From My Favourite Shrunken Hearted Shrink

This Telegraph article makes little sense.  Dalrymple is using a single case to illustrate his own problem with these kind of cases being dealt with by the courts at all.  (Does he think that perhaps these cases should not be the business of the legal system but of his own specialism: psychiatry?)  Should we never require psychologically vulnerable people to take the stand?  Does that include perpetrators?  And surely the job of ensuring that witnesses are psychologically robust enough to take the stand are members of his own medical specialism: psychiatry.

And yet the main target of his criticism is (as always) the police. He mentions the CPS, of course, but only in passing.  It is the CPS who decide whether or not to launch a prosecution.  A casual glance at police internet fora reveals that the decisions made by the CPS are often a source of much consternation among rank and file members of the police force.

I do not believe I have every seen so many non-sequiturs and red herrings in a single op-ed piece.

What for example is this supposed to mean?

‘The police and CPS, moreover, have been heavily criticised for the low rate of conviction in cases of rape and sexual abuse, often by the very people who, in other circumstances, deny the efficacy or justice of punishment.

Why, after all, should the punishment of sexual abusers have a deterrent effect, but not that of burglars?’

Can he name the people to whom he refers in this passage?

And then of course comes the kind of evidence that Dalrymple relies on to support his often ill thought out theories: a single piece of anecdotal evidence:

‘I recall, for example, the case of a man who was wrongly accused of rape by a woman; the prosecution not only failed to prove the allegation beyond reasonable doubt, but the defence proved beyond reasonable doubt that it was false.

Yet after his release from prison on remand he was treated by those around him as if he were guilty, on the grounds that there was no smoke without fire.’

It is high time that Dalrymple learnt something from the methodology of the historian: that academic discipline has no problem with anecdotal evidence. It does insist, however, on the use of multiple sources.

Incidentally, the good doctor is back in Yeovil again.

He devoted an entire book to that small town in Somerset:

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/02/05/a-program-of-integrated-frivolity/

Aimed at Americans, a fact made all too clear by the following: ‘Recently I stayed a few weeks in a small town in Somerset, England called Yeovil, pronounced Yoville.’ (because they are evidently too stupid to work that out for themselves.)  I’m guessing that Wifey Dalrymple is there delivering ECT to the elderly mentalists of ‘the most important town in Somerset’.  She is a geriatric psychiatrist (in more ways than one).  I’m also guessing she’ll be working for a while yet. Fourteen years of service, even in the publicly funded NHS, doesn’t yield a terribly generous pension. Poor old lady hitched her wagon to the wrong star there. I’m thinking maybe an internet wide collection may be in order.

Addendum: This is the place in which Dalrymple acted as a kind of indentured servant to the NHS for fourteen years (some kind of record, surely.)

 

There Really Is Nothing New Under the Sun

‘Young mother down at Smithfield
5 am, looking for food for her kids
In her arms she holds three cold babies
And the first word that they learned was “please”

These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave
“Remember what I told you
If you were of the world they would love you”‘

Black Boys On Mopeds, Sinead O’Connor

In the early nineties I was taking my A Levels and living with my parents in a 1930s semi detached pebble dashed house in the suburbs of Birmingham.  I also had some pretty severe psychiatric problems (an eating disorder, depression etcetera).  The house in which we lived was one of those ex-council houses that so many people enjoy sneering at, forgetting that their inhabitants are only there because they were desperate to be a part of Maggie Thatcher’s ‘Home Owning Democracy’.

Most of the neighbours were ‘decent’, reasonable, hard-working people but there was a large family whose children pretty much terrorized the entire street.  They would smash the wind screens of cars, verbally intimidate people as they walked past, attack the vulnerable.  I was sexually assaulted by one of them.  They targeted our next door neighbour.  He was a retired, elderly gentleman living in the upstairs flat of the house next door.  His garden was at the front of the house.  He worked hard on it, planting flowers and vegetables.  Eventually he gave up because these kids would trespass on his land and simply wreck it.  My father tried to intervene on several occasions but eventually he gave up too.  The reason?  On the final occasion the eldest ‘child’, a boy who was taller than he was, shoved my father.  My father, reacting instinctively, shoved him back. The police were called and my father was told that if he did anything like that again then he would be the one who would be prosecuted.

WTF are people getting out of pretending that this is anything new?