The Fourth Group
The hazards of helping people who won't help themselves
My apologies in advance for writing two bummer posts in a row; however, this is relevant to a current event, or at least inspired by it, so I have some excuse.
As you may or may not have heard, depending on your politics and preferred corner of the internet, Britain recently released the Rape Gang Inquiry Report, which is about as cheery as you would expect something entitled “the Rape Gang Inquiry Report” to be. Not going to get into all the details of this icky bombshell here1, because God knows my ordinary subject matter can be depressing enough.
But I do want to note the different reactions my wife and I had to the report. She said, “the purpose of a system is what it does,” and wondered why so many people were evidently so invested in being extravagantly cruel to the British working class. What was the purpose of this? Why were they so intent on punishing such a large chunk of people? The report describes a vast system of collusion, involving not only the perpetrators and their affiliates, but also police officers, social workers, schools, and basically all of the UK’s social safety net which is not restricted to helping the elderly.
My response was that I do not believe this is the result of a deliberate conspiracy to wreck the British working class. I believe this is only a monstrous side effect of choices which were made for other reasons2, and the extreme harm inflicted on all these girls was basically deemed to be an acceptable price to pay to the limited extent that it was consciously considered by anyone of importance at all.
My wife countered3 that she has seen the way the British intelligentsia think and speak of their working class, which is basically that they are something less than animals. I did not find that claim (that is, of the purported upper-class attitude) at all hard to believe4, but … then the argument/discussion/debate was cut short by the necessity of circumlocution to avoid letting our kids know the ghastly thing we were talking about, both of us having other things to do, my general aversion to extended arguments, etc.
That was a couple of days ago. I have since had some time to reflect. I read far more of the individual testimonies than my wife did, since I have a stronger stomach than she does for this sort of thing. I switched to skimming after the first dozen or so, but only because really they’re mostly quite similar, a general pattern with a few details changed here and there.
One of the most telling parts of that pattern, to me, is that every account I read described children who were already living pretty awful lives even before the gangs snared them. They’re from broken or abusive families, and were raised by mentally unstable people, drug addicts, or perverts. In all these accounts, something invariably happened to make them vulnerable to the gangs; the girls had a poor sense of self-respect or appropriate boundaries, and few if any adults they could trust. The rapists thus found them easy prey, and an initial pattern of love-bombing and “courtship” led to control by blackmail and threats of violence to the girls or their families. Various people who noticed and should have intervened assumed the girls were voluntarily taking older boyfriends.
This is obviously disgraceful and, based on my own experiences, I can easily understand why it happened.
I have long noted—don’t recall if I’ve mentioned it on here before—that hospitals commonly serve four types of patients (with some overlap between groups). The first three are obvious. We take care of old people, because aging breaks down the body and makes it more vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses, in addition to accumulated damage from the patient’s suboptimal lifestyle choices. We take care of the very unlucky: young people with weird genetic disorders, or victims of awful accidents. We take care of pregnant women, because pregnancy imposes a serious strain on the human body. And then there is the fourth group, the group which I describe, in my less charitable and more frustrated moments, as “people who suck at life.”
Mostly, this means alcohol or drugs; that’s usually the immediate cause of their showing up in our emergency room, though they can show up with gunshot wounds or injuries from fights as well. The category also includes inmates who got shanked in jail, and possibly the very morbidly obese depending how you look at it. You can argue that “sucking at life” is really a continuum of behavior, since many patients have ordinary, genteel dysfunctional behaviors like smoking or drinking just a little too much, eating bad things, not exercising, whatever. The damage adds up over time, and the bill comes due at the end5. But the defining trait of the fourth group is that they keep making obviously bad choices with obviously bad consequences and steadfastly refusing to learn from them. The ODer gets stable, leaves, takes another hit and comes right back, again and again and again.
This is relevant to the RGIR because—though I didn’t think of it this way until recently—the fourth group consists largely if not entirely of the poor, and more specifically the dysfunctionally poor6. Some of them might have started out comfortable or even wealthy, but you can’t keep playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes without taking serious damage to your pocketbook. Occasionally these people wind up outright homeless, but the majority will be marginally-functional human beings teetering on the bottom rung of the social ladder.
And we, as healthcare workers, pretty much all despise them. Old people can’t help being old; unlucky people can’t help bad luck; you can help being pregnant, but if we all avoided that the human race would go extinct in short order. And we like babies. We do not like manchildren. They can choose to get their lives in order7, and repeatedly decline to do so.
The RGIR’s girls are all obviously fourth-group. They are also obviously not, as minors, personally at fault for any of this8. But the people who enabled the abuse—not the rapists themselves, but the cops and the bureaucrats9—deal with the fourth group all the time. And dealing with them is, frankly, exhausting. This is not to excuse their behavior; it is patently absurd to suggest that a girl of thirteen can have a healthy sexual relationship with a man of twenty-eight, regardless of cultural factors. It cannot be denied that all this was the result of criminal negligence on a vast scale. But when I look at these people who have to deal with utterly appalling misbehavior all the time—who had to deal with the abuse and neglect that these girls grew up with before they met a single Muslim man—I can understand why they fucked up this badly. They’re me, but more so.
The report describes, though in passing, a social safety net which bluntly does not seem to work at all. In these accounts, homes for at-risk youth are consistently overworked and corrupt, social workers are apathetic and fatalistic about the futures of these little girls, and there are apparently no resources to make anything work properly. This is, again, very wrong. But again, I can see how it got that way.
Why are there so many dysfunctionally poor people in the first place? My guess (and it is only a guess, pure speculation) comes down to sorting effects. People who are unusually clever, ambitious, determined, or otherwise exemplary have better odds of climbing out of poverty. The remainder, sustained by the welfare state and possibly encouraged by perverse incentives within it, have kids and pass on their pathologies to them10. Rinse and repeat for generations, and you get a vast body of people who just cannot get their acts together. The social safety net turns into the trap at the base of your kitchen sink; instead of going entirely down the drain, all the grossness sits in place and festers11.
By the same logic, how do you get so many callous bureaucrats and cops? They evolve in parallel with the population they ostensibly serve. People who are unusually clever, ambitious, determined, or otherwise exemplary do not typically choose to spend their lives staring into the abyss of depressing and refractory social decay for a middling salary. I’m sure plenty of idealistic young people sign up to make a difference. They then either quit to do something else or have the idealism beaten out of them after the thirtieth time they have to decide whether this particular family shows enough signs of failure to justify sending the kids to foster care, where they might just get abused again but this time by strangers12.
Basically, what I’m envisioning here is the bottom of the middle class taking care of the bottom of the lower class, and getting burnt out, and neglecting even their most obvious duties to a shocking extent for the simple reason that it’s easier that way13. Nobody actually looks that closely at the bureaucrats for the same reason the bureaucrats don’t look that closely at the people they’re supposed to be taking care of: it’s depressing and you can’t fix it. And so, when the choice is to either report that immigrants appear to be running a rape gang—and likely get censured for being an obvious bigot who spreads phenomenally lurid stories—or just shrugging because in the unlikely event you stopped this the girl would, you assume, move on to a domestically-produced pimp-cum-drug-dealer in a couple of years, you elect to shrug. And pathological immigrants, in turn, notice that they can get away with outrageous things, and get bolder. There’s no need for central coordination or any deliberate evil intent by Machiavellian schemers at the highest levels. Only a few initial conditions are necessary for the problem to create itself.
It is still extremely wrong, and those who did wrong should of course face legal penalties. But I only have to deal with the fourth group a smallish percentage of the time, for short intervals. Mostly I have fundamentally reasonable if not friendly old COPDers to take care of, and understandable grumpiness from patients who are scared, tired, and hurting. Easy stuff, and people thank me for it, all the time14. If “judge not” means anything, it applies universally—even to malfeasant welfare drones you read about on the internet.
Briefly, a British government investigation found a pattern, going back decades, of young lower-class girls getting sexually exploited (to the point of actual gang rape and sometimes sexual torture) by predominantly Pakistani Muslim men operating in organized gangs, aided by a callous and indifferent welfare bureaucracy which typically blamed the girls and/or told them/their families to shut up lest they encourage ugly stereotypes about Muslims. The report estimates, based on extrapolation, that at least 250K mostly-white girls have fallen victim to this kind of predation over several generations. Obviously this is politically extremely sensitive, and I have never been to the UK in my life, so I am not going to weigh in on the matter directly, or correct policy responses to it. Not even going to speculate on its epistemic status; all of the following will proceed on the assumption that everything in the report is entirely true, which is not necessarily the case. I am merely reflecting on where my thoughts (based on my purely American experiences) went after reading and talking about it.
Political alliances with immigrants, a strong progressive taboo on anything that might foster prejudice against minorities, and the reactionary tendencies of working-class people everywhere making them unreliable allies for the modern Left. Probably among many other things. All speculative, since again, I’ve never set foot in the UK.
This is going from memory, with some details elided for brevity; apologies to my wife if I am inadvertently misrepresenting her position.
If only because you run into it on this side of the pond too.
I have some relatively minor health issues in my early forties from injudicious use of caffeine.
As opposed to the ordinary poor who don’t have a lot of cash for whatever reason but have the sense to live clean and stay out of trouble.
A rabbit-hole I will not be going down, but which should be noted: children learn from their elders, and damage done in childhood frequently contributes to bad choices in adulthood. Abused and neglected children abuse and neglect their own children, and the cycle repeats. One must assume that adults are in some sense personally responsible for their actions—certainly from a legal perspective—but I try to bear in mind, when looking at the fourth group, that these are very likely people who started out in a hole, one way or another, and possibly lacked the courage, resilience, or what-have-you to climb out. Sin is a burden and a disease, and we can’t all get better. There but for the grace of God go I.
I try to avoid the language of desert in arguments like this (and in general). Did so-and-so deserve this consequence or punishment for that action? What does deserving even mean? So far as I can tell, it is only the subjective point where our vindictive and merciful impulses meet in the middle for a compromise. Arguing over what policy will achieve which results may be frustrating sometimes, but at least it’s about objective realities. Arguing about what somebody actually deserves is a fight over intuitions; you might as well fight over which restaurant cooks the best burger. Not interested.
More specifically, the cops and bureaucrats who did not have a specific perverse incentive in belonging to the same abuse-prone Muslim subculture as the rapists themselves, or being their friends or collaborators, etc. This is considering only ordinary human apathy in the face of overwhelming horror.
I don’t like writing this way because it’s how eugenicists on the internet talk, and eugenics is vile. The image of God is not erased by any amount of mud thrown on top of it, and I don’t have the right to judge people themselves unfit or inferior, let alone succumb to the temptation to make modest proposals. One easily-overlooked lesson of the RGIR is that social engineering is very easy to get very wrong. At the same time, obvious pattern is obvious pattern, and I am not called to be oblivious.
As I’ve noted before, a vaguely similar phenomenon is responsible to for the perpetual re-accumulation of hopeless terminal cases in the ICU. Easy cases move quickly, hard cases pile up, and soon the hard cases outnumber the easy, because familial rights keep dead people from dying in much the same way that the welfare state delays utter and final self-destruction.
I spent a whole three months working for the Florida Department of Children and Families, back in my wayward recovering-English-Major days. My entire job was helping these mostly nice, but uneducated and frequently stupid, people navigate an incredibly complicated and confusing computerized benefits application process. Basically we were aware that there was a limited amount of pie to go around, and the process had no reason to make it easier for more people to claim a slice, and it was my job to ensure that as much pie as possible went to people from our part of Florida. This presumably in turn affected funding for my branch of the DCF. If I’d stayed and moved higher up in the system, I imagine I would be some combination of depressed, overweight, and alcoholic. Ten years in healthcare have not fed my natural self-destructive cynical tendencies half so much as those few months in the DCF.
Several years as a substitute teacher didn’t help. There’s nothing like actually rowing the social services galley to make a libertarian out of a fellow.
When they’re not actually corrupt and getting a take from the rapists, which evidently happened too. Mold grows in dark corners where nobody looks.
Patients, that is. Respiratory therapists tend to have a chip on their shoulder for getting no recognition compared to nursing. It’s true: nurses get all the awards and prizes and attention, because they have a more visible role. But the most heroic and underappreciated respiratory therapists are Time magazine’s people of the year compared to some career social worker who earnestly struggles every day to course-correct people who seem destined for the gutter.