Deadly Compassion Part II

Fear and funding

The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty against Children (NSPCC) has a long history and a solid reputation for protecting children and raising awareness of children’s rights. After focusing on adults in the previous round, their £1.5 million, 2004 advertising campaign concentrated on going directly to children themselves, encouraging them to go to organisations rather than work it through within the family. Unfortunately, there were concerns from academics that highlighted the dangers of placing undue importance on agencies outside of the family. 
 

Campaigns of this kind marketed and advertised directly to children were creating a fine line between alleviating a deep-seated problem and actually adding further layers to an already potent fear which has been injected into society. According to one academic: “This creates a poisonous atmosphere, in which both mistrust and suspicion thrive,” he said. “People who are concerned about the effect of advertising on children ought to be concerned about this.” ¹ Children must be protected from the often subtle influence of self-confirming beliefs and assumptions regarding the powerfully sensitive issue of abuse, not least the substantial history of a growing injustice that goes with it. A sensationalist crusade is not what is required, yet this so often seems to be the preferred strategy. 
 

Charities like NSPCC have access to huge sums of money which are accrued from high-profile advertising campaigns. The climate of suspicion rather than evidence is gaining ground. Though many offer up the tired old polarity between left-right agenda politics behind criticism of traditionally liberal institutions one can see that “political correctness” and the staid conservatism of yesteryear are both part of the problem. There is cause for concern that children and parents are being demonized by activities that, while prevalent, are not taking place in every household. Yet the NSPCC spends over 38 million a year on campaigning, PR and administration and public education with 28 million on actual children’s services.²
 

From the reports gathered it does seem to lean towards creating fear and suspicion rather than practical preventative measures that do not require the “shock and awe” tactics projected into families already struggling with innumerable problems. Does this advertising really work? Or is this another example of co-option towards a political agenda? Unconscious or not, like the complexities involved in child pornography, the net result may be the same.

Part of NSPCC’s drive to protect children also includes those who have themselves been abused with a monitoring that pushes the boundaries of what can be termed “protection.” We also seeing another form of “pre-emptive” protection: “From 2002 onwards we are developing this work to help young people who have not yet abused others, but show signs of doing so in the future.” ³ 

According to a recent report by The Spectator from September 2002 The Data Protection Register lists: “…details of sex life, political opinions, ethnic origin and religious beliefs on offenders and alleged offenders and their relatives. Possible recipients of this data include employers and voluntary and charitable organisations.” This is dangerously close to spying and inevitably begs the question: where does it end? Are we seeing more patterns of controls and the erosion of freedoms under cover of “child protection”? If it was just a case of inappropriate PR and advertising, propaganda and selective data it would be alarming enough. However, the track record of child advocacy and social services regarding child abuse cases is less than exemplary. 
 

The report also mentions the case of the Victoria Climbie ⁴ who was tortured over a nine-month period in 1999 and finally murdered by members of her family. Serious inaction on the part of social services, police child-protection units, two hospitals were found to be the cause of the death. The NSPCC shared a central part of the blame. Victoria Climbie had been beaten, burned with cigarettes and forced to sleep in a bin liner inside an empty bath. The eight year old died in February 2000 with 128 separate injuries to her body along with contributory symptoms of hypothermia and malnutrition. Yet she was ignored. 
 

Some of the reasons for the Climbie tragedy lay directly at the door of the charity yet a new multi million pound campaign to stop child abuse on completion of the Climbie report could be said by some to have distracted criticism away from any more probing into the NSPCC. True to form, junior police officers were also alleging that they were made scapegoats in the case. Though we could say it is unfair to single out a case such as this where one “slipped through the net.” However, there are other cases which do not necessarily make headline reports. 
 

The emphasis on advertising campaigns and big corporate donation drives, active lobbying and hi-tec expenditure have placed the NSPCC in the position of being the most donated to charity in the UK. It shows that there must be something deeply flawed in the system which allows a child to be tortured and abused to death from an error of data management that was “inadequate and incomplete.” The Climbie case was high profile – what of the cases which do not reach the press? It is a matter of record that:

* They failed to check on Victoria for a week after she was referred to them in August 1999 because they were busy planning a party.

* They did not act on the eight-year-old’s multiple injuries for several months despite her being referred to them as an urgent case.

* Once the referral had been received vital clarification of the information and the expectations of social services were not sought.

* NSPCC officials had altered documents to show they closed the case.⁵

Ms. Marsh offered some apologies with little attempts to reason why the above happened. She also denied this was an indication of a cover-up, yet that is precisely what it was. This begs the question is the status and way of life of this charity – indeed any charity – more important than its primary goal? How many other cases have slipped through the net for the same reasons? No doubt great lessons were learned in terms of logistical planning, data collection and the like. But questions still remain as to the overall awareness of the deeper implications of abuse in general, where on more than one occasion the charity’s own figures and myths concerning child abuse contradicted its own high profile campaigning messages. 
 

According to NSPCC about 1 percent of UK children are abused by a parent, most usually the mother not the biological father as so many reports suggest. Other listed abuse is shown to have come from other relatives, brothers or stepbrothers at the top end of the scale. Significantly, the researchers estimate that about 13-14 percent of sexual abuse involves non-relatives - which are to say, people outside the family. It has long been known that even in the United States as far back as 1989, a University study found that:

…non-biological fathers were almost four times as likely as natural fathers to sexually abuse children in their care. Another report found that, although mothers’ boyfriends contributed less than 2 percent of non-parental child care, they committed almost half of all the child abuse by non-parents. […]

This fits with other research that reveals mothers to be more violent toward children than fathers are. Yet the NSPCC study omits the further disturbing factor, brought out in American reports that such physical abuse is most likely to occur among lone mothers. In one such survey, unwed mothers reported a rate of ‘very severe violence’ toward their children that was 71 times higher than the rate among mothers who lived with fathers.⁶

Expensive media campaigns were defined by powerful images and focused on parents can produce unnecessary destabilisation and fear. Over simplification of complex issues seems to be the prerogative of our sound-byte culture. The media inevitably reconfirms the myth of the family in the United Kingdom as an inherently dangerous place. After the many miscarriages of justice fuelled by sensationalist media reports, one has to question how far does charity PR and media subjectivity actually inform the public and thereby raise awareness? Or does it introduce new tensions of guilt, hyper-sensitivity and political correctness into families already being squeezed by child laws that increase family fragmentation? 
 

Advocacy research is not an exact science. In fact, it seems the researcher merely needs to find numbers to prove their case disregarding inconvenient data that does not fit. The NSPCC already crossed the line into lobbying and with a disturbing bias on parenting as the ills to all society which its own figures dispute. The media machine is only too happy to oblige in turning societies’ ills into more and more of a reflex action where causes and solutions are by passed in favour of hysteria. There is no question that the world in which we live is full of horror and if one has eyes to see beneath the entertainment, political spin and mediocrity that passes for culture in our world it is a certainty that we are teetering on the abyss. It is one thing to tell children the truth in ways that are manageable and that can be healthily assimilated and made sense of, but quite another to garner profit from the creation of fear plucked from essential truths and to then seed it in the child’s mind with no reference point for understanding. This amounts to programming of a very destructive kind. Abuse does indeed exist but programming awareness of the problem cannot include sensationalism or fear-mongering in an already fear-saturated society. 
 

Increasing the powers of professionals to speak on children’s behalf is not the same as empowering children to have the confidence to understand and take action in concert with protective guardians. This can amount to the addition of more propaganda sourced from largely accurate data but that is distorted and warped, which in turn feeds into the pre-existing platforms of CoIntelpro. Society needs very little conspiratorial manipulation, if the seeds of subjective beliefs merely need to attach themselves to the right meme.⁷ When a purified intention begins to manifest into a hierarchical corporation then it seems it becomes a beacon for those whose nature it is to subtlety warp the group or organisation in question. Like a mathematical “strange attractor” it only needs the smallest “error” to alter the course towards a pre-designed but misguided direction. Or worse, the whole set-up can be fraudulent, a means to ride on the back of a good cause. And because there is a desperate need to alleviate suffering in the world then there is also the presence of those ready to take advantage of that need. Companies, corporations and NGOs are based on the same model that invites such "pathogens".
 

There is evidence to suggest that charities and NGOs across environmental activism, child exploitation and medical research are being funded by the very sources that are part of the problem, giving ammunition to those who see such moves as the assimilation of civic society by corporatism and politics. NGOs rely on funding from individual donors, foundations, corporations and governments, therefore, a case could be made that that these funding sources can affect NGO policy, twisting decision-making in favour of corporate imperatives, thereby calling into question the legitimacy of many NGOs and charities, existence. In fact, a number of cases suggest that they may even be some that are fake and operate to obfuscate ideals; to promote vested interests and to act as vehicles for siphoning off revenue towards personal or political aims. 
 

Since Live Aid, most independent charities have been transformed into effective businesses channelling millions of pounds and dollars into a multitude of projects. The strategy of maintaining growth and the payment of its employees as the consumption and production becomes ever greater, is of paramount importance. With the income of the UK’s top 500 fundraising charities topping £8.6bn in 2004⁸ one can imagine that financial steerage and conditional donations is becoming a greater issue still. Where there is success in funding, politics will not be far behind. 
 

The humanitarian NGO Care International and the murder of its director Margaret Hussein is a case in point. The organization had most of its donations from the US government and therefore never publicly condemned the war in Iraq for fear of losing its income, very likely contributed to the belief that Hussein has sold out to western colonialism. Or Save the Children, describing itself as “the world’s largest independent global organisation for children” relies on huge donations from corporations and governments. The US counterpart of the charity came down hard on its UK branch as it condemned the military in Iraq for breaching the Geneva Convention when US military forces blocked humanitarian aid. Future withdrawal of funding from the US government was implied in several heated exchanges. 
 

Governments and corporations have become the new donors rather than the voluntary sector of the public, where operational independence has been removed. If one looks carefully, one can see that the “passion” and higher principles of service to humankind has been vastly diluted, or as a recent report from the Association of Charitable Foundations mentioned: “In a world where funding comes from service contracts, there is a danger that the passion is neutralised, in the interests of financial survival. People do what they are paid to do, rather than what they care deeply about doing.”⁹
 

So, how to find the middle ground? There lies the rub. Once a person, company and NGO has become ponerized it is very difficult – nigh on impossible - to retrieve the original principles upon which they were founded. Once again, we find it lies in the pathological infection that is currently existing in society and until we devote all our powers of objective analysis to the situation, any form of lasting progress will be fleeting.

Notes 

  
1 “Campaign by NSPCC “poisons families’ ” The Sunday Times Monday, January 19, 2004

2 BBC News, 13 December, 2000, “A UK children's charity has come under fire for spending more on advertising and administration than directly on children's services.”

3 http://www.nspcc.org.uk/

4 The Victoria Climbie Inquiry www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

5 Officers in Climbie case 'scapegoats' Monday, 18 February, 2002.

6 ‘Myths Aside, Traditional Families Protect Kids Best British Report Stirs Up Debate about Sexual Abuse’ The Times, December 22, 2000.

7 The term “meme” was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins, which refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. Or as Dawkins said, ‘Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’.

8 ‘Top charities' income rises 42 percent’ Society Guardian, June 30, 2004.

9  http://www.acf.org.uk/ Association of Charitable Foundations UK Offices.