AMONG the more extreme reactions to the Shannon Matthews case has been a call for all feckless young women on deprived housing estates to be denied the right to have children.
You may think I'm joking, but I'm not. The idea – first mooted by a maverick Tory councillor in Kent way back in March – gained currency after Shannon's mother Karen and Michael Donovan, uncle of Karen's former partner, were convicted of her kidnappi
ng last week.
Suddenly, radio phone-ins were packed with social commentators endorsing mass sterilisation as a means of breaking the cycle of deprivation they believed was to blame for the abuse and kidnap of the nine-year-old girl from Dewsbury in West Yorkshire. Yes, it's untested, unorthodox, unethical, they said, but how else are we to stop teenage inadequates producing squads of kids they haven't the foggiest idea how to care for?
As nonsensical as the proposition sounds (Who would police it? What criteria would they use? And would it apply to the Ulrika Jonssons of this world as well as the Karen Matthews?) you can see where its proponents are coming from. After all, when a child is drugged, kidnapped and imprisoned at her mother's behest, you can't just shrug your shoulders and move on: Something Has To Be Done.
It's easy to mock, but isn't that really what we all want when confronted by a crime of the proportions of the one committed by Karen Matthews – to draw meaning from it; learn from it; act on it and make sure it never happens again? The urge to impose order on chaos is a normal human impulse. And Matthews' crime is enormous, not so much in terms of the damage she has inflicted (in that sense she doesn't begin to compare with the likes of Fred West, Myra Hindley or Peter Tobin) but in the way it upsets the natural order and defies all sociological or psychological explanation. How could any mother put her own daughter through 24 days of physical and emotional torment on the off-chance she might get a reward for her safe recovery; and what on earth convinced her and Donovan they could pull off such a stupid, half-baked stunt? We need answers as much for our own sanity as to make any profound social point.
It is this compulsion to make sense of all the craziness that drives us to find patterns where there are none. So Matthews becomes not an unaccountable aberration, but a symbol of broken Britain; the hapless victim of generations of deprivation or the inevitable product of our dependency culture, depending on your political perspective.
And yet if any story served to demonstrate the perils of trying to draw sweeping cultural conclusions on the basis of a missing child and a couple of press conferences, this is it.
I don't think I ever remember a case that so messed with the way we interpret what we see in front of us. As the tale unfolded, it confirmed and then subverted our assumptions, before finally abandoning us in unfamiliar territory.
To begin to understand public reaction to Shannon Matthews' kidnapping, you have to view it through the prism of Madeleine McCann, whose abduction 10 months earlier is said to have inspired the whole sordid plan. Because so many people already saw the McCann case as a signifier of class prejudice (Madeleine got more attention than other missing children because her parents were good-looking and well-off) they were geared up to view the Matthews family as the other half of the equation.
A handful of journalists may have questioned Matthews' parenting skills and complicated family set-up; they may have used words like "feckless" and " feral" and portrayed her as an archetypal member of the country's growing underclass, but the consensus seemed to be that what the mother of seven really represented was the way in which the calamities that befall the underprivileged are regarded as less important than those which affect the wealthy.
That position became untenable when it became clear Matthews was implicated in her disappearance. So instead she became a symbol of everything that's wrong with Britain today; of social fragmentation; sexual irresponsibility and moral decline, when in fact she's nothing of the sort: she's just one truly dysfunctional woman with a fragile grip on reality.
This is not to say we shouldn't analyse the Matthews case to see if lessons can be learned. As it emerges Shannon was on the at-risk register five years before her kidnap, it is important to establish if child protection procedures should be improved. Should social services have acted more assertively on information they received from neighbours and teachers that the Matthews children were being neglected? And just as importantly, what happened to the psychological report that showed Karen had difficulty "putting her children's interests before her own"?
But it doesn't follow that as a result of the Matthews case all mothers who have a succession of children to different fathers should be regarded as potential drug-dealers and kidnappers or candidates for sterilisation; any more than it follows that we should outlaw divan beds because they're big enough to imprison a small child in. Any attempt to draw universal significance from the Shannon Matthews case is doomed to failure, and is likely to tempt the most rational of us to call for irrational action.
Dewsbury may be a troubled estate with more than its fair share of problems. But only Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan thought the answer to those problems was to fake a little girl's abduction and claim the £50,000 reward money. Why should anyone else carry the burden of their guilt?
