The tragic background of the Doncaster boys
From the Independent:
Until a few weeks before they were arrested, the boys lived with their mother and other siblings in a tatty semi on a quiet council estate. They lived there for eight years until they were moved into foster care about a month before they committed GBH by beating, burning and sexually abusing two boys aged 9 and 11. The rest of the brothers’ natural family moved out, accompanied by a fleet of council and police vehicles, on the day the brothers first appeared in court. Neighbours said they felt like celebrating as the clan left their dilapidated home, shouting abuse as they departed. One man with a young family said: “I think everyone is so pleased they’ve gone they’re thinking of holding a street party. I can put my car out now without fear it will be wrecked. I can let my kids out to play now.” Like many others living nearby, he did not want to be named as he talked about frequent damage to cars, stones thrown at windows and buses, and constant noise and abuse with police visiting the family’s home “two or three times a week”. Others in the community spoke of random acts of violence, including one incident when one of the brothers attacked an 11-year-old girl with a baseball bat. Magistrates at an early court appearance heard how the 11-year-old brother has already appeared in court on four separate occasions for “acts of violence”, the last being in January when he received a 12-month supervision order for an offence of battery. The 10-year-old had been reprimanded for violence, including offences of causing actual bodily harm and common assault. At the time of the Edlington horror he was on bail facing two charges of causing actual bodily harm and one of burglary. The hearing heard both boys were on the child protection register. They were also expelled from their local primary school and were being taught at a Pupil Referral Unit.
The area where they lived is not a stereotypical benefit-dependant sink estate. Most of the households appear to be normal working families. The boys’ 36-year-old mother has seven sons aged between 8 and 18-years-old from a variety of partners. Her recent partner of many years lived with them until a short time before the two boys were put into foster care. The mum is now said to be seeing a new boyfriend aged 29, after meeting him while living in a caravan on the East Coast. One woman who’s known the boys’ mother since she was a teenager said her constant cannabis smoking deeply affected her life. “I think that’s why she just doesn’t give a s***,” she said. But many who knew the family felt it was the mother’s partner who was the real problem. Neighbours described him as a “violent drunk” and laughed when asked what he did for a living. A woman said: “His life was drink, drink, drink, go out, come back, kick off, beat the kids, drink, drink, drink.” Other people said the brothers often appeared to live a scavenging existence in the area. “She never cooked a meal for them,” one neighbour said. “They just scavenged for food or just ate fish and chips and stuff.” A teenager said: “Everyday I saw them they were scruffier. Their fingernails were always black. Their shoes were too big for them. They used to scavenge trainers and tracky bottoms from skips. “When it rained they’d just go to a sports shop and steal umbrellas. That’s the way they lived.”
But one person living on the estate who had constant problems with the brothers conceded: “All they wanted was a bit of sympathy – a bit of love from their parents. For them to get into trouble they were getting attention from their parents.” One woman said she had repeatedly pleaded with the local council and police for something to be done. “If social services had acted sooner maybe those kids wouldn’t have been fighting for their lives and whatever,” she said. It got to a stage where people are going out with bats to resolve things for themselves. I must have been phoning them for the last 18 months,” But a friend of the boys’ mother said the neighbours had twisted the blame round the wrong way and insisted her friend just could not cope. “If social services had got off their arses and done something none of this would have happened,” she said. She said her friend accepted “her kids were wild” but she insisted she was a good mum.
We look at our own situation and in our terms, it’s a bit dire. Then we look at this situation described in your letter and it’s time for a rethink.
Just another example of a society that has lost all sense of self-responsibility, and one that’s made into the public eye.
We don’t punish criminals – I’ll be making a post on an article in the latest issue of Private Eye regarding that later – and we have parents who don’t know how to be a parent. We’re creating a criminal subculture that leads to situations like this.
I’ve seen families like this, and, when I was growing up, their precursors.
7 kids from varying partners? What kind of stability is that? And it’s no wonder she can’t cope – most people would find 7 difficult to deal with, hence why you stop having kids.
Self-responsibility. Self-respect. Self-dependency. That’s the trifecta for a solid citizen, and two of those the state can supply at an educational level.
I always try to avoid comments on this sort of situation (he says, commenting on this situation!) but there are so many factors….
1. she clearly isn’t a good parent and I have to guess that none of the dad’s were either. It real is a sad tale of a complete lack of responsibility for one’s actions (is this a record…all those different fathers?)
2. she is surrounded by others that don’t care and probably think it’s a laugh, maybe even encourage the boys.
3. They have no real father figure, as one person commented they need sympathy or attention…maybe they just needed someone to play football in the park with.
4. Knowing the history of violence and court appearances it is surprising there was no action sooner; in this case they had just been moved from another area so maybe protocols suggest a certain “settling-in” period.
5. I think the KEY point, after reading of the relief etc when they were taken away from the mum and the estate, shows that maybe they shouldn’t be together…if they had been fostered one in rural Northumbria and another in rural Cornwall…maybe…they wouldn’t have taken the step into the abyss from petty damage to torture.
6. …what do I know?
Once again this happens, and decent people are not allowed to reprimand the errant children, their mother should be steralised, benefit should be paid to these type of people every three months, only after they have received an injection of depo-pravera, or some other contraceptive.
That would benefit the country, How can someone be allowed out in the comunity while being charged with such a violent offence?
Letting people like this have rights is pure stupidity, unless people behave in such a way that is responsible, they should be out of sight, this is all due to the state of equality, there is nothing wrong with trying to get people equqal, providing you do not go down to the level of the gutter,(labour favour the lowest common denominator)
IDS wrote a very good article in the Telegraph today on this. I’m not an expert by any means but what he said seems just common sense.
Unfortunately for these kids the damage is done: now it needs containment and to the extent possible intervention to prevent recidivism. Long term, though, we need to break the cycle: I’m willing to bet that the mother in question had a troubled childhood and grew up without any idea of what it means to be a responsible adult/good parent.
That said, it may be
easy to diagnose the problem, but how do you fix it?
“And it’s no wonder she can’t cope…”
Doubt it’s anything like a case of her being unable to cope.
It’s more a case of her being unwilling to cope, because, why bother? Nothing bad will happen to her if she lets the kids run riot and smokes cannabis all day in front of daytime tv. She won’t starve. She won’t be thrown on the streets.
“Unfortunately for these kids the damage is done…”
How many more families are there out there like this, or potentially like this, if nothing is done?
I read the police blogs, and think: ‘We don’t know the half of it…’
@Charles – There’s only one solution, but none of us would ever really consider it seriously: pay higher levels of benefit to those who agree to undergo sterilisation once they have been nominated as ‘poor parenting material’.
It will allow them to live comfortably, even without the numerous ‘child support’ cheques which are often the reason for a child’s existence, but will end their harm to society at the end of their life, their inappropriate behaviours will not be continued via the next generation.
To fill the need for more children, working and middle class couples should be given tax breaks to have more children who are more likely to be productive workers throughout their life. This will solve the pensions problem, improve the education system, ease strains on the Health service, police and social services, and save the productive part of society billions of pounds.
Problem is, nobody will ever suggest this seriously because it removes a human right, the right to a family, and that is not what liberal societies do, even if it is best for society as a whole and those inside the scheme are participating willingly.
Have the foster parents been seen since?
Too much pussy footing goes on (but given today’s Quote of the Day, I am not sure this is an entirely appropriate observation to make).
The only aspect of this whole sorry case to surprise me is that Balls hasn’t blamed the people of Doncaster for having the temerity to elect a Mayor who doesn’t wear a Labour rosette.
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This is one of the tragic effects of a system which has failed these poor kids (the victims of the assault): a system in which it is possible to get enough to spend all day smoking dope or drinking while doing not-a-lot to get the money and both mother and her “partner” moving on to another “relationship” on a whim and not for the first time, apparently.
Children who kill and injure other children, although rare, is nothing new. Remember Mary Bell who strangled 2 young boys just for fun in 1968? And, more recently, Venables and Thompson who killed Jamie Bulger in 1993.
But what to do? The crime’s rarity and, almost certainly, its idiosynchratic circumstances, mean there can be no one-size-fits-all solution. Often, much is made of the necessity for firmness and discipline in punishment, but the old ‘approved’ schools and borstals were tough and uncompromising in their dealings with kids sent there; but they didn’t stop offending.
And sterilising the often ghastly, feckless parent/s seems somewhat remote from the commission of the offence (and frighteningly close to a Nazi policy).
These horrible, out-of-control kids’ backgrounds cannot be the sole or even principal cause of these terrible events: otherwise the sheer size of the feral underclass in our flawed, politically correct, dogma-laden, socially-engineered, ‘broken Britain’ means we would be reading of such horror as this case every other day.
Do I know what to do? Christ, no. But a greater certainty of being caught (for whatever crime), a punishment to be feared (yes, feared!), and condemnation from peers and intimates – rather than approbation for some – might help a little to redress the balance.
Has anyone seen any actual evidence that these boys exist, and that they did these things? It just doesn’t make sense, such as the motive. Their motive was supposedly to get locked up, but according to the description, they hardly seemed like the kind that would enjoy sitting in a cell for long periods of time. Why isn’t their brother, who supposedly told them that prison is great, facing terrorism-related charges? I think someone’s playing games with our heads by foisting a massive disinformation campaign upon us. I doubt that even a drunk would force his kids to watch horror movies, or that a pot-headed mother would give some of her precious weed that she could barely afford to her kids, especially when she could use something else to calm them down that wouldn’t impair their mental function. The story just doesn’t fit with reality.
“The story just doesn’t fit with reality. “
Sadly, it does fit very well with reality.