If symptoms persist. . .
LIKE LORD JUSTICE Butler-Sloss, Dr Marietta Higgs and all right-thinking people, I am against the sexual abuse of children, though it has fleetingly crossed my mind that the complete extirpation of such abuse from our green and pleasant land will perhaps prove rather difficult. Indeed, the very attempt to do so by the Torquemadas of our social services might on occasion result in more harm than good.
Last week I was called to see a man who had suddenly become convinced that 'they' were after him. He had barri- caded himself and his family into his house, and would answer neither the door nor the telephone. Less than a fort- night before a pair of social workers had called at the house and declared that a denunciation had been received from an unnamed source to the effect that the man had been sexually abusing his daughter.
The daughter was taken away and sub- jected to torture (for such is the correct characterisation of an interview with the unctuously compassionate bureaucrats of care). Nevertheless, she refused to con- fess to her father's crimes and was reluc- tantly returned home. The fact that the family had previously been a close-knit one was regarded as especially suspi- cious by the social workers; and the com- munity in which the man lived, being a small one, soon got to hear about the accusations.
Never of strong character or intellect, and unable to disperse the Kafkaesque miasma which now enveloped him, the man went mad and was carted off to the local asylum. Could a guilty conscience have made itself plainer?
During my own infrequent moments of paranoia, I have wondered whether child sexual abuse was not an invention of social workers to prove their indis- pensability to the welfare of society. I discovered how unworthy a thought this was when I visited a department of social services three days ago. While waiting, and having exhausted the deeply conde- scending posters on the wall of great blacks in history, produced by the Racism Awareness Unit's Education and Development Bureau, I turned to the internal telephone directory. Here are the positions held by the first 25 of the 80 people on the list:
Child Care Planning Manager, Supplies Manager, Secretary to Assistant Director of Quality Assurance, Secretary to Service Development Section, Quality Assurance Manager, Informations Systems Support Assistant, Customer Services Manager (Quality Assurance), Operational Support Manager, Service Development Manager, Secretary to Resources Development Manager, Quality Assurance Research Manager, Research Officer (p.m. only and not Thursdays), Information Systems and Technology Manager, Secretary to Assis- tant Director of Personnel, Principal Plan- ning Manager, Computer Information Systems Organiser, Senior Personnel Manager, Secretary Quality Assurance Section, Secretary (part-time) to Quality Assurance Manager, Administration Man- ager, Administrative Support Officer, Principal Service Development Manager, Secretary to Assistant Director Family Social Services, Secretary to Operational Support Manager, Assistant Director of Quality Assurance.
I realised at once, of course, that Social Services need no bonne bouche like the sexual abuse of children to occu- py their time. Indeed, they require no external reality at all. They live in a truly solipsistic world of awareness and sensi- tivity groups, mutual support meetings and courses on the changing role of social services in a multicultural environ- ment. The wonder is that they can spare a few moments from their busy sched- ules to drive my patients mad.
Theodore Dalrymple
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