The Conditioned Society
There are times when the British Press can actually make you physically nauseous. It's not the rabble-rousing, unapologetic scaremongering that does it; it's the sheer incontestable chutzpah with which they ignore what they do. Now we have another perfect example of the ability.
To prevent this post being a succession of links, here's a stripped-down version of what happened. A 38 year-old woman, Fiona Pilkington, and her severely disabled daughter, Francecca, were found dead in a blazing car in October 2007. It seems that local kids, and in particular three boys from a family called Simmons, were responsible for her increased hysteria by throwing stones, flour and eggs at the house and shouting taunts. In the end she drove to a layby with her daughter, and set their car ablaze.
The inquest is out and has found that the poor response of the police contributed to her death; that 33 calls were unanswered; and that Pilkington wasn't referred for psychiatric help after telling social services that she felt suicidal.
You've got the Mail, the Sun, the Telegraph, the Express, and probably plenty more I could mention if I could be arsed looking. The phrase "street rat" and "family from hell" (both quotes by surprisingly anonymous neighbours) sums up the tone. Get our police to lock up these yobs is the best way of summarising the conclusions.
The question of ooh what's happened to society is a broad and complex one, so I'm not going to try and tackle it. Instead I want to focus on one things, it's not the reasons for what happened, just the sort of important factors that give rise to an increased incidence of this sort of thing. Fuck knows how social workers go about their business, I certainly ain't got a clue and I'm not going to pretend I do.
So:
Fiona Pilkington's diaries do not show a woman besieged by feral youth, they show a woman besieged by her own terror. Let's be clear; spending years with your house surrounded by teenagers chucking stones is no fun, and it's hardly surprising that it would wear you down. Teenagers behave like shits at the best of times, and chanting taunts at a mentally handicapped kid is a shit thing to do. However, the woman's terrified reaction to this, even before her final act, are clearly disproportionate. She was reduced to a hopeless, trembling wreck by some kids sitting on her wall.
Misleading as it is to apply general trends to specifics, there's an obvious parallel; for the last couple of decades, British people have been conditioned to see young people as a threat. Whatever the reality of petty crime among the yoof of today, the automatic association between hoodies and criminals couldn't be more specific if it had been a plot-point in the Manchurian Candidate. It might be something that right-wing newspapers like to dismiss as an idealogical wetness from bleeding-heart liberals, but conditioning is a highly effective means of generating emotional responses. Show a country enough pictures of slouching spotty wraiths, replete with headlines or voiceovers about crime / thugs / Broken Britain, and it's obvious that people will associate the message with the image. This isn't dogma or bleeding heart, it's Pavlovian conditioning. Or put another way; basic fucking psychology.
The sad thing about these cycles is how self-fulfilling they are. Treat someone like a prick, they'll act like a prick, and you become more convinced they're a prick. If someone specifically planned a way to drive a society schizophrenic, this is exactly the process they'd use.
You can factor in so much more than this. There's a second strand of the same narrative, related largely to the hysteria surrounding paedophilia, which has lead to most people feeling disempowered in the face of young people; has propogated the notion that only the state, or parents, can address or remonstrate with a child; has reinforced the idea, conditioned it into society, that people under 18 aren't quite human. A few grotesque cases were magnified and iconicised, whipping a nation into a frenzy about cartoon paedophiles; the state reacted as only states do, by initiating central control and bureaucracy; suspicion and institutionalised fear become the cornerstones for how the young are dealt with. They aren't people, they're different and special and normal rules don't apply to them. Then, when they behave as though the rules don't apply, they're shocked.
The irony? It's the right-wing press who hurl the insults and the yobs and/or scumbags, the thugs and/or gurriers. And yet they're exactly the people who have created the world they detest so much. One day, the Express or Mail or Telegraph will look at the media-saturated society of modern history, look at the images that they've flashed in front of our eyes all that time, and admit to themselves; we are the architects of this world we so despise.
To prevent this post being a succession of links, here's a stripped-down version of what happened. A 38 year-old woman, Fiona Pilkington, and her severely disabled daughter, Francecca, were found dead in a blazing car in October 2007. It seems that local kids, and in particular three boys from a family called Simmons, were responsible for her increased hysteria by throwing stones, flour and eggs at the house and shouting taunts. In the end she drove to a layby with her daughter, and set their car ablaze.
The inquest is out and has found that the poor response of the police contributed to her death; that 33 calls were unanswered; and that Pilkington wasn't referred for psychiatric help after telling social services that she felt suicidal.
You've got the Mail, the Sun, the Telegraph, the Express, and probably plenty more I could mention if I could be arsed looking. The phrase "street rat" and "family from hell" (both quotes by surprisingly anonymous neighbours) sums up the tone. Get our police to lock up these yobs is the best way of summarising the conclusions.
The question of ooh what's happened to society is a broad and complex one, so I'm not going to try and tackle it. Instead I want to focus on one things, it's not the reasons for what happened, just the sort of important factors that give rise to an increased incidence of this sort of thing. Fuck knows how social workers go about their business, I certainly ain't got a clue and I'm not going to pretend I do.
So:
Fiona Pilkington's diaries do not show a woman besieged by feral youth, they show a woman besieged by her own terror. Let's be clear; spending years with your house surrounded by teenagers chucking stones is no fun, and it's hardly surprising that it would wear you down. Teenagers behave like shits at the best of times, and chanting taunts at a mentally handicapped kid is a shit thing to do. However, the woman's terrified reaction to this, even before her final act, are clearly disproportionate. She was reduced to a hopeless, trembling wreck by some kids sitting on her wall.
Misleading as it is to apply general trends to specifics, there's an obvious parallel; for the last couple of decades, British people have been conditioned to see young people as a threat. Whatever the reality of petty crime among the yoof of today, the automatic association between hoodies and criminals couldn't be more specific if it had been a plot-point in the Manchurian Candidate. It might be something that right-wing newspapers like to dismiss as an idealogical wetness from bleeding-heart liberals, but conditioning is a highly effective means of generating emotional responses. Show a country enough pictures of slouching spotty wraiths, replete with headlines or voiceovers about crime / thugs / Broken Britain, and it's obvious that people will associate the message with the image. This isn't dogma or bleeding heart, it's Pavlovian conditioning. Or put another way; basic fucking psychology.
The sad thing about these cycles is how self-fulfilling they are. Treat someone like a prick, they'll act like a prick, and you become more convinced they're a prick. If someone specifically planned a way to drive a society schizophrenic, this is exactly the process they'd use.
You can factor in so much more than this. There's a second strand of the same narrative, related largely to the hysteria surrounding paedophilia, which has lead to most people feeling disempowered in the face of young people; has propogated the notion that only the state, or parents, can address or remonstrate with a child; has reinforced the idea, conditioned it into society, that people under 18 aren't quite human. A few grotesque cases were magnified and iconicised, whipping a nation into a frenzy about cartoon paedophiles; the state reacted as only states do, by initiating central control and bureaucracy; suspicion and institutionalised fear become the cornerstones for how the young are dealt with. They aren't people, they're different and special and normal rules don't apply to them. Then, when they behave as though the rules don't apply, they're shocked.
The irony? It's the right-wing press who hurl the insults and the yobs and/or scumbags, the thugs and/or gurriers. And yet they're exactly the people who have created the world they detest so much. One day, the Express or Mail or Telegraph will look at the media-saturated society of modern history, look at the images that they've flashed in front of our eyes all that time, and admit to themselves; we are the architects of this world we so despise.
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
01:30
4 Comments:
I can't help feeling that your sentence
Misleading as it is to apply general trends to specifics, there's an obvious parallel
somewhat undermines this post. Don't get me wrong; certainly more thought-out than the usual Scum Drive Mum To Gruesome Death Pact tabloidese. But - as someone who hasn't followed the case, and who has only just now been looking a few details up - I don't think one can use Pilkington's mental state as indicative of a culture of fear. The latter, which I always associate with that final image in the cartoon bit of Bowling for Columbine, seems different from Pilkington's apparent state of distress.
She was reduced to a hopeless, trembling wreck by some kids sitting on her wall.
Well, from what I can gather they were rather more active in their winding-up than just sitting their looking sullen. Also, one has the impression that she was vulnerable/susceptible to ending up in that state, for reasons more personal and specific than your reading of the cultural runes.
That said, I think I agree to some extent with what you say about the conditioning aspect of the Country Gone To The Dogs rubbish, and one can see how it's playing out in the US. I just think you chose a poor example to hang it on.
(Oh, and you're right about Gridlock, but I think you're overly harsh on Partners in Crime and on Tate-in-Cinecitta.)
Huh. Don't get this. New name. New person commenting... always get worried when I discovered I have a reader.
Well hello. And Catherine Tate's rubbish. I feel increasingly out on a limb with this, which can only mean that the rest of the world's wrong.
"I can't help feeling that your sentence
Misleading as it is to apply general trends to specifics, there's an obvious parallel
somewhat undermines this post"
In retrospect, my core reason for writing this post has got lost somewhere. I'm not trying to comment on the case; I'm trying to comment on the newspaper habit of extrapolating broad societal trends from this case, and others like it (hence the links are to comment pieces, not primary news)... it's like blaming a spell of bad weather on climate change.
Contemporary society isn't directly responsible... even if contemporary society makes it more likely for things to happen. Reasons are always personal and specific and articles along the lines of this-woman-killed-herself-because-of-the-disempowerment-of-community-government (stand up, Simon Jenkins) always strike me as astonishingly crass. So when the right-wing press extrapolate to comment about society, and yet write their own influence out of the picture, it's just sickening. To me, what happened here is reflective (NOT directly linked) to a world where instinctive fear of the young, and a collective inability to handle minors, have been on the rise for some time... fuelled exactly by rabble-rousing commentary on This Sort Of Thing.
"Well, from what I can gather they were rather more active in their winding-up than just sitting their looking sullen."
In general, yes. But in the uniquely ghoulish way that Brit media operates, extracts from her diary were published and in some cases, that was literally all they were doing. Even the more nasty events - stone-throwing, name-calling - are, in the scheme of things, pretty minor stuff. We're not talking Thompson and Venables here. Obviously there's a cumulative effect, but... I find this case, of a woman who (for her own personal reasons) essentially couldn't handle a group of miserable teenagers to be a microcosm of a society that doesn't know how to deal with minors.
Thanks for replying (I'm not so much a reader as a recent lurker, since I think I may have seen some DW reviews of yours in other places under other names. Sorry if not and I've just got crossed wires)
[Tate was not as good as some of the sillier gushing would claim, but I thought she was perfectly adequate in a broad brushstroke way, and a lot less thumpable than Tennant. Most of the writers wrote lazily for her though - or else RTD edited it that way - and there the fact that they were writing for Her Off The Catherine Tate Show was a hindrance, or get-out clause. But each to their own and all that.]
Anyway: I think we broadly agree on the hypocrisy & laziness of the meejah portrayal of The Ruin of Society, and your point about conditioning's a decent one. Since I've been living outside Britain for a couple of years I might be underestimating the background hum of Fear Them! that's being put out. Selection bias and all that.
In the same way, I've probably not been paying attention to the "feral youth will come and knife us" message - which now I think of it goes as far back as then-opposition-star Anthony Blair promising to be tough on crime... So yes, fair point.
I still think that when you talk about Pilkington being besieged by her own terror, that reflects a different sort/extent of terror - justified or not - than the general cultural one. But I also agree that her case isn't really the point of your post. (Have to admit that I didn't follow your links, since given the papers in question I feared for my blood pressure.)
Oh - on the DWRG, without aid pseudonym - yup, that's me. When venturing into comments on the wider world, I need the help of a construct-type-character-thing.
Funnily enough, what you said about Tate is exactly what I'd say about Tennant. When pushed to stretch himself, he was quite often superb (I cite Human Nature / The Family of Blood), but tended to be given "that David Tennant thing" stuff to do by the writers.
Perhaps I just find That Catherine Tate Thing more obnoxious, but I also think she didn't really soften the material she was given. There was no need to deliver, say, "A wasp that's GIANT - I mean, flippin' E-NOR-MOUS" like she did, for example. In my more sober more moments
- i.e. the moments where I don't fo "and she appeared with a sodding war criminal in a comedy sketch too" -
I'd say the blame lies as much with the production team, for not reigning her in, as it does with her. From Silence in the Library onwards she's perfectly fine, except in the finale, but the finale would stretch anyone.
Oh, look at the time. Better leave it there I think.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home