http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6245461/Fiona-Pilkington-Will-we-hear-the-next-cry-for-help.html
Bardon Road in Barwell, Leicestershire is not syringe city. Yesterday morning, one of Fiona Pilkington's former neighbours was taking advantage of the autumn sunshine to paint his garage door a tasteful shade of sage green, while mothers pushed well-dressed children past front gardens adorned with statuary, water features and hanging baskets.
The suburban serenity of the scene makes it all the more shocking that, almost exactly two years ago, Pilkington reached such a pitch of despair about the torment she was subjected to by neighbouring youths that she gave her 18-year-old daughter, Frankie, the family rabbit to hold, drove to a lay-by on the nearby A47 and set fire to their car. With the nights closing in, she believed death was the only way they could find peace.
Hallowe'en and Guy Fawkes' night were for her not just a passing nuisance, but the low point in a year-round cycle of horror that she had endured for a decade. Using trick-or-treating and fireworks as an excuse, yobs would post lighted bangers through her door and light fires on the ground in front of her three-bedroom semi. Fiona Pilkington, 38, had complained to the police no fewer than 33 times about such incidents, as well as several vicious attacks on her son, Anthony, and mockery of Frankie, who had severe learning difficulties.
Neither the police, nor any of the agencies who should have been supporting a vulnerable family, had responded to her cries for help. After a decade of being ignored, she had become resigned to the authorities being "too busy" to deal with what they considered low-level nuisance behaviour.
Almost the most shocking thing about this case is that we might not know about this failure to help her if it weren't for Olivia Davison. The assistant deputy coroner for north Leicestershire fought police attempts to impose reporting restrictions on the inquest and, despite the police lawyer's protest about her "robust, challenging and judgmental approach", she asked the questions that all of us would want answered.
Had she not done so, we might not know how easy it is for the weakest in society to get the rawest of deals. Fiona Pilkington had learning difficulties herself and was suffering from depression. She was facing the moment when Francecca was about to leave the special-needs school where she had been happy for 14 years, and start life as an adult. With little support and nothing to look forward to, Pilkington despaired.
This case is being hailed as the Stephen Lawrence moment for disability hate crime. But it also marks a turning point in our tolerance of anti-social behaviour, on which Britain has a worse record than other European countries. "That could be because the public are less willing to intervene," says Rick Muir of the Institute of Public Policy Research, "and children spend less time with their parents."
Yesterday, in his speech to the Labour Party conference, Gordon Brown dared to talk of "mums and dads... who let their kids run riot". Labour is now wooing all those who are sick of seeing parents absolved from blame for their children's behaviour.
He could not take any other line because commentators of every political hue are shocked that a gang of youths were able to make this family's life such a misery – especially in an apparently comfortable street like Bardon Road. One of Pilkington's neighbours, sitting in a neat living room decorated with pictures of his young children, defends the neighbourhood.
"My girlfriend is not afraid to walk around here at night, as we would be in some areas of Birmingham, London or Leicester," he says. "The families concerned are not as bad as have been portrayed: at least you can talk to them. One of the boys held responsible once stole a bike from us; when I told the parents, it was returned."
If the teenage tormentors weren't hardened criminals, it is even more extraordianry that they weren't stopped, but this man knows why he and others didn't take a stand. They thought it was futile. "These days you can't touch kids, and they know it. If you have a go at them, they will try to intimidate you. The laws have become so technical that instead of protecting people, they have made the world more unstable."
To illustrate his point, he says: "My nephew was bullied on his first day at school, but when I talked to the bully, the police came to see me." His experience echoes last week's news that a dinner lady was sacked for telling parents that a pupil at the school where she worked was tied up and whipped with a skipping rope.
It is a skewed world when the police are quicker to take action against well-meaning adults than they ever were in response to Pilkington's complaints. "There have always been unruly kids," says David Green, director of the think tank Civitas, "but other parents don't stop them now because they can't say 'I'll call the police'.
"They know, and the kids know, that the police either won't turn up or won't do anything about it. If they do, they will be told off by their superiors for taking an action that cannot be measured against a target for crime reduction."
In that case, what point is there in Gordon Brown announcing yesterday that: "Wherever there is disruptive behaviour, we will be there to fight it"? A public grown cynical about the effectiveness of parenting orders and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders will shrug despairingly at the thought of more families getting the Family Intervention treatment that Brown claims has an 80 per cent success rate. But Honor Rhodes, development director of the Family and Parenting Institute, believes that Brown is right in seeing it as an effective tool for tackling problem families.
What works well, she believes, is a whole-family approach (such as social services no longer use). It must involve a range of agencies from housing to health, schools to social services, the police, even parking enforcement, "We've got to let these families experience the consequences of the life they lead, one of the most effective being to demote their tenancy of their home if they don't comply with parenting skills training. These people are scary and you have to show them that you mean business. They need to know that it's not OK, for example, for teenagers to wander around until 11 at night, they should be in by nine, and that if they aren't, the parents risk losing their home."
She used to sit on the Nuisance Neighbour Expert Panel to which the worst cases were referred from all over the country. "Often these very troubled families frighten housing officers and social workers, so the people who end up working with them are the least qualified, such as Police Support Officers.
"When the right people take action together, you get results. One family reported to us ended up not being allowed to look out of their windows because people were walking an extra mile and a half just to avoid going past their house."
Before such action can be taken, the authorities need to be alerted to the trouble-makers. The Home Office's Respect website, which puts a price tag of £3.4 billion on anti-social behaviour, begs us all to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to disruptive neighbours. Just dial 101, it says, to reach the 24-hour complaints service. Sadly, that only exists in Hampshire, Cardiff, Northumberland, Sheffield and Leicester City (but not nearby Barwell). Elsewhere, you will struggle to find someone within the local authority or police to take an interest.
Extending that service, and freeing the police to take action would be two useful outcomes to the soul-searching prompted by this sad case. But it isn't only the authorities who need to be more vigilant.
The death of these two women diminishes us all. Without getting sentimental about the imaginary days when everyone lived around the village green and popped into houses to borrow sugar, it is a reminder that we are all so busy getting and spending that we ignore what is going on under our noses. As Pilkington's neighbour says, "Lots of people were worried, but which of us did something?"
Perhaps we could all start by thinking about one of the coroner's most pertinent questions: "Why did no one sit and chat to her over a cup of tea about her problems?"
No comments:
Post a Comment