Britain’s Worst Mum Introduces A Nation Of Baby Ps
THE Sun brings news of the “UK’s worst mum” who “faces jail term”.
Who is the UK’s worst mum, then? Tracey Connelly? Vanessa George?
No, it’s:
A SINGLE mum left her four kids – all aged under five – at home to go on a 24-hour drinking binge, a court heard today. The 22-year-old, branded Britain’s worst mother, knocked back a bottle of wine before going on a giant bender at town centre bars and house parties.
She is 22. She has four children. She sounds like a rubbish mother. But is she the worst?
One sickened policewoman who examined the house said: “It was a scene of filth and disorder.” Kitchen chairs had been pushed up to the units and there were children’s footprints in the milk powder where the tots had tried to climb up to the cupboards.
Do we take it as a positive that there was food in the house? At an earlier hearing at Blackburn magistrates Miss Catherine Allan, prosecuting, said:
The children had been trying to gain access to the cupboards because they were hungry. Inside the house there were empty cans, bottles, broken furniture and the kitchen knives could have been accessed.
“Any of the children could have been seriously injured or worse as a result of being left unattended. They were left on their own in appalling conditions and with dangers in the house.”
Why is it that when a scene speaks for itself someone needs to imagine how much worse it could be?
Because:
The grim figures led one social workers’ leader to warn there are “Baby P’s” [sic] in every local authority in Britain.
Can we now expect to see in the Sun computer-created images of the scene of abuse, with arrows aimed at illustrating what could have occurred? Nothing is too stomach-churning for the press that wants to show us how life should not be:
He was in a travel cot without a blanket, wearing a soiled nappy and crying with hunger. There was also dried milk and sick all over his clothing. He was said to be wet through, grey, docile and his forehead was “sunken”. You wants more facts? Grab a book of adjectives and get searching.
More Baby Ps suggests this woman’s behaviour is nothing compared to how bad it can get. Baby P is no longer a rare and horrific case – the tabloids bill it as typical of our broken society and an underclass.
What talk of Baby P in every ward does is enable those in the abuse industry to get to work, to further their cause and inveigle themselves into our lives. But not everyone is potential Baby P – only the underclass, the estate-dwellers and the poor.
We need to watch these people. We need to spy on them. We need to treat all families as potential time-bombs. And while we all look at everyone, the real abusers get away with it…
Posted: 22nd, October 2009 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
