by Abrams, Fran
The sky turns dark
Such exaltation of the child as a unique being with a special perspective on the world had not been prevalent since before World War One. And so as the adult world once again began to idolize the notion of the innocent, the unspoiled and even the sagacious child in an era of rapid social change, perhaps it is hardly surprising that violations against childhood – events which had taken place with some regularity throughout history – would again begin to impact more strongly on the public imagination.
Maybe the trail of events had begun early in the morning of 7 October 1965, when a couple named David and Maureen Smith had made their way to a phone box near the flat where they lived, near Hyde, in Cheshire, armed with a screwdriver and a kitchen knife. The call they made, to Hyde police station, led to one of the most notorious murder inquiries of the century. The previous night, David Smith had been at the house that his wife’s sister, Myra Hindley, shared with her boyfriend, Ian Brady. Smith had watched as Brady had murdered a seventeen-year-old apprentice named Edward Evans, first beating him with the flat of an axe and then throttling him with electrical cord. Brady had asked Smith to help him dispose of the body the following evening, but a terrified Smith had confessed all to his wife. A week later, with Brady and Hindley in custody, the police found a ticket to a left-luggage locker at a Manchester station in the back of Hindley’s prayer book. Inside were suitcases containing pornographic photographs of a young girl along with tape recordings of her screaming and begging for help. The girl was ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, who had disappeared from a fairground the previous December. Her body was later found on nearby Saddleworth Moor, along with that of twelve-year-old John Kilbride, who had been abducted from a local market two years earlier. Brady and Hindley went on trial for all three murders. Years later, they would confess to two further killings – of sixteen-year-old Pauline Reade, whose body was eventually recovered from the moor, and of twelve-year-old Keith Bennett, whose remains were never found.
Child murder on this scale was, and always had been, sensational. The world’s press was full of the story, and continued to follow its developments over the subsequent decades. Yet there was also a sense of propriety which surrounded such things in the 1960s. The Times did not run a leader on the subject until 1972, when it published a largely impenetrable piece about the rights and wrongs of Myra Hindley being allowed to go out for a walk – an event which had sparked public outrage. The first letter ever printed by the paper on the subject was in 1968, when a vicar named Kenneth Leech wrote to object to a proposal that a film might be made about the murders: ‘I hope that I am not alone in finding the desire to make publicity and profit out of human suffering utterly disreputable and horrible . . . It is almost unspeakably cruel and nasty,’ he wrote. Yet despite this reticence, maybe it was around this time that a sense of fear began to spread around the concept of childhood. Children, having become more precious to their parents as they became fewer and more expensive, were too valuable to lose. Parents began to gather their young a little closer to them – or at least to worry more about them when they were not close. The exhortation not to ‘get into cars with strange men’ became universal.
The next child murder case to hit the headlines during this period was in many ways even more disturbing, for this time the perpetrator and the victims were all children, and the perpetrator was a girl. One of the strangest aspects of the case, to the modern eye, is also one of the most mundane. It is the detail in a description of the last day of the first of two little boys who would become the victims of ten-year-old Mary Bell.38 On the morning of Saturday, 25 May 1968, four-year-old Martin Brown, a solid boy with blond hair, blue eyes and a round face who called his father ‘Georgie’, woke up early in his home in Scotswood, Newcastle. As was his usual habit on a Saturday, when his parents had a lie-in while he babysat his one-year-old sister, Linda, he went downstairs to fetch a drink of milk and a piece of bread. He dressed Linda and took her into their mother’s room before having a bowl of sugar pops in the kitchen. When he had finished the cereal he fetched his anorak and put it on. His mother, June, by now up and in the scullery, heard him call: ‘I’m away, Mam. Tara, Georgie!’ She never saw him again. Martin spent the day playing with other children around the streets of Scotswood, turning up variously at the local shop and at the house of an ‘aunt’ – a friend of his mother’s – looking for food. At 3.30 p.m. he was found dead in a derelict house. The fact that a four-year-old boy should have spent his last day without adult supervision, being shooed out of his aunt’s house when he did turn up there, excited no comment whatsoever. It seemed the adult world, which had begun to take much more notice of its children than previously, still saw them largely as independent – if vulnerable – beings.
Martin’s death was initially thought to have been the result of a random accident, and even when Mary Bell and her friend Norma Bell – who was no relation – broke into a local nursery and left notes saying things like: ‘We did murder Martain brown, fuckof you BastArd,’ and: ‘YOU ArE micey y because we murdered Martain GO brown you BettER Look out THErE arE MurdErs about By FANNYAND and auld Faggot you screws,’ no one took them seriously. Nine weeks later, three-year-old Brian Howe was found dead on a nearby piece of waste ground with a carpet of weeds and flowers covering his body and with scratches and pressure marks on his neck. The two deaths were then linked, and both Mary and Norma were charged with murder. Norma was eventually acquitted; Mary was convicted of manslaughter owing to diminished responsibility.
These murders, like the Moors murders, did not attract the kind of comment they might have provoked in later years. They certainly attracted widespread publicity, and Mary was dismissed as evil in true pre-enlightenment terms – the judge used the word ‘wicked,’ when sentencing her. In the media, she was described as a ‘freak of nature’, ‘evil born’ and ‘a bad seed’. Such descriptions served a useful social purpose – they allowed these horrifying and seemingly inexplicable crimes to be neatly packaged up and put away – much as the Reverend Leech would have liked to have seen the Moors murders parked in a dark, inaccessible corner of the public mind. If Mary was somehow possessed by the devil, or if her twisted nature were the result of some freak genetic mutation, then no one was really responsible.
The truth was far more complicated, of course. And it is perhaps surprising, given the ongoing debate at the time about the links between criminality and bad childhood experiences, that Mary’s own early life was not examined in more detail. It has since been suggested that her mother was a prostitute who exposed her child to sexual abuse by her clients, and who tried on several occasions to kill her. She did not know who her father was. In an account of the case written thirty years later, Gitta Sereny39 – who befriended Mary in adulthood – argued that the girl should have been seen not as perpetrator but as victim. Sereny cited a case from 1861 in which two eight-year-olds beat a two-year-old called George Burgess to death in Stockport. There was never any question of the two older boys being tried for the crime, she wrote, quoting a Times leader on the 1861 case which said: ‘Children of that age cannot be held legally accountable in the same way as adults. Conscience, like other natural faculties, admits of degrees: it is weak, and has not arrived at its proper growth in children.’40
If Mary’s cries for help had been heeded, Sereny suggested, she would never have become a killer. Mary’s probation officer told the author: ‘In the public’s justified horror about these events, and their ready acceptance of “evil” as an explanation, people tend to forget that they were children who carried around a baggage of childhood experiences unknown to or ignored by any responsible adult.’41 But that was later. For now, child killers were, it seems, simply that – children who happened also to be killers.
It would be many years before anyone would take seriously the idea that the adults around Mary Bell could have prevented her from killing if only they had listened to her more. Indeed, the suggestion would always remain controver
sial – the feeling that such crimes must be born out of an evil which was in some way inhuman, even diabolical, rather than of a twisted and damaged childhood, ran very deep. But, even in the early 1970s, the notion that children in general should be heard, that their opinions should be taken into account, had begun to take hold.
This belief had not penetrated every corner, nor had it even penetrated very far into the system of social services which had grown up since the war. Ever since the death of Dennis O’Neill in 1945 had caused such outrage against the authorities who would foster out a little boy without making proper checks on his safety, the role of the state in children’s lives, and particularly in the lives of children who came from families with problems, had been growing. Indeed, as a mother named Pauline Colwell gave birth in March 1965 to a daughter named Maria, moves were afoot to ensure that role would become even greater in years to come. The Seebohm Report, commissioned that year and published three years later, would bring social services departments into being within local councils, and would lead to a huge rise – 10 per cent a year for several years – in the resources available to social workers. Some social work departments ran to several thousand members of staff. And yet despite all this activity, and despite a growing awareness nationally of children’s individual needs, it would be another twenty years before social workers would fully move on from generic work with families to putting the needs of individual children first. ‘In the early 1970s there was a great sense of optimism about prevention to the point where some of the specifics of child protection were neglected,’ one social services director would remark later.42 ‘Social workers were so focused on the family as a whole that they were forgetting about the child.’
And certainly, it must have been painfully, heartbreakingly clear to the Sussex social workers who handed little Maria Colwell over to her mother in November 1971 that they were not acting on the child’s wishes. That morning, Maria had been taken to Middle Street School in Brighton by her uncle, Bob Cooper, who with his wife, Doris had been looking after her since she was a baby. Later, Mr Cooper had collected her and taken her to the social services office, where the handover was to take place. Maria screamed and clung to her uncle. Indeed, so hysterical was she at the prospect of being separated from her foster-parents that she could only be persuaded to go with her mother on the basis of a lie – that she would be allowed to return to the Coopers the following weekend. She never saw them again, and less than fourteen months later she was dead.
Maria was the fifth and last child of her mother’s first marriage. Her father, Raymond Colwell, left just weeks after she was born and died a few months later. Pauline went to pieces, often leaving her children dirty and neglected and, according to an official report on the case, ‘associating with numerous men’.43 When Maria was five months old, Pauline gave her to the Coopers, both of whom became devoted to her. Her school reported that she was a nice girl, always polite and well dressed. They saw no particular problems with her health or behaviour. But relations between Maria’s mother and the Coopers deteriorated, and Pauline wanted to end the arrangement. She had remarried, to Mr Kepple, and had two more children. Despite the fact that these children were sometimes left outside pubs in the evenings and that the older girl had been seen with bruising and a black eye, social services now felt Pauline’s parenting skills were ‘adequate’. And the rights of the parent took precedence, it seems, over the rights of the child. So if there were no good reasons to keep Maria in care other than that she wanted to stay there, she was expected to go back. For some time before the final separation, Maria had been going on visits to her mother’s house, returning distressed and sometimes with bruises which, she said, Kepple had inflicted. Sometimes she would work herself into such a state at the prospect of a visit that she would be unable to go.
In the last year of her life, Maria would change, literally before the eyes of everyone who knew her, from a happy, healthy child into a thin, frightened shadow, depressed – according to her doctor – and often bruised. She was used by the Kepples as a drudge, dragging heavy bags of coal from the local shop. A neighbour would hear her mother slapping her and calling her a ‘dirty little bitch’ after she had apparently soiled herself. Yet the feeling that the authorities knew what they were doing seemed to prevail – her teacher, who had seen Maria hysterical at the prospect of having to go to her mother’s, said later that although she had felt the procedures inhumane, she assumed they were for the best. Even when social workers saw Maria with a blackened face and an eye that was just ‘a pool of blood’, they accepted the Kepples’ explanation that she had had an accident on her scooter. The neighbour who had reported these injuries then confronted Maria’s social worker, demanding to know if she really believed the story. She allegedly replied: ‘Well, knowing the family I would say that Maria has had a beating.’ Yet still nothing was done. A few months later, in December 1972, Maria’s social worker, Diana Lees, would see her, very thin and suffering from an infection and persistent diarrhoea, and soon after that would learn from a message left by the neighbour that Maria was now ‘more or less like a skeleton’, unkempt and dirty. Miss Lees did not return the call. On 7 January 1973, the Kepples arrived at the local hospital with Maria’s limp body in a pram. The post mortem showed she had bruising all over her and a fractured rib which had begun to heal. She weighed just thirty-six pounds – ten pounds less than the normal weight for an eight-year-old. William Kepple was convicted of manslaughter and eventually served a four-year sentence.
It was the public, not the authorities, who were initially outraged when the details of Maria’s death emerged. Neighbours and other locals queued to get into the public inquiry which was subsequently held, and many gave evidence of the abuse they had seen the girl suffer. Yet while the inquiry was swingeing in its criticisms of social workers – that they failed to communicate properly, or to draw properly the lines of responsibility for Maria’s care – its final conclusion acknowledged that something new was happening – that although the state was at the sharp end of the public anger about Maria’s death, it was not felt to be the only culprit: ‘It is upon society as a whole that the ultimate blame must rest; indeed the highly emotional and angry reaction of the public in this case may indicate society’s troubled conscience,’ it said.44 It was not enough for the state, representing society, to assume responsibility for those such as Maria. When Dennis O’Neill died at the hands of his foster-parents, social workers were held to have failed him. When Maria Colwell died at the hands of her stepfather, nearly twenty years later, society as a whole began to question how it treated its young. The case would spark decades of legislative reform, and yet the messages which came out of this inquiry would become depressingly familiar: childcare professionals needed to communicate better; they needed to be better trained. Each time another child died, the same failings would be found to be to blame.
And yet things were changing. Child abuse, as a concept, was at this time relatively new. Terrible abuse had always occurred, of course. But now the notion of child abuse as a ‘syndrome’, the abuser as someone suffering from a recognizable condition, began to grow. The term ‘battered child syndrome’ had in fact been coined some ten years before Maria’s death, by a University of Colorado paediatrician named C. Henry Kempe. Kempe set out the symptoms of this condition – abusing parents would often bring their children to hospital with injuries, expressing apparently appropriate concern and saying they had occurred accidentally. Such parents were not incurable psychopaths, he believed, but were suffering from a form of psychological disturbance which could – by logical extension – be cured. In November 1969, a Home Office pathologist called Professor Francis Camps had told the Royal Medical Psychological Association that he expected the phenomenon to die out because it was essentially a social disease: ‘Very nearly all injuries to children come in lower social class families. There is a high proportion of unemployed fathers amongst attackers,’ he said.45 Camps believed a lack of self-dis
cipline could help to explain the rise in child injury.
The recognition of the problem would not stop it from happening. Over the next decade and more, every child death from abuse would lead to the same discussion: twenty-one-month-old Tyra Henry, battered and bitten by her father while in local authority care in 1984; three-year-old Heidi Koseda and four-year-old Jasmine Beckford, both starved and beaten by their stepfathers in the same year; four-year-old Kimberley Carlile, killed by her stepfather in 1986; sixteen-month-old Doreen Mason, who died in similar circumstances in 1987. The list would go on. And every time, the same questions would be asked: why did the various agencies that dealt with these children – for almost all were known to social services – not talk to one another? How could warnings from neighbours and others have gone unheeded?
It would seem, in many ways, as if each death demonstrated that nothing had changed. It would seem, too, that the outrage engendered by these deaths ran in a similar vein to the outrage which had been sparked by the death of Mary Ellen Wilson in nineteenth-century New York; that it had its roots in the notion that the child was endlessly vulnerable and in need of adult protection. And yet with each renewed outbreak of public revulsion and outrage, children as a corporate body would garner a little strength. The radicalism of the early 1970s was beginning to trickle down, and children would never be seen in quite the same light again. From now on, a child would be less and less an appendage of its parents; more and more an individual in its own right. It would take another twenty years or so before children would have those individual rights enshrined in law, but the process had begun.
8 Eighties to ASBOs
Natalie Dowse, born on the south coast of England in 1970, would later recall little of this radicalism. Yet she would remember a childhood that was free from many of the cares her parents had faced: ‘My mum played an important role with her own family. Her father died when she was fourteen, and she looked after her younger siblings. She helped her mother – from fourteen, she always cooked Sunday roast. When she was seventeen, she went to work full-time, as a secretary.’1
