Last updated at 13:01, Tuesday, 09 December 2008

You tend to wonder how many times in her troubled life kidnapped youngster Shannon Matthews had need to repeat the words she whimpered to policemen coming to her rescue.

Manipulation: It’s easy to brand Karen Matthews as evil because we can’t face trying to understand how she could do what she did

“Stop it now – you’re frightening me!” she cried, as finally her mother’s plot to exploit the child for a £50,000 windfall was exposed and shattered.

Drugged, deceived, abducted, hidden away as a quick buck opportunity – like a deposit in a short-term, high-interest savings plan – Shannon was coldly used by the one person in the world she should have trusted for unconditional love and absolute protection from harm. The chances of this spectacular experience of fear being the little girl’s first are close to nil.

She was though, lucky in the end. Lucky that police busted the calculated scam; lucky that having done so, the law was able to remove her from the poisonous presence of her mother; lucky that now she will be able to look forward to a life of stability and care in a new family.

Other children like Shannon will not be so fortunate. Other children on Dewsbury’s Moorside Estate, where Shannon and her mother Karen had lived, won’t know how to hope for such luck. Their lives will trundle on in the same old routine of neglect and a fear so commonplace they grow not to notice it.

They will continue that way because that’s how life is prescribed – quite deliberately – for the Shannons of this world.

No matter how indignantly outraged local and national politicians sound in their feigned shock at the depth of deprivation suffered by Shannon Matthews and her ilk, what hurts them most is the rising to the surface of secret sins they would prefer to ignore. And they feel a lot safer if we can ignore them too.

When Moorside Estate and so many sink estates like it were created they were populated by design with families no one really knew what to do with. Ghettos were designated for an underclass, the dysfunctional, uneducated and hopeless. Drink, drugs, loan-sharking, child-porn downloading, neglect and abuse, they were left to do what they do – however distasteful or dangerous – at a safe and forgettable distance from the middle classes who would swoon in horror should they ever turn up as neighbours.

These ghettos were and are called communities – as though that forgives everything. Moorside was and is a community. But it is one without diversity. A common thread of nothingness binds neighbours together.

There are no excuses for Karen Matthews. There can be no sympathy for a woman who sees children as meal tickets to benefits at best, a commodity to be held to ransom at worst.

But none of us should run away with the idea that this no-mark, criminally selfish mother is uniquely evil. To do so would be to hide from the truth that dysfunctional, uneducated, hopeless families exist in their thousands on every sink estate ghetto in the country; that children like Shannon, Baby P, Victoria Climbie and so many more remain at risk in sad approximations of homes... and still we’d like to pretend they have nothing to do with us.

Evil is an overused word meaning nothing much at all outside of a child’s Sunday School prayer. Karen Matthews is branded as evil because we can’t face trying to understand the reality of a parent having felt so little about her children for so long – and with nobody challenging her about it – that she will do absolutely anything she thinks she may have a chance of getting away with. She wanted money more than her daughter’s health, happiness and wellbeing.

Would she have used it for chance of escape to a better life for her family? Unlikely. Karen Matthews could have blown £50,000 in the local Asda’s wines and spirits department without pausing to draw breath.

Was she even thinking of how her share of a £50,000 media reward for the discovery of her daughter would have enhanced or improved her life? Also unlikely. This isn’t a woman who thinks through a plan to its ultimate conclusion, with added element of risk assessment for safety – she’s never had to do that. When she needs a few quid extra, she finds a new bloke and gets pregnant again.

She is a woman refusing to take any responsibility for anything – but then why would she when, barring kidnap, nobody who isn’t dysfunctional, uneducated and hopeless gives a fig about how her behaviour affects her children or how the behaviour of others on her estate affects their children?

There are no excuses for Karen Matthews. She deserves not to be pitied but to be judged and vilified. But so, I believe, do the cloud cuckoo-land social planners who reckoned that by lumping together all their problem people on one grotty estate they could kill two birds with one stone. Little bird: looking good for providing social housing. Big bird: keeping problem people out of sight and out of mind.

As the economy sinks daily into deeper crisis, calls for more social and council housing grow louder and more urgent.

Please God, before more knee-jerk government responses repeat the failed social experiments that created Moorside, let’s think anew about that big bird before hurling the stone. Out of sight and mind will invariably lead to out of control and off the radar of social services rescue.

Abandoned people will always behave the way they would be expected to behave. When hope isn’t on their menu, there’s absolutely nothing to lose – apart perhaps from a daughter... and there are plenty more where she came from.

Yes, Shannon Matthews was lucky – luckier than her friends who keep their own secrets within the walls of their approximations of home. But as her name is added to a shameful list of children at appalling risk from parents an inadequate social system has failed to identify as dangerous, we who look in only momentarily on chaotic lives too frequently ignored, can only echo the words of a little girl, crying in the dark.

“Stop it now – you’re frightening me!”

First published at 11:27, Tuesday, 09 December 2008
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk