Natural Child, Natural Society

Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform - a brief history.

Me too. UK Government "crackdown on benefits fraud" my arse..

Institutionalised Cruelty as a policy platform has a history...... read all about it.

BENEFITS REFORM - What price preventable harm: social policies designed to

disregard human need?

Here's a history of the introduction of the system that led to Work Capability Assessments, Benefits Sanctions and so much else along those lines... I have posted here a section, the introduction, to peak your interest, dear reader.

I offer this in the hope you will read the paper. I'm afraid it will infuriate and inform in equal measure. Knowledge is powerful, because understanding the evidence makes for better decision making, and also assists in firming resistance to ill-informed policy.

Reading it will both inform and infuriate in equal measure. I know. I have just repeated myself.

This is critically important information and all to often left out of even the liberal press in their ruminations on this subject of 'benefits reforms'.

To tell the truth so that the population can understand what is being done matters.

It is shameful the 'news media' refuse this rather straight forward task so often.

https://citizen-network.org/uploads/attachment/746/what-price-preventable-harm.pdf

Mo Stewart

The Centre for Welfare Reform, England

Abstract

"Historically, the UK welfare system was designed to protect those in greatest need, which provided the necessary financial and psychological security for the unemployed and especially for the chronically ill and disabled community who are unfit to work.

This paper identifies how social policy reforms based on fiscal priorities have had the opposite effect, creating a crisis for disability benefit claimants. Conducted over a period of ten years, the Preventable Harm Project demonstrates the negative impact of the adoption of American social and labour market policies, and the often fatal human consequences of the removal of medical opinion from disability benefit assessments.

I argue that the adoption of the Work Capability Assessment for the restriction of disability benefit(s) has created preventable harm for those in greatest need, and this article identifies the negative influences impacting on UK social policy reforms to the detriment of the chronically ill and disabled community.

Key words: preventable harm, work capability assessment

Introduction

The past financial and psychological security provided by state financial support for the long-term chronically ill and disabled community was destined to end with the adoption of neoliberal politics, which is an ideology that supports free market competition with an emphasis on minimal state intervention in all aspects of social affairs.

Neoliberal ideology has swept the globe and has impacted on all countries in the Organisation For Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who are influential in the social policy reforms of all OECD member countries (OECD, 2003; Soldatic & Grover, 2012; Stafford et al, 2019). Margaret Thatcher was the first elected neoliberal politician in the UK and in 1982, during her first term in office as Prime Minister, Thatcher identified her political ambition to remove the UK’s welfare support system, including the National Health Service (NHS), in favour of the adoption of the American welfare system using private health insurance (Travis, 2016).

Every successive neoliberal government since Thatcher adopted social policy reforms to work towards this political ambition. In doing so, the past psychological security provided by the UK welfare state was removed, and every effort was made to ensure that access to state financial support would be made as difficult as possible when moving from a welfare state to a market state.

Commonly known as ‘welfare reforms’ the combination of social policy reforms, together with the adoption of increasingly punitive conditionality using financial sanctions (Dwyer, 2018), increased the prevalence of psychological distress identified within the disabled community (Patrick, 2012). The Preventable Harm Project (the Project) was created to offer a critical reflection of published research papers and key policy documents in this area of social policy reforms.

Preventable harm: the creation of a social policy crisis

The Project identified the adoption of a ‘non-medical’ functional assessment model, known as the Work Capability Assessment (WCA), which disregards medical opinion when used to assess claimants of disability benefit (Stewart, 2018) .

The WCA was introduced in 2008 to restrict access to the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) disability benefit, by tightening the benefit gateway in order to reduce the costs of the social policy budget (DWP, 2006); as recommended by government commissioned research (Waddell & Aylward, 2005) which was funded by the American corporate sponsors UnumProvident Insurance (Cover, 2004).

Introduced on an exclusive fiscal basis, with a dangerous disregard for health and wellbeing (Barr et al, 2016), this flawed method of assessment guaranteed that disability benefit claimants would learn to live in fear of the WCA (Garthwaite, 2014), which became a matter of life or death for many of those in greatest need.

The use of harsh sanctions by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for often minor misdemeanors associated with the WCA is linked to a disturbing number of chronically ill and disabled benefit claimants attempting suicide (Mills, 2017; Barr et al 2016), and others have starved to death in C21st UK when they were sanctioned with all benefit income removed, identified as being ‘killed by the state’ (Elward, 2016: 30)."

https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58235/1/1351_Shakespeare.pdf - a more detailed paper on the Waddell & Aylward, 2005 model. The devastation that the implementation of the BPS model as interpreted by Waddel and Aylward is an immense unspeakable horror story. Millions of lives have been adversely impacted, just to 'save a few bob'...

In essence the voices of the vulnerable, their interior sense of what they are going through, are key to designing healthy policy. Always ask the locals, they know their territory really well.

Meeting the unmet needs of the vulnerable (we are all vulnerable) is an essential element of healthy policy, in as much healthy policy seeks always to avoid avoidable harms.

I think it is not so much to ask for, when we consider Governance of our society. The improved outcomes for all of us are what I describe as the profit of healthy policy. Rather than wealth extracted from privatisation of health care, we ought to mandate the profit as being the outcomes for the whole population.

Clean water is the profit denied when water utilities refuse to invest, and their negligence leads to raw sewage being free, from the rivers to the sea, as CEOs take their bonus's and the shareholders celebrate with glee.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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Ze'ev Jacobintsky

The Iron Wall is an essay written by Ze'ev Jabotinsky in 1923. It was originally published in Russian, as he was born in Russia as Vladimir Yevgenyevich Zhabotinsky and wrote for the Russian press.^[1]

Written in 1923, by Ze'ev Jacobintsky, in the same year as The Beer Hall Putsch, also known as the Munich Putsch, which was a failed coup d'état by Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP) leader Adolf Hitler, Generalquartiermeister Erich Ludendorff and other Kampfbund leaders in Munich, Bavaria, on 8–9 November 1923, during the Weimar Republic.

He wrote the essay after the British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill prohibited Zionist settlement on the east bank of the Jordan River, and formed the Zionist Revisionist party after writing it.^[2]

Jabotinsky argued that the Palestinian Arabs would not agree to a Jewish majority in Palestine, and that "Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach."^[1] The only solution to achieve peace and a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, he argued, would be for Jews to first establish a strong Jewish state, which would eventually prompt the Arabs to "drop their extremist leaders, whose watchword is ‘never!’ and pass the leadership to the moderate groups, who will approach us with a proposal that we should both agree to mutual concessions."

A week following the publication of this essay, Jabotinsky followed with "The Ethics of the Iron Wall," in which he argued that morality comes before everything else, and that Zionism is "moral and just," since it subscribes to "national self-determination" as a "sacred principle," which Arabs may also enjoy

The Iron Wall.

Full essay

https://en.jabotinsky.org/media/9747/the-iron-wall.pdf

I recommend my readers to read it, it is a short read, 8 minutes or 10...

In what follows I make my own comments on the meaning of this essays and it's impact upon the shituation in Palestine.

"The Iron Wall

Original in Russian, Razsviet, 4.11.1923

Colonisation of Palestine

Agreement with Arabs Impossible at present

Zionism Must Go Forward

"It is an excellent rule to begin an article with the most important point. But this time, I find it necessary to begin with an introduction, and, moreover, with a personal introduction.

I am reputed to be an enemy of the Arabs, who wants to have them ejected from Palestine, and so forth. It is not true.

Emotionally, my attitude to the Arabs is the same as to all other nations – polite indifference.

Politically, my attitude is determined by two principles.

First of all, I consider it utterly impossible to eject the Arabs from Palestine. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority.

And secondly, I belong to the group that once drew up the Helsingfors Programme, the programme of national rights for all nationalities living in the same State.

In drawing up that programme, we had in mind not only the Jews , but all nations everywhere, and its basis is equality of rights.

I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.

This seems to me a fairly peaceful credo.

But it is quite another question whether it is always possible to realise a peaceful aim by peaceful means.

For the answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs; but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism."

----

In this last paragraph in this section Jacobintsky lays all the responsibility for any difficulties the Zionists might face squarely upon the Palestinian people and their resistance to being colonised. The Zionists are innocent.

He then states the following.

----

Voluntary Agreement Not Possible

"Voluntary Agreement Not Possible.

There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs.

Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists.

I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries.

I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage."

----

Jabotinsky admits that Colonialism always generates a fierce resistance amongst the people who lands are to colonised. We all know that Colonialism is inherently an evil process, a cruel and bloody one.

As he processes into this essay he makes it quite clear what the true stance of Zionism is, all the time seeking to absolve the Zionist project of any culpability.

The phrase 'the most moral army in the world' is drawn from this essay. Read on to see it’s roots, and the soil in which that false flag is planted.

----

Colonisation.

"It does not matter at all which phraseology we employ in explaining our colonising aims, Herzl's or Sir Herbert Samuel's.

Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab.

Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed.

The Iron Wall

We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say "non" and withdraw from Zionism."

----

Two State Solution as a strategic weapon of hopeless hope.

The Two State solution was always dead in the water. It was never at the centre of Zionist aspirations, from the get-go, and the aspirations of the Two State Solution promoted to Western Audiences was always a strategic tactic, designed to enable the colonisation to move ahead, protected by Hope. The Hope of The Western audiences.

Zionists, and importantly, the Ruling Class in the West fully understood this strategic tactic and played along, delaying the necessary awakening amongst the western electorates, to buy the Zionists time to 'change the facts on the ground' through mass immigration of Jewish people, and settlement, and then by conquest and occupation, and now by total destruction of Palestinian civil and social and economic and political infrastructure.

---

Jabotisnky proceeds.

Here Jabotinsky sets ups the claim that Zionism is inherently Moral, and that outside forces should back it all the way.

——

The Iron Wall

"Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.

Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

That is our Arab policy; not what we should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not.

What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate?

Their value to us is that outside Power has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible.

And we are all of us ,without any exception, demanding day after day that this outside Power, should carry out this task vigorously and with determination.

In this matter there is no difference between our "militarists" and our "vegetarians".

Except that the first prefer that the iron wall should consist of Jewish soldiers, and the others are content that they should be British.

We all demand that there should be an iron wall.

Yet we keep spoiling our own case, by talking about "agreement" which means telling the Mandatory Government that the important thing is not the iron wall, but discussions. Empty rhetoric of this kind is dangerous. And that is why it is not only a pleasure but a duty to discredit it and to demonstrate that it is both fantastic and dishonest.”

Zionism Moral and Just

“Two brief remarks:

In the first place, if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true: either Zionism is moral and just ,or it is immoral and unjust.

But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative.

We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not.

There is no other morality."

----

This then lays out the coffin of Palestinian self determination, the sarcophagus of their human rights, the entombment of their land tenure and polity, the grave that is the erasure of their culture and their peoples from those lands, and ultimately the denial of their natural right to live peacefully on the land they have lived on for thousands of years, long before the advent os Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

The question then becomes how many nails must be used to ensure that the coffin lid is firmly shut, and cannot be re-opened.

The assault on Gaza is one of those nails.

The settlements across the West Bank are another bag of nails.

USUK unconditional support for their pet colonial project is another. That support is strategic in that it is designed to enrage, divide and destabilise the entire Arab polity.

The lack of detailed understanding of the history, the genesis of the so-called Israel -Palestine 'conflict' amongst the voters of the Western Christian Colonial States is another nail.

My task here is to remove that nail, and our task as a democratic population is to ensure our Governments nails are removed, so that the Zionists are isolated, defanged and eventually placed where they cannot harm the Palestinian people any more.

Free Palestine. Free Western Democracy from the abject, venal and cruel Ruling Class Establishment.

The two are inextricably linked.

Letter to my MP, following the revelations by Alicia Kearns regarding Legal Advice from Foreign Office Lawyers.

I have always opposed militarism, and have been part of the protest movements that challenged the many wars prosecuted by the UK Governments of the past 25 years.

I sent this and other letters via www.writetothem.com

Dear Representative,

It has been revealed by Alicia Stearns, Commons Foreign Affairs Committee via an audio clip from a meeting with Conservatives in London last week. that the foreign office Lawyers have advised that Israel is in breach of International Law, Humanitarian Law and other Laws.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, has confirmed that 4 of the 5 conditions of the Genocide Convention have been met in Gaza and The West Bank.

These all indicates that Lord Cameron and prime minister Rishi Sunak must understand that the legal situation as defined above means the UK has to cease all arms sales to Israel without delay.

Legal experts said that not to do so would risk putting the UK in breach of international law itself, as it would be seen as aiding and abetting war crimes by a country it was exporting arms to.

I urge you to go to the House of Commons and speak up for me, as you represent me, your constituent, to demand that the UK Parliament, the UK Government in whole acts now to uphold international law, without fear or favour, to prevent Israel from further military action, blockades, occupation and other forms of oppression of the Palestinian people, and that the Israeli State and indeed, the Hamas Military wing, be held accountable for all their criminal actions, in this 'war', unconditionally.

I urge you to represent this to Sir Keir Starmer as Leader and to the front bench of the Labour Parliamentary Party.

To fail to do so will be seen and understood as being complicit in the commission of those crimes.

Yours sincerely,

Letter to my democratically elected representative on Gaza, Genocide and the Law.

Gaza 2024

Some of the data : source

Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Speaking after the Ceasefire Resolution
"Everyone knows their duty"

Francesca Albanese confirms the charge - It is a genocide.
Letter, sent via https://www.writetothem.com
Dear Representative,  
This Tuesday, March 26th, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine and the (illegally) Occupied Territories, working for the United Nations Human Rights Commission, held a press conference to announce confirmation that Israeli MIlitary Assault and Occupation of Gaza has met the first 4 of 5 conditions required to define the action as a Genocide.  
https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session55/advance-versions/a-hrc-55-73-auv.pdf  
The Genocide Convention codifies genocide as “any of the [specified] acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
Accordingly, the crime of genocide comprises two interconnected elements:
(a) The actus reus: the commission of any one or more specific acts against a protected group, namely:
(i) killing members of the group;  (ii) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;  (iii) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;  (iv) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (v) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.  
and
 (b) The mens rea: the intent behind the commission of one or more of the above- mentioned acts that must be established, which includes two intertwined elements:
(i) a general intention to carry out the criminal acts (dolus generalis), and  (ii) a specific intention to destroy the target group as such (dolus specialis).
 Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for for the United Nations Human Rights Commission for Palestine and the (Illegally) Occupied Territories, has asserted, with evidence to support the claim, that Israel and its allies have broken the first four elements of the Genocide Convention, and have fulfilled the mens rea element.  
As an elected democratic governance official you represent the total population of the Constituency, irrespective of individuals choice of parties - you represent the people who did not vote for, as much as any other.  
As as an elected democratic governance official you are duty bound to uphold the Law, without exception.   There is a moral element to this too which you cannot avoid.
I sincerely call upon you, as a constituent whom you represent, to present my concern that the Law regarding genocide is upheld in fully , by His Majesty’s Government and his Majesty’s Opposition and that you represent this in Parliament, as the earliest possible moment, and that you reply to me having done so, with proof of having done so.
I humbly request that you to take the appropriate action(s) to uphold the Law , to do your duty as my political representative, because I cannot walk into Parliament and make my case - that is your job.  
I hope that you agree with me that the civilian population of Palestine need every possible action taken to to stop this atrocity, immediately, without any preconditions set that would impede cessation of the genocidal violence being perpetrated upon them, even as I write.
If you fail in this - without adequate explanation - I will consider you to be actively complicit in enabling this Genocide, as a member of the UK Parliament, the Democratic Governing Body of the United Kingdom.  
I will take action, with others, within the Constituency to follow up on that, either way, without fear or favour.  
I beg you to do the right thing, to not remain silent on this matter, to speak out on my behalf in the House of Commons and elsewhere. Let us stand together in solidarity on this matter.
Yours Sincerely....

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

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How do we talk about the unspeakable : the necessity of Raw Truth as part of our advocacy for Survivors.

How do we talk about the unspeakable, atrocities that are perpetrated in war and …other forms of abuse and violence perpetrated against vulnerable populations..?

31,000 known murders, many more buried under the rubble, 2 million people facing deliberately imposed starvation, a call for ceasefire repeatedly ignored, billions witness the disgusting violence and maiming on their mobile phones.

Judith Herman has written on this in her book ‘Trauma and Recovery - The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Lewis_Herman

"“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure no one listens.”

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”

― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery:

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”

― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/542700

The only way to describe atrocity is to describe EXACTLY what happens, for example, when a missile strikes a house, followed by another.

What happens in the milliseconds of explosion, fireball, blast wave, air suction and what that did to the peoples bodies in those moments, and what happens when the building collapses, what that does to the bodies on the moments, what happens when the collapse completes, what happens to the bodies crushed, what happens to the survivors, and their thoughts and feelings and sensations before, during and afterwards...

We can then listen to the first responders, neighbours and others who rush into help in what ever way they can, in particular when all they have are their hands and bodies to move rubble, extract survivors and bodies, take them to hospitals etc, etc, etc....

And then describe the way the person issuing the targeting command, location and number of missiles, and his or her command chain, and what happens when they clock off, and go home to their comfortable homes, to cook meals, play with their children, watch a movie, go to sleep, wake up and do it again.

Multiplied by the number of people adversely affected and all the down stream harms that follow, listening carefully to the survivors because their lived experience is first hand evidence of what that was like...

We could also talk about the designers of the missiles, what research they did, how they tested the missiles, who they understood exactly what their designs do to people and buildings...

There are no adjectives to describe this. Just the raw honest data.

Justice and Repair

Judith Herman has recently published a follow up book looking at how Survivors think and feel about justice.

https://basicbooks.uk/titles/judith-herman/truth-and-repair/9781529395006/

“From one of America’s most influential psychiatrists, an “extraordinary” and “profound” ( New York Times ) manifesto for reimagining justice for survivors of sexual trauma

The #MeToo movement brought worldwide attention to sexual violence, but while the media focused on the fates of a few notorious predators who were put on trial, we heard far less about the outcomes of those trials for the survivors of their abuse.

The conventional retributive process fails to serve most survivors; it was never designed for them. Renowned trauma expert Judith L. Herman argues that the first step toward a better form of justice is simply to ask survivors what would make things as right as possible for them. In Truth and Repair , she commits the radical act of listening to survivors. Recounting their stories, she offers an alternative vision of justice as healing for survivors and their communities.

Deeply researched and compassionately told, Truth and Repair envisions a new path to justice for all.”

Survivors and Justice - a story of resilience, persistence, determination and humane spirit.

Here is a astonishing story of one person who was kidnapped as a child having already been sexually assaulted by neighbours, unbeknownst to his parents, because he was unable to speak.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/25/at-four-i-was-kidnapped-and-sex-trafficked-for-years-now-i-fight-for-the-powerless-and-win-every-case

"Although it happened more than 60 years ago, Antonio Salazar-Hobson remembers every detail of his kidnapping. He says that if he closes his eyes, he is instantly taken back to that hot Sunday afternoon in 1960 when he was a four-year-old boy standing with his brothers and sisters in the red dust of his back yard on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona.

Nearby, at the bottom of a short passageway connecting the back yard to the road out of town, a car is idling.

A white man is leaning out of the window, calling Salazar-Hobson’s name. He is very afraid of this man and the woman sitting next to him in the passenger seat. His older brother and sister are also afraid. They have been told by their parents, who are out working in the fields, that they must not let Salazar-Hobson go anywhere with the couple in the car. He can hear the fear in their voices as they call out: “Thank you very much, but Antonio can’t come for ice-cream.”

Then, suddenly, the man is out of the car and moving at astonishing speed towards them. As the children stand frozen with terror, he swoops down on Salazar-Hobson, lifting him up and carrying him away. He throws him into the backseat and the car accelerates away, leaving his brothers and sisters screaming in the dust. In just a few hours, the car will have crossed over the border into California. It will be another 24 years before Salazar-Hobson sees his family again.

What happens to Salazar-Hobson in the time between his kidnapping and his return to his family is so horrifying that it is almost impossible to comprehend. After being snatched from his back yard, he is taken into a nightmarish landscape of sex trafficking, violence and exploitation, where the rest of his early life is spent in an endless loop of fear, pain and loneliness.

Yet Salazar-Hobson’s story is so much more than the evil that was done to him. Rather than being broken by what he experienced, he instead rose from the ashes of his stolen childhood to accomplish extraordinary academic feats and become one of the US’s most successful labour rights attorneys, representing vulnerable and powerless communities, and dedicating his life to justice and compassion. “I chose not to be obliterated by the abuse and trauma I was forced to endure,” he says. “Instead of being swallowed by the darkness, I survived by walking towards the light.”"

Antonio when he was a young boy, working on the ranch.Photograph: Courtesy of Salazar-Hobson’s family phot

In Ireland the necessary process of Justice and Repair has been underway for 40 years and is as yet unfinished. Many, many Institutions of Care entrusted to State and Church covered up the most egregious predation of innocents, men, women and children which enabled the predators to continue to cause avoidable harms to hundreds of thousands of vulnerable innocents for 70 years and more, since the inception of the Irish State.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

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