Family breakdown mirrors national, civilizational decline
Melanie Phillips
Daily Mail
For many years, those of us who have been writing about the potentially catastrophic effects of epidemic family breakdown have been warning that its impact won’t be limited to damaged individuals or a rising crime rate.
If it is on a large enough scale, it is also likely to cause the destruction of civilised values and even the most basic human instincts.
One can’t help but think in these terms when reading about last week’s appalling court case which heard how a mother, Zara Care, from Plymouth goaded her two toddlers into fighting each other like dogs — and filmed their ordeal on a camcorder in front of her mother and two sisters, who in turn were egging on the children to ever greater violence.
On the film, the women were heard laughing as the two-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister were encouraged to hit and punch each other. The boy was seen crying and trying to hide after being punched in the face by his sister, but was told by one of the women “not to be a wimp or a faggot” and to hit the girl back. At one point, someone threw a hairbrush at him to encourage him to hit her; at another, he was given a rolled-up magazine with the spine on the outside for more impact.Such behaviour towards very young children by their own mother, not to mention their aunts and grandmother, would strike any normal person as wholly unnatural. Far from showing love and care to these children, they displayed cruelty and sadism as they turned them into instruments for their own vicarious aggression, taking pleasure in their distress.
Some of us found it difficult even to read such a sickening account of the tormenting of two toddlers. Their mother actually filmed it.
A healthy society would show its revulsion at such behaviour by jailing these women. Instead, they were each given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to do 100 hours of community work. Yet on the same day, another court sent a man to jail for staging a real dog fight in his house. Is the welfare of a child assumed by the English courts to be of less importance than the welfare of a pit bull terrier?
In letting these women walk free, the court displayed once again the feebleminded sentimentality with which so many judges tend to regard the state of motherhood in particular and women in general.
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=503