Baby P, Peter, the little boy whose face has been on many front pages over the past fortnight, is on my mind. When I can't sleep, I sometimes think about him, his situation, the stepfather, the mother, the lodger...
I let myself try to imagine how lonely it must be to have no one in the world. To feel lost. To be cut adrift. To have human needs and feelings and to have them unrecognised, to have them unmet. To be small and have dark secrets. To feel utterly helpless. To not know how to escape. It makes me weep.
As more details emerge, especially the testimony of the lodger's 15-year-old girlfriend, I find myself even more unable to fathom what happened, how another person could possess such a capacity for callousness and evil. I hope there is a hell.
Hey Mell, I have to confess that until now I have avoided the full details of what happened to baby P - I remember when Victoria Climbie died, I couldn't get images of what she must have gone through out of my head, I would think of her and not be able to sleep... I almost don't know how to respond emotionally to such monstrous, callous torture of a child - my outrage and horror is almost inarticulable. But as you said in an earlier thread, humans are capable of unspeakable things - it is unthinkable that a mother could be complicit in the systematic torture of her own child - any child - but it is always going to be this way, that humans can do and do do terrible and evil things - nothing will deter them. I don't mean to be trite saying that, what I mean is that the actions of the torturers are hellish, but not the first and tragically not the last - does that make sense? However, I just have no fu*king idea how to even begin to understand the catastrophic failure of the social and medical services that should have protected this little boy, both these children. x
ReplyDeleteHey NMJ, I do understand what you are saying and I agree. There will inevitably be other babies that die in a similar fashion, other Victorias and Baby Ps. What also sent shudders through me was the sure knowledge that around us are these other kids, suffering in silence. Their stories may never emerge: they may go on to lead damaged lives and will beat their tormentors, or they will go on to lead damaged lives that will end in self-destruction or the destruction of other people.
ReplyDeleteAs you say, it's the failure of the so-called experts that makes the mind boggle. If a child has remained under the radar (and is not officially deemed 'at risk', as P was), you can almost accept that some people are simply cruel and behave like the worst form of scum if a child dies at their hands. It's difficult to save someone when you don't know they are in trouble. What were these bloody idiots doing with Baby P, though? It was 78 visits. How many did they need?! Morons.
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