We are shown but we don't want to see

Barnardos' new video Breaking the Cycle is shocking. Will it be banned like their 2003 campaign, which featured a cockroach coming out of a baby's mouth? Let us hope not.

The outrage hasn’t started in earnest yet, but it seems certain it will do. There are already angry comments such as "they'll stoop to any level to get money nowadays".

Some parents fear for their children because they might see it while watching X Factor or I'm a Celebrity. My just-turned 13 year old would be uncomfortable but she would not thank me for keeping it from her. She knows what sadnesses there are, in the world, not just in the UK. She has been aware for a long time from my magazines (New Internationalist, Amnesty), radio and family conversations. Now she is well equipped to receive these shocking moving images and maturing all the better for it.

If children are old enough to see others seeking fame and the sarcastic "wit" that the judges are encourage to utter, they are old enough to assess the other types of damage that humans can wreak on other and experience the hurt that comes from it. I suspect that those who don’t see Breaking the Cycle in this way don’t see X Factor or I’m a Celebrity in this way either, and are as self-obsessed as the stereotypes they watch. The comments "one thing raising awareness but another upsetting people" and "if i want to give to a cause, its because i belive in their plight not because i was shocked into it" dismiss that shock comes first, then awareness, then belief. Let's hope that once their shock has dissipated, a true awareness will develop.

Let’s think again about what this video does. It shows a cycle of desperation, punishment, abuse and escape through drugs that then leads to desperation. It is vivid because that IS what is happening to people in some parts of UK society. Another’s comment is "I don't think these type of ads are constructive to be honest and just give people the wrong idea that if they have seen it on tv then it's the norm." This person obviously hasn’t sat on a bus and seen a mother punch her daughter with sovereign rings on her fist -- someone in this household has.

Another comment is "there is enough awareness at the mo especially after Baby P", Victoria Climbie’s death came before Baby P’s, but the horror of her death didn’t prevent his. Shortcomings in social services can only be part of the problem if we believe that there is enough awareness. This is why such a shocking video is needed.

The nation needs to wake up and get its brains and hearts. "A 16y girl from care-home needed shelter, I asked Barnados & NSPCC to put her up” says another comment. How can the UK expect charities to act on behalf of our social responsibilities, expect social services to do their job when we don't press them to do it, expect that keeping only one eye open is enough to prevent These Things happening again and then damn those that would try? With hypocrisy, I imagine.

It will be very bad for us indeed to damn the advert. If we do, we will be more Dickensian than when Dr Barnardo started his charity. He used the media and we responded to it and made the charity successful. Let’s not change our minds now.

One tribe goes to war; one tribe fights the fires

A couple of days ago, I ended a comment to this blog with the words Viva Humanity!

This morning, I was reminded of the nightmare that comes when inhumanity lives and thrives, while listening to Lyn Witheridge* on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live.

Lyn is one of the first people in the UK to prove her case of bullying in the High Court. Her story of the ridiculous professional demands and personal insults is not the whole of it. Nor is it sufficient to recognise the depression and the effect on her family life while she was being bullied.

What tips the balance into a nightmare situation, a nervous breakdown and complete feelings of helplessness is when the legal process goes wrong. In Lyn's case, the tribunal rejected her complaint on the basis that she had bullied her employer, the organisation itself. She called for apparently too many meetings to discuss the issues. This is again a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. My deepest sympathy to anyone forced into this situation anywhere, at work, at home, with their neighbours.

Lyn's efforts were viewed as bullying itself. The court was used by the bully to further their own actions.

This is where our legal system goes wrong; still even today I believe it is happening.The victim is placed on the same level as the bully, where the implication is that there are "two warring parties". With this, a court gives the bully a voice and places value judgements on the victim's responses to the situation that they have been placed in (remember, they were not looking for it). Hence, the bully's actions are condoned and the bully's effects on the victim are strengthened.

This is the nightmare; a war is being fought between an aggressor and a fire fighter, and the fire fighter is damned for his efforts to put out the fire that no one wants but the aggressor. The bully has the Law on their side.

Fortunately, in Lyn's case, her union was funding her case and supported her taking the case to appeal. A nightmare within a nightmare and thank goodness she had her union; it is nigh on impossible for anyone with a private case. Appeals are expensive, transcipts have to be taken of the original hearing; the focus has to be that the original hearing was not conducted properly. And new evidence can only be presented with good reason. If you are forced in to this situation with a civil issue, where you are paying, make sure you get your case clear from the start. All the emotions don't make it easy but get it right first time -- the right to go to appeal is not a matter of course.

The result: Lyn's was worst case of bullying that the judge had ever heard and the tribunal had to be held again.

There are many good people forced on to the back foot by a few. It would serve the world well if the practioners of law were to routinely recognise even just the coarser grains within humanity.

So, Longue Vie à La Bonne Humanitié!

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* Lyn Witheridge's account starts 20 minutes into the programme.

Damnation and Hope

A month ago, I praised the skies because Mother was moving closer to me. A positive start to the next era in our lives ...

Now, I am damning the gods because Mother is not committed to her decision. She cannot see past the difficult time of waiting for a house sale and living in my (very large) sitting room to the better times afterwards.

Mother is moving back to her house. She decided this within the week of arriving at my place and I have not been able to stop her slide into damnation of everything about me and my locality.

So, No Change? apart from the loss of about £2000 on a round-trip for her things? It is not as simple as that.

A Disaster? Mother wants to re-establish her status quo; it will surely be further entrenched. Being based on a behavioural disorder, her status quo is not happy.

I am accused of coercion. Although a month ago I said "the decision was forced by having to book the date with the removal firm", it was actually the time of the decision that was forced. She did have the choice to move within her town so she could get away from her new neighbours rather than move closer to me. Thus, she has rejected me, my attentions to details as well as the bigger picture, my execution of her wishes, and asserted that she herself is "the only one" who knows what she needs. She is confirming what I have long suspected but was hoping I was seeing the end of, a lack of trust in her daughter. No one has yet been able to be her advocate and the shell around her will only be reinforced.

Also a month ago, I was "expecting other instances of uncertainty": I knew she would be anxious about what was going to happen next, and indeed such a major change is fraught with difficulties as well as delight. What happened was that I could not maintain a delightful life for her for sufficient time -- I became a workman in her home, then a mother herself with her children visiting -- and Mother could not maintain her enjoyment -- therein lies the story of her life.

So a potential Disaster? No end to the frantic calls telling her daughter the latest atrocities against her? No end to her fight against the world? No decrease in the risk that she will be upset and fall again (a real possibility which has happened once this year). I wait to see. I have little hope of a new and positive attitude.

Yet I damn the gods mildly. One can only try, and I have lived being damned if I do and damned if I don't. I damn the gods thus:

Mother has “nerves” (also "nerve": her mother told her in no uncertain terms what she thought of her wearing a lime-green suit in the late 1940s and one could postulate that, even then, Mother had no regard for how others saw her). At the age of 13, about 1940, she was put in an institution for some nervous condition for six weeks, at the time not knowing if she would ever come out. Never mind that this was frightening – all types of "not-normal" people have been institutionalised for the rest of their lives -- there was no diagnosis, no follow up, no healing.

Thus, Mother developed coping strategies that have made her really quite dysfunctional. She has emigrated at least three times in her life and regularly wants to make big moves again. She is constantly dissatisfied with people and events, belligerent and obsessively aggressive to the point of upsetting whoever is her target. She defends herself to the hilt by pleading reactions she can't control and by attacking with emotion and little empathy for how others may feel. She complains that she “has to do it all” herself yet trusts no one to be her advocate.

Thus, we have one more person who is difficult to care for in their old age. We have two children, my brother and me, who are still learning how not-normal their mother is and their childhood was (such that my brother was distressed enough to seek counselling). We have a person who has not been able to fulfill their potential in this world.

Mother will return to her house and her frequent visits to the doctor. And here may be the silver lining to this Disaster.

Evidence for better funding for mental health services?

Surely yes! Although Mother may reject seeing a psychiatrist, a treatment already being suggested by her doctor, because she thinks she is doing alright, there are people who want to receive counselling because of a behavioural disorder or mental illness yet cannot because services don't have enough money. Here is a parallel, the non-availability of mental health service provision in the 1940s, which has turned out to be a false economy in Mother's case.

Indeed, I will thank the gods when the English government finally comes up with a holistic and evidence-based Mental Health Act. The Act of 2007 introduced Community Treatment Orders, an extreme treatment that is at risk of being over used.

The next Act must describe a full range of counselling treatments for a broader spectrum of patients and could-be patients, and make it accessible to anyone who wants it.

Scotland is already taking up this challenge, as well as looking at what contributes to good mental health.

Thus I live in hope rather than damnation.