Dec 11 2008
Just How Far Has The Baby P Case Affected British Society?
I am about to shock you so hold onto your seat.
The Baby P case has dominated the British newspapers and media in recent months. Over 1 million people signed The Sun newpaper’s petition to hold managers and social workers like Sharon Shoesmith and Maria Ward accountable for their actions. The nation roared with outrage when the details of the case were reveal… how his excuse for a mother stood by and watched Baby P’s depraved stepfather repeatedly torture and eventually kill him. We all cried at how the 17 month old bravely smiled at family friends and social workers who had no clue what was going on. We all thought how sick it was to smother a child’s face in chocolate to cover bruises, how cruel it was to break his back and paralyse him, how base it was to cut off the tips of his fingers. We all wept and shouted and declared that the Baby P case should never ever be repeated in the future but just how far have we took it to heart as a society that should not stand for these things? Just how far have we resolved, every single one of us, to do all we can to prevent other poor children suffering?
The answer - sickeningly, not all of us have.
My husband works in a town centre near to where we live. We do live out in the sticks a little but the town he works in has upwards of 15,000 living in the surrounding area. It may then come as no surprise that the town centre was busy just 14 days from Christmas. It may also come as no surprise that a national children’s charity had a stall there today and was catching passer’s by to sign a petition to send to the government in favour of a complete overhaul of child protection. In the wake of Baby P and the Sharon Shoesmith hate bandwagon they most likely thought that they would have people queueing to sign their noble and worthy petition.
They couldn’t have been more wrong.
My husband stopped to sign the petition and was chatting to one of the guys on the stall for at least 10 minutes of his lunchbreak. During that chat, the guy told my husband that someone had threatened to punch him for asking whether he would sign the petition for tighter child protection laws. Someone else had called him a nazi and then there were those that were shouting abuse about those campaigning for a better life for the Baby P’s everywhere being do-gooders, interfering busybodies and much, much worse. In fact, the fact that Baby P had been in the news so much may as well have never happened. It seems that those people had already forgotten it. You can guarantee though that they would be the first to cry out when reading the paper or watching the news, if the uneducated ingrates even watched the news.
It shocks me that those people that care enough to give up their own free time to stand on the street in freezing weather get so much abuse. They are not salespeople that follow shoppers everywhere, and neither were they after money. They are just trying to make the world a better place for the next generation, and all society does is throw it back in their faces. Disgusting.
The fact is that we have to do everything we can to help shelter children from abuse but this ignorance, this sickening lack of humanity just goes to show that it can and probably will happen again. Why? Because if it is not on the TV or in The Sun, many of us just don’t seem to care.
It is very rare that I would ever say this but today I was most definitely not proud to be a Brit.
