Moorside

So far my posts have just been general commentary on current affairs, and there has not been anything to illustrate the distinctive point of view I alluded to in the introduction to my blog. This post will give a clearer insight into what I think.

I’ve just watched the BBC drama Moorside, which was a dramatized account of the real disappearance and reappearance of nine year old Shannon Mathews from her home on a council estate in Yorkshire in 2008.  Shannon was missing for twenty four days.  There was a massive, extensive and expensive search, and a huge local and national campaign to find her.  It subsequently transpired that Shannon was being held by a friend of her mother’s, and that her mother Karen knew all along where she was.

I do not know Shannon or Karen Mathews. I have not read the court transcripts and it is not appropriate for me to rush to judgement in respect of the real people involved in this case. But in this excellent drama/documentary a particular view emerged of the character of Karen Mathews, and it is this hypothetical Karen – let’s call her KM – that I’m going to discuss, because it gives an insight in the way we think about what it is to be human.

KM was portrayed as a weak, inadequate, unintelligent, immature, damaged and childlike woman. It is suggested that KM was trying to escape the relationship she had with her live-in boyfriend, whom she hated and who may or may not have been abusing her children and had intended to take her other children and go and live with Shannon’s “abductor”, but unfortunately this plan went wrong when her boyfriend failed to go to work as expected.  Terrified of him she was persuaded to phone 999 and declare Shannon missing.  Once this had happened KM felt obliged to carry on with the deception and did not have the strength of character to tell the truth and stop the hunt for Shannon.

In astronomy, stars in the sky fall on what is called the “main sequence”: where they light up, shine then die. But not all stars.  Some are different and do not follow this usual path.  It is not often understood is that there is a parallel in human beings.  Most people fall within a “normal” range of difference on the scatter graph of all possible human beings.  Some, however fall outside of the main sequence, and have behaviour that we do not usually think of as being “normal”.  Our hypothetical KM is clearly an outlier on this graph.  She is quite a long way from the main sequence.  So how did she get to be so different?  To switch metaphors:  Every time nature makes a new human being it pulls the handle of the fruit machine and the person is stuck with the line of symbols they get.  There will certainly be big jackpot winners, but also those who get the worst possible arrangement in the game of genetic chance.  (It is this genetic variation that Darwinian natural selection acts on and allows evolution to happen.)  There has to be variation in behaviour in all animal species otherwise they could not evolve and adapt their behaviour to changing environments.  We are each the product of our genes and our environment.  Someone who is weak, stupid and incapable clearly did not get like that by choice.  Some people do not mature fully and retain some childlike features as adults (there is a technical term for this in Biology: neoteny, but we don’t need to go there) and there is known to be a genetic component in intelligence.  But it would be wrong to think that genetic influence is all there is.  People are also products of their environment, but even if the primary factors that made KM what she was were environmental it is hard to see how it could be her fault that she is the kind of person she is.  She couldn’t have chosen her upbringing or environment any more than she could her genes.

So if KM had no input into the kind of person she became, she cannot reasonably be held responsible for being the kind of person she is. This makes the claims society makes about her culpability for the crime look tenuous indeed.

There was a claim in the drama that Shannon’s abduction was all a big scam to claim and split the reward for finding Shannon, but the programme was ambiguous on this point. It also claimed that the main culprits KM and the man who “looked after” Shannon were far too stupid to have planned such a sophisticated plot.  No evidence was offered for this claim except for the intuitive assumptions of police officers involved that something more sinister was going on behind the scenes.  It seems clear to me that such a claim had to be made otherwise KM was not bad, but sad.  We have to protect the myth that Britain does not imprison, and take the children away from vulnerable people merely on the basis of their vulnerability.  If any such plot happened in the real Shannon Mathews’ case then it certainly would change the dynamic of the story, but that should not concern us here.  That’s because it is my case that there is a possibility that someone very like our hypothetical KM could exist, and the real question is how society is supposed to deal with them.

In the drama, the then Prime Minister, David Cameron absurdly described the incident as being an example of “Broken Britain”. Unfortunately politicians often let their tribal genes do their thinking for them.  The Shannon Mathews incident, as it was described in the drama, had nothing to do with Britain, it was about the nature of human beings.  British people are not taught to be weak and feckless.  Any influences KM had absorbed from the British culture in which she lived had little, if anything, to do with the person she had become. KM’s problems were about human interaction and development, not about the state of the nation.

Should KM have been helped, rather than – as she ultimately was – imprisoned. It is not clear that help would have worked.  KM was not intelligent enough to understand that the only thing that might have helped her was the truth, she repeatedly changed her story, and it is not clear that she was able to let anyone close enough to her to help, and any help offered might not have been understood by her as being genuinely in her interest.  It might not be possible to help KM, and this illustrates the point that these kinds of problems are not easy to resolve.

On the other hand what purpose was there in jailing her? There are four reasons for taking away someone’s liberty: 1) An act of retribution: the offender needs to be made aware of the gravity of the crime they have been committed, and they need to feel that they have been appropriately punished.  2) Society needs to protect itself against dangerous individuals who might cause harm, and such people need to be kept away from the general population.  3) To rehabilitate offenders and 4) to send a message to society at large that “bad” behaviour has consequences.

Only the first of these would seem to apply to KM. It does not seem likely that she would have caused a continuing danger to society, and the idea that she would have come out of jail as a mature, intelligent and capable adult, or in any way improved, seems risible.  The idea that people like KM would be deterred from bad behaviour also looks, at the very least, questionable.  “Main sequence people” would certainly know the consequences, but it is not clear that people whose personalities are so simplistic and underdeveloped as KM would understand the message.  While the rule of law must apply to everyone – main sequence or outlier, if as I’ve already claimed KM is more of a victim of nature than a criminal, it is not clear that the first reason applies either.  The point is that the system must take account of the great variation in the ways of being human, and it would be wrong to lump weak outliers like KM with dangerous outliers like, say moors murderer, Ian Brady or Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper.

KM got eight years in jail, and in an act at least as horrific and monstrous as KM’s “crime” they tore her innocent children away from her and put them into care, away from their friends, schools and perhaps their siblings, probably condemning them to a lifetime of incarceration in the care system and quite possibly damaging their lives irreparably. Thus traumatising them at least as much as KM did Shannon when she left her neglected in a stranger’s house.  Here it is important to point out that I am fully capable of producing dispassionate academic writing. The language I’m using is highly emotive and some will say unprofessional, but I am writing this way intentionally.  If we fail to emote we fail to engage with reality of the damage that is likely to have occurred to Shannon and KM’s other children by their forced removal from a parent who seems to have loved them (KM showed great distress when her children were taken from her) even if it is doubtful that she had the necessary human faculties to put their interests first.  The act of tearing any child who is over about six months of age, and has the capacity of love for its parent, out of its family is always an act of evil.  The only question is whether there is a greater evil in leaving the child where it is.

Society had to be seen to punish the real Karen Mathews. She had been vilified by the press and portrayed as being pure evil, so they had no choice.  The authorities, and the local community, stamped their primate feet, beat their gorilla chest and pointed an accusative orang-utan finger at her.  Should we think more deeply about the culpability of people who, through no fault of their own, might be weak and inadequate? Or is this just another instance of society’s gross discrimination against people who turn out to be different?  The BBC is to be applauded for giving “Main Sequence” people the chance to consider the question.