The down side of good manners

Rant warning - this post has little or nothing to do with learning, but is the outpouring of a heavy heart.

Featuring understandably big in the news in the UK at the moment is the story of a little girl who died of what appears to be starvation in Birmingham. Her 5 siblings were found to be emaciated and underfed. They were taken out of school, after their mother said they were being bullied.

There are few incidences of below-the-breadline poverty in the UK, so it seems unlikely that the parents could not afford to feed their children. Which would seem to indicate that it was their choice not to feed them. Perhaps their reasons will be made known during the course of the investigation.

Naturally, fingers are pointing at social services who allegedly only made one call to the house, finding no-one home, and did not return. The children's father, with whom they were no longer living, has called the situation a disgrace. I yelled at the telly, "Yeah, and where were you?" My husband reminded me that he may not have had access to his children (this is not an unknown situation - we have a very close friend who is still fighting to be allowed to see his twin daughters after their mother walked out him when they were just tots. They are now adults and one is married.)

And yes, if the story is what it appears to be at face value, these children have been failed by their parents and by social services.

But there have been accounts from the neighbours of how these children were so hungry they would take food left out for the birds. And yet these neighbours did not intervene. You see, that would have been rude. Interfering in one another's lives has become taboo in our western culture. "It's none of my business, you see." So we watch from a distance while children die of starvation, neglect and abuse. We tut to each other about the evidence we see of these situations, but we take no action.

I wonder. If my neighbours' stick thin children were "stealing" the food that I put out for the birds, would I not suddenly take it into my head that what the birds really needed to eat was peanutbutter sandwiches? And bananas? Would I not seek to befriend these children and invite them in for the occasional protein drink? Would I not notify the police? Would I not call social services repeatedly until they took action to shut me up? Would I not overcome my reluctance to interfere and try to speak to the parents?

Whatever became of the village it supposedly takes to raise a child?

We're so very quick to storm outside and tell the kids to pipe down when they play raucus games in the street. We aren't afraid to go and knock on the neighbours' door to tell them we're had about enough of their son's loud music. We have no qualms about asking them please not to drive over our lawn. Let them inconvenience us and we will take action.

And yet, under our very noses, in our nice, affluent, first world neighbourhoods, children are being beaten, starved and abused... and sometimes we know about it!

There's a girl in my neighbourhood. She looks to be about 12. She doesn't go to school. She appears to have no friends but her cat. I have never seen her with any parents. I have never seen her smile. She spends hours drifting aimlessly around the nighbourhood on her scooter or sitting on a low wall outside her house, stroking her cat.

I worry about her, and yet I have done nothing. I can't for the life of me think of a valid excuse to go and talk to her. I tell myself to go and talk to her. Then I tell myself it's none of my business and perhaps she's just being homeschooled.

I am so angry with those neighbours whose inaction contributed to Khyra's death. But I am no better.

Mea culpa.