It doesn’t look like hell, but for one 17-month-old toddler the scruffy
streets of Haringey in North London — where he suffered torture and abuse
beyond most people’s imagination — were exactly that.
It was here in one of the most deprived boroughs in the country, just streets
away from where eight-year-old Victoria Climbié met her death at the hands
of her brutally abusive guardians eight years ago, that the boy known as
Baby P died in August last year after enduring months of abuse and neglect.
In many ways Haringey is a borough of two halves, neatly divided by the East
Coast rail line. To the west are the prosperous wards of Muswell Hill and
Crouch End, while on the east — very much on the wrong side of the tracks —
are the sink estates and deprived wards of Tottenham Hale and Northumberland
Park.
The statistics could not be more telling. A one-bedroom flat in the western
side costs the same as a three-bedroom Victorian property in the east.
Twenty per cent of pupils gain five A*-C grades at St Thomas More Roman
Catholic, a state school near Wood Green. More than 60 per cent achieve this
target at Fortismere, a state school in the more prosperous ward of Fortis
Green.
Teenagers at the Wood Green Shopping City, considered the heart of the
borough, bemoan the lack of facilities and the excessive cost of activities
in the local leisure centres. They also feel threatened by the competition
for work, citing the influx of Eastern Europeans as a main cause of
unemployment. One teenager of Afro-Caribbean heritage told me that she had
failed to get a job in McDonald’s and that they were employing only “foreigners”.
Northumberland Park is the most deprived ward in the borough. The
neighbourhood is quite clean, but the tell-tale signs of deprivation quickly
become apparent. Boarded shops, a parade of ten shops where four are
hairdressers. In one of the barbers, Faze 1, is Ade, who is angry at the
media for not coming to the borough unless there is a scandal or murder.
“People have negative stereotypes about Haringey — but did anyone mug you?”
he says. “Look around you, we’re all working hard here. You keep your story
on the positive side.”
Indeed, you won’t find the world of Baby P by glancing around. His was a world
apart even from the residents of this deprived area.
Dubbed by some the Shameless subculture (after Paul Abbott’s television drama
about a dysfunctional Mancunian family) they are part of an underclass that
is increasingly detached from normal society.
The markers are overwhelming apathy, unemployment, benefit dependency and,
often, physical and emotional abuse that has been passed down the
generations. They live on the margins and appear to be as cut off from
so-called normal standards of behaviour as they are from the aspirations and
dreams of what are traditionally known as the working class.
It is a phenomenon to be found in cities all over the country. They are the
broken communities living life on the margins, where children sleep under
their coats because there are no sheets on the bed; under-tens hang around
bus-stops at midnight and six-year-olds get themselves up for school without
breakfast because their parents are in drug-addled stupors.
To a certain strata of society — the fractured, impoverished families — it is
normal. They were not raised very differently themselves. And having been
shown little affection as children, they go on to have a dysfunctional
relationship with their own offspring.
One social worker tells of a 20-year-old woman who turned up at hospital in
Manchester with three Asda carrier bags and two unkempt children. After a
short, painful birth the midwife went to hand her her new baby. “Oh, I don’t
want it — get it adopted,” said the mother. “My boyfriend didn’t know I was
pregnant again. He’ll batter me if he finds out.” The woman than announced
that she was discharging herself and going home before her partner, an
alcoholic, realised that she was gone. The only question she had was: “Will
I be able to have sex tonight?” When staff replied that no, of course not,
she shrugged and replied: “I will have to.” The baby was adopted.
This woman, whose children were by two different fathers and who was clearly a
victim of domestic violence, lives on one of the North West’s most deprived
estates. She was evidently prepared to walk away from a newborn baby
apparently without a second glance.
Kirsty, 19, from the Everton area of Liverpool, was brought up in poverty by a
heavy-drinking mother. She is a single mother of two herself. She admits
that she got pregnant with her first child merely to escape the family home
and get a place of her own. It never occurred to her to get a job: her
parents never seemed to work, and it appears to be out of the realms of her
experience. “Getting away from home was my priority, nothing else. Most of
the jobs people like me could do are so badly paid that you’d been seen as
some kind of d***head to do them,” she says. “There are easier and quicker
ways of making money.”
She means drugs, of course — the root cause of most social problems in areas
like this. Teenage boys can make hundreds of pounds just for “looking after”
drugs for a gang member for a few days and simultaneously acquire kudos and
self-esteem.
In the Openshaw area of Manchester, some children are so deprived that it has
even been known for the cooker to have been sold for drugs. Though in many
cases the drug users love their children and are ashamed of their failures,
they feel powerless to escape their addiction. For this reason the Salvation
Army set up a project there a few years ago to help the neglected children.
As one heroin addict told a project worker one Christmas: “There’s nothing
in my house worth more than £10 because it has all been sold for drugs.”
Iain Duncan Smith, the former leader of the Conservative Party and chairman of
the Centre for Social Justice, says that there are many factors behind the
increase in what he calls “dysfunctional families”, but fears that the
problem is exacerbated by a greater number of single-parent households and
homes in which there are non-parental or non-biological parental adults. The
Tories talk about the “broken society” — society is not broken but there are
communities in Britain today that certainly are.
For Mr Duncan Smith, these family outcomes are symptoms, not causes: “Early
intervention is the key to break the cycle of dysfunction. By the time a
child reaches 3, you can tell where that child will be at the age of 18.”
Your Comments
Order By: