A Zen student came to Bankei and complained: âMaster I have an ungovernable temper. How can I cure it?â?
âYou have something very strange,â? replied Bankei. âLet me see what you have.â?
âJust now I cannot show it to you,â? replied the other.
âWhen can you show it to me?â? asked Bankei.
âIt arises unexpectedly,â? replied the student.
âThen,â? concluded Bankei, âit must not be your own true nature. If it were, you could show it to me at any time. When you were born you did not have it, and your parents did not give it to you. Think that over.â?
From Zen Flesh, Zen Bones compiled by Paul Reps
No, Iâm not a practicing Zen Marxist-Leninist-Buddhist, but I do have a temper that flares up occasionally. Thatâs a minor problem, compared to the chronic trouble Iâve had for years with outrage management.
I have two problems with outrage. The first is a perverse resistance to joining in when the community gets outraged. That would be tolerable if it werenât for the second problem â an equally perverse tendency to get outraged by the wrong things. Like obvious attempts by crusading journalists to foment community outrage. Particularly when the campaign is as low as The Hunâs current crusade for tougher sentencing of child-killers.
Iâve decided not to indulge that second tendency today, so I wonât be buying a copy of The Hun to see where the campaign has got to. It was bad enough picking up an abandoned copy on the tram last night and reading Neil Mitchellâs bandwagon piece. Mitchellâs basic message is that judges should get with the program and start handing out tougher sentences. Iâd be a lot closer to being convinced if the prose werenât such a sanctimonious shade of purple.
Hereâs a fact thatâs so bleeding obvious itâs been overlooked in the rush to judgement: The Hun is in the business of selling newspapers and advertising space. Any crusading it does, on behalf of anybody, is going to be governed by commercial considerations. Considerations like â will this go over with the readership, or will we actually end up selling fewer papers? The Ageâs reportage, opinion writing and editorialising are governed by the same constraint.
So what goes over with The Hunâs readership, in the view of its editors and journalists? Sensationalised stories about shocking crimes and demands for tougher sentencing. To what end? Not one âtiny innocent lifeâ? will be saved if The Hun gets what itâs demanding on behalf of the community.
The Hunâs Katie Lapthorne and Mark Buttler hunted out 12 cases of child killing where they thought the sentencing was a bit light on. If theyâd read this section of the judgement in just one of those cases, the killing of Dylen Jones by Michael Horsey, they would have found a few questions worth asking and a few issues where a bit of journalistic campaigning â for better prevention of violence against children â might do some real good:
14 On 10 October 1997 David Clements of the Glenroy Department of Human Services, who had also telephoned Community Policing Squad and notified them of a case of possible physical abuse, caused the Department to issue a breach order with respect to the supervision order, which meant that the children were taken into care, and he then brought the matter back to court.
15 The court then ordered that the children be placed in foster care, where they remained for two months, but on 9 December 1997, six days before Dylen was to die, Dylen and Benjamin were returned to the home, after a hearing in the Children’s Court. I do not know the precise circumstances in which that order was made. In earlier pre-trial conferences the mother had sought their return, and the Department had opposed that option, but it seems likely that the Department and the mother agreed on terms and conditions on which the children could be returned. On 2 December 1997 a document, known as a family contract, was jointly signed between the Department, the mother and yourself, and also representatives of the Families First Program. In that document you acknowledged the Department’s areas of concern as to the well-being of the children, your obligations as a care giver, and the fact that you could not physically discipline the children. So far as I am aware the Children’s Court was not called upon to adjudicate upon a contested hearing, but endorsed the terms and conditions on which it had been agreed that the children could be returned.
16 It is not my function, on sentencing, to explore the broader issues which might later be relevant in a coronial inquiry. Whilst, with the benefit of hindsight, wrong decisions may well have been made at various times during Dylen’s life, and need to be identified and understood, it is appropriate, I believe, to observe that from what I have read and heard of this case those members of the medical profession, the community policing squad, the officers of the Department or staff of the various welfare organisations, and of the officers and staff of the Courts who had a role in Dylen’s supervision, did so with scrupulous integrity and dedication.
17 Those people charged with the supervision of the well-being of Dylen were required (to greater and lesser extents) to make difficult decisions with incomplete information. Why that was so is a matter worthy of examination by appropriate authorities.
(Mr Justice Eames, R v Horsey)
Whoâs failing the tiny innocents of Victoria? The journalists and editors of The Hun, thatâs who.
Say what?
1. Something must be done.
2. This is something.
3. Let’s do this.
Gummo, you are working under the assumption that what the Hun wants, the Hun gets. While politicians tend to jump when the Murdoch orders say jump, how high and where they end up are factors that the editors tend not to control. If this sudden focus on child murder/abuse leads to a drop in said phenomena, it can’t be all bad. Doesn’t matter where it comes from really.
FFS! How many times do I have to repeat this? The Hun’s little crusade will achieve nothing when it comes to reducing the number of deaths of children through repeated abuse. Mandatory sentences aren’t going to change anything, because no bloke who can’t or won’t control the impulse to hit a child in anger is ever going to think straight enough to say to himself “Hang on, I could do 20 years bird if hit the little bugger too hard.”
Try this three pointer on for size:
1. Something must be done.
2. This is something, but it’s bloody stupid and it won’t achieve any useful result.
3. OK, let’s think of something else.
you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, gummo.
Gillian Calvert, the nsw commissioner for children – was criticised for changing the laws so DOCs could remove children more easily, in these sort of cases only last month. http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200610/s1771962.htm
There must be some lingering concern in civil liberties circles that social services will start removing kids with five band-aids on their knees…the reality is, without those big old state institutions for wards, and very few foster placements – taking kids out of their homes is only for the worst cases these days, and if guarantees are made by the parents, as in many of the cases reported, the courts and/or state agencies often return the child/ren.
It’s old the rubber effect – too far one way, then too far the other……hopefully, the courts/police/hospitals/social services are finally starting to get the balance right. (Although in those 2003 child death review stats., some 20% had no ‘agency’ contact prior the death.)
As to punishment…some of those light sentences don’t reflect the seriousness of the crime, and you do wonder why, however the hysteria of the Hun/Terror is way out of proportion considering their vacillating position/lack of concern over public education, vocational training, restorative justice, drug rehabilitation & treatment programs, affordable long child care, and all other community based programs, public housing, mental health beds, public hospitals and decent working wages and job security… etc
Really great, Gummo.
(Of course we are sometimes damned if we do and occasionally damned if we don’t, but that’s no argument to give it up to this puny stupidity of the Sun-Herald.
Gummo has opened and shut the lid on this one.
Whether its the hysteria of The Hun or the tut-tutting of the rest of us who don’t habitually physcially abuse kids, what The Hun & we generally will not do, is examine our societal attitudes about the rights of children and the privileges of parenting/care-giver.
Famously Sweden has outlawed physical discipling of children – it is illegal to smack little Johnnie for pulling his sister’s hair or eating the 14 chocolate bars before breakfast etc etc. In Australia, surveys as to the attitude of discipling children finds the overwhelming majority of people believe that smacking kids is OK, & an effective parenting tool. We have a high level of community acceptance of using physical violence as a part of our parenting process. A general sentiment about violence that seeps into our societal groundwater.
Our sports are violent but because that is cloaked in the mystique of competitiveness, its OK. Violence against women only ganders media attention when particularly icky or incorporating a racial element. A child murdered by a stranger is a threat to the principle of the family or the patrician control of that unit – a child killed by a parent is a failure in bureaucratic supervision of the fencelines of acceptable behaviour.
How odd that we can believe there is such a thing as an accepatable level of physical violence.
As Gummo correctly suggests, the end of this sensationalism will not be the life of a single battered infant.
And the last thing that the Hun wants is to promote humane interventionism by the State.
So what do Rupert’s Myrmidons want (besides to polish Rupert’s knob)?
This sleazy bucket job is just one of an almost countless number of skirmishes in the Culture Wars. For the sake of present purposes, “lenient judges” are conceived of as charter members of the Leftie Elitist New Classes Out of Touch with the Concerns of Battlers.
For it is well known in the Rupertverse that drinking latte causes people to love crims and to hate kids.
The only way to counter these lies is to tell more entertaining truths.
Remedy: turn down the moral outrage. Turn up the satire.