LAST weekend, I spent a night in a country hotel in Perthshire with my family. It was a beautiful place, but not one much used to accommodating children, particularly fidgety, bumptious boys who find it difficult to walk across a room without banging into furniture.
As we trekked past the dining room, with its fine china, three sets of cutlery and crystal glasses, it became clear that dining en famille was out of the question. The hotel staff's solution was to feed the children early in their rooms then leave th
em to watch TV, while we enjoyed a four-course meal in peace. Sounds pretty good you might think. But leaving the children alone for any length of time was a first for us and what with the Matthews and McCann cases dominating the headlines again, we were ambivalent about doing it now.
Bear in mind, this was no tapas bar scenario: our oldest son is almost 11, the dining room was just up the corridor, he knew where to find us and the meal was likely to take an hour and a half at most. But still we weren't sure. And, more surprisingly, neither were the children. In fact, they seemed distinctly nervous about the prospect of being let off the parental leash. They had a litany of questions: Would the patio doors to the room be locked or unlocked? How often would we be checking on them? Could we put a clock out so they would know when our next visit was due? And so we ate, with our eyes on our watches, popping out between every course to make sure they were not upset.
It's ridiculous, really, that it should have come to this. That children who are capable in so many ways, should be worried about being left alone for such a short time; ridiculous that we have allowed our own irrational fear to impinge on their independence and emotional well-being. Ridiculous, but also inevitable when you think of the way in which the abductions of Madeleine McCann and Shannon Matthews have seeped into every crevice of our lives over the past year.
I know it's not new, this sense of claustrophobia caused by our inflated fear of crime. But what struck me last week – as Shannon's mother Karen was arrested and charged with child neglect and perverting the course of justice, and it emerged Madeleine had berated the McCanns for failing to answer her cries the night before she went missing – is just how bewildering a place the world must be for children viewing it through the prism of these strange cases.
It's not just the relentlessness of the coverage, although this in itself must be overwhelming for children who are now familiar with the faces of Shannon and Madeleine. It's the way in which they have mutated, from horrific, but somehow manageable stories of children snatched from loving parents by predatory strangers, to ones in which there are no moral certainties; ones where anyone, anywhere could be the enemy, and where those whose job it is to protect their children have been shown to be, at best, unresponsive to their needs, and at worst, complicit in their coming to harm.
The adult response to such chaos is to try to impose order from the situation before them; to mould the shifting contours of these unfathomable happenings into something less alien. And so these cases come to be seen – not as terrible one-offs – but as signifiers of social change. We saw it with the McCanns, who long ago ceased to be individuals caught up in a personal nightmare, and became emblems of a certain kind of middle-class complacency.
And now we are seeing it fourfold with the Matthews family – whose dysfunctional behaviour is being treated, not as an aberration, but as evidence of the existence of new, feral underclass. How some elements of the press loved it when it appeared Shannon's abduction might have been copied from an episode of Shameless – because that's what they want us to believe poverty in Britain looks like now. Lots of feckless Frank Gallaghers drinking, breeding, collecting benefits and taking no responsibility for anything. Many commentators ignored the fact that ordinary families in Dewsbury banded together to search for Shannon as they wrote off vast swathes of the urban UK as moral wastegrounds.
The notion that the Matthews family is the "new face of poverty" is, of course, nonsense. There's always been deprivation – and it's always produced a hefty dollop of ugliness alongside the famed community spirit.
Take child killer Mary Bell, for instance. She grew up in Scotswood, Newcastle, in the 1960s. It was the kind of estate where children as young as three roamed free around building sites as their families did their best to make ends meet. In the midst of this run-of-the-mill deprivation, was Mary Bell's mother, Betty, a some time prostitute, who brought a succession of men home and serviced them in front of her daughter. It is thought she tried to kill Mary several times. At the very least, she was ambivalent towards her, possibly because she was conceived as the result of Betty being raped by her own father. You can't get much more dysfunctional than that.
I suspect life has always been a mish-mash of good and bad, it's just that now the bad's a lot more in our faces. And in our children's faces.
That's going to be difficult to cope with. But encouraging our sons and daughters to believe we are in the grip of an unprecedented moral crisis is far more disabling than telling them the truth: that life is unpredictable, that bad things happen to good people, that it was always thus, and that most of us muddle through regardless. No wonder they don't want to be left alone.
The full article contains 985 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
