One Child, One Teacher, One Book, One Pen...

One year and one day ago, a fifteen year old girl travelling home with her friends on their school bus was shot in the head.  Much like the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austro-Hungary and  the two elder Kennedy brothers, it became a "shot heard 'round the world": Western media seized on the story and ran with it in a flurry of both shock and outrage; photos of a then-predominantly unknown Malala Yousafzai were beamed from the distant heartland of Pakistan's Swat Valley into living rooms from Los Angeles to London and on across Europe as the news, and the outrage, spread.  Eventually, it was announced that Malala had been shot by the Taliban, although to this day there are still conflicting 'reasons' for the attempt on her life: some say it was because she spoke up for the education of girls in her country, others because she was a vocal opponent of the Taliban and their efforts to assert their dominance in the region.  Whatever the Taliban's own personal justification for the shooting Malala and the two other girls injured in the incident, Shazia Ramzan and Kainat Riaz, remain resolutely alive and well.  Shazia is attending school in Britain; Malala and her family are also in this country, trying to rebuild their lives and come to terms with a way of life very different from the one they are used to. Malala says she dreams of being able to return to her homeland, to her home and her friends in the Swat Valley, yet even now the Taliban say they would shoot her again if she was to return.  She has become a symbol, a passionate advocate of the right for every girl across the world to receive an education and be treated equally to her brothers, yet she is still only sixteen years of age.  It is a terrible, wonderful burden to bear and yet, having read her memoir which was released this week, I can't help but feel that no one is more equal to the task than Malala Yousafzai.

The firstborn child of a poor Pashtun family in the town of Mingora in the once-beautiful Swat Valley, Malala's father was commiserated with after her birth for having a daughter instead of a son.  Fortunately for Malala, and probably the world, her father Ziauddin is an enlightened man in an oft-unenlightened place; he named his daughter for one of the great heroines of the Pashtun and, as a young man from a poor family with no money to pay for his education, he worked hard to be able to fulfil his dream of going to university, getting his degree and coming home to open a school for the children of his local area - the same school Malala and her friends attended.  I'm not going to delve too deeply into the family's story; no words of mine could ever do it justice when Malala and her co-writer Christina Lamb do so perfectly eloquently, and besides I think everyone should read and discover Malala's story for themselves (seriously, read this book.  If you consider yourself a functioning member of the human race you need to read this book...actually, make that ALL races.  Malala doesn't discriminate and neither do I, so be you Human, Martian, Android, Time Lord or any other, you *need* to read this book...)  All you need to know is this young woman and her father were speaking out against the Taliban and fighting for girls to receive an education for years before the attempt on her life, something I didn't know and a fact I feel curiously ashamed of...

Contrasting Malala's inspiring advocacy for girl's education with the news this week that both England and Northern Ireland have among the worse levels of numeracy and literacy in the developed world is enough to make my blood run cold.  Now I'm not saying I was an angel at school, far from it, and there were times I hated having to go with an all-consuming passion, but at least I live in a country where I am not only given the opportunity to receive some form of an education, it is a given that I will do so.  It both bewilders and terrifies me, doing the job I currently do, to see how many young people point blank refuse to go to school, or do everything they possibly can to disrupt things when they can be strong-armed into the building, and how many parents seem quite prepared to go along with that.  These are the future movers and shakers of the world, people; if you aren't afraid you bloody well should be!  I left 'compulsory' education at 16 way back in 1998; while there were unquestionably 'naughty' children in my classes throughout school and we could be a wee bit cheeky, it was nothing compared to some of the shocking stuff which goes on in classrooms today.  I don't remember a single case of ADHD among my peers in all the time I was in school, yet nowadays it seems there are more children in our classrooms with this label - and the accompanying medication - than ever.  Now I don't want to get into the whole "is it a real condition or is it just bad parenting?" debate, mainly because I don't have any definitive answers and sometimes think it's six of one and half a dozen of the other, but still I find it a frightening statistic.  We are drugging more kids than ever before, have more children with behaviourial problems than ever before, and seem to be failing dismally at meeting even the most basic skills with these kids.  How on earth do we expect these children and young people to go on to becoming fully-functioning members of society, especially with the Tory Government's sweeping welfare reform changes and its insistence that everybody goes out and works, dammit, when frankly there's a hell of a lot of these people who won't be fit to do anything?!!

I genuinely don't think young people in this country realise how incredibly lucky they are.  You know what, we all hated school at one point or another; there is absolutely nothing 'revolutionary' in their insistent whining that they hate it and it's boring and too hard and why can't we just play on our computers/stay in bed all day/go out and get hammered in the park on cheap cider/whatever the current 'thing' is for not going to school these days.  Tough shit.  Doing things you don't like is part of life.  I hate paying taxes but if I don't, I get a nasty visit from the Inland Revenue and a sudden lack of hospitals/schools/policemen, all things I actually need and which we all take for granted.  Would I like to not go into work every day if I could be paid for staying at home watching telly?  Well duh!  And yet I go into work, pay my taxes and the world keeps spinning.  Yet apparently we think it's a good idea to reward a child who hasn't been going into school by taking them on a day out if they manage to go in all day every day for a fortnight!  How is this sensible?!  On the one hand, it gives these kids a ridiculous sense of power and entitlement, and I'm sorry but they are still kids and actually we are the grown-ups; and on the other hand, that is obscenely unfair to all those other kids who manage to get themselves into school all day every day for an entire academic year (barring the odd sick day or whatever) without getting so much as a pat on the head!!  WHAT IS ALL THAT ABOUT?!!  You're not telling me that Little Johnny likes going into school any more than Little Bobby does; given the chance Little Johnny would quite happily sit at home all day and play on his PlayStation (other games consoles are available...) and yet he turns up each and every day, moaning about his teachers and the blatant unfairness of maths homework on a Friday which has to be in on the Monday, and gets nothing.  Little Bobby, meanwhile, makes an appearance for all of a week and is suddenly whisked off for a day on the seafront for his achievement.  How the Little Johnnies of this world haven't yet led an armed uprising against Little Bobby and his ilk is beyond me, frankly...So yes.  School sucks.  Homework sucks more.  And teachers and authority figures exist only to make your life a misery.  You know what?  Study hard, become a teacher and voila!  The power to make other people's lives a misery by handing out triple algebra on the last day of term is yours!!

To be less facetious, however, I do think some young people in this country have no frigging clue how lucky they are.  If you are educated you can do anything, be anything, go anywhere....the world and all its infinite wonders are yours, and that's not something to be sniffed at.  Across the world millions of children, the majority of them girls, remain uneducated, puppets and pawns of a world they can't possibly comprehend because they weren't given the dignity of being able to ask "why?" or "how?" or "what for?"  There are girls married off at ridiculously-young ages to men old enough to be their fathers and grandfathers, having children when they are no more than children themselves.  There are girls whose only education is how to cook, to keep house, to look after a husband and family; who have no aspirations beyond that because they are not taught and not encouraged to think that they could have a life beyond that.  (This is not to belittle those in the developed world who choose to stay at home and raise a family, but that's kind of the key word right there: choose.  They at least were able to make an informed choice, something denied to their sisters elsewhere in the world).  We speak of the next great political leader, the next great scientist or economist; the person who might discover a cure for cancer or AIDS...any one of them could be one of those children denied an education, yet because of that very fact we will never know.  More importantly they will never know, either what they could be capable of or what their worth may be - something we in the developed world seem to all to easily take for granted.

Malala Yousafzai's campaign to speak up for education and for the rights of women and girls is something which should be shouted from the rooftops.  In the body of this courageous, unassuming, self-confident young woman there burns an absolute conviction that everyone - everyone - is entitled to an education and, with that education, to make free and informed decisions about themselves and the world they live in.  And she believes this because it is the absolute right of each and every one of us to be able to do so.  If I had my way, a copy of Malala's book would be given to each and every child in this country, along with the video of the speech she made on her sixteenth birthday at the UN Headquarters in New York, to try and make them realise just how incredibly fortunate they really are.  If it changes only a handful of minds then it will have been a worthwhile endeavour...

Malala wants to be a politician like one of her heroines, Benazir Bhutto; to go back to Pakistan and be a force for change, for good, in that oft-troubled country.  I for one wouldn't bet against her.  As she said in her speech at the UN, and again in her memoir, books and pens are the most powerful weapons we have to change things, to bring light to the darkness.  One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.  In this child, this teacher, we have an instrument which might do just that...

Anyone wishing to support the Malala Fund in its aim to empower girls by providing them with an education can do so here.  It may be a small step, but from such small steps epic journeys are begun...

Beyond Broadmoor...?

Over the past two weeks that bastion of bonkers television, Channel 5, has surprisingly proved itself to be almost worthy of its existence by showing a two-part series which was both well made, informative, and not about a Z-list celebrity-turned-benefit-scrounger with a failed gastric band trying to get into the Big Brother house while guest-starring as the corpse in a re-run of CSI/Law and Order.  (Think I covered all their usual bases there...)  Instead, "Inside Broadmoor" had exclusive access to the archives of possibly the most notorious of Britain's maximum security secure psychiatric hospitals (bonus points to you if you have actually heard of both Rampton and Ashworth, the two other secure psychiatric hospitals for England and Wales.  Extra-special double bonus points if you were aware of the existence of Carstairs State Hospital in Scotland, which performs the same function for patients for Scotland and Northern Ireland), and spoke to those who have previously worked in the hospital.  (Extra gold star triple bonus points if you remembered Broadmoor actually IS a hospital and not a prison...some people tend to forget it actually has a therapeutic function given the notoriety of some of its patients...)

Now those of you who know me well will be fully aware of my somewhat perverse fascination with the mind of the "criminal lunatic", as the original inhabitants of the 150 year old hospital were oft referred to.  As my friend Lee has pointed out to me on more than one occasion, I do like a good psychopathic murderer every now and then; not on a personal level, obviously - never going to go and have tea and cake with Peter Sutcliffe, for example - but from a professional psychological point of view.  A programme about Broadmoor was going to draw me like a moth to the proverbial flame and, for once, I was not disappointed with a Channel 5 show.  (I'm sorry, C5, but when you dropped Prison Break and let it go to Sky when I didn't actually have Sky it caused a huge rift between us which I've never fully gotten over...)  Not only was it interesting from a professional psychological angle but from a social historical angle as well; some of the stuff in those archives is amazing, especially concerning Broadmoor's role in some real pioneering "treatments", and I would quite happily lose myself among its treasures for hours at a time.  There were also real nuggets of gold in some of the information about the patients as well, and not just some of the more historical ones.  I was beyond intrigued to learn for example, that the Medical Superintendent in charge of the hospital at the time of the Moors Murders - a rather excellent chap from Glasgow named Pat McGrath, who brought his wife and two kids to live with him in the hospital and instituted a rather compassionate regime (his son, who was seven at the time they moved in, recalls walking the grounds with his father one evening when they heard a terrible scream coming from Block 6, where the most disturbed male patients were kept; Dr McGrath glanced up and said "poor John, having a bad night tonight", which reinforced in the boy that these people were in fact sick and needed treatment).  I've digressed...oh yes, so the excellent Dr McGrath was in charge of the hospital at the time of the Moors Murders and was a jolly sensible and compassionate man, in charge of a large population of schizophrenics (about two-thirds of the hospital patients have schizophrenia) and those with severe personality disorders such as psychopaths.  Some of the most notorious inmates of that hospital have been incredibly challenging men, who have committed the most dreadful crimes imaginable, and yet the estimable doctor believed fully in caring for his patients and apparently lost the plot whenever anyone called Broadmoor a prison instead of a hospital.  However, not even the remarkable Pat McGrath felt anything could be done to treat Ian Brady; he refused point blank to bring him into the hospital, sensing no humanity in the man with which he could build a therapeutic relationship, and stated that Broadmoor had nothing to offer him as he was "beyond psychiatric help".  I'll leave you to insert your own comments on that one; suffice to say Brady was sent to the maximum security prison at Durham until 1985, when he was sent to Ashworth.  (Interestingly - to me, anyway - this sentiment reminds me of the one expressed by one of my personal heroes, former FBI Behavioural Analysis Unit Chief and pioneer in the 'profiling' field John Douglas, who stated that in order to rehabilitate an offender, any offender, you have to have something to rehabilitate to, which many of these individuals seem not to possess).

However, the reason for this blog post is something which was said at the end of the programme and has left me pondering.  Professor Tony Maden, former head of the now-closed Dangerous Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) unit at the Berkshire hospital, stated that thanks to the anti-psychotic medication he's on to control his schizophrenia symptoms, serial murderer Peter Sutcliffe is no longer acutely mentally ill and, since the Broadmoor Hospital would appear to have achieved its aim of stabilising the patient's condition, he should be released back to prison.  Now this throws up all kinds of interesting discussion points: exactly how stable is is "stable"; can we rely on the overstretched prison system to continue doling out the medication to Sutcliffe to keep him "stable", or will he relapse and have to be moved back to hospital; and how expensive will it be to send him to a prison where, for his own safety, he's going to have to be held in isolation?  Now I'm not suggesting for one single second Peter Sutcliffe is some delicate little flower who has to be protected from all those nasty criminals in prison - the crimes he committed were, after all, completely and utterly reprehensible - but actually there is something in that.  Those of you who know my little rants will be fully aware of my anti-death penalty stance (State-sanctioned murder is still murder, after all, and how can we say to people "killing is bad, m'kay?" when we, um, kill them...?) and this extends to this sort of situation as well.  Now my emotional gut-response instinct is to be really pissed off when I hear that child sex offenders, for example, have to be segregated from the rest of the prison population 'for their own safety'; "let the gen. pop. lot have at them", I cry,  "for surely they'll be doing us a favour!" However, I can't exactly claim to be a humanist/reasonably decent Human Bean if I'm prepared to turn a blind eye to the murder of an individual, no matter how morally repulsive they are to me on a personal level.  (And please don't think I'm going for Joan of Arc-style sainthood here; my emotions run as pure and white-hot as anyone else's do, and there are people like Ian Huntley who really would be no great loss to the world if they died suddenly, but on a philosophical basis I have to stand by my belief that murder is murder is murder and therefore wrong, no matter who the victim is).

With someone like Sutcliffe, however, and this particular situation, I find myself concluding that, actually, somewhere like Broadmoor probably IS the best place for him no matter how stable his condition has now become.  Think about it: this is a man who committed one of the most notorious crimes this country has ever had the misfortune to witness; whether for their own notoriety or out of some twisted form of justice, there are probably plenty of people in the prison system who'd like to get their hands on Peter Sutcliffe (he was attacked while in prison before his removal to Broadmoor).  He has been diagnosed with a severe psychiatric condition which requires ongoing medication and treatment and has been held in Broadmoor since 1984; there is no doubt in my mind that he is going to be severely institutionalised as a result.  Our prison system is already full of people suffering from mental health disorders who really shouldn't be there; I really don't think any prison, with the best will in the world, would be able to cope with the level of Sutcliffe's needs if he was removed there (and, thanks to a ruling in 2010, he will never be released).  Bizarrely, even though he's actually considered stable enough to leave Broadmoor for the prison system, the secure hospital is probably the safest place for him.  Many of the patients treated at the secure psychiatric hospitals will eventually be returned to prison once their condition has stabilised (although I'd be very interested to see any data relating to whether they are subsequently sent back to the hospitals for further treatment), but it seems some are destined to stay there even though they could, theoretically, be moved on.

And it's not just Sutcliffe.  He at least has a treatable condition; you cannot cure schizophrenia, but at least you can provide medication to keep the symptoms under control.  For psychopaths and others with severe personality disorders (such as Michael Stone, who in 1996 murdered Lin Russell and her daughter Megan, severely injuring her other daughter Josie), no amount of medication in the world is going to make the blindest bit of difference; since you cannot keep people in prison beyond their tariff - and especially since the Court of Human Rights has ruled the use of the "whole life" tariff (with no set time scale for reviews and the possibility of parole) as illegal - what do you do with these incredibly-dangerous individuals who can never, for the safety of everyone else, ever be allowed back on the streets?

The answer, it seems, has become Broadmoor and its sister-hospitals.  This goes right to the heart of the dilemma of Broadmoor: originally conceived as a hospital, for a select group of individuals it has become the prison it was never intended to be.  Believe me when I say I don't know what the answer is, and really, truly believe me when I say I'm extremely glad these most dangerous of individuals are securely held somewhere they can't be a danger to the public or commit further horrendous crimes, but also believe me when I say that this is a symptom of how we as a society view both mental health and those who commit crimes.  Psychiatric-disordered offending isn't going to go away; people like Sutcliffe are merely the tip of the iceberg, especially when recent estimates from the Centre for Mental Health suggest approximately 60% of prisoners have some form of personality disorder and receive no help while in prison, and perhaps now, with the 150th anniversary of Broadmoor's founding upon us, we need to take a long hard look at how we treat them...