I was reading a bedtime story to my daughter last night, we’re currently struggling through the prologue on The Fellowship of the Ring, I say struggling because, as much as I love the Hobbits, the 20 page history of them is not the book’s best parts, but she loves it, so we carry on.
At the end of each night’s instalment we have ‘2 minutes of talking’ which is for her get anything she wants off her mind before she goes to sleep, it’s never lasted less than about twenty minutes, but that’s 8 year olds. Last night she said “Daddy, I don’t like it when we have to do lockdowns at school in case a dog comes along. We have to lock the doors and our teacher reads a story to us until it’s safe to come back out again.” I replied that’s OK they’re just doing it to make sure they can keep you safe, she seemed a little unsure, but she fell asleep anyway.
As I left her room, I suddenly thought, hang on a minute, dogs can’t open doors, and I realised this isn’t about dogs at all.
Martyn’s Law came about after the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, where a terrorist called Salman Abedi killed 22 and injured hundreds more in a suicide attack. The law requires public venues to have proper emergency preparedness plans in place. The schools are doing what they’re told, and the dog is what they’re told to say.
Having procedures in place to deal with threats is indeed a good thing to do, but as I thought about my daughter, with this drill as part of a normal school day I realised how many light-years from normal this is.
They were told to say it’s a dog because we can’t say what it actually is, and that inability is how we end up needing these drills in the first place. The teachers know, the DfE knows, the government knows, we all know, and yet we pretend all the same. Calling it a dog doesn’t fix anything, it just means we don’t have to say the word. There is nothing wrong with telling a child that dangerous people exist and that we want to keep them safe.
At the risk of slipping into nostalgia, the 80s were the peak of terrifying children about the real world. The railway safety videos were horrifying and we had public safety campaigns like ‘stranger danger’. It was appropriate and useful. At some point we seem to have stopped protecting children in order to protect the adults from having to face reality.
This distortion of reality creates further problems upstream: replacing the real threat with a dog is the same thing that’s happened in the name of ‘community cohesion’.
Children do not need to be protected from dangerous ideas, they need to be protected from danger. The world is dangerous and if we can name the danger we can understand it and face it.
While I was writing this, something peculiar happened. After the meningitis B outbreak in Kent I had at least one email a day from my daughter’s school updating on the situation - so far, so sensible. The advice from the government was clear and precise, specifically naming the problem and exactly what to do about it.
Why is it OK to name meningitis but not terrorism? Could we not substitute in ‘a bad smell’ to protect our children from the truth?
The difference is simple. Neither dogs nor Meningitis will punish you at the ballot box.
At bedtime tonight we discussed meningitis, its causes, how it spreads and what to do about it, she got into bed satisfied that the grown-ups knew what they were doing and she’d be alright. There doesn’t seem to be an antibiotic for terrorism but perhaps naming it might be a good start.
As we finally get into the story of the Fellowship of the Ring, the comparison between Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Britain is striking. Both have mortal danger. For the Hobbits, the Shire was paradise and, while they could, they ignored Mordor, but when the danger came, they faced it. We should be more Hobbit.