28.08.2002

This sick society

The rightwing media have typically manipulated the tragic abduction and murder of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in order to stir up a climate of mass hysteria. This resulted in the gathering of a medieval-style lynch mob outside Peterborough Crown Court, in which Maxine Carr appeared last Wednesday, charged with perverting the course of justice. Seething with hatred, the mob carried placards reading 'Rot in hell' and 'Bring back hanging'. Police restrained them as they screamed obscenities and threw eggs at the van in which Ms Carr was being transported. Many brought their children along to witness the spectacle. While it is impossible for us to understand what motivated one alienated individual to commit such a horrendous crime, the hysterical response we have witnessed in the media here is a far cry from the reaction in Norway a couple of years ago to a similar incident. The Norwegian press at the time asked itself what had Norwegian society done to produce such a horrible act. People are not merely atomised individuals, but are products of their social environment. Yet our media absolves British society from any responsibility, and would have it that it these individuals alone are the problem. Such sentiments are a reflection of Margaret Thatcher's view that 'there is no such thing as society' - only individuals and families. We must not forget that child abductions are an extremely rare occurrence. Advising parents to keep their children under lock and key and fill them with fear of strangers cannot contribute to a healthier society, but will most likely produce more warped and twisted adults brimming over with distrust. Besides, in the case of Holly and Jessica it was not a stranger who is alleged to have abducted them, but their school caretaker - somebody they knew and no doubt trusted. Statistics show that children are actually most at risk from abuse or even death at the hands of their parents or guardians. Yet it would not cross anybody's mind to take all children away from their parents and put them into state custody. The publicity regarding the Soham murders was also, I feel, partially an issue of class and race. When a black youth disappeared in the not so distant past from a Tottenham council estate, no news coverage appeared at all. A few thousand people go missing from London every year, most of whom we never hear about in the press. Had Damilola Taylor merely been missing for a while in working class Peckham, I doubt he would have received the same coverage as he did in the wake of the Stephen Lawrence murder after he was killed. Another factor is that it is not clear that there was any sexual element involved in the murders, and nobody has yet has been charged. Huntley remains sectioned in a mental home and Carr remains under investigation. Under British law suspects are innocent until proven guilty, and miscarriages of justice are not that uncommon. While the suspects were being held, the tabloids felt free to publish all kinds of speculation about them. Associates of the couple have been interviewed for cash sums, and solicitors acting for Ms Carr's sister and husband wrote to editors asking the media to leave them alone (The Guardian August 26). Relatives are living in fear of the lynch mobs. The Sun/News of the World predictably renewed its campaign for the naming and shaming of sex offenders. The media invasion of Soham, along with the large financial rewards offered by the tabloids for information, caused extra grief to the girls' families and must have affected the other residents of the town. It is also worthwhile to mention in passing the case of nursery nurses Dawn Reed and Christopher Lillie, who were accused eight years ago of running a paedophile ring. Although they were found not guilty in court, in 1998 Newcastle city council chose to publish the results of an independent inquiry, which claimed they had carried out all sorts of horrific acts, based on evidence that was extremely unreliable and misleading, to say the least. The media were quick to seize on this, not for an instant doubting their guilt. The Sun even made an appeal to its readers to 'help us find these fiends'. The pair had to flee the city. Last week their names were cleared after they finally won their libel case. Due to the lynch mobs and their demands for the restoration of the death penalty, the question of capital punishment was discussed in a TV documentary last Thursday. It was worrying that the statistics showed a majority of the British population being in favour of restoration. If one looks at the United States, a majority of inmates on death row are poor, and in most cases black. While the death penalty is claimed to be a deterrent, the statistics seem to show the opposite. Violent crime in the US is notoriously higher than in western Europe. When Britain abolished the death penalty, there was no leap in homicides. We should, of course, strongly oppose any attempts to restore such a barbaric practice in this country. Likewise calling for measures such as harsher punishment only helps to obscure the root of the social ills that lie behind anti-social behaviour and crime. Lynch mobs do not represent some form of independent working class politics. Far from it: they are nothing but a hysterical manifestation of reaction whipped up by the rightwing media. There is nothing progressive whatsoever about a group of people baying for the blood of a murder suspect and his partner. Besides these elements, the emotional response of the flower-layers and candle-lighters was likened to the mass mourning over the death of princess Diana. Such public displays of grief over the deaths of strangers say much about how fragmented and atomised society has become. It is disturbing that people can only feel any sense of social solidarity through a media-fed hysteria. A Diana-style 'celebration' of the lives of the two girls is being organised for the public to express their grief. Thankfully the girls' families have expressed the wish for the funerals to be strictly private affairs and have asked both the media and the public not to attend. The vicar of St Andrew's church in Soham asked the public to stay way from the town, as it has been inundated with gawpers. Several coach parties have turned up. Some went as far as to take out deckchairs and eat fish and chips in the churchyard, and a few even asked to see the caretaker's house so they could take photographs, a phenomenon the vicar described as "macabre". Indeed there does seem to be something sinister about such reactions. In a less alienated society tragedies like the Soham murders would still occur. But surely they would be rarer. More to the point, after such an event society would have to ask itself profound questions about itself. People who commit violent or abusive acts against other human beings simply for their own gratification are obviously deeply disturbed, and it would be the task of a sane society not to punish, but to rehabilitate them. Prevention, so to speak, is better than cure, and it is the task of socialists to help build a healthy society, where people will be less likely driven to violent crime, and where social solidarity would exist as a general feature, not just in times of media-fuelled hysteria. Renee Marsden