Two child-related incidents

There are two big chunks of child-related outrage in our newspapers today (and tomorrow, I’d guess). The first is the story of a woman with learning difficulties who fled the country with her baby daughter because the local social services department argued that, effectively, she was too thick to bring the kid up. She has now been tracked down and the child taken away. There was outrage, on her behalf, when she fled and there is even more now she has been caught. How can they do this, the inhuman politically correct monkeys in the social services? It’s her human right to have a kid, etc etc.

The other chunk of outrage has been occasioned by those two young boys sentenced by a Sheffield court to an indeterminate spell under lock and key for having tortured two younger boys. The perpetrators were eleven and ten years old when they inflicted the most appalling injuries on the other kids, the details too grim to repeat here. Other stuff has come out since the verdict; the two boys were perpetually wild, violent and destructive and made local residents’ lives a misery, even before their torture spree. We also learn that their home life was violent and chaotic and that the mother was, reportedly, utterly incapable of looking after them, instilling discipline providing them with a moral code and so on.

Two chunks of hermetically sealed outrage, then, with no conceivable link between them.