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Career-learning
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REAL
LIVES - turning points
Karen
Listen to Karen, sitting with her back to the lift-shaft wall, listless,
aimless, hopeless. ... She has not been to school regularly since she
was 11, and she is now 14. When she was seven her father started using
heroin and crack cocaine and he got her mother on to it, too. Until then,
life had been OK. They had a nice house, there was food in the kitchen,
she was going to school. But the mother and father slid downhill fast,
taking Karen and her three younger sisters with them.
Her dad used to take her out thieving. She used to knock on the door,
a little girl with gaps in her teeth, and if there was someone in, she
would ask for a glass of water and run along; if not, her dad would smash
a window and they would get inside and take whatever they could. She got
arrested for that eventually, when she was 11, and spent 36 hours in a
cell. By that time she had lost sight of normal life. She says there was
no food in the house, and to feed her sisters as well its herself she
would go and borrow money off friends or eat at someone else's house or
steal things from shops or scavenge in rubbish bills. They had no light
or heat in the house. Her mum and dad just did drugs and watched time
go by.
She became the stand-in mother, feeding and caring for the three younger
ones. At first, when she stopped going to school, she still took the others,
but then it got too much and so they all stopped. From time to time the
welfare officer used to come round and bang on the door. And Karen says
her mum told them to keep quiet and then the welfare officer would go
away. If their were letters about it, they just ignored them. Eventually
her dad h got sent to jail - four years for robbery - and her mum was
left on her own with four children and a heroin habit. And that's the
way it still is now.
So why does she not want to sit in school? Because she is too sure there
is no point, too scared to be caught out failing, too determined to advertise
her indifference, too angry. and too cynical - too emotionally damaged.
When they are not up here in the block, Karen and the others spend most
of their time in some old railway arches which have been converted into
it kind of refuge for young people. They are run by a psychotherapist
called Camila Batmanghelidjh who was taken to court by her building society,
because she stopped paying her mortgage and used the money to set up this
day club for the kids under the arches....
The morning is past the afternoon is wearing on and, up in the block,
where Batmanghelidjh is not in charge, finally they have found something
to do. They are smoking hash. Batmanghelidjh knows they do it. She knows
it is part of the daily routine, for as long as they can afford the hash.
And worse.
She has one 12-year-old who had rocks of crack cocaine found in his
pocket. She has urged them not to it. But she is not about to hammer them
for it. She knows why it is happening: "they use cannabis to control
their moods." And why do they do that? Because just about nobody
else is doing anything to help them with those moods.
Nick Davies
"The Tower block children for whom school has no point"
The Guardian,
10th July, 2000, pp. 1 & 6
see also Nick Davies (2000)
The School Report
London: Vintage.
Extracted with permission.
Copyright Nick Davies, 2000.
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