2.2.5 Purpose And Rationale - Conclusion

If I am a hidden child I am born into family circumstances where my natural and healthy growth and development are restrained by toxic fear – but no-one notices!

Toxic fear means that its ongoing presence is doing more harm than good [1].  This doesn’t mean that I am unhappy all the time.  Because of the resilience of the human spirit I manage to find happiness somewhere and sometimes.  But, overwhelmingly, my experiences inhibit my ability to thrive.

I may be growing up in a family where my parent or parents find it difficult to meet my needs – and when I express them in school I encounter an indifferent or even a punitive response – so I stop.

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In respect of toxic fear it is a sad fact that some children have experiences, (even when they are in their mother’s womb) where they feel such fear that they believe that their lives are in danger.

I ask you now; what would you do if you believed that your life was in danger?

How would you feel?

What parts of your body would you feel the fear in?

Would you fight, flee or freeze?

Or none of the three – would you flop, and dissociate – which we will describe in the Chapter on Trauma and Related Topics.

I ask you these questions not to frighten the life out of you – but just to get you thinking about what effect toxic fear might have in a little baby.

[1]. I’d say most of you will be familiar with the fear that might do us some good!  If we are parents we may remember this from our own childhood, adapt it, and use it well so that our own children, in turn, learn through a mixture of appropriate fear and reward what is good for them and what isn’t.

If we already protected the hidden children of families involved in crime, and effected this protection with appropriate resources, then we would have good design in such work, and we would not have such serious problems in society. (And this website would be different)!

I would say that there is overwhelming anecdotal evidence to support the claim that our current design contains significant deficiencies but it is also strongly supported by research done by the late and greatly missed Dr. Paul O’Mahoney in his research entitled Mountjoy Prisoners; A Sociological and Criminological Profile.

He found (among many other findings in a most interesting piece of research) that in the ten years between 1986 and 1996 the experience of imprisonment became more socially concentrated in Dublin.

In other words, the number of families affected by imprisonment in the specific (geographic) communities that were researched increased over that time.

What Paul’s research does not show, but I would say is true, is that the number of agencies set up to assist people in distress also increased in those communities – yet the general situation would appear, over the years, not to have improved greatly.

Now I would imagine that this would have held true for any city in Ireland – and even though some years have elapsed and the trend might have stabilised since then I would be very surprised if it has been reversed!

This – to my mind anyway – shows that the design of many of the initiatives may be flawed! After all, if they weren’t, the situation would have improved significantly as the number of agencies increased.

(As an aside – this has a parallel in the widening of the gap between rich and poor well documented by Social Justice Ireland who have done extensive research in the area of wealth distribution in Ireland in recent years).

What we prioritise is particularly important in design.

And looking from the priorities perspective, we consider who to listen to, and how the first thought position of the world in which we live, in respect of many realities that have an impact on vulnerable children are not always right and might need to be challenged.

(For example, the first thought when we consider child protection is probably social worker.  Why can’t it be wise grandmother or even prison officer)?

It also invites people – who believe that the current system struggles to reach those most in need – to be curious about how we might be able to protect very vulnerable children affected by imprisonment a bit better.

This will, of course, be very good for us economically! [1]

I hope that what I write will offer support to people working in voluntary and statutory institutions in communities all over the country and beyond.  I hope that all community workers would get something from it, including people who have leadership ambition in this most challenging, rewarding and enjoyable area of work, sometimes referred to as part of the helping industry [2], or the caring profession.

The people who will be interested, or even, dare I say it, excited will be those who hope for change for the better, who wish to look beyond the them and us way of looking at the world, who wish to argue rather than fight, who believe in people, who like original ideas and different ways of looking at old problems that seem to hang around forever, and who feel that it is important to be the change.

[1]. I was watching a programme on BBC one night and it was claimed that not protecting vulnerable children in the UK, when all is added up, costs £17 billion per annum.  The population of Ireland is about 8% of that of the UK.  That would put costs in Ireland around €1.5 billion.

[2]. Is there a helping industry?  Of course there is – just like there is a chemical, banking or construction industry.  The important thing is that the people who make a living out of this industry deliver results.  Because if it doesn’t deliver then it is an awful waste of money!