Media Frenzies and Mob Justice

It's like passing a car accident and craning your head, desperately trying to get a better view. I don't know many - if any - people who haven't done it. I remember when I was about 10 years old witnessing a young man on a motorcycle being hit by a car. I slowed down as the event unfurled around me, watching in morbid fascination . The deathly white face of the driver, unmoving, clutching her steering wheel in shock. The intense stillness of the man's body. A brief moment, frozen in time. Incredibly loud.
I jumped on my bike and pedalled so quickly, eager to get to my friends and recount what I had seen. I lost control and crashed to the ground, grazing my hand and face. Maybe it was a rough kind of justice. I think the young man was alright in the end.

Why are people so keen to witness acts of devastation and cruelty? Why do they scream injustice at misdemeanors that have no bearing on their own lives? They are voyeurs of misery looking for a moral highground, for a reason to be outraged.

There have been several baby and child abuse cases in the news recently. Most of the children involved are dead. But none has attracted the media and therefore public's attention so much as the story of Baby P. A 17 month old little boy that died under the care of his Mother, Step-Father and the man who lived with them. The tot was subject to a series of terrible mistreatment that eventually ended up with his death. He and his family were known to social services and he was on the 'at risk' register.
It is a devastatingly upsetting story without a doubt. But the tabloid newspapers and the general public have leapt on it like a pack of rabid wolves, keen to draw every last drop of blood, every last hint at life and tear them to pieces. There are facebook groups screaming for the blood of the perpetrators of this horrible crime; screaming for the blood of the professionals who let this little boy slip through their grasp with terrible results. There are websites dedicated to unveiling the identities both of the little boy and of the Mother and Step-Father - all of whom have been granted anonymity by law. There are discussions on news websites with cruel, vengeful themes. How is this 'Justice for Baby P'?
Equally there are people claiming the story as their own personal tragedy. Weeping tears of grief for a little boy they never met. Leaving teddies and flowers and letters of tribute outside in the November rain. There's a sense of hysteria surrounding the whole sorry event that I find unnerving and a little grotesque.

Where was the rage against the man who snapped his daughter's spine? Or the people who failed to spot a Mother's mental illness before she murdered her two baby boys?
Are these people spitting hate and crowing justice to compound the fact that they are Good People because they don't beat or torture their children? And quite when being a social worker became akin to being the devil is beyond me.

Don't get me wrong, it is entirely beyond me how anybody could mistreat a child so. I look at my sons and feel incredibly protective. There is a physical sense of revulsion that comes with the idea of harming them in any way. I cannot comprehend how a Mother could do this to her baby. And I feel desperately sorry for what that helpless child had to live through. But I do not subscribe to this culture of blame and rage in the face of what has happened.
I don't think I ever will. I remember when Jamie Bulger was killed by Thompson and Venables. The shock that prevailed; that two little boys could commit such a terrible crime. But do I think it was right to cry for their blood to be spilled? For grown men with no personal attachment to Jamie to be attacking police vans carrying the accused; hounding them, shaking them - fuelled by the media, fraught by a sense of misplaced rage and a false idea of justice in their minds.

I'm not cynical and pessimistic all the time. I believe that there is plenty of good in the world but sometimes I find it is difficult to see. Everyone is so keen to point the finger of blame but in a society that is so keen to turn a blind eye and where acts of true altruism are rarely seen perhaps we are pulling the wool over our own eyes. Sometimes 'society' seems like a crumbling concept in this country.