Are We Becoming A Cruel Society?

 

The following article, recently published by the Daily Mail, is reproduced here by kind permission.

It warns of the dangers of going OTT with Health & Safety issues, Child Protection, and so on, important as such things are. Laura Clark’s article quotes Julia Neuberger, an adviser to Gordon Brown, featured in ‘Face in the News’ (see below).

We might well wonder to what extent Health & Safety issues prompted Exeter City Council’s damaging tactics, resulting in the destruction of the Orchard Adventure Playground and its equipment.  This might also be a factor in ECC’s unilateral and high-handed destruction of the Summerway Clubhouse, in which the Club had an immense stake.  If this is so, these are tragic examples of throwing the baby out with the bath water, and is no excuse for depriving us of major children’s organisations managed by volunteers at so little expense to the public purse.  The City Council seems devoid of all sense of proportion, and has no respect for the volunteers involved, whom it manifestly holds in contempt.  It wastes resources.

The issue of cruelty shown towards the community’s children by a callous Exeter City Council is raised in a Unitary Status submission. When posted later on this website, following its consideration by the Boundary Committee, or a decision is reached without the document being rigorously examined, a link to the relevant reference to cruelty will be added here.

 

‘Risk-averse’ culture is creating a cruel society warns Brown’s adviser

By Laura Clark

( Education Correspondent )

Daily Mail – Wednesday 24th September 2008 – Page 17

 

An adviser to Gordon Brown has warned that a culture of risk aversion is preventing even small acts of kindness.

She is concerned that many staff in caring roles are having kindness ‘professionally frightened out of them’ while men are fearful of showing common decency around children to avoid speculation about their motives.

Her intervention comes in an address to a Royal Society of Arts event entitled A Decline of Values, which aims to investigate whether mounting social evils mean that values are being lost.

In a written submission to the event, the Liberal Democrat peer, who advises the Prime Minister on increasing levels of volunteering, warns that the old wartime sense of obligation to others has taken a ‘battering’.

Those who wanted to ‘lend a hand’ often find it ‘extremely hard’, she says.

‘That is because we have become seriously risk-averse – fearful as a nation, scared of terrorists, child molesters and violence on the street – and as a result we make it harder and harder to help those who need our aid, and we become more and more withdrawn into ourselves,’ she says.

‘It is hard for ordinary people to give a leg up to someone less fortunate, to help the kid in care or the granny whose life is getting tough.’

She continues: ‘Risk aversion all too often takes precedence over kindness and risk aversion militates against communities supporting themselves.

‘The smallest of risks (and some are not so small) takes precedence over what we used to call kindness and care.

‘The result is that the kindness one sees in hospitals often comes from porters and care assistants rather than from senior staff; from the people whose training has not yet brought them into a culture where risk aversion is so strong.’

Baroness Neuberger says an arm around the shoulders might be thought to be ‘common assault’, while an invitation to dinner might be seen as ‘some of kind of sexually predatory lure’.

She raises particular concern over stringent background vetting of those who have dealings with children following high profile cases such as the Soham murders and abduction of Madeleine McCann.

An ‘obsession’ with protecting youngsters from sexual predators was not ‘wholly misplaced’ but led to ‘perverse consequences’, she says.

It meant children becoming ‘suspicious of adults in a way that may be quite unhealthy, both for themselves and for society as a whole’.

She adds: ‘Those who are inclined to look after a child or young person who is distressed – who is, for instance, lost or being attacked by older children – will be nervous of getting involved.’

Baroness Neuberger cites the case of Abigail Rae, a two-year-old who drowned in a pond after walking out of her nursery school in Warwickshire.

The inquest into her death heard that a bricklayer had passed her as she wandered down a road alone but ‘failed to stop and help her because he was afraid people would think he was trying to abduct her’.

The baroness says: ‘Suspicion of what their motives might be has forced some people, particularly men, to restrain themselves from showing ordinary common decency.

‘Yet many of our most troubled young people have no regular male role model in their households and need to know what being an ordinary, stable, feeling, understanding man is all about.

‘When pictures of children at nursery school cannot be taken without parental consent, for fear of pornographic use, we have a problem.

‘When we are so suspicious of adults’ motives in wanting to help a child that one cannot help in a school without a thorough and lengthy police check, we will deter all but the most determined, however legitimate our concern may be.’

© Daily Mail

(Reproduced by kind permission)

 

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Face in the News

Julia Neuberger was Britain’s second female rabbi and the first to lead her own synagogue.

Since quitting as a congregational rabbi in 1989 to pursue her social crusades, the 58-year-old baroness has taken up the causes of, among others, pensioners, the mentally ill and the homeless.

For six years, she ran the influential King’s Fund, the health think-tank and recently led the Commission on the future of volunteering.

Despite being a Liberal Democrat peer, appointed in 2004, she is the Prime Minister’s adviser and ‘champion’ on volunteering.

In 2005, she wrote The Moral State We’re In, which criticised the poor treatment of the weakest in society.

She is married to Professor Anthony Neuberger and has two adult children - a son and a daughter.

© Daily Mail

(Reproduced by kind permission)