‘Sean’s hiding under the demountable classrooms again !’
Essentially double sized Portakabins. These ‘demountable’ classrooms had been placed between my primary school’s two playgrounds to provide some much needed extra teaching space.
They were raised maybe eighteen inches off the ground like static caravans. The space beneath, a dank, dark void filled with lost tennis balls, snow drifts of empty crisp packets, and other untold horrors.
It was into this space that eight year Sean Kelly had retreated. Nimble and naughty, he had easily evaded his would-be captors, a trio of nuns in full habit, and dashed beneath.
Now he crouched at the centre of the darkness, his black eyes shining, like those of a little rat. A rodent he could uncharitably be said to resemble.
The whole school gathered to watch as two of the most hardy nuns got down on their hands and knees, (did nuns even have knees? None of us knew for sure), and began scrabbling their way under, to coax him out.
This might prove to be a long process. He had been known to camp out under there all day.
Because this wasn’t Sean’s first rodeo. Oh no. He was always kicking off and causing mayhem.
Sean was from, what we called back then, a ‘broken home’. Which meant Sean didn’t have a dad, a real rarity in my Catholic primary school in the seventies.
This lack of a father figure had clearly left a huge hole in his life, one the nuns simply couldn’t fill. Yes, we had a couple of male teachers. But they were very much the Polyvelt wearing RE teacher type. By which I mean they were absolute drips. And not exactly role model material.
Sean was poor, what these days we’d euphemistically class as ‘less well off’. I remember once the nuns bought him shoes. They didn’t advertise the fact. But the whole school knew.
So thanks to those wonderful, kind, (although flinty when they needed to be) Sisters, Sean got extra attention, and he sometimes got breakfast, he got compassion, and yes, he got the occasional pair of shoes.
He got all sorts of things.
But mainly, he got himself into trouble.
What he didn’t get, was a diagnosis of autism. He didn’t get a prescription for drugs to combat ADHD. He didn’t get extra marks in tests because he had a ‘borderline personality disorder’.
In short. He didn’t get told, that he was broken.
Things would no doubt be very different for Sean today.
Far from being allowed to simply be a naughty, difficult kid, whose problems were rooted in/exacerbated by, his fatherless home, he would instead be slotted into a pigeonhole marked ‘neurodiverse’. And placed, by no doubt well meaning, well paid, psychologists, social workers, and care professionals, on some kind of spectrum.
According to the Guardian
80 years ago, autism was thought to affect one in 2,500 children. That has gradually increased and now one in 36 children are believed to have autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
I first researched these figures a year ago for a piece I wrote about smartphones.👇 Back then the NHS judged the percentage of British children suffering from some kind of mental health disorder to be an astonishing 17%.
Now it’s a jaw dropping 20%.
On one level this makes perfect sense. These kids are the collateral damage of growing worklessness, the result of homes hooked on subsidy and benefits, the multi generational consequence of entire communities of boys growing up without a father.
And it’s not just the ‘underprivileged’ either, far from it. As I’ve noted before, there seems to be an arms race among middle class mums to have their child diagnosed with some kind of neurological disorder.
There are benefits, not least at exam time, when these afflictions become the currency used to pay for exam board indulgences.
If you can claim your child is dyslexic, ‘mildly’ autistic, has a bi-polar disorder, or is suffering from ADHD, they can get extra time to complete their tests.
Of course it’s cheating. But if everyone else is cheating. You’d be mad to play it straight with your own child.
I am not denying these conditions exist. They really do, and they can be a blight on the healthy development of any child. But lately the number of diagnoses seems to have grown exponentially. Ever expanding, like a red wine stain on a Mumsnet carpet.
(Edit: After a comment from a valued reader I’d just like to reiterate that I do of course accept autism is very real. My point is that the casual diagnosis of different ‘neurodiverse’ conditions can make it extra difficult for many sufferers to access the scant resources they need. If that didn’t come across in the original version of this piece then that is entirely my fault. Thank you for pointing it out to me.)
Can it really be the case that 1 in 5 British children are genuinely, actually, mentally ill?
That so many children have become so broken in their early years that they cannot hope to cope with the rough and tumble, the ups and downs, of growing up without some kind of intervention, some form of medicalisation ?
We’re talking about children here. Teenagers.
Surely the reason the vast majority of kids can’t concentrate on their schoolwork is not because they are ill.
It’s because schoolwork is boring.
And they have better things to do than listen to some failed actor, or weekend bassist, drone on disinterestedly about the St Lawrence Seaway. Or shrilly lecture them that the oceans are literally boiling, and that their great grandparents (and grandparents, and probably their parents too) were all irredeemable racists.
We need reminding that simply growing up, is not a ‘personality disorder’
Which brings us onto the most insidious of these child pathologies.
Trans.
I started, I think like most reasonable people, believing that cross dressing adults who wanted to live their lives as the opposite sex deserved our compassion and understanding.
Sure. These guys, and it was always guys, had an obvious mental issue, but they weren’t hurting anyone. Live and let live.
But then the cause was hijacked by extremists, who angrily demanded that the rest of us loudly affirm their bonkers belief that putting on a dress, a crappy wig, and size 12 stilettos, magically transformed a fella into an actual real life lady.
And if we dared deny such an obvious truth we were an unforgivably noxious, criminal bigot, who deserved to lose our job, our livelihood, and even our freedom.
That was bad enough. Then they came for our kids.
Claiming that perfectly normal children, the vast majority of whom, if left alone as they should be, would no doubt grow up to be happily gay adults, had been ‘born in the wrong body’.
That they were actually in possession of a ‘gendered soul.’ Which was the opposite sex to the one which they had been mistakenly ’assigned at birth.’
And that the only way to free this gendered soul was to remove, chemically or physically, the child’s genitals.
This ideology seemed so demonstrably deranged, barmy, demented, and utterly, obviously, unhinged, that the hardest part, for me at least, was believing that anyone would ever go along with it.
But they did. Everyone did.
Including, and most unforgivably, the very agencies, institutions and professionals whose role in society is supposedly to protect children from exactly this sort of exploitation, sexual predation, ‘misinformation’, and abuse.
But no. Our most trusted institutions, our schools, the NHS, Social Services, the BBC, even the police, became the loudest, most committed cheerleaders for this nonsense.
And even in some cases, informed worried parents that their children were so damaged and broken, that if they refused to wholeheartedly and enthusiastically endorse their transition, then that child would inevitably, unquestionably, kill themselves.
That their choice was binary. Mutilation, or suicide.
It was, and is, unforgivable.
Of course when we are growing up we can all experience feelings of awkwardness about our bodies. It’s only natural. And gay teenagers face extra hurdles, from coming to terms with their sexuality, to coming out to their friends, peers and family.
But as, (and I’m really going to trigger some people now), that monster, President Trump says, these kids don’t need fixing, because
‘You are perfect exactly the way God made you’
But now, even trans has been overtaken as the children’s defect de jour.
There’s a new (broken) kid in town.
And congratulations!! It’s a boy.
Adolescence is a compelling drama, super sad and affecting. With some top notch performances, not least from its young lead, Owen Cooper.
Gripping for the most part, although the school scenes in episode 2, where the Neanderthal kids (mainly the boys obvs) seemed to find the horrific murder of a classmate something to laugh about, did strike me as crass, and a bit fake.
The fact that each episode is shot in one continuous take is also incredibly impressive.
So I want to make clear that I’m making no comment on the show itself.
Watch it, or don’t. Make up your own mind.
I’m only commenting on the moral panic, and the broader, pre existing, misandry which surrounds it.
This moral panic has reached such a fever pitch of outrage, and indignant, sanctimonious, hectoring, that Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, (who knew right?), was literally scolded on live television by a scandalised BBC for having the temerity not to watch it.
It’s a TV show! And it’s not even one of yours.
For the authoritarian, censorious, elite class. Not watching Adolescence is the new Unvaccinated.
Despite the fact that Adolescence is, like an OBR forecast for growth, a work of pure fiction, Prime Minister Keir Starmer twice called it ‘a documentary’.
This was no mere slip of the tongue. An accidental mistake. This guy is a trained barrister after all. This was intentional.
Starmer clearly wants to give the impression that the show depicts reality. And for him, and our entire governing class, I suppose it does. Because it reflects back to them the world as they imagine it. Rather than the world as it is.
A world where the tsunami of misogyny currently engulfing our country is exclusively the result of ‘incel culture’, and white teenage boys imbibing Andrew Tate’s poison on the ‘dark web’. (Whatever that is. I’ve been online since 1998 and I’ve never come across it).
Meanwhile they studiously ignore, if not blatantly deny, the deleterious effect of their own policies. Chiefly their enthusiasm for importing thousands upon thousands of men from cultures which treat women as, at best second class citizens, and at worst, property, and chattel.
And the growing number of boys growing up in fatherless homes. Perhaps the real problem isn’t that there are too many men in their young lives. It’s that there are too few.
Our bosses are promoting a fictional TV drama as evidence that our real life society is infected by a plague of ‘toxic masculinity’.
A misanthropic concept which asserts that fully half of our children have been irreparably damaged, not this time, by some chemical misbalance in their burst and busted brains, or by having their true ‘gender identity’ misallocated by a lazy, sloppy, butterfingered, god.
But by having their young bodies infected by a poisonous combination of X and Y chromosomes. By slowly growing up, repulsively, dangerously, and unforgivably, into white, working class men.
The central idea being that all boys, yes all of them, are born faulty. That being a man is inherently ‘problematic’. That maleness itself is its own pathology.
An unfortunate condition which must now be neutered, contained, crushed, and eliminated.
As if the only way to ‘cure’ little boys, is to force them to reject masculinity and embrace femininity. To turn themselves figuratively, and sometimes even literally, into little girls.
The bigger question comes when we look at these examples of ‘broken childhood’ as a whole, and ask what it is that compels the progressive ruling class to deny nature, the rebelliousness of teenagers, the awkward development of human sexuality, and the clumsy, raucous, stumble of boys into manhood?
Why is it so keen to portray these things, not as experiences that young people must learn from and live through, but as disorders which must be medicated, mitigated, and eradicated?
One reason of course is money. There are rivers of public cash flowing into the coffers of those institutions tasked with alleviating these largely invented, or at least massively exaggerated, pathologies.
And I have long maintained that if there was no public money propping up the creaky, creepy, transgender cult, it would vanish overnight.
But perhaps the main reason for this obsession with labelling our children as defective is that it is just a small scale application of the larger progressive world view.
These Malthusians see us, the little people, as wholly inadequate, lesser (sub) humans whose moral deficiencies and wonky values can only be fixed by their gentle beneficence, and heavy handed (two tier) intervention.
The progressives are at heart anti human. They just don’t like people. And if they can’t abide grown ups, why should they suffer little children?
Of course it’s not so easy to label children as malign, prejudiced, and bigoted.
Although when a four year old child is smeared as a ‘transphobe’ by his nursery school you can see they’re doing their very best to make it so.
Instead they define them as ill.
Brand them blameless victims of some sinister malady or another, which only they can cure, through their benign instruction, enlightened indoctrination, strict supervision, and kindly scalpels.
But what hope is there that our children will grow up to live whole, happy, and complete lives in the future, if we insist on telling them that they are damaged beyond repair in the present?
There’s only one ‘cure’ for childhood. And it’s the same as it has ever been.
Growing up.
Of course there is one aspect of the modern British childhood experience where the government, the liberal progressives, and the do gooders, have been studiously hands off.
The ‘grooming gangs’ rape scandal.
On this one occasion, when our children actually needed the state’s intervention, the government abandoned them.
Denied the victims a proper national inquiry. And even pulled the plug on the five smaller, less rigorous, inquiries which were supposed to take its place.
When our children really were damaged, shattered and broken, when they really needed the state’s help, succour, and support, Starmer and his entire government, closed its eyes to their genuine unspeakable suffering, turned its back on them, and walked away.
I’ll leave it there.
Now, please excuse me, I need to go and check the demountable classrooms at my old school. And if he’s still hiding under there, ask Sean Kelly if he wouldn’t mind a little company.
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Author: Low Status Opinions
Karen O’Blivious – Senior political correspondent who insists she’s neutral but only interviews people who agree with her.