http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/aug/02/daniel-pelka-mother-stepfather-jailed-life
"On Thursday the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, branded the treatment meted out to the boy as evil and vile. Speaking during his weekly phone-in on the London radio station LBC, Clegg said: "Clearly people must have seen something was wrong with this boy. We all ask the same questions: how did this happen? What happened when teachers saw this boy scavenging in bins, when they saw him lose all that weight? They apparently did pass information on - why did no one act on it?...
..."So many teachers and people in the NHS and social work that I know have only the best interests of children at heart. It's not a lack of motive. But I think what people worry about is that maybe one bit of the system doesn't talk to another bit of the system."..."
There appears to be two separate aspects to this:
-Why did it happen?
-Why was it allowed to happen?
I doubt whether we will ever get a satisfactory answer to the first point. For each of us is starkly aware that the human individual is capable of great malice, any and all human individuals. If only there was a clear 'Miracle' behind this stark fact; the Miracle that so few human individuals succumb to a totality of malice, perhaps there is justification for saying that 'we' - the vast majority of humankind - that live free from such weakness are part of a Miracle.
Though its not quite a clear miracle, we are each subject to moments - short and long - of weakness. For do we not know and accept the truth behind the old saw, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."*
And with only a few words more, we move on to point number two...
[From the same site, linked to below and asterisked above.]
"The Henrik Hudson School District Library Media Centre provides a model essay for students which ends with the words,
Perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, victims: we can be clear about three of these categories. The bystander, however, is the fulcrum. If there are enough notable exceptions, then protest reaches a critical mass. We don't usually think of history as being shaped by silence, but..."
-Why was it allowed to happen?
I could knock-on about Clegg's partial anagram string:
evil,
vile, and wonder aloud upon the benefits of saying and re-saying buzz-words while not quite saying the one word that is Totemic to the whole conversation, "LIVE", but no.
Visiting that web page has changed all that, we best stick to 'Bystander', and the issue of " history as being shaped by silence", or in this case, the 'too small voice'.
It is not The System itself that is to blame here as much as the fact that there is a System, and that
because there is a System we are all, as individuals, designated as mere bystanders, without a clear role to play:The Human Rights Act, Health & Safety, Contract of Employment and the sad fact that being, again and again, told to do more and more leaves us all with the sense that we need to do less and less, that if we do something we have done everything. And finally, that if anyone had acted to rescue this child, had anyone decided to be that 'Clear Miracle', they would have been pilloried from some one or more quarter, right up until the child was dead.
Clegg said, " that maybe one bit of the system doesn't talk to another bit of the system" When really what went wrong was that in answer to persons doing bad no person was
doing good.
*
http://tartarus.org/~martin/essays/burkequote.html 