Dark Heart: The Shocking Truth about Hidden Britain
By Nick Davies
Chatto & Windus. 308 pages (hardback). £16.99
In 1993, Nick Davies, a journalist with The Guardian, came upon two small boys standing in a fairground in Nottingham. He got them to tell him their story, and discovered the hidden world of child prostitutes in the Forest area of Nottingham.
Between 1994 and 1996, Davies investigated the 'Hidden Britain' of the cities, and council estates where for many people the 'norms' of life are chaotic and frightening. Dark Heart aims to reveal to complacent 'Middle England' the sordid reality of life in the 'other England'.
The frightening increase in child prostitution
There have always been children who for whatever reason have turned to prostitution. But Davies found that all the evidence points to something new happening in the 1990s: 'The sheer scale of it, as if there were some invisible escalator tipping an endless supply of children onto the streets.' (p.27). And what is new is the total lack of any concept of right and wrong, a great vacuum as far as any sort of morality is concerned. 'These aren't child prostitutes in the classic Victorian sense, pushed out onto the streets by sheer want of food and shelter, selling their bodies simply because they have no other means of survival . . . these children are surrounded by offers of help. They are virtually being ambushed by policemen, social workers, church workers, voluntary helpers, all begging to rescue them, to give them homes and food and clothing and education. In truth, these street children are unusually rich in material terms, pulling in hundreds of pounds a week in untaxed cash . . .' (p.31). There is something different about these 'damaged, deprived, depraved and delinquent children' (p.31). In all his communication with them, Davies found a terrifying toughness, a seeming inability to feel anything. He gives many examples of children being brutally treated from a very young age, and through sheer self-defence becoming hardened to suffering. They then have no conscience about inflicting pain on others. Victims of their crimes testify that the youngster 'looked through me' or 'looked at me as if I were a lump of meat'. A section of the younger generation has effectively been dehumanised.
Davies' solution: increased material well-being
Davies paints an almost unbearably bleak picture of the reality of life in Britain today for many people. He describes not only the world of child prostitution, but also something of the violent reality of life for many older prostitutes, and something of the effects of the drug culture.
The major weakness of this work is that it is anecdotal, few hard statistics are provided. Moreover, the message is deterministic and hopeless: products of abusive backgrounds are bound to repeat the cycle. Relative poverty (a treacherous term) will inevitably result in moral degradation. The cause of the depravity of Hidden Britain, argues Davies, is poverty. 'It is not that poor people are bad . . . poverty is bad for people. It brutalises them. It has produced a mutant society in which, after all the physical and emotional and social damage which has been inflicted on the poor, it becomes clear that there is also a deeper damage - something that strikes them in the core, robbing them of their humanity. For want of a better way of describing it, they have also suffered a spiritual damage.' (p.285). Davies blames the Thatcher years: unemployment, cuts in welfare, the widening gap between rich and poor. Most of all, he blames Charles Murray, and the theory of 'welfare dependency' which has 'polluted' Labour thinking (pp.303-304). So what Davies admits is a spiritual or moral problem is to be solved by economic means. More welfare, more employment: a fiscal policy which aims to redistribute income.
But money in and of itself does not touch the problem of moral depravity. To this moral or spiritual problem, Davies provides no answer. A common factor in his stories of abused children seems to be the rapidly changing boyfriends of their unmarried mothers, yet there is the refusal to stigmatise illegitimacy, and nothing of the need for governments to stop penalising marriage (as fiscal and welfare policies have effectively done over the past 20 years, and continue to do).
What about individual responsibility?
In contrast, Charles Murray (the author Davies vilifies) argues that one of the causes of the moral vacuum at the 'Dark Heart' of Britain is family breakdown.(1) He refuses to accept that economic poverty inevitably results in moral depravity: he maintains the conviction that moral responsibility involves judging certain forms of behaviour as unacceptable. He describes an 'underclass' characterised by illegitimacy, violent crime, and drop-out from the labour force.
Welfare provisions have made the mother-child unit a viable one: the need for responsible fathering has been removed. The way the fiscal and welfare system interrelates has contributed to the breakdown of the family and the work ethic. Conservative government policy in effect undermined the virtues they professed to believe in. The well-intentioned reforms of the current Labour government which aim to provide more adequate childcare and employment for single mothers will have the same negative effect.(2)
Increased welfare exacerbates problems
Leo McKinstry (assistant to Harriet Harman and a Labour councillor in Islington before he resigned from the Labour Party) has provided a devastating counter-blast to the idea that giving out more in welfare is the answer to the scenario painted in Dark Heart. McKinstry's Turning the Tide: a personal manifesto for modern Britain (3) is a compelling description of the amorality of opinion-formers, the present culture of grievance, the breakdown of belief in authority, the breakdown of the family, and the increase in crime. He argues that the 'real disgrace of 18 years of Tory rule' was the increasing tax burden on low income working families in order to subsidise what was, in reality, ever-increasing expenditure on welfare (p.236). From first-hand experience as a Labour councillor, he savages the 'morally degraded nature of our benefits system' (p.231). 'The bloated modern welfare system is one of the prices we pay for our infantalised society. In its relentless growth, it has both encouraged and reflected the breakdown of our moral values . . . In many families, the state has taken over the roles of breadwinner, father, rent-payer and childminder . . . social security does not free its 'clients' from poverty . . . it traps them in it. By a combination of benefit withdrawals and low tax thresholds, our welfare state discourages people from taking jobs.' (p.231). This welfare dependency is a reality. It is not saying that poor people want to live on the dole rather than work. It is saying that the way that taxes and benefits mesh together has led to an absurd situation where taking a job involves the loss of so many other benefits that it is not worth it. McKinstry shows that far from Davies's scenario of brutal welfare cuts, in reality, 'welfare spending has risen spectacularly in the last two decades, more than doubling in real terms. But a few still regard the present 'sprawling welfare structure' as 'so sacred' that 'the only change they can ever contemplate is the up-rating of benefits' (p.233).
Easy complacency
The analysis of McKinstry points to the weakness of the solutions offered by Davies in Dark Heart. But that is not to detract from the importance of Davies' work. It is all too easy to be complacently cut off from the sordid realities of life in 'Hidden Britain'. We do need to wake up to the gross needs of what seems to be a lost generation. And as we see the great need, we do not discount economic factors. It is right to pray for and work for just legislation and reduction in unemployment. It is right for churches to have programmes of very practical help for the needy. But moral degradation demands more than economic provision. During the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th, there was a powerful revival movement in America where evangelicals reached out in all manner of practical ways into the worst slums and also took the gospel.(4) That is the need today.
1. Murray, Charles, The Emerging British Underclass, Institute of Economic Affairs, Health and Welfare Unit, 2 Lord North Street, London SW1P 3LB, 1990. Under-class: the Crisis Deepens, IEA (as above), 1994.
2. Phillips, Melanie, The Sex Change State, Social Market Foundation, 1997.
3. McKinstry, Leo. Turning the Tide: a personal Manifesto for Modern Britain, Michael Joseph, London, 1997 (paperback).
4. See, for example: Magnuson, Norris. Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work 1865-1920, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, USA. 1977.
