THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND – PART 1
Three years ago the news media began reporting an incident of such barbaric behaviour it left communities stunned. It was a ‘story’ about a little boy, a baby just seven months old, brutally beaten and permanently crippled by an unknown intruder while in the care of an aunt’s partner. The incident occurred in the midst of a news media focus on domestic violence and murders of women by their partners, yet was so shocking, so confronting, it managed to surface and continue to draw enough attention to be profitable.
Bobby Webber was not the only child subjected to such callous, vicious treatment that year, even that month or week. Bobby Webber was just one of countless thousands who would have otherwise remained unknown, he, his parents, relatives and friends isolated and forced to remain as silent as most every other victim of child abuse unless they manage to catch the attention of the news media, unless their ‘story’ can generate enough interest to make reporting it worthwhile, unless it can generate profit for that agency.
What Bobby suffered
was horrendous. The countless thousands of victims who suffer similar, the same
or worse does not detract from that. But Bobby was just the very visual tip of
the brimstone in a reprehensible, entrenched culture of corruption whereby
children are not only left vulnerable and subjected to such evil, but then
ignored, isolated and silenced by flawed community values, and police and
public servants who are supposed to help but are so morally and ethically
bankrupt they are willingly complicit in the acts of using the law, policies
and procedures to conceal and enable the vast majority of predators.
The incomprehensible, disgusting behaviour and brutal
actions of predators like Andrew Nolan do not just impact upon victims like Bobby
Webber, but on the victim’s whole family. Bobby’s mother must devote her life
to full-time care of her son, crippled for life by the brutality of the animal
that violated him. His father is now the sole provider for the family. His
sister must go without things she may have otherwise had, opportunity to be
more than what she will become lost as a result.
The family must struggle to survive with what was inflicted on not just Bobby, but them, for the rest of their lives, by the predator who will be out, to get on with his life, protected by the anonymity provided by the legal system, in just over ten years. According to the law, he will have served his sentence, justice served. But Bobby, his sister, his mother his father, his grandparents, and others, must suffer a life sentence, with no parole, and no opportunity to ever recover what was lost, under that indifferent legal system.
Maybe it’s time to
really have a look at what that animal did. To ask the question about what
justice really is when the victim and their family/carers are forced to suffer
a life-sentence and a predator gets to walk away after a mere decade of
imprisonment. To ask why the predator sucks $1.2M out of the tax-payer while
the victim and their family/carers get nothing, forced to survive as best they can,
hopes and dreams for the future shattered and lost forever, replaced by the
constant fear of financial ruin and that predator released.
Bobby’s parents, grandparents, and sister must live with the misdirected guilt of trusting that predator with his care. They must live with the guilt of niggling resentment that his survival burdens them with, the burden of financial costs, and the cruel thoughts that maybe, maybe he would have been better off dead. It may sound politically incorrect, but no decent parent or sibling wants to see their child or relative suffer. They must suffer that horrid feeling of helplessness, unable to support and watch their son, brother, grandson and nephew be all he could have been.
Bobby’s parents, grandparents, and sister must live with the misdirected guilt of trusting that predator with his care. They must live with the guilt of niggling resentment that his survival burdens them with, the burden of financial costs, and the cruel thoughts that maybe, maybe he would have been better off dead. It may sound politically incorrect, but no decent parent or sibling wants to see their child or relative suffer. They must suffer that horrid feeling of helplessness, unable to support and watch their son, brother, grandson and nephew be all he could have been.
But perhaps the most incomprehensible outcome of this
terrible incident is the extremes. Bobby is brutalised by an animal who has
never explained or apologised for his self-centred actions, a creature that
should have been locked away for life (or better yet, executed) for the betterment
of our society. And Bobby’s parents who have been forced to suffer the
cruellest of decisions but willingly sacrificed so much to give their son every
chance they can.
And then there is the government. Our so-called
political representatives. Those overlords of the public services tasked with establishing
and maintaining law and order, providing assistance to those in need, and
addressing systemic failure and injustices. What end of the spectrum do they
occupy? Well, the rhetoric would suggest they support victims like Bobby and
his parents, relatives and friends, but their actions reveal the sorry state of
reality. It finds too many of those politicians and public services at the
other end of the scale, complicit in pure evil.
The animal that inflicted itself on Bobby and, as a
result, every other life that brutality impacted, drains tax-payer funded
revenue of around $100K a year while it’s incarcerated, and after little more
than a decade will be out to live its life as if what it did never happened.
Bobby, his sister, parents and grandparents have suffered a life sentence. They
will never enjoy parole from their injuries, suffering, and financial hardship.
They get no financial compensation.
And they are not alone. There are tens of thousands of
victims of crimes like those inflicted on Bobby. The consequences of some more
extreme, others less so, but the vast majority remain unrecorded. Not because a
victim doesn’t come forward, but because the people who are meant to help
refuse to help, citing laws, policies and procedures in a never ending effort
to find excuses not to provide assistance to victims rather than ways they can.
There’s always an excuse.
Consider Gabe Taye, an eight-year-old so vindictively
bullied and brutalised at a school that did nothing to protect him, or even reprimand
and discourage his abusers from committing such vile acts, that he committed
suicide. An eight-year-old! Yet there will be many who insist Gabe doesn’t
count because what happened to him happened in the United States, that they
have different laws, that it has nothing to do with us, here, in Australia.
What is that? What kind of sick, demented arsehat dismisses the suffering of a
child, of any victim, because they come from a different country and,
therefore, don’t count?
That, right there, is part of the problem. Scumbags
that find excuses to ignore or justify unacceptable behaviour, insisting better
people remain silent, say nothing, mind their own business, provide aid to what
can only be considered terrorists. Gabe is not alone. Children everywhere are
subjected to that kind of treatment at the hands of predators and those that
enable them. They are forced to suffer and die, one way or another, alone,
whatever is mistaken for continued life too often a prolonged, miserable death.
The excuses for doing nothing to change this sick,
twisted culture of corruption do not stop with a failure to introduce and
enforce legal outcomes that will really discourage and punish such vile
behaviour, but start with attitudes that conceal and enable the kind of
anti-social behaviour that leads to an escalation whereby victims are
brutalised, where the very authorities who speak so many fine words and
encourage victims and witnesses to speak up, ultimately isolate and silence
those very victims and witnesses.
It begins in the home. It begins in the schools. It
begins with a failure to reprimand children for bullying others. It begins with
gutless parents justifying the horrid things their vile children do, blaming
the victims and bullying into silence anybody that dares challenge their
piss-poor excuse for parenting. It begins with staff at schools doing the same
or covering-up immoral, unethical and criminal activities to protect their
inept, incompetent or despicable personalities from dismissal and litigation.
Monkey see, monkey do. It’s not just the official
curriculum from which children learn and which defines the moral compass that
shapes their personalities – it’s the incidents they experience, and examples
they witness, along the way. It is reinforced all the way through school and
then into the world beyond. There is an expression from Japan or China that
states something like “there are no bad students, only bad teachers”. Perhaps
it’s a little of both. We are all, like it or not, teachers.
It is the example we set, the messages we teach
children that make them what they are. We live in a society that is all too
ready to blame the victims. Yes, at some point, a victim is responsible for the
things they do, but until they are taught a better way, given the opportunity
to be anything more than what some vile predator and his mates have forced them
to become, until they make that choice to become as bad as their abusers, anybody
that blames the victim is just as much at fault, just as responsible for all
the horror inflicted on a victim, all the misery they suffer.
The sad reality of prosecution and incarceration costs
alone makes a mockery of the Queensland State government’s efforts to tackle
domestic violence with an allocation of just under $40m a year for the next
five years. That funding is the equivalent of what it costs to merely imprison
forty offenders for ten years. It suddenly throws into question the motives of
authorities who refuse to offer assistance to victims, even at the earliest
stages when they plead to be allowed to make a report and are forced to remain
silent.
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