THERE WAS grim material in our homes last night: the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women by powerful men; prostitution, urination and indecency in public places; contempt for religious and cultural tradition. But more of Edouard Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe later. By contrast Edge of the City (Channel 4), Anna Hall’s account of the work of Bradford social services department, was positively heart-warming.
This programme was so controversially unpleasant that it was pulled from the schedule in May at the request of the West Yorkshire Police. They feared the material about groups of Asian men seducing, drugging and raping underage white girls would be used by the BNP to inflame racial hatred during the local and European election campaigns.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Hall also turned over the verminous mattresses of the helpless and filmed what crawled out. We followed Keith, a violent alcoholic with minor cerebral palsy, and his girlfriend Caroline, afflicted by a wasting disease, as they were hounded from one squalid council home to another by abusive yobs. We met Eric, a self-reliant old man, struggling to preserve his independence even though he could hardly walk. And we tracked Mathew, a Ritalin-sedated teenage delinquent with 96 convictions, as his case-worker struggled to keep him out of prison. Hall took us to places most of us would avoid like the plague and took a long, hard look at people we would shun.
So what was heart-warming about that? The social workers, actually. These are low-status “professionals” who most tabloid readers, for example, believe are all lefties or interfering do-gooders. They make loony decisions driven by “political correctness gone mad”, so the story goes. Their crackpot theories are matched only by their incompetence and lack of common sense. This image is constantly reinforced because social workers’ mistakes often result in tragedy and make great press copy. Even the most earnest Guardian reader might skip past “Elderly Couple Successfully Re-housed” or “Young Offender Blossoms on Employment Preparation Scheme”.
Hall’s documentary did a good deal to redress this balance. You could probably argue about some of the Bradford team’s judgment calls. Dave, who had Keith and Caroline on his books, kept the couple out of permanent care, thus saving the taxpayer thousands a year, but his belief that they could eventually manage without him proved over-optimistic and seemed a little naive.
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Sometimes workers seemed too willing to bow to the restrictions of their procedures. What they all seemed to have, though, by the bucketful, was patience and a genuine desire to make their clients’ lives better, no matter how churlish, ungrateful or perverse their behaviour. What is more they were often reasonably effective, and, as they quickly pointed out, that saved taxpayers’ money. It was cheaper, for example, to help grumpy old Eric carry on living at home, as well as much nicer for him.
The star was Omar, an enthusiastic young Asian trainee who had the job of tracking the delinquent Mathew. Anyone else would have given up on this grunting, back-sliding, impulse-criminal and waster, but Omar hung on in there, determined to turn his charge’s life around. By the end of the 18 months of filming, Mathew had dropped out of the joinery course on to which Omar had got him, but he had also gone the longest period without committing an offence since he was ten years old. It was a triumph of a kind.
All this, sadly, is likely to be buried under the coverage of the shocking lead story. There were still calls for the programme not to be shown, and a feeling that perhaps Asian men were being fingered for the abuse by the mothers of two of the victims. But the “politically correct” social workers and those from other involved agencies made no bones about the fact that it has been mainly groups of Asian men who have been “grooming” girls for illegal sex, sometimes involving drugging, group-rape and the threat of extreme violence.
The problem is that, while many underage girls have consented to sex and do not see it as a problem, others have been terrorised into silence. Neither group is willing to press charges. It is the social workers, along with campaigning mothers, who have been pushing the police to help them sort out the problem.
Even if you admit a certain melodrama in Hall’s presentation, the statistics indicate that there is a serious problem. It raises extremely uncomfortable issues, both for West Yorkshire’s Muslim community and for the working-class white families whose daughters are, apparently, so easily victimised. No problem was ever solved by wishing it away. Both groups, it seems, need to do some deep soul-searching.
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Waldemar Januszczak seems to have entered Five’s half-hour art-slot as Tim Marlow’s evil twin. On Every Picture Tells a Story he told us that Edouard Manet’s dad, a distinguished judge, had impregnated the piano tutor whom Manet later married, and fathered her illegitimate son. Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe was calculated to expose the hypocrisy of both the French bourgeoisie and Renaissance art. As well as showing an illegal act of public indecency, it contains a symbolic reference to prostitution and mocks religious iconography. And the woman at the back has just had a pee in the river. Social dysfunction is not confined to Bradford then.