ten, Mary made friends with another girl who was being raped by a local paedophile. All they had known in their lives was violent abuse – and they began to act it out. Mary tried to cut off one of the boy’s penises with a razor – a plain, crazed act of revenge for what she had experienced since she was a toddler.

Yet it is strangely comforting to see evil as a primordial external force, something alien that can be hunted down and confined to cages. It dodges the colder truth that I have learned from all the child-killers I have met: we all have the capacity for terrible cruelty and sadism, especially if we are subjected to horror ourselves. Which of us can be confident that, given such Mary Bell’s childhood, we wouldn’t have done something depraved?

Yet the trial of the two children who killed Jamie Bulger – and the websites trying to figure out where they are now, so they can be lynched – suggests we have barely progressed since then. Excellent works of investigative journalism like Blake Morrison’s book ‘As If’ have uncovered evidence that these children were subjected to violent and probably sexual abuse. We don’t want to hear it. We want devils and demons and a black-and-white world that tells us: no, it couldn’t have been you; this crime belongs to a different species.

These killings are not political parables. However much right-wingers want to make this a story about welfare dependency and left-wingers want to make it a story of brutal Thatcherite economics, these rare murders have happened in Britain at the same rate for over a century. They have to be understood at the personal, human level.

To understand and explain these cases is not to excuse, or justify. We are talking about the most terrible thing that can happen to a person: torture, and murder. The children who do this need to be humanely detained for as long as they are a danger. But everything we know about children who kill tells us they are invariably victims of extreme abuse themselves, deserving of compassion, not hysterical condemnation.

I have watched my friend Camilla Batmangelidh – the director of Kid’s Company – work with children in South London who have bricked, bottled and tortured other children. She explains: “Since the Bell and Bulger cases, we’ve learned a lot about how a developing brain reacts to abuse, but the judicial system hasn’t caught up. We now know from brain scans that if you have really poor quality care in childhood, your pre-frontal lobes don’t develop properly. Those are the parts of the brain that think rationally, empathise, and exercise self-control. It is physically impossible for these children to calm down and think a situation through. Their brains haven’t developed that way.” So to treat them like morally responsible mini-adults who just made a bad decision – as the British courts do today – doesn’t make sense. It is a neurological fiction.

When this impaired brain chemistry combines with violent abuse and rape, the children can become time-bombs. “They have been taught to see the world through one template: you’re a victim, or you’re an abuser. That’s how they think human relationships work,” Batmangelidh puts it. “At first, they are abused, and at some point they become determined to be a perpetrator, because then at least they have power and control. If you think those are your only two options in life, it seems preferable.”

As she said this, I remembered the child soldiers in Central Africa who pointed guns into my face and smirked. Their families had been bayoneted in front of them, and they had buried the bodies themselves. In the warzones of the Congo, I met eleven and twelve year old boys who had seen their mothers and sisters snatched away, and were then picked up by the militiamen and trained to rape and kill. Like Mary, they were re-enacting the violence they had experienced in a desperate attempt to switch roles: this time, they were the Big Men.

Children who kill are a question of mental health, not morality. They are internally destroyed children, not devils. Given the love and support that they deserve, such children can develop their frontal lobes and their capacity for empathy over time, and be released. As Gita Sereny’s reportorial masterpiece ‘Cries Unheard’ shows, Mary Bell eventually developed into a morally responsible adult and “a very, very loving mother” – albeit one perpetually haunted by the knowledge of what she had done.

Haven’t we progressed enough since the Middle Ages to see these truths, and reject the barbaric theology of “evil” children?

When accusations like this bleed into the news, we need to stand at the front of the looming lynch mob and say: Stop. Think. In 1861, a leader in The Times commented on the trial of two eight year old boys in Stockport who had tortured and killed a toddler. It said: “Children of that age cannot be held legally accountable in the same way as adults. It is absurd and monstrous that these two children have been treated like murderers.” Isn’t it time we progressed to 1862?

WTF???

Sleep Talkin Man

"Don't leave the duck there. It's totally irresponsible. Put it on the swing, it'll have much more fun."

Many more gems

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HA!

Screwtape - The System Is Clean

More on the unmanned drones used by the cops (thanx Joly)

RePost: Rhauder feat. Paul St.Hilaire - No News (Marko Fuerstenberg re-dub)

   

Electra - The Music of Penny Ikinger

Penny Ikinger - Kathleen

 Penny Ikinger

One of my fave guitarists.

HA! (Thanx Fifi)

CCTV in the sky: UK police plan to use military-style spy drones

Drones could be used for civilian surveillance in the UK as early as 2012. Source: BAE

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ­"routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.
The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.
Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.
They reveal the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. They also indicate that police claims that the technology will be used for maritime surveillance fall well short of their intended use – which could span a range of police activity – and that officers have talked about selling the surveillance data to private companies. A prototype drone equipped with high-powered cameras and sensors is set to take to the skies for test flights later this year.
The Civil Aviation Authority, which regulates UK airspace, has been told by BAE and Kent police that civilian UAVs would "greatly extend" the government's surveillance capacity and "revolutionise policing". The CAA is currently reluctant to license UAVs in normal airspace because of the risk of collisions with other aircraft, but adequate "sense and avoid" systems for drones are only a few years away.
Five other police forces have signed up to the scheme, which is considered a pilot preceding the countrywide adoption of the technology for "surveillance, monitoring and evidence gathering". The partnership's stated mission is to introduce drones "into the routine work of the police, border authorities and other government agencies" across the UK.
Concerned about the slow pace of progress of licensing issues, Kent police's assistant chief constable, Allyn Thomas, wrote to the CAA last March arguing that military drones would be useful "in the policing of major events, whether they be protests or the ­Olympics". He said interest in their use in the UK had "developed after the terrorist attack in Mumbai".
Stressing that he was not seeking to interfere with the regulatory process, Thomas pointed out that there was "rather more urgency in the work since Mumbai and we have a clear deadline of the 2012 Olympics".
BAE drones are programmed to take off and land on their own, stay airborne for up to 15 hours and reach heights of 20,000ft, making them invisible from the ground.
Far more sophisticated than the remote-controlled rotor-blade robots that hover 50-metres above the ground – which police already use – BAE UAVs are programmed to undertake specific operations. They can, for example, deviate from a routine flightpath after encountering suspicious ­activity on the ground, or undertake numerous reconnaissance tasks simultaneously.
The surveillance data is fed back to control rooms via monitoring equipment such as high-definition cameras, radar devices and infrared sensors.
Previously, Kent police has said the drone scheme was intended for use over the English Channel to monitor shipping and detect immigrants crossing from France. However, the documents suggest the maritime focus was, at least in part, a public relations strategy designed to minimise civil liberty concerns.
"There is potential for these [maritime] uses to be projected as a 'good news' story to the public rather than more 'big brother'," a minute from the one of the earliest meetings, in July 2007, states.
Behind closed doors, the scope for UAVs has expanded significantly. Working with various policing organisations as well as the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Maritime and Fisheries Agency, HM Revenue and Customs and the UK Border Agency, BAE and Kent police have drawn up wider lists of potential uses.
One document lists "[detecting] theft from cash machines, preventing theft of tractors and monitoring antisocial driving" as future tasks for police drones, while another states the aircraft could be used for road and railway monitoring, search and rescue, event security and covert urban surveillance.
Under a section entitled "Other routine tasks (Local Councils) – surveillance", another document states the drones could be used to combat "fly-posting, fly-tipping, abandoned vehicles, abnormal loads, waste management".
Senior officers have conceded there will be "large capital costs" involved in buying the drones, but argue this will be shared by various government agencies. They also say unmanned aircraft are no more intrusive than CCTV cameras and far cheaper to run than helicopters.
Partnership officials have said the UAVs could raise revenue from private companies. At one strategy meeting it was proposed the aircraft could undertake commercial work during spare time to offset some of the running costs.
There are two models of BAE drone under consideration, neither of which has been licensed to fly in non-segregated airspace by the CAA. The Herti (High Endurance Rapid Technology Insertion) is a five-metre long aircraft that the Ministry of Defence deployed in Afghanistan for tests in 2007 and 2009.
CAA officials are sceptical that any Herti-type drone manufacturer can develop the technology to make them airworthy for the UK before 2015 at the earliest. However the South Coast Partnership has set its sights on another BAE prototype drone, the GA22 airship, developed by Lindstrand Technologies which would be subject to different regulations. BAE and Kent police believe the 22-metre long airship could be certified for civilian use by 2012.
Military drones have been used extensively by the US to assist reconnaissance and airstrikes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But their use in war zones has been blamed for high civilian death tolls.

@'The Guardian'

As my friend Mo said: 

"Apparently they're going to use them for "routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers. Does that mean if you're none of the above you'll not show up on the screen?? Be afraid, be very afraid."

The Beat - Save It For Later