Editor-At-Large: Harassed to death – why did no one listen?
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Independent Minds
Her story is so distressing that it makes me wonder what kind of neighbours lived in her street. Couldn't anyone have saved her from herself? Why didn't a single person of authority – a social worker or a police officer – simply act kindly, as the coroner put it, sympathetically and "sit down and have a cup of tea" with Fiona Pilkington to find out what was going on in her head?
Consider the list of abuse she carefully wrote up in a "harassment diary" found incomplete after her death – it would make most of us terrified – and, on top of everything else, she had two teenagers with their own problems. With an 18-year-old daughter with a mental age of four, and a son with severe dyslexia, this distraught woman sat in the dark until 2.30am night after night, too scared to put the lights on for fear of attracting the bullies who routinely made her existence a total misery. She endured shouting and verbal abuse outside her home until the early hours. Stones chucked at the windows. Fences set on fire. Fireworks pushed through the letterbox. Eggs and flour regularly thrown at her front door. She felt under siege – wouldn't anyone? And yet it appears this antisocial behaviour was never deemed serious enough for effective preventative action to be taken against her tormentors.
After making 33 complaints to Leicestershire police, to no avail, Fiona Pilkington took drastic action – setting fire to herself and her daughter in the family car, with just their pet rabbit for company, ending their lives in the most horrific way imaginable. That was two years ago, and no one has ever been arrested or charged with any crime. Well done, everyone concerned. Doesn't this story sound awfully familiar? Life in 21st-century Britain.
The case of baby Peter shocked us, with social workers, doctors and the local council all passing the buck. Sure, they apologised. But most people, having seen the pictures of the dreadful squalor in which that child lived would have stepped in and removed him to a cleaner and safer place long before he died from multiple injuries. Amazingly, it seems that social workers were reluctant to intervene. In the case of Fiona Pilkington, they didn't even know about her plight, because the police failed to notify social services of her situation.
She eventually sank into a serious depression without ever receiving any counselling or support. In spite of receiving endless phone calls and pleas for help, the police apparently failed to note her daughter's learning difficulties (and that Fiona herself struggled) and also that her son was dyslexic. If they had been more perceptive, they would have realised this family unit was being picked on for being different, and the bullies lived within yards of their front door. And the police still don't seem to accept blame; they stated at the inquest that dealing with yobs "was the job of the local council". Complaints against the police in Leicestershire rose 11 per cent last year. Failure to act on complaints was a key concern.
Incredibly, the ringleaders in the gang of about 16 youths who tormented Fiona and her kids still live in the same road and wreak havoc in the neighbourhood, although now a "problem family" has been belatedly identified and an injunction issued. That's two years too late for Fiona. Between April and December 2007 – the period leading up to her death – the police recorded 313 incidents of antisocial behaviour on her estate. The local council's community safety manager said that, with the resources available, he thought he "did a good job". Doesn't that sound just like smug Sharon Shoesmith, former director of child services for baby Peter's local council, Haringey, who claimed that her team had done nothing wrong?
The coroner is in the final stages of the inquest into Fiona's death, two years after her death. Leicester council instituted a serious case review and concluded that their social services "should have done more". Their findings include the need to "pay more attention to the needs of families" and the need to "pay more attention to anti-social behaviour". Surely these are fundamental requirements of the job. How can a woman with learning difficulties, with two severely challenged children, remain unsupported by social services? Statements documenting 18 months of abuse were given to the local council the day before Fiona killed herself and her daughter. Someone must take the blame. As the coroner said, "I don't understand how it got to this point."
That's quite an understatement.
Oh, Mandy! How nice to have the time to hang about at Burberry
What was Peter Mandelson, whose job title now stretches to no fewer than 39 words, doing at the Burberry fashion show last week? Presumably he was there to support British business – and he was proudly wearing a dapper Burberry suit. I wonder, if like many of the models on show, he received it as a freebie. Or perhaps he gets a generous discount. Anyway, he looked a little out of place in the front row along with Anna Wintour, Donna Air, Emily Watson and Agyness Deyn.
The clothes were delightful and Christopher Bailey is undoubtedly a talented designer. But I wondered how Peter had managed to schedule the 30 minutes of waiting time before the show started into his notoriously hectic diary.
After the show Mandy got a friendly hug from David Walliams, although the next night he got a frostier reception at the British Retail Consortium's annual dinner, telling retailers he wouldn't alter the date when VAT goes back up to 17.5 per cent – 1 January, in the middle of the busiest trading period. I don't suppose he'll have any spare time to help out with re-ticketing garments and altering tills. Retailers such as Sir Philip Green claim it's "an administrative nightmare" – and they should know.
Where no man has bared to go
Germany is bravely leading the world in one recreational activity – nude hiking! With over 50,000 naturists, there's clearly a strong demand, and now an 11-mile trail has opened specifically for nude hikers, complete with warning signs to deter those who might be offended. Nude hiking is increasingly popular in some alpine regions of Austria, Germany and Switzerland, and it seems chilly weather is no deterrent as there are reports of nude tobogganing. I haven't encountered any nude hikers on my walks in the UK, although I could suggest a few remote spots they might enjoy. Could this be the answer for our ailing tourist industry? Instead of designating any more areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, perhaps we should campaign for nude hiking zones in rural spots that could do with an economic boost.
Euston Arch's falls from grace
As a child, the highlight of holiday trips to Wales was starting the long train journey with the wonderful arch at London's Euston station. This fabulous structure, modelled on the Acropolis in Athens, exuded style – something sadly lacking from the present concourse, a featureless windy space inhabited by Big Issue sellers. Years ago, Dan Cruickshank presented a BBC programme that set out to discover what had happened to the arch when it was demolished, and discovered it had been dumped in the river Lea in east London. Now, campaigners are optimistic it will be restored and re-erected as part of the redevelopment of the station, only this time it will contain a nightclub in the basement and a banqueting hall at the top. What a shame that the only use we can come up with for an architectural gem is a nightclub – somewhere people sit in the dark and get drunk.
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Comments
At the inquest, a Police superintendent said it was due to the 1998 Criminal act that demoted these things to the council. Why, I don't know, what powers have a council got to combat this, can't think of any. So this lady and child died due to the complete ineptness of Labour, to enact Laws that protect, rather than what most labour laws do and wreck our lives.
It shows the ineptness of the police and the local authority. They could easily have installed hidden cameras and watched them and then arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned a few. And there were clear cases of criminal damage, so I don't see how it could have been the council's job - the police are still supposed to deal with criminal acts. Sounds like buck passing to me.
I quote from the County Council’s web site as follows: “Leicestershire County Council provides social care and support for people. We also have a legal duty to protect people, including children and young people from harm, neglect or abuse”. Clearly, they failed to do that. The local authority, Hinckley and Bosworth, also has copious web pages giving advice regarding ‘antisocial behaviour’, but, almost without exception, including the page relating to ‘hate crime’, they refer users back to the County Council web site. The only interest Hinckley & Bosworth appears to take in cases of this kind is when there is misbehaviour on one of their housing estates and they obviously failed to do anything about it, e.g. by helping the victims to move or by evicting the ‘problem’ family.
Perhaps the greatest failure is lack of action on the part of Leicestershire Police. I wonder how many of those 33 calls in seven years were referred to Community Support Officers? I watched with dismay Channel 4’s recent Dispatches programme ‘Police on the Cheap’, where officers with full powers ‘pass the buck’ to their community colleagues because they don’t consider an incident to be serious enough and community officers ‘pass the buck’ back because they don’t have sufficient powers to deal with the offenders. This case is tragically symptomatic of this ‘not my problem’ approach, which seems to have been prevalent since the loss of the local ‘bobby’ who would have lived in the police house on the estate, would have personally known the local kids and their parents, would have seen the abuse happening at first hand and would have had the powers to deal with it.
All that Fiona Pilkington and her daughter needed was a sympathetic police officer to visit their home, get to the bottom of their problems and actually take responsibility for seeing that something was done, including alerting the appropriate local and county authorities. Barwell isn’t Hackney, Moss Side or Toxteth and protection of these vulnerable people wasn’t ‘rocket science’. Perhaps all the potential form-filling and follow up action made it ‘too much trouble’ - the victims were probably regarded as being a nuisance, from the same ‘underclass’ as their abusers. They just weren’t sufficiently important.
A. Collins, Wigston, Leics.
For them to say this is a council problem shows exactly what they think.
We suffered gangs of youths / yobs / fereal youths , call them what you want, outside our house for years.
The police did absolutly nothing to stop them.
These yobs cause misery and distress. They create intimidation and cause you to live in fear inside your own house.
This is something the police simply do not understand. They refuse almost point blank to do anything about them.
The usual reasons given are - prioritys and lack of evidence. The police simply do not understand or see these yobs outside your home as an issue and simply do not understand the fear and intimidation they cause.
The police have recently put in place what they call neighbourhood policing - this was as a direct result of the general public wanting a more involved and visible police force. as usual that seems to be more talk than actual action. I for one have never seen my neighbourhood police officer.
I hope and pray that what Mr johnson is saying is real and the goverment do something to make the police realise that community policing that gets involved with, and deals with the community and the real issues that concern them are what we want.
I also strongly believe parents need to be hels to account for there childrens behavour.
I hope something comes of this - the yobs are running the strrets - we need to take them back
and put adults in contol once more.
Thanks
manchester
The Reaganite Republican slogan has found a new home in New Labour country, and its latest victims are these two women who were abandoned by their neighbours, the council and the police.
The reason why neighbours did not get involved is obvious: you're the next target if you stick your nose in.
Only this morning Brown was praising himself on the Marr show for the 'community' policing NuLab has introduced. Yeah, right. Dream on Gordo! A few kids wandering around with a silly smile on their faces when the shops are open does not count as community policing.
But we don't know, and making sweeping surmises can lead to way-off-the-mark presumptions. Thorntongate's guess strikes me as more probable, given the racket that these attacks, some very late at night, must have created, and which must have disturbed the neighbours too.
Not only are you "the next target if you stick your nose in" - you may find that the police, so unready to act in this and, often, in other situations which they class as "low-level nuisance", are beating on your door - or even, in odd circumstances, smashing it in - if you intervene and one of the kids, or their parents, makes an accusation against you. And doing so very quickly indeed.
Though politicians in the last couple of years have rather belatedly started to bemoan the effects of it, our society has, in effect, formally and officially professionalized social responsibility. If people these days are inclined to mind their own business and not get involved, it's in no small part a result of fifty years of people in authority telling them to do just that; at the very least informing them that they should leave such matters to "the proper authorities", and, at times, "binding them over", as the phrase used to be, or giving them written formal warnings (the more recent version), or even punishing them through the courts, when they haven't done so. It's a bit rich for ministers then to complain when people walk on by.
I thought there was something peculiarly complacent and odious about the senior police officer's reported evidence at the inquest - something along the lines of "people seem not to be aware that nuisance incidents since 19-whatever-it-was are no longer the responsibility of the police, but of the local authority".
So large groups of kids yelling and hurling rocks at your windows doesn't constitute, at the very least, a breach of the peace? The police are quick enough to involve themselves in other situations which would seem to most of us far less serious and significant - "Youtube" has some clips, which manage to be simultaneously both hilarious and sinister, of unpleasant confrontations and threats of police action over things as trivial as people filming in the street - especially filming the police themselves in quite routine situations.
And yet the message from this senior police officer seems to be that the only redress for a woman with less coping skills than most of us might have who's being besieged in her home is that she should ring the council - next morning, of course, as neighbourhood nuisance isn't a 24 hour emergency service.
There's a snapshot here, not just of the nastier aspects of contemporary British society, but of the way in which those in authority both in policy and in practice look at their responsibilties towards the rest of us. And, I think in my more pessimistic moments, the extent to which they're emphatically NOT there to work for us.
If that police officer's evidence was correctly reported and represents his real approach to this and other such situations, not only should he not be in a position of command. He'd be better out of the police force completely. And if it's really true - and, in fairness, I'd want real evidence to believe it, even of this degenerate and discredited shower - that the government has deprived the police of the powers to deal urgently and thoroughly with situations such as this, boy, do we need a change at the top.
When forced to act after weeks, months and, yes, years, they suggest arbitration with lunatics living in stink squalor who throw fridge-freezers down flights of stairs or junkies who allow others to shoot up in their homes. Their mantra and that of the police force is that they just want us to "live in peace" with whatever moves in next to us. Sod our children, our rights to live decently and quietly, sod our property, our personal safety and our sanity. The government wants everyone to believe it presides over a success story of social inclusion; there can be no problems ergo there are no problems! The police make no arrests and the CPR and Fiscals do not prosecute therefore there are no criminals...
Advising tenants to keep diaries is a tactic employed to wear them down. It's the same as putting letters in the office shredder "letter, what letter?" - and refusing to take calls. Officials use "I've lost the file", "She's off sick and I don't know anything", "We're shut for the Easter/Christmas/Bank Holiday" , "I wrote to him 4 weeks ago" etc to delay taking action. Should anyone complete a "diary" it is rarely looked at let alone acted upon. It is an officially sanctioned form of mental cruelty endured by hundreds of thousands every day. In this case the woman and her daughter died horribly. The least they deserve is naming, shaming, sacking and prosecution of those who so clearly didn't care about her misery and desperation. Ironically, of course they were doing precisely the job that New Labour paid them for.
Let's face it, she would have been regarded as less than human, very likely seen as a boring, hysterical, ignorant nuisance, the butt of many a joke in the council tea-break and of low priority to the police She'd have been punished for complaining by being refused re-housing or offered a slum (this is standard council/housing association procedure designed to frighten people into silence) and frustrating her would have been regarded as a sport. It is a continuing source of amazement to me that people do not riot in the streets. That may yet come!