Top Hats and Track Suits

The single biggest news item in the UK at the moment is probably the allegation that a National treasure; Sir Jimmy Savil abused scores of underage girls over several decades before his death.

Many of his alleged victims are coming forward now to describe their experiences.

But why, many ask, are these victims coming out now, after his death, when he cannot defend himself against their accusations or indeed suffer punishment if found guilty.

The answer psychologists, and many of the victims themselves give, is that they were simply too frightened to. They feared that their word would not be believed against that of a great and charismatic philanthropist such as Savil. They perceived him as being a great and powerful man, with wealth and therefore access to the very best legal representation.

Now that he is dead, there is no one to disbelieve them and the numbers of other women...and now men coming forward corroborates their own memory and provides safety in numbers from a public opinion still influenced by fond memory.

Savil was an enigma: Eccentric, yes; charismatic, certainly and undeniably a great philanthropist. Yet it seems now that he was also a monster.

If we struggle to marry those opposites in our minds, how must he have fared? Did he do his many good works to compensate for his bad? Did he genuinely believe that he was not really hurting anybody, or that his victims were actually enjoying it? Or were the alleged rapes and assaults the products of episodic madness?

My own feeling is that his power had corrupted him. (See my previous blog.) He regarded the girls as nothing more than playthings, objects to be toyed with at will.

It was the same in the Nineteenth Century during what came to be known as the Defloration Mania. Gentlemen saw young girls as pretty toys to be used and abused at will. They themselves were rich and powerful and effectively above the law. They were the very pillars of society and any attack on them was an attack on society itself. In Great Britain, the leading nation of the world, that would never do.

When the Defloration Mania was finally exposed by the journalist WT Stead amongst others, an outraged public was shocked to see that monsters might dress in waistcoats and fine linen. We today are shocked that they might also wear glittering tracksuits.  

Peers, Plebs, Presidents and People.

It was the liberal peer Lord Acton (1834-1902) who famously remarked that, ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.’

 

What Acton meant by this was not that the powerful would necessarily become corrupt or fraudulent in the legal sense of the word but rather that power tends to cause a moral corruption, a corruption of the heart and conscience.  There were very many in Acton’s own day like that. The immense wealth and military might of Victorian Britain led to the outrageous exploitation of many of the weakest in society both at home and abroad despite the efforts of the celebrated philanthropists and social reformers of the day.

 

Tragically, little has changed almost a century and a half later. From Presidential candidates in the United States to some of the popular press here in the UK there is a deeply-held belief that some people are part of an underclass of no-hope, ne’er-do-well freeloaders who parasitize society. It is an attitude held by not a few, both in government and in society.  

 

These individuals have invariably been born into privilege; either into wealth or self-perceived authority, or at least NOT into financial and emotional hardship. They see disadvantage as something that must surely have resulted from laziness or fecklessness and not from circumstance or sheer bad luck. They make judgements based on stereotypes and assumption and they condemn.

 

After months of portraying those on disability benefits as largely workshy and lazy, Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborn were roundly jeered by the spectators at the recent Paralympic Games in London.  They then attributed this to the poor presentation of their views rather than the views themselves.

 

Then we have a now-notorious Chief Whip in the British Government who (allegedly) called a member of the police service a, ‘pleb,’ and (again allegedly) suggested he should ‘know his place.’ He may well have been, as he claims, tired and frustrated when he made the outburst but tiredness and frustration does not excuse that fundamentally superior attitude of mind; it merely explains why it was blurted out in the heat of the moment.

 

Civilisation is all about how we regard and go about caring for the least advantaged in society, not about how we might encourage or laud those who already have the most advantage. It is about striving to do what is best for civilisation – for society – as a whole, not for ourselves or our ‘equals’. This is not politics; this is simple humanity. It sounds self-evident but tragically relatively few really live it.

 

The Tick Grows Louder

From time to time the press and the media advise us of the next great, ‘ticking time-bomb,’ about to cause a holocaust in our society. There has been variant-Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, Alzheimer’s Disease, Ebola, various avian influenzas, AIDS, cancers and many, many others. Let me say from the start that I certainly wouldn’t wish to minimise in any way the misery or devastation caused to anyone unfortunate enough to suffer from any of these conditions, or their families, but there is another group of disorders which profoundly affects millions of persons across the world, (especially the First World), which are hardly ever reported on and which are too-often ignored by the health professionals.

These are the Personality Disorders.

Whilst there are several different types and sub-types of personality disorder, the behavioural patterns they cause are typically disturbed, usually substantially so, and often in several areas of the personality. They are nearly always associated with considerable personal and social disruption for the sufferer, often causing severe anxiety and depression. Personality disorders are inflexible and pervasive.

Most people haven’t heard of these disorders and might be surprised to learn that they account for between 40 and 60% of all mental health diagnoses – by far the most common. Whilst there is likely a genetic predisposition, typically they can be traced back to trauma or other profound difficulties in adolescence or childhood.

Therein lies the problem: As society degrades and the family unit breaks down, and as the number of dysfunctional parental relationships increases, so does the number of children exposed to trauma, neglect and abuse. These are the individuals most likely to develop personality disorders.

And because psychological disorders in general, and personality disorders in particular are difficult and expensive to treat, so cash-strapped health bodies tend not to formally diagnose or even attempt to address them. They rely instead on the sufferer, and their family and friends, coping as best they can, perhaps prescribing anti-depressant medication. But because personality disorders are psychological in origin, medication is generally of limited benefit. Effective treatment typically involves talking or group therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy or the excellent dialectical behaviour therapy.

If diagnosis and treatment is generally poor in this, the 21^st Century, it was virtually non-existent in the 19^th. The rape and sexual abuse of girls was endemic in the Defloration Mania of the Victorian era. Most of it took place when the girls were just 13 years and above, (when they were deemed capable of consent), and this is the age at which such trauma can have the most profound and enduring consequences. There must have been tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deeply traumatised girls living in continual anguish as a result of their being procured as children for the, ‘amusement,’ of wealthy gentleman.

I have tried to express the manifestations of such trauma in The Eighth Circle of Hell (available early October 2012, Thames River Press.) It is a stark, shocking account set in the explosion of the Victorian-age time-bomb. 150 years later, the ticking grow deafening once more.

Good Grief, Mr Chips!

            July 2012 sees the printing of my debut novel, The Eighth Circle of Hell. It’s classified by the publisher, Thames River Press, as historical fiction, which it undoubtedly is, being set in the 1840s and ‘90s. But it is also literary fiction, both in style and in the way it parallels Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Last week, Kamaljit Singh, the driving force behind Thames River Press, told me that he had entered it into the Costa Book Awards as a first novel and that he intends to do the same for the Man Booker Prize. Heady days indeed!

I was never particularly good at English at school. The fact that I was placed firmly in Set 4 at my comprehensive school perhaps illustrates this, as does my achievement of a grade B in English Language at ‘O’-Level and the scraping of a ‘C’ in English Literature.  So I wonder what the reaction of my old English teachers will be if they find out about all of this. The fact that I’ve written anything without a gun to my temple will astound them; that it’s been taken up and published by a traditional publisher will send them reaching for a cold compress.

Very much, Good Grief!

What has changed for me is that my family has been through some real dark days over the past five years or so. Death, illness and mental disorder have a way of really squeezing the creative juices from the most dry and shrivelled fruit. And looking back at the time before then, I am a much better human being for it. I am far less judgemental and a lot kinder. In a way, and for me, (I certainly would not have wished it on any of the other family members) it was good grief.

Cometh the Hour

I recall the demise of the Net Book Agreement (NBA) very well. It was in March 1997 and I remember feeling outraged that such an abomination as a price-fixing agreement could have existed in the first place. I felt as if I had been ripped-off for years and I celebrated the decision to declare it unlawful. Spokesmen for independent booksellers bleated at the time that not only did the NBA help to ensure that new writing talent was nurtured by the big publishing houses, it also kept their own sector buoyant. I regarded their words as just that – the pitiful bleating of those afraid of fair competition.

I fear now that they were entirely correct.

The removal of the NBA allowed the large multiple retailers, both specialist chains and especially supermarkets to dominate the market. They were interested only in pounds, shillings and pence, and not at all in the health of literature per se. A narrow offering of best-selling titles and celebrity memoirs increasingly dominated the market with volumes driven by deep discounting and strong point-of-purchase marketing. Multiple buyers looked only for proven names and formats and the large but increasingly dependent publishers and their literary agents slavishly pandered to them. The independent booksellers, unable to compete on best-seller sales were decimated. There was less and less shelf space available for new authors and as a result, fewer were taken on. Literature suffered.

Cometh the hour, cometh the independent presses. The vacuum created by the implosion of the offerings of the big publishing houses began to be filled by small presses and latterly, ebook publishers. They now drive the new blood in writing and as often as not, dominate the literary prize shortlists. The traditional gatekeepers of publication, the literary agents, have been either overwhelmed, or by-passed by the tide of competent new writers being adopted by the small presses.

Unfortunately, that tide also contains very many poor writers who generate correspondingly poor and barely-edited work, which is self-published, (and yes of course, on occasion, good work is self-published too.) With the exceptions perhaps of erotica and some fantasy fiction, consumers learn to buy books from traditional publishers who will both proof-read and substantively edit their offerings.

But small presses are not equipped to supply the big retailers and the demise of the independent sector means that the shelf space to offer their books on is often not there, leaving only the electronic route to market.

Be careful what you wish for.  

The Infernal Narrative

As we approach the one hundredth anniversary of the death of its greatest pioneer, it is ironic that the reputation of British journalism and in particular British investigative journalism has never been lower.

William Thomas Stead was by contrast, a man of great integrity and reforming zeal who used his, ‘New Journalism,’ relentlessly in defence of the exploited, the oppressed and the downtrodden.

In 1885, as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, he wrote a series of sensational articles entitled, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” These exposed the widespread trade in very young, virgin girls who were procured for rape and prostitution. Stead's, ‘Infernal Narrative,’ as he called it, revealed to a respectable and prudish Victorian readership a seedy underworld of brothels, procuresses and padded chambers, where upper-class gentlemen could revel, ‘in the cries of an immature child.’

Under such sensational headers as, ‘Virgins, Willing and Unwilling,’ ‘The London Slave Market,’ and, ‘Strapping Girls Down,’ the articles threw society into a state of near panic and achieved as a consequence, the implementation of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, whereby the age of consent for girls was raised from thirteen to sixteen years.

To demonstrate how easy it was to procure a young girl for prostitution, Stead arranged for the purchase of Eliza Armstrong, the thirteen year-old daughter of a chimney sweep for £5. As a result of what were subsequently considered to be illegal investigative methods, he was convicted of the, ‘unlawful kidnapping of a minor’, and sentenced to three months in prison. Thereafter, every November 10^th, (the anniversary of his conviction), Stead would dress in his prison uniform as a reminder of his, ‘triumph.’ 

My debut novel, Victorian Maiden, published July 2012 by Thames River Press explores the so-called Victorian Defloration Mania through the experiences of a young, orphan-girl who falls into the hands of a group of powerful, predatory men. Decades after she flees from the horrors of her time with them, advancing senile dementia forces her to once again relive her years of hell.

WT Stead was unbowed on his release from prison and remained convinced of his probity in attempting to break what he considered to be the, ‘conspiracy of silence,’ surrounding the subject. Today, over 125 years after the articles were published, the latest research by the NSPCC suggests that some one in nine children have been contact-abused sexually at some point in their lives. The Maiden Tribute is still being paid today.