A girl thing

A couple of years ago I had almost reached my front door after returning from work when I heard something that stopped me in my tracks. I was outside a neighbouring house and I could hear loud, continuous sobbing and weeping. It sounded as though a woman was in great distress.

I really did not feel like sorting out anyone’s problems at the time, I was tired and fed up, but this was days after the discovery of Jaycee Lee Dugard, kidnapped as a young girl and held for 18 years. I decided that I did not want to be one of those people who noticed something and did not act on it. So I dumped my bag just inside my front door with an explanation to my partner, walked back and listened again. The sound was still coming from a first floor window. I rang the bell and explained myself to the man who answered the door. “I suppose you want to see them for yourself?” he said before turning and calling to someone upstairs. Two teenage girls appeared who seemed perfectly happy. So I left. A week later the same thing happened but I ignored it. I’ve seen both girls since then and I still have no idea what was going on.

At the time I was already aware that the suburb I live in was home to a number of brothels, with convenient transport links. The ads in the back of the local paper testify to it and I suppose that most of us regard it as a fact of life. What the majority of people who glance at those ads do not know is that apart from the women who engage willingly in prostitution there are now many who have been forced into it. Women desperate to earn money and gain independence are brought to the UK by traffickers, discovering too late that the men who promised them a great job and a new life are actually selling them into the worst situation imaginable. Even if they are rescued they are cut off from their old life forever, knowing that other young girls from their home town are being targeted by the same traffickers.



The cases of Elizabeth Fritzl and Natascha Kampusch are bound to chill the blood of anyone who thought that women in the West were no longer vulnerable to this kind of ill-treatment. There has been much speculation, particularly in Austria where these incidents occurred, that the men who held them captive were fossils, throwbacks to an earlier time when women were expected to do as they were told. Others suggest that these cases are symptomatic of an underlying desire to keep women in their place.

It is tempting to think that, one hundred years after the first International Women’s Day, the repression of women is restricted to countries where it is part of a cultural tradition. The truth is that all around us women suffer in silence, treating the bruises they get from an angry partner as part of the deal. It was revealed recently that it is common for there to be an increase in the rate of domestic violence after football matches involving Rangers and Celtic, in fact they doubled after one game.

At the same time I have noticed the capacity for violence is no longer restricted to men, if it ever was. There was a time when it was taken as read that a young teenage girl who caused trouble was a fluke and likely to come from a challenging background. How things have changed. Last year a young women was convicted of manslaughter, having stamped on and kicked a man who later died. She was seventeen years old at the time, her fashionable ballet pumps and handbag covered in her victim’s blood. So much for an expensive education and a comfortable home. I see Ruby Thomas in many of the teenage girls I now encounter, the smart back chat that some see as confidence as likely to be a first step in a potentially violent encounter. I never underestimate the dangerousness of girls in school uniform.

Almost thirty years ago, when I was still at school, a fellow students was told by one teacher that she was not welcome to study technical drawing in his class as he did not feel that a career in engineering was suitable for a woman. Even then this comment made jaws drop amongst students and staff who took it for granted that a woman could have any career she wanted. By then women had begun to take control of reproduction using the Pill and, especially with the advent of AIDS/HIV, by insisting on the use of condoms. That made it easier for them to delay having children until they wanted too but it has become clear that some have delayed too long and it has now reached the stage where women are being warned not to wait until their forties to get pregnant.

The influx of Eastern Europeans, largely Poles in my area, has shown up this element in the change of women’s fortunes. I don’t suppose that many of the young women who moved here several years ago planned to stay more than a few years but have in fact settled down and had babies. They stood out, often slimmer and healthier than their British counterparts and now that they are mothers they are unusual again in that the fathers of their children are in evidence and even live with them as part of a family unit. In my street it had reached the stage where there were barely any young children living in the surrounding houses. One morning I found that I had spent several minutes standing by the bathroom window transfixed by something unusual - the sound of a baby crying, coming from a neighbouring house.

The impression I get is that in my area British couples wait until they can get a mortgage before they begin having children whereas other nationalities are quite happy to raise their families in rented accommodation. These newcomers have at times seemed to have old fashioned values that were once common in the UK and the women in that group don’t seem to regard motherhood as restrictive. Personally I don’t believe women can have it all. I think you can be a good mother and hold down a job once the children are at school but I now find it difficult to accept the idea of a woman heading back to work leaving a very young child in someone else’s care. Perhaps I’m getting old and conservative.

Even so I was stunned when I heard about the impact that the notion that a male is worth more than a female has had on ante-natal care in the UK. Hospitals in areas where there is a large Asian population do not advise the expectant mothers in their care of the gender before the child is born as it can be a death sentence for a female foetus. It could lead to a “miscarriage”.

During my life I know that things have improved beyond recognition for so many women but it is hugely dispiriting to think that we are still being paid less because of our gender. In Portugal, a short flight away from the UK, women can still end up in prison if they have an abortion. In Guatemala it is almost commonplace for women to be murdered. In Afghanistan women continue to kill themselves in despair at forced marriages. In my own country women return to the homes where they are beaten and abused because they have no other choice.

I suppose you could argue that the fact that I was prepared to challenge someone over what I thought might be a case of domestic violence means that things aren’t as bad as they once were. People used to look the other way when I was a child because they felt that it wasn’t their business. Worse than that, the policeman who attended the incident might actually commiserate with the perpetrator. Today, the police officer who attends is as likely to be female but still capable of standing up to a man who thinks that pounding his wife after his team loses on a Saturday night is a form of leisure activity. Perhaps that is the biggest gain of all.

Small society

Something happened last week that brought to mind the Prime Minister’s continued efforts to explain his concept of the “Big Society” .

I was at the small parade of shops a street away from my home when I spotted a young woman, wearing the kind of long skirt favoured by Roma women, standing very close to an elderly man with whom she was deep in conversation. I didn’t think anything of it until I happened to look that way again and realised that I could see banknotes. Sometimes you just know that something isn’t right and as I was in the mood to take notice I walked up to them and asked what was going on.

By this time I was less than two feet away and could also see a substantial gold chain which I automatically grabbed to keep it where it was. I couldn’t tell which direction it was travelling in but in the seconds I had my hand around it I realised that it wasn’t the heavy gold necklace it appeared to be. I know metallised plastic when I handle it. The girl was startled and pulled it away from me but I had reached them in time to see that she had been taking more and more five pound notes from him. Over her shoulder I could see a man and another girl standing a few feet away, clearly worried at my intervention.

Something about the girl I was standing close to threw me, she seemed so frightened. I couldn’t work out exactly what was going on so I backed off and left them to it but by the time I had dealt with my errand I realised that I should have been firmer with her and told her to get lost. It was too late. All those involved had disappeared. I asked a shopkeeper if he had seen anything and was given one of those answers that makes me despair. Yes, some people had been trying to sell fake gold jewellery in the street, especially to pensioners. There was no point telling the police because by the time they arrived they would be gone. That was the mindset of every person I told in the minutes after it happened. When I mentioned it in another shop and said that I thought those involved might be Roma someone asked me what my nationality was. The suggestion was that to point out their ethnicity was to be racist, even though that is the sort of information the police would have asked for.

Looking at it now, days after the event, it occurs to me that what happened in the small space between the three of us brought up some really big issues. That young woman represented centuries of persecution and discrimination. As a citizen of the European Union she is of monetary value to her family in that she can be married off to someone who wants the right to live in the UK and is prepared to pay for a wife. She wouldn’t keep the money she was making by selling jewellery, it would be passed on to someone else, possibly along with any she managed to acquire through the benefits system and was actually entitled to.

The man being conned was clearly a veteran, of an age to have fought the fascists who murdered as many as 600,000 Roma. His reward was to be ignored because no one seemed to have noticed what was happening to him. Perhaps old soldiers really do fade away. The elderly, constant and uncomfortable reminders of what we will become, tend to be left to their own devices these days, their lives characterised by isolation and loneliness, their pensions worth less and less.

And there I was, unable to decide what to do or who to tell. Was it theft and therefore a police matter? Would I be wasting their time? Should I contact Trading Standards? Should I have just had the guts to shout at that young woman and scare her off, aware that she was as much a victim as the man she had targeted? So fearful of doing the wrong thing, of being drawn into something I might lose control of, of being accused of discrimination. My original urge to follow my instinct and intervene drowned in a sea of doubt and fear, undermined by the knowledge that I would probably be on my own with it, that no one else would help. In that small space between a young Roma woman, a veteran of World War Two and a forty something blogger, it was my responsibility to decide whose rights took priority at that moment but I had forgotten how to do it. I made the wrong choice.

It took me some time to realise that personal experience of dealing with the legal system influenced the way I reacted. The despair I felt at hearing the words “no point” came from understanding that those who spoke them were probably right. If the case was proved the pensioner would be unlikely to get his money back and the girl, a pawn in someone else’s game, would find herself in an even worse situation. In the hands of a sharp barrister a statement written in a hurry at the time could make the whole process pointless. If every person I had told about it had at that moment rushed up to deal with those involved we would have been called a mob. I want to make it clear that I do not believe the police are to blame for this, I am sure they are just as frustrated as I am at times.

Mention the “Big Society” and immediate reference is made to volunteering, or to the running of state facilities by charities, or to taking part in local government. That’s when I (and a great many others) switch off. The sad thing is that I think I understand what the Prime Minister is talking about. In some ways it is about being bigger than yourself, “ubuntu“, I am because we are. Have a conscience, give a damn, get your hands dirty. Well, a lot of us do that already. The postman who notices that a vulnerable pensioner is being targeted by scam mail . The neighbour who reports a child’s bruises. We need to make it easier and more socially acceptable to intervene in small ways, and back up those who do so. Somehow we need to develop more confident caring habits because until we do we won‘t be willing or able to move on to the bigger things that we are being asked to take on.

There are plenty of people out there who haven’t waited for someone else to fix a problem for them. There are probably even more who want to do that but are put off by the fear of being told off for doing so. We’ve protected ourselves through legislation to the point where we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, a lack of common sense in relation to child protection and volunteering has made it almost impossible to do something as simple as drive someone else’s children to a football match. At the same time it would be foolish to risk the kind of incident which brought that hard won legislation into force. I suppose those who promote the “Big Society” are asking us to take the risk of being found at fault in the hope that our motives will be understood by the majority, to rediscover self-reliance. It has reached the stage where too many of us believe that we longer have to be conscientious because we’ve paid others to do that for us. It remains to be seen whether we will recover from the atrophy that has developed as a consequence of being so well looked after, leaving some of us unable to think for ourselves.

“Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighbourhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

Fort Home, Suburbia

At first I laughed when I saw it. Someone had pinched some pampas grass from a nearby street and stuck the stems very neatly into the shared hedge that edges ours and the neighbour’s front gardens. It looked quite festive, a night time prank by some passing reveller. Then it was pointed out to me that to leave them there might invite more negative attention, suggesting that if we let this pass something less funny might follow. So I called on our neighbours to ask if they didn’t mind my removing them and was really surprised to find that they were concerned that the opposite might happen. They had left them there in case the person responsible retaliated.

This incident is typical of the kind that leave the average householder with what we are told is an exaggerated sense of threat. The statistics tell me that the crime rate in my area is at an average level compared to central London but the sight of an empty wallet abandoned in the street or broken glass on a pavement where someone has broken into a car remind me that someone suffers as a result of criminal activity every day within a few metres of my front door. It doesn’t matter how often the police remind drivers not leave anything, even cigarettes, on show in their vehicles or suggest that we keep credit cards zipped into our inside pockets. We still leave ourselves open to opportunists with no conscience. One hot summer evening I called at a house to point out that I could see a handbag, heavy with money, cards and keys from the pavement through a front door that had been left open to ventilate the house. Even a locked door is no deterrent to car thieves who use a hook on the end of a broom handle to steal car keys from stairs and tables in hallways. I was told of one incident where all three cars belonging to one household were stolen at once.

In my experience it is older people, often those who have been on the receiving end of this kind of attention, who are most switched on about crime. A former neighbour giggled as he showed me his latest ploy to ward off burglars, a recording of a barking dog that was triggered when I walked past his back door. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it actually sounded like a recording of a dog and I suspect he was as aware of it as I was but it was certainly more convincing than the man who began barking when I slipped a piece of misdirected mail through his letterbox.

These attempts at putting off baddies may sound absurd but at least they were aware of the threat. Many people have no idea that they regularly leave their home in a state that screams “Come and get me!“ to burglars. I am left open mouthed at the naivety of the householders in my area. The enclosed porches that were meant to prevent heat escaping through the front door are often left unlocked. It is common for the post to be pushed through the letterbox in the glazed porch door so that bank statements, tax returns and all manner of confidential paperwork sit there for hours until the householder returns from work. Even if the door is locked there is barely anyone around to take notice if the glass panel is kicked in.

Those bold enough to go that far might take the opportunity to tackle the main door and help themselves to something more substantial than the cash, credit cards and jewellery left in full view. A surprising number of householders leave a spare key under a plant pot or somewhere similar and burglars know this. They are some of the most accomplished people watchers, reading the message sent out by the festering milk bottles and soggy newspapers that collect on your doorstep during your summer holiday. They know that a confident manner will reassure those passing by and that the average person is reluctant to sort out someone else’s problem, leaving them to get on with it.

“Kick ins”, where a driver waits in a car outside a target house while an accomplice literally kicks in the front door and carries out valuables, are quite common in the suburbs. I know because we were targeted in this way a few years ago. I was in the middle of a nap on a weekday afternoon when someone rang the doorbell and used the knocker rather too vigorously on the door . I took this to be an impatient courier and as I got to the top of the stairs in time to see the front door fly open I actually thought that some fool had lobbed the parcel at it in haste, bursting it open. It was the brief sight of a man stepping in and then very quickly out of the hall that put me right. I got to the bottom of the stairs in time to see him duck behind what was then an untidy and rather high hedge and into a car which tore off at speed. Being half asleep didn’t help as I tried to work out what had just happened but the one other person I saw in the street didn’t seem to realise that anything was wrong. It turned out that ours was not the only home to be targeted by this pair of thieves on that day. Their movements were tracked for some time on CCTV using number plate recognition technology. I was lucky in that I was in and did not come face to face with someone who would use violence rather than get caught.

Since then we bother to double lock the front door during the day and use the bolts and chain once we are both in. The hedge is now kept at a height that allows us to see the car when we are downstairs - we‘ve already lost one to someone who needed spare parts for his own similar car (he was kind enough to dump what was left of it a few streets away). The lawn is also kept in a reasonable state as it seems that untidiness suggests a vulnerable occupant who won‘t fight back. The hedge that the owner is no longer able to trim themselves also provides a screen for anyone busy at the front door for the wrong reasons. It seems that the message sent out by a house proud homeowner is “I am prepared to defend my castle” whereas an unkempt lawn and hedge suggest the opposite.

Suburban homes are particularly vulnerable because they usually come with front and back gardens. If a boundary fence comes down it often stays down until the owner establishes who is responsible for it. The fact that a long section of fence can be owned in part by several people doesn’t help as it can mean that the various sections don’t match up and a gap becomes a highway for cats, foxes and thieves. It is usually the police officer chasing a suspect who tells us about the intruder in our back garden. Reluctantly I have come to the conclusion that the low fence that has been in place there since 1936 between ours and the adjoining semi will have to be replaced with something much taller. It’s a sad comment on our times. We will also be replacing the gate to the front garden that was removed long before we arrived to reinforce the psychological barrier between the street and the house.

Those who lived in my area when the mock Tudor semis were newly built will tell you that there was a time when you could go shopping leaving the front door unlocked. If that really was the case I suspect it had more to do with the fact that there was usually someone around to put off a thief than with the general level of honesty. That generation knew their neighbours, married women were often housewives and strangers stood out. Ours inhabits a world where you can live next to someone for years and exchange no more than a few words with them in all that time. We no longer rely on our neighbours to inform and entertain us and are more likely to speak online to total strangers on the other side of the world than the person we know on the other side of the wall.

The irony is, of course, that we are as much at risk from the attentions of the dishonest online as we are in our homes. I have decided that I will never bank online as I’ve seen one news story too many about errors made by various banks. I get so many phishing emails mentioning HSBC that it has put me off becoming a customer. My partner spent Christmas Day eliminating a virus that had wormed its way into his PC. Fraudulent websites are so convincing that even the most alert are sometimes taken in. However, when it comes to emails Mr Musa Mohamad, Mrs Madina Dauda and Mr Hassan Karim should probably give it a rest as I’m unlikely ever to respond to their “urgent appeals” although I’m glad to know that I “remain blessed in the Lord”. It must be worth their while to keep up the relentless attempts to dupe people in this way although I can’t help thinking that it might be more fruitful to invest in the air fare to the UK and rifle through the recycling boxes out put every week by the trusting. Oblivious to the concept of shredding confidential documents, they discard bank statements and payslips, unaware of the goldmine they provide for those engaged in ID theft. Or they could just stick their hands into a few letterboxes.

I know that I will become much more vulnerable as I get older. An elderly neighbour told me that she is often the target of fraudsters via her telephone. Because she isn’t expecting the call she is not on her guard and before she knows it she has given away personal information to someone she cannot see and has never met. She has a piece of tape marked with a cross on the receiver to remind her to watch what she says when she lifts it. “Boiler room” fraud has deprived some of thousands of pounds in this way. I can see why some older people own the sort of dog you choose not to pat and that shreds their mail with enthusiasm. When I get to that age (and possibly even before that) I will have a pair of highly trained Dobermans called Heckler and Koch - I already fantasise about the next miscreant feeling the heat of their breath on his arse as he flees the neighbourhood.

http://www.met.police.uk/crimeprevention/burglary.htm

Enough for California

Ours is a fairly typical suburban wardrobe in that when you open it quite a lot just falls out. A year ago the avalanche would have included bags stuffed full of unused Christmas cards amongst the sweaters, handbags and toilet rolls for which there is no other home. This peculiar form of hoarding went on for several years but it wasn’t because I’m a big fan of the season. I don’t do Christmas. The hundreds of cards that took up space in and then on the wardrobe as the year went on represented my commitment to a particular human rights issue, as they were intended for prisoners across the United States who are on death row.

Following a conversation with a member of an organisation that befriends them I came across some unused cards at the back of a cupboard. I wondered how many other people had a few left over every January and if any were willing to donate them. I had learned that the number of DR prisoners was so great (over 3000) that it was too expensive to send them all a card at Christmas, even though it might be the only one they got. Friends and family are often thin on the ground when you’re in that situation. I mentioned my idea to a contact at a local church and was rewarded a few weeks later with several bulging carrier bags. By now it was late October. I called one of the organisation’s co-ordinators and told her I had some cards. She didn’t sound terribly impressed.

“How many do you have?” “About six hundred.” There was a moment’s silence. “That’s enough for California. This year everyone gets a card.”

It took a couple of years to get going but eventually it became an annual ritual to ask for cards on Freecycle in the early weeks of the New Year. January found me trudging round the suburbs with my trusty A to Z, collecting donations. To these were added the cards sent to me by members of sympathetic groups, some from as far away as Australia. The strange thing is that I ended up with around six hundred every year, apart from one occasion when I was fifteen short of a thousand.

When it got to September I would begin to sift out any inappropriate ones which could mean anything from the pornographic (Santa‘s little helper in fishnets) to the relentlessly cheerful (“Have a great Christmas with your family and friends!”). I was given humorous ones with a cartoon of frantic Christmas shoppers outside a travel agent’s window. “Seven more escaping days to Christmas!” said the poster. I didn’t think the censors would laugh. I also separated the overtly religious ones because while some condemned prisoners develop a strong religious faith many others feel God wasn’t there when they needed him most.

Why have I stopped doing it? The final straw came when I found I had wasted quite a lot of time visiting the same bit of West London twice in bitterly cold weather because someone who was really keen to donate forgot to leave the package out the first time. Just to make things worse, when I sorted them out it turned out that she had written something in around a third of them and then put them back into the pack! This followed being given used ones by those who misunderstood the request. I thought of all the cards I could have bought with the fares I had wasted and felt there must be a better way of doing it.

Why do it in the first place? Sometimes a Christmas card is all that a prisoner can cope with because he or she can’t read. Someone else has to read their mail to them. Apart from that just because I think Christmas is an over-commercialised and shallow event it doesn’t mean it can’t seem a little magical to someone who has very little. When you become involved in prison reform it is the denial and importance of ordinary things in the life of an inmate that tends to strike you. Asking for them was also a way of raising awareness about the issue. Most people have an opinion about it but not much knowledge. There’s often an assumption that everyone given a death sentence has received adequate representation in court - the reality is that it depends on your bank balance. That often determines how good your defence will be. If you are very lucky you will attract the support of a human rights organisation but that tends to happen once the appeals stage is reached. Some of the nicest cards I received came from Yatombi Ikei who was himself poorly represented during his trial and has raised some serious questions about the issue.

Murder and sudden violent death must seem a million miles away from the average person’s experience, the whole subject imbued with a dark glamour. In truth, murder is often mundane, triggered by trivial and ridiculous events. It isn’t generally about gangsters and drug deals. The perpetrator isn’t always the fearsome stranger you bolt your doors against at night. I appreciate that the family of a victim may derive something from the death of the person who killed their loved one but I’ve wondered how it’s supposed to work when both the victim and the condemned are from the same close family circle. Put yourself in the place of Jon Flinner who lost his mother to cancer, his stepmother to murder and then his father to death row for the killing. Raising awareness of their father’s plight is not how most people expect to spend their teenage years but he has done so very successfully via Twitter.

Most of us come no closer to a personal experience of the criminal justice system than a brief contact with the police. Occasionally things go further and this may involve being a juror or giving evidence at a hearing, as I have. I played a very insignificant part in a relatively insignificant case but it was made rather more daunting by the fact that it took place at the Central Criminal Court in the City of London, better known as the Old Bailey. Some of the most serious trials have taken place there, including capital cases when the death penalty was still carried out in the UK.

Seen close up the process of justice was boring and sad. The things that seemed so exotic in court room dramas became ordinary, dulled by the hours of waiting that it involved. Until then I had no idea just how much time police officers are obliged to spend hanging about. It is impossible to forget that you are sharing a waiting room with people who may have seen terrible things. I got used to seeing people drift about in black robes. A barrister’s wig, caught in his fingers under a stack of paperwork, seemed like a small limp animal set aside for lunch.

Waiting to give evidence in those grey green marble halls made me think of being under the surface of a lake, watching the sunlight filter through the drifting weed, glinting on the golden figure of Justice far above me. Considering that witnesses have over the centuries described some of the worst human behaviour on that site the gloom seemed appropriate. And far below me what is left of Newgate Prison was a reminder of all those whose legal defence had not been good enough, many of whom were executed just outside in the street that gives the place its name.

When the moment came it was, as a police officer had said, like theatre but the acting was wooden. There were no Oscar winning performances. The dialogue between a barrister and a witness is somewhere between a pavane and a bull fight. Depending on who you are giving evidence for they’ll either dance with you or spear you and some are better dancers than others. The Old Bailey’s version of Lady Justice is not blind as she stands against the London skyline with her sword and scales and it occurred to me that she probably knows a good barrister when she sees one.

In spite of what goes on there those tasked with the day to day running of the place manage to retain an astonishing degree of humanity. They seemed truly impartial and I was humbled by their cheerful and professional attitude as they guided ordinary and occasionally frightened people through their visit. When I hear someone say that it should be a life for a life I wonder how they would react to what I was told by a member of staff, that for a period it was common for the victims, witnesses and defendants to be so young that their ages were almost in single figures. The notice board full of child art took on a new significance. Drawn by someone’s kid brother or sister, not their kid. One very short life for another.

In the end the experience confirmed what I had already believed for some time, that such life or death decisions should never, never depend on the opinions of fallible human beings. I have never been so glad that all we have left from the bad old days are the wigs but I also feel profoundly sad at the thought that a belief in truth and justice is something you can grow out of, just as I once believed that Jesus was born in a stable and that Santa eats all those mince pies.