Does anyone but me find it odd that the police should be dragging ten year olds to court for using bad words while at the same time I am told that the British are horrendously racist? I won't bother asking if any Muslim country has ever prosecuted a Muslim for calling a Christian or a Jew rude words. It would be too silly for words.
The Times April 10, 2006
Ya, boo to the PC playground
By Carol Sarler
THE PO-FACED POLICE force of Greater Manchester, together with the Crown Prosecution Service and the vigorous support of teachers’ unions, have conspired to haul to court a boy of 10 on charges of racism. The judge looked at the allegations — essentially ones of name-calling, including “Paki” and “bin Laden”; he found them to be absurd, sent everybody home to reconsider the value of prosecuting at all and declared the case to be political correctness gone mad.
He was wrong. It was worse than that, for it is hard to think of anything more certain to increase this particular brand of schoolyard torment than to have made such a song and dance about it.
Children aren’t naturally racist; indeed, the Manchester lad and his “victim” are already friends again, in and out of each others’ homes and playing football together — inconceivable had race really been a serious issue between them.
What children are is horrid. All of them have at times actively sought to wound for no better reason than that they feel like it and they can. And from the delicious discovery of their first swear word — unintelligible to them at the time but, golly, just look at its effect! — they build an arsenal of vocabulary whose entire meaning for them lies only in the punch it packs.
At the primary school age of which we are speaking, children no more mind that a fellow pupil is brown or black than that he wears pebble glasses or sports spots or a fat tum; they care only that each characteristic, in a mean moment, lines up the cross hairs for target practice.
So if children with attack in mind come to realise — whether courtesy of the police, judges, politicians or anybody else — that “Four Eyes” or “Fatso” or “Paki” are the very worst names they can possibly call another, they will become, de facto, the very best.
Such brattish behaviour does, of course, deserve our attention, be it a quiet word, a loud rebuke or — a personal favourite — a hefty dose of ridicule. But to invoke the full might of the law is not only counter-productive, it is dangerous. If children learn that they are to be more strictly punished for teasing the brown boy than for teasing the spotty white boy, we won’t have to worry about racism. That will follow right behind, all of its own accord.
Ya, boo to the PC playground
By Carol Sarler
THE PO-FACED POLICE force of Greater Manchester, together with the Crown Prosecution Service and the vigorous support of teachers’ unions, have conspired to haul to court a boy of 10 on charges of racism. The judge looked at the allegations — essentially ones of name-calling, including “Paki” and “bin Laden”; he found them to be absurd, sent everybody home to reconsider the value of prosecuting at all and declared the case to be political correctness gone mad.
He was wrong. It was worse than that, for it is hard to think of anything more certain to increase this particular brand of schoolyard torment than to have made such a song and dance about it.
Children aren’t naturally racist; indeed, the Manchester lad and his “victim” are already friends again, in and out of each others’ homes and playing football together — inconceivable had race really been a serious issue between them.
What children are is horrid. All of them have at times actively sought to wound for no better reason than that they feel like it and they can. And from the delicious discovery of their first swear word — unintelligible to them at the time but, golly, just look at its effect! — they build an arsenal of vocabulary whose entire meaning for them lies only in the punch it packs.
At the primary school age of which we are speaking, children no more mind that a fellow pupil is brown or black than that he wears pebble glasses or sports spots or a fat tum; they care only that each characteristic, in a mean moment, lines up the cross hairs for target practice.
So if children with attack in mind come to realise — whether courtesy of the police, judges, politicians or anybody else — that “Four Eyes” or “Fatso” or “Paki” are the very worst names they can possibly call another, they will become, de facto, the very best.
Such brattish behaviour does, of course, deserve our attention, be it a quiet word, a loud rebuke or — a personal favourite — a hefty dose of ridicule. But to invoke the full might of the law is not only counter-productive, it is dangerous. If children learn that they are to be more strictly punished for teasing the brown boy than for teasing the spotty white boy, we won’t have to worry about racism. That will follow right behind, all of its own accord.
