Children Services Abuse

We get our allotted time on this planet and I have had way more than half of mine.  I feel as if I am in the early evening of my life although I am so exhausted I might just fall asleep a bit early.  On reflection I see a strange convoluted feedback entanglement of intercommunication between humans.  Oppression!  It may just be my bag but the likes of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest all illustrate an undercurrent in the human psyche which disturbs me.

I was brought up on a diet of deception and lies, emotional manipulation and brutality.  I really struggled to understand it and my overall conclusion is that when humans are abused it screws up their ability to perceive reality correctly (or at least functionally successfully).  There is a lovely book called Figments of Reality: The Evolution of the Curious Mind by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart which does an incredible job of almost inducing a paradigm shift as you read it.  But primarily it indicates on an intellectual level the convolutions of our cultural perception.  It is a must read for the thinking/feeling human.  Then there is the extensive research and insight provided by Arthur Janov in his book The Biology of Love which illustrates that what we call emotions and thoughts are all driven by the underlying biology.  So mess with the underlying biology of the neurological system and it is messed up.  It doesn't work at its best.

There is also a lovely book by Dr Seuss that has been turned into an equally lovely film called Horton Hears A Who! where Horton repeatedly asserts that "a person's a person, no matter how small".

Whether there is a moral angle to this or not is not my concern but humanity has the capacity to mimic what it is like to be another person.  Oppression rather perverts that and although people want to appear as if they are thinking about the other they are doing it out of the need to survive other people's moral judgement and the consequence is a kind of inside out-ness.  They think they are talking about the other and they sound as if they are talking about the other but they are really talking about themselves.  All of that is for another dissertation but the point of this post is to raise the issue of abuse.

Abuse is abuse no matter how small.

By ignoring, belittling, dismissing or even tolerating abuse it cascades.  Like the slag heap collapse at Aberfan in 1966.  The slag is constantly slipping.  Thousands of little slips, hundreds of bigger chains of slippage until eventually one tiny slip triggers another which triggers another and the whole slag heap comes down in a torrent of death and destruction smothering the school and killing 116 children.

Every time a teacher is abusive to a child it is part of the bigger groundswell.  All abuse is abuse no matter how small.  My friend Dave (you know - that friend of a friend), a single parent, and his only daughter have had a tough time of things for many years.  Their life is a wreck because of other people's abuse.  Just because his wonderful daughter became ill with appendicitis a cascade of abuse was set in motion and the effect on them was far worse than it might have been because they were already weakened by years of abuse.  It could be called the last straw.  But Dave has had enough and he has decided to make a mountain out of this mole hill (because it is all part of the mountain) and he wants to expose the dreadful behaviour of the Children Services and their part in this cascading abuse that is our culture.

In themselves the manipulation, the prejudice, the lies, intimidation and abuse by the Children Services might be small compared with the security forces in Libya but to Dave and his daughter they are significant and damaging.  The only way to stop the disasters of abuse across the globe is to stop all abuse when it is still nugget sized and manageable.

Toxic Drums has decided to host, a duly redacted (nice fashionable phrase), account of this encounter with the Children Services under the title "Children Services Abuse".  Some of it is very detailed and indulgent but sometimes needs to be in order to dissect the minutia of what is going wrong.  Some of it is more entertaining, harsh or even amusing in places like the angry letter to the Manager or the damning letter to the complaints department.  The introduction is a good place to get the gist of what this is about.

Although the dates and names and places are all falsified (for the time being) they are consistent and the situation is currently evolving.  Of course it will be kept up to date with each new evolution of events.  What I would appreciate is any viral spread of this article.  Post it, Facebook it, Twitter it, just link to it.  I want it to get to the right people and to find the people who are also concerned with this subject either in particular or in general.  I want to make a noise and to seriously ruffle someone's feathers.  I am angry!

I welcome any kind comments, criticisms or contacts with reciprocal love and warmth but unkind remarks will be returned like shattered glass through cyberspace to slice your virtual jugular.

Please keep in touch ;)