As I’ve often said, I very much believe the children are our future. Teach them well, I’ve often said, and thereafter watch them lead the way. I also very much believe when the night falls the loneliness calls. And that you should give me one moment in time.
Look around the world of social work, you see how undereducation knackers people almost completely. How adults struggle with the basics of reading and writing, how they work shitty jobs or no jobs at all, how their confidence takes a dive, how they don’t value education because it did nothing for them, how they pass that on to their kids. Look around the world of the rest of the world, you’ll see how undereducation knackers everything almost completely and how male dickheads are stopping millions of girls getting an education. UNICEF agrees with me here, as it so often does, pointing to the links with child labour, sexual exploitation, the spread of HIV and AIDS, child mortality and other awfulnesses. Get girls into education, you grow educated women. That’ll be why the dickhead men aren’t so into it.
You’ll recall how Malala Yousafzai is a 15-year-old girl from the Swat District of Pakistan. Back in 2009, when she was 11 and the Taliban were banning girls’ education and blowing up their schools, she blogged for the BBC’s Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl under the pseudonym of Gul Makai. She wrote about how her dad’s school was slowly emptying, how her English teacher couldn’t make it in because of a curfew, how she got death threats on the way home. Clever as she was, brave as she was, she gave up her anonymity to feature in Adam Ellick and Irfan Ashraf’s documentary, Class Dismissed, which, you should be warned, includes shots of corpses left in the streets after the Taliban was done with them. Malala did a few interviews speaking out against the Taliban’s repression, got known for it, and in October 2011 was nominated for the Children’s Peace Prize. In October 2012, as she sat on her school bus after finishing an exam, she was shot in the head by some Taliban prick. Their spokesman called her activism “a new chapter of obscenity” and threatened the media for its unsympathetic accounts of their attempted assassination of a schoolgirl because what they lack in humanity they also lack in self-awareness.
Malala survived. The single bullet passed through her head and neck and stopped in her shoulder, not far from her spine. She was in a coma for days, passing through hospitals in Pakistan on her way to a specialist place in England. She regained consciousness after her arrival there and started her long recovery. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and last month returned to education, starting her GCSEs in a school in Birmingham on her way to becoming a doctor and/or politician. She is so many kinds of awesome you can’t keep count of it all.
In her honour, and working with her and her family, Vital Voices Global Partnership set up the Malala Fund to campaign for and enable girls’ education. In April, Malala announced the fund’s first grant, paying for the education of 40 girls in the Swat Valley. It was, she said, the happiest moment of her life. I assume being named as the Chazza of the Month bumps it to second place. Like she says in that video up there, “Let us turn the education of 40 girls into 40 million girls”. You can help her with that by donating to the fund as close to immediately as you can manage.
When last we met I was banging on about stag nights and homophobic banter, the two intertwined more closely than David Cameron’s tongue and the devil’s dirty bumhole. There was a lot of it kicking about and much of it incredibly immature. I never would have believed the word ‘gaylord’ was still in use, or that if it was it would be used so often, or that if it was and was being used often it would be by full-grown adults, or that if it was and they were they’d be using it on a non-ironic basis. But that’s the thing with homophobia: It’s basically everywhere.
At the stag it was on the level of supposedly non-homophobic name calling, where people make out it’s not homophobia at all, where objects or concepts are gay if you don’t like them, where people are fags if you think they’re stupid, where homosexuality is a byword for badness. Morons like this. Chris Moyles liked this, spreading his family-friendly homophobia to millions of listeners because he’s a cock. That earned him Stonewall’s Bully of the Year award. Like they said, ‘Chris Moyles is not helping young LGBT people struggling to come out through his comments’. But it’s not just charmless ex-DJs who indulge in this shit. A teacher in Mrs Zero’s old school used to call stuff gay to sound down with the kids. The straight kids. Presumably the gay kids and the bisexual kids and the kids who hadn’t quite figured themselves out were less keen to get down with him on account of him being an arsehole.
If you know anything about wedges you’ll recognise that as the thin end of one, the other end being homophobic threats, homophobic violence and vandalism, homophobic murder, homophobic politics, religions and laws backed up by a homophobic media. Back in 2008, Stonewall, the campaigning charity that looks to even things up a bit, ran a survey of homophobic crimes in the UK. It reckoned one in five lesbians and gay men had been on the receiving end of a homophobic incident or hate crime in the preceding three years, that one in six of these incidents involved physical assault, that one in eight involved unwanted sexual contact. Occasionally these things make the headlines. There was the guy in Edinburgh beaten by four men and a woman. There were the two men in Coventry punched in the face and kicked in the chest because one of them looked wrong to their attacker. There was Stuart Walker, murdered. And although the world seems to be getting its shit together and it seems like every generation looks back at the last thinking it was in the stone age, the Stonewall survey found people aged 18-24 were far more likely to be abused and harassed than were old people, and that young men seemed to be the most common perpetrators. As level as society’s getting – which isn’t very – it’s headed wrong here.
A look around the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill tells you how the world’s working, people talking about ‘gay marriage’ as opposed to ‘marriage equality’ like people are asking for something special as opposed to what the straight part of the world’s always had. Without the bill, straight people getting married is like people playing golf in a country club that doesn’t allow Jews. A look at the bill’s debate tells you everything you need to know about the people working to keep it that way. People like David Burrowes who reckons “the state is trying to divide and rule the meaning of marriage”. People like Ian Paisley who reckons marriage equality is killing heterosexual marriages in Spain and Portugal. People like Tony Baldry, who chipped in some wisdom from Christianity and Islam to say how much the idea sucked. People like Roger Gale, who reckoned the bill was almost Orwellian, that same-sex marriage had the whiff of Alice in Wonderland about it and who made a helpful reference to incest. Twats, all of them. The bill got through, obviously, and progress is on its way. But these poisonous people still think these poisonous things, and millions of poisonous people agree with them.
We need a Chazza of the Month that’s going to fix all this. A charity that campaigns for equality in law, that points to inequalities in politics and the media, a charity that works in schools to help gay and lesbian kids with what they’re going through and shouldn’t be, that tells other kids to not be assholes, that will make stag nights of the future halfway bearable for people who aren’t galactic twats. I’m thinking maybe Stonewall. They take money right here.
One thing I’ll tell you: No one gets into social work for the laughs. I’m in about seven months now and it’s been a relentless parade of misery and awfulness, a daily dose of systemic dickery and individual flaws and failure. It’s been punctuated by the occasional bit of progress and improvement, the odd bit of reason to think sometimes it works. I think maybe you have to be in a long time to get enough success to keep you going, to feel you’ve made enough of a difference often enough it counters all the times people charge into their miseries and all you can do is write about it. I sound a little down on social work, and on life. A week-long child protection course will do that to you.
The past four days I’ve been holed up in a training centre, me and 14 other newbies too fresh to be cynical, too new to shrug anything off easily. Professional detachment protects people. We haven’t got it figured yet. We’ve spent four days talking over cases of child abuse. Talking over kids beaten and burned and tortured and poisoned, kids unwashed and hungry, kids seeing the world with adult eyes, seeing their parents drunk and high. Kids touched where they shouldn’t be, kids made to touch people where they shouldn’t, kids raped and told to keep quiet. We’ve been talking these lives over, feeling shitty about them. They’ve been living them; we’ve been feeling extra shitty, like it’s not our place to feel anything, like our sympathy’s an indulgence.
Today we worked through a stack of serious case reviews, cases where children died and workers didn’t see enough to see it coming or do enough to stop it happening. Peter Connolly, murdered at 17 months. Kennedy McFarlane, killed at three years old, drugged and beaten by her mum’s boyfriend. Caleb Ness, killed at 11 weeks, tiny and so thoroughly helpless you can’t figure it fully, his life so short, his tragedy so huge you can’t find its edges. Victoria Climbié, burned and beaten, chained and tortured and killed at 8 years old, let down so completely we should be ashamed for about the next thousand generations.
Get through tomorrow, I’ll take on these cases myself. It’s work I want to do. It’s mildly terrifying. 65 million people in the country, all behind closed doors, all with their curtains drawn, all working to keep their secrets. Children scattered over the country, scared and living with God knows what. Me with my questions. Me trying to find where the truth is.
We need as many eyes as possible, as many routes to the truth as possible, as many routes out for as many children as possible. The NSPCC’s the Chazza of the Month. They keep Childline going, taking 650,000 calls and online contacts last year. They run the Parents Under Pressure programme, getting in about children whose parents use drugs or alcohol, working to keep the danger from them. They run Minding the Baby, making weekly visits to babies born to young and vulnerable parents, kids themselves who haven’t got enough figured to know how not to do harm. They’re campaigning their assess off for children’s rights and researching their assess off to find better ways of doing things. They’ve got a ton of work going. A bit of cash their way will help.
Hell of a week. The lunches have been good. They did soup on Monday. It was cold outside.
Generally I prefer not to write about current scandals and upsets, I prefer not to jump on media bandwagons or scrap around in tabloid hubbubs. Go too far in that direction you’ll find yourself with a site people think of as relevant, topical and interesting. But these past few weeks, with the death of Jacinta Saldanha, I’ve had suicide on my mind.
You’ll be aware how a while back a couple members of a family with a flimsy claim to an anachronistic position of limited power and unlimited privilege announced they’re expecting a baby. And how millions of nosey people with nothing in the way of class consciousness were interested. And how the media went berserk with nothing articles about how the future-sprog will one day wear the world’s most expensive hat while the rest of us go about our business. And how a couple of lame-ass DJs made a lame-ass prank call to remind us how prank calls stopped being funny about two minutes before Alexander Graham Bell was born. And how one of the nurses they called gave out a bit of information she shouldn’t have and justified the existence of every Data Protection Officer the world over and their end-of-days lecturing in every organisation everywhere. And how one of the nurses killed herself, and how the world stopped for a second and shook its head.
What does this tell us about the role of the media? About its obsession with the royal family? About prank calls and ratings-grabs and that time we upset Andrew Sachs? Nothing. It tells us nothing we didn’t know already. It’s what it tells us about life and mental health and suicide that matters. It tells us how life hangs by the thinnest of threads and how life is a pair of scissors ready to cut itself to fuck.
Suicide’s a big killer of people. The Samaritans reckon a million people around the world die every year by suicide, with more than 5,000 in the UK. That’s enough to touch most of us. I know people who’ve tried to kill themselves and I’ve known people who’ve managed it and I know people who’ve lost people. And it’s an awful shitfest of tragicness, with all the grief that comes with losing someone with added layers of guilt and failure and lost opportunities and embarrassment and feeling looked at and judged. There are reasons for suicide; mostly not the ones we imagine afterwards. Like The Samaritans say, it’s a complicated thing. It’s not often the result of a single problem, more a bunch of problems bound together. There are problems that seem unmanageable and unhappiness that seems intolerable and maybe is. But suicide’s a permanent solution to a temporary set of problems, and it seems survivors are mostly glad to find themselves alive, glad they survived the decision they made. And it’s around the decision point, when someone’s giving it serious thought, us Zeroes can get stuck in and be all awesome and life saving and that.
Like yer regular first aid, which helps save lives and fill blog entries, we have mental health first aid that teaches the art of suicide intervention. I did a course on this a few years back and a refresher a few weeks back and have had to use it once or twice. I’d be linking all over the place here so you could look into it yourself but it seems the companies who run the training would rather get paid than give out their ideas for free. This, then, comes from a memory known for being fairly lousy:
First, we have to be on the lookout for people who seem down or distant or maybe different to how they seem usually. We have to have a conversation, using a spot of tact and subtlety, to find how lousy they’re feeling. We have to ask a hard question and we have to use the S word: “Are you thinking of suicide?” Anything less than that leaves us and them open to misinterpretation. We have to ask their reasons for wanting to die, respect them and not be afraid to talk about them, not jump in with how wrong they are. We have to ask their reasons for staying alive, figuring most people aren’t a hundred percent sold on the idea of dying. We have to bring those reasons out and big them up. We have to get an idea of their plan, if they’re thinking vaguely about not being around any more or if they’ve bought tablets ready to swallow or picked out the bridge they’re going from. We have to disrupt the plan with them, agree to get shot of the tablets or find a way to resist the temptation of the bridge if only for a few days. We have to get them to help that knows what it’s doing like we’d get someone to a hospital after they collapse, and we have to follow up and see how they’re doing once the crisis is over.
There are people thinking about suicide. It’s on us to find them and help them. In the meantime, The Samaritans are the Chazza of the Month. Christmas is a rough time for some people, and a bit of your money will give them someone to talk to.
You’ll have noticed I have a kind of love/hate relationship with fundraising, a relationship typified more by hate than by love on account of how I can’t fucking stand it. I can’t stand it on two counts: first, because I want you to give me your money without having to do anything for it; and second, because it brings out the inner twat in otherwise tedious people.
Ten years into fundraising I’ve run out of ideas. I ran out of ideas two years into fundraising, the last eight being a mash up of frustration, repetition and boredom. Quite why I have to entertain, amaze or otherwise dazzle people into giving me money when everyone knows the world is screwed in seventeen different directions is a mystery and injustice second only in size to the repeated casting of Madonna in otherwise professional feature films. I shouldn’t have to tap dance on an alligator’s left tit to remind you how people are starving in the world or promise you a nice day’s skydiving to get you off your arse. Fundraising should require nothing more than me standing in the street with a sandwich board saying “Seriously, though” and people dropping wads of cash into a skip in an acknowledgement of how other people need it more.
And then there’s the twat factor. Here we have Steve from Accounts getting his legs waxed because he’s ker-azy. Here we have Sandra from HR wearing deely boppers for 24 consecutive hours because she’s mad, her. Here we have Nicholas Witchell doing the can can for the 18th consecutive year because he’s Pudsey’s bitch. It’s why I was embarrassed by thoseruns the past couple of years in spite of the ten grand they brought in and it’s why I’m currently sick of testosterone-fuelled pube wranglers banging on about Movember. Even though I’m doing it, having caved in to what was a pretty minor bit of office-based peer pressure.
Movember, you’ll recall, is an annual fundraiser and awareness raiser for testicular and prostate cancer. It started in Australia in 2004 with a handful of men growing a few facefuls of moustaches to raise a few quid for men’s health charities. It’s absolutely raced away in the eight years since, hitting America, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Spain and the UK. Here we have a full on proper Butterfly, a small idea taking off and doing a substantial amount of goodery.
It’s a blokey bit of gimmickry that amounts to the facial hair equivalent of dick measuring, but it’s a necessary bit of gimmickry being as how men are often quite stupid about looking after their health, particularly if it’s in or around the toilet area. Movember is a big manly bit of manliness that gets in about the macho posturing that stops men getting checked. And they should get checked, on account of how many people are dying. NHS Choices reckons 36,000 men get hit with prostate cancer every year, accounting for a quarter of all male cancer diagnoses. 10,000 men die every year as a result. And yet, says the NHS, it can be cured if it’s caught and treated in the early stages. Likewise testicular cancer. It’s less common, with just over 2,000 diagnoses a year, but it too can be treated when caught early. And survival rates are way up there, kicking about the 95 percent area. The problem, of course, is that these particular cancers are not always caught early because they’re found in the balls and via the bumhole and some men aren’t up for doctors poking around their bits. That’s a shame because their embarrassment is killing them in a grotesque demonstration of Darwinian theory. That’s what Movember is looking to change.
In spite of my cynicism and other people’s twattishness it’s a cracking fundraiser, Movember’s official site reckoning it’s raised £184 million since its launch. The pace is gathering, with last year’s efforts accounting for near enough £80 million. Money raised in the UK goes to Prostate Cancer UK, the Institute for Cancer Research and awareness raising bits and pieces to get men to get themselves checked. And it’s a cracking awareness raiser. You’d be amazed these past few weeks how many conversations I’ve had with my coworkers about the quality and condition of their testicles. Way more than usual. Whether that translates to them going home and feeling up their balls for lumps is harder to say, even with the powerful zoom lens I have on my camera, but at least it’s being talked about. Movember’s the Chazza of the Month. You can donate right here and see about saving some of those 10,000 embarrassed Darwinites.
So there I was, all ready to announce Kiva as the Chazza of the Month for a second non-consecutive time when what should appear but a classic spot of Zero angst?
You’ll recall how Kiva is a microfinance outfit offering loans to people in developing countries and how I’ve bigged them up a couple of times already. So far I’ve loaned to Rosaura Tuñoque Santisteban’s general store in Peru, the Santa Lucia Group’s clothing business in Nicaragua, the Kunthea Hun Village Bank Group’s vegetable plot in Cambodia, Malikie Kanu’s food store in Sierra Leone, Luka Ngoti Hahunyu’s car repair place in Kenya and Rose’s egg, water and milk shop in Rwanda, and felt pretty good about my noble self doing it. The loans have all been returned to me now, like a boomerang of justice flung by an aborigine of morality round a kangaroo of reversible poverty, in a metaphor so strained it’s got a hefty case of haemorrhoids. Point is, I’ve got money waiting to go back out into the world and do good.
That’s about where the wobble kicked in. After that last rant about payday lenders being arseholes the worries I’ve had about microfinance went from being vague floaty things at the back of my mind to being slightly less vague, marginally firmer things on a list of other things to consider thinking about at some point in time when I can be bothered. There are two worries at work here: the interest people are expected to pay, and whether the loans actually do any long-term, world-improving, future-fixing good.
Like the likes of Wonga, the fees and interest on these things can be fairly hefty. Kiva reckons high interest is in the bones of microfinance, that it’s needed to cover the costs of making small loans. There’s a degree of sense in that, and a spot of maths that adds up to something halfway convincing. Kiva says sorting a loan of $100 costs about the same as a loan of $500 but the transactional costs come off as disproportionate for the hundred bucks. A hypothetical $30 charge would show as 6 percent for the $500 borrower but 30 percent for the $100 borrower.
Thing is, the examples Kiva gives are only hypothetical and then vague on top of that, making them less transparent than the arseholes I was banging on about last week. I can’t find how much people actually pay back for the money they borrow. Dig into repayment schedules, they only total the amount loaned with no mention of the interest. This matters. If Kiva and the Wonga-likes have the same basic business model it feels like a cheat to say one’s a big hearted doer of good and the other’s a lousy, exploitative bag of bastards. And adding to this you’ve got Wonga supporting Kiva, slapping the logo on its website like they’re arseholes in a pod. Serenity now!
The closest I can get to resolving the interest thing is going through CARE International which does its own microfinance via Lend With Care. It says affiliated Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) typically charge between 20 percent and 30 percent interest which, if true of Kiva’s MFIs, would make their hypothetical 30 percent at least less hypothetical if no less vague. And if we’re talking highs of 30 percent we’re far enough from Wonga’s trillion percent to relax a little about the interest.
Next up is the worry about whether the loans actually do any good. Here we wade into economic and development theory so complicated it makes my bumhole sting. Some say it’s cool, others say it’s not. I’ve simplified their positions slightly. That aside there’s basic logic that says if someone’s getting a loan to buy stock for their shop, and that shop’s not new, and they’re not looking to expand but just to fill shelves, then the shop’s not making the money it should and maybe a loan won’t help that much. But, again, there’s not much in the way of detail so maybe these are always new businesses or always businesses looking to expand.
Maybe it comes down to trust. I’m not a fan of that kind of thing, not since I lent that hobo my car so he could take his sick dog to its audition at the circus, their own car having been stolen by a friend of Douglas Hurd. They said they’d only need it for an afternoon. It’s been twelve years. But I trust CARE International and Kiva gets top marks from Charity Navigator, so maybe trust will have to do.
As for Kiva’s affiliation with Wonga, I’m willing to write that off as just the kind of bad-taste blowjob charities have to give corporations to stay funded and Kiva’s not unique in that. The charity I used to work for once took money from Nestlé in a corporate blowie so distasteful I downed two bottles of Listerine and still had an aftertaste of dead babies.
Main thing is there’s only about 90 minutes of October left and I need my bed. By which I mean congratulations to Kiva, the official, undisputed Chazza of the Month.
Having signed up for a life as a Zero I am duty bound to do good, to right wrongs both large and small, to meddle in events both global and local, and to take credit for any good thing that happens within a four mile radius of me and anywhere else in the world and also throughout history. But even with my in-built awesomeness, even with my devotion to the cause, even with my principal principles well in place, these things can drift. People, it’s time for a do-gooding audit!
I’m doing okay with Fairtrade, having substituted a decent amount of evil-hearted products with their noble Fairtrade equivalents. I’m strict on tea, coffee, sugar, bananas, cereal bars and cocoa powder, a bit patchy with the likes of jam, marmalade, spices and non-banana based fruitage, and lousy with the likes of cereal and clothes. My excuse here is around availability but, if we’re honest, I could track them down with a little effort. There’s work to be done there. Laziness aside, chocolate remains my weak point, both with Fairtrade and with life in general. I crave the lusty brown beast like my grandmother craves cock, and without personal intervention from Nancy Reagan I’m powerless against its charms. I buy Fairtrade chocolate whenever it’s around, made easier by the likes of Dairy Milk and Maltesers, and go for Rainforest Alliance as a back up but if the need’s upon me and I’m facing an only partially-stocked vending machine I’ll go for whatever they’ve got and say balls to Africa and hide in a corner and cram the dirty brown glory block into my face hole. On Fairtrade, then, I’m mostly worse than Hitler.
The Nestlé boycott’s my strong point, my moral Achilles’ rest of body. You’ll recall how Nestlé aggressively markets baby milk formula in countries where the dirty water it gets mixed with can kill and where the price can knacker the world’s poorest people and how it does this in spite of breast milk coming free and breasts being fitted as standard on the bodies of roughly half the adult population of the planet. I’ve not bought anything from them sons of bitches in about six years, not counting the ton of chocolate I bought in the name a particularly immature burn. Even when faced with the vending machine dilemma I steer clear of Nestlé, even though my life is emptier for the absence of Drifters and their chewy goodness, Milky Bars and their creepy child mascots and Yorkies and their tedious gender stereotyped marketing campaigns. Yes yes, full points for me there.
Likewise, I continue to be awesome in the category of vegetarianism, at least in terms of not eating animals. I remain fairly lousy in terms of basic nutrition. Fact is, try as I might, I just can’t give two shits about it. For that I’ll score myself two Linda McCartneys, minus one Heather Mills, resulting in a final score of a PETA volunteer’s exposed vagina.
As for volunteering, I’m a little conflicted. Fundraising for Yaknak, I’ve done a half marathon and a cross country 10k in the past couple of months and bigged up regular donations that now account for more than half its income. It would, of course, be unwise to make direct comparisons with Christ. We all know how that went for John Lennon – who I am also like. However, good as I am there’s something slightly unsatisfying about it all, being as how most of the work is done online, tucked away in Zero Towers rather than out in the world. I felt much more hands on and do-goodery when I was doing those river clean ups but it’s amazing how quickly you get tired of picking up other people’s junk and condoms. Here, I feel, I need to do something new.
Environmentally I’m about middle on the Al Gore/Fox News spectrum. I’ve abandoned public transport for work in favour of some actual reliability and convenience, a sell out so huge John Lydon interrupted the filming of his latest butter advert to give me a telling off. Similarly, I haven’t got around to changing my electricity supply to more expensive renewable energy thanks to colossal student debt, and have dabbled with old, evil washing up liquid after the plant-based stuff proved insufficient for the greasy shit I’ve been cooking. I’ve also got a bit slack around reusable shopping bags, often forgetting to take them with me and having to buy new ones which probably makes them less environmentally friendly than the thinner disposable ones. Worse than all of this, I’ve reverted to old incandescent light bulbs in some of the windowless rooms in Zero Towers, the gloom in winter descending to somewhere around the middle ages. In the plus column, I still recycle like a mutha, still refuse plastic cups at the water cooler, still buy second hand, still compost, still go for sustainable materials when buying stuff, and still avoid veg flown from Uganda when there’s local stuff on offer. I’d say I’ve got a bit of work to do if Al Gore is ever to make me his bride.
So there we are. A spot of awesomeness with a degree of slippage. I need to get more fundamentalist on Fairtrade chocolate, walk with a cocky swagger on behalf of the Nestlé boycott, try and be a slightly better vegetarian to the extent that I give a shit, really pull up my hemp socks on the environment and either do some hands-on volunteering or feel smugger about the stuff I’m doing already. None of which brings us to September’s Charity of the Month. It’s me. Please give generously.
The thing with this here social work is you see an awful lot of people’s awful lots in life. The stuff you read about and don’t think about and mostly never see. Child abuse, obviously. Domestic violence, like how we talked about. Poverty. Real poverty. Bare floorboards poverty. Eating food or making rent but never both poverty. Oxfam reckons 1 in 5 people in the UK are living below the poverty line, living hard and unhappy lives made harder and unhappier by cuts to services that mean the help they used to get isn’t around any more.
Poverty’s rubbish. It’s depressing and humiliating. It’s bad for your health and for kids’ development. It brings violence. It kills you sooner. Poverty means kids skipping breakfast, skipping lunch at weekends when schools aren’t around to feed them. The country’s full of these miseries and the government’s piling miseries upon them, making out cuts to services are the only way of fixing the problem services didn’t get us into.
As a social worker I’m supposed to be part of the solution. Sometimes I am. If someone comes to the office claiming destitution and I can’t prove them wrong and they’ve got kids they might get a few quid. If someone comes to the office claiming destitution and I can’t prove them wrong but they’ve not got kids they won’t get anything unless they can drum up another crisis or two, like a spot of severe mental illness. More often now the solution’s being outsourced to charities. We send people to the Salvation Army for a bit of free food and to a furniture recycler that gives out decent stuff for a few quid. And we apply to Buttle UK, a cracking charity I hadn’t heard of ten weeks ago and now rely on.
They give small grants to people who need them, providing things so basic we should be embarrassed they have to. They give people beds, bedding, cookers, washing machines and fridge freezers, and cash to buy vital bits and pieces we barely even think about having. If they didn’t, people wouldn’t have them. They get to be the Chazza of the Month. You can help them continue their low-key awesomeness by donating a few quid. And, yes, you could argue it’s shocking to have to turn to charity to get this kind of help for vulnerable families, but then you’re a pinko Commie. Its no better than they deserve given their colossal tax evasion, massive fraud and lead role in the global financial crisis.
When it comes to genitals I’ve got the male set, an untidy cluster of appendages that when looking at the world both past and present generates a sense of embarrassed responsibility, being as how men have been, in general, total shits. Domestic violence is one of their ways of being. We’re talking controlling behaviour, financial dickery, manipulation, intimidation and threats, building to physical and sexual assault and murder. Women’s Aid reckons there are 13 million incidents of domestic violence every year, that one in four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime, that every week two are killed by their current or ex-partners. The place I’m working in has one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the country, and already it’s striking how often it comes up.
There are people helping. Women’s Aid, obviously, and Refuge and the National Domestic Violence Helpline and Rape Crisis and Broken Rainbow, all of which do good stuff for people going through it. Those people being overwhelmingly female. And their work’s all good and vital and necessary, but being a futurist type with an eye on how life could suck less hard in a generation or two, my mind’s drawn to a question I’m slightly embarrassed to ask because of my penis: what about men?
I’m not asking that in a Daily Mail/Jeremy Clarkson, “White, able-bodied, heterosexual men just can’t get a break” kind of way. Men make up a tiny percentage of domestic violence victims because domestic violence is part of the patriarchal power bollocks men have carved out for the world, and as bad as I feel for the few male victims there are they’re not symptomatic of a bigger pile of wrong. No, I’m asking more in the way of how working only with women on domestic violence is like working only with gay people on homophobia or black people on racism. If we’re going to move past domestic violence on our way to a half-decent society we have to stop the men doing the hitting from hitting people, change the way they think about this stuff and make sure the next generation of women aren’t saddled with this shit.
Women’s Aid’s does a spot of that. They run the Expect Respect campaign that tells teenagers how their relationships should be going down, and run the Real Men campaign that tells men how abusing women isn’t the way to come off butch, that abusive men are weak and prickish. The White Ribbon Campaign does a spot of that too but with deeper voices and more in the way of Adam’s apples. Set up by a group of men, they’re looking for other men to stand up and say, “Enough of this shit”. They’ve signed up big butch male celebrities, the likes of football and rugby players and boxer Amir Khan, who only beats the shit out of people if they’re the same gender as him, and only if loads of other people are cheering him on, and only if he’s getting paid a load of cash for it.
All of which brings us to the Zeroistic bit of do-gooding. The White Ribbon gang gets men to make a pledge to never “commit, condone, or remain silent about men’s violence against women in all its forms”. I did that, along with 7,000 other people. If you have the qualifying set of genitals you can pledge that yourself. And then there’s the Chazza of the Month, the recently reinstated feature that replaces its recent replacement. It’s Women’s Aid. Apologies, White Ribbon Campaign. I’d be too embarrassed to do this whole thing on patriarchy and then give to the chazza with the wang.
Fans of our regular Charity of the Month feature will have been dismayed, possibly distraught, probably driven to homicidal rampages, to note its absence in February, March and the pretty big amount of April we’ve got through so far. Rumours abound that I’ve had to more or less forget about The Zero, my social life and basic personal hygiene to finish this social work course, and that beneficiary charities have been left wanting and ignored, like Chris O’Donnell after his inexplicable bubble finally burst. Not so. Let us not fall for the desperate lies my enemies tell, for their attempts to discredit The Zero cause, dispel the Zero myth and destroy everything I and, to a lesser extent, you have worked for. As planned all along, I am now proud to announce the first official Charity of the End of Quarter Four Financial Year 2011-2012.
Our head of communications assures me this new format will be less labour intensive for the creative team, while the head of marketing assures me it’ll make the brand more appealing to key demographics who, in recent focus groups, said they were “bored”, “scared” and “begging to see their families again”. Already, kids are calling it the Chazza of the Ezza of Quazza Fozza Finazza Yizza 2011-2012, while our merchandising is focused on the funky acronym of COTEOQFFY2011-2012. Research suggests it’ll be this year’s WWJD but with less emphasis on virginity and magic.
Down to business. You’ll have noticed, if you follow politics or current affairs or the general doings of evil, that the coalition government is no great friend of the poor, the ill, the disabled, the female, the living or the non-reptilian overlord. This week sees a typically horrific welfare measure kicking in, with ill and disabled people about to lose up to a hundred quid a week. Now, yer man The Zero’s done his share of wheelchair residency and life on benefits and, without depowering my former people and making out like life can’t be happy when you’re living with disability, it was, in general, several shades shitter than it had to be. Rest assured, disabled people can do without this type of hassle thrown on top of whatever other hassles they’re working on at present.
Disability Rights UK, a campaigning organisation fused from the remnants of Radar, the Disability Alliance and the National Centre for Independent Living, aims to give the government what for. It appears to be particularly disabled in the field of web design, but we’ll let that pass in the interests of empowerment. Whoever put their site together, with whatever creative impairment they were born with or acquired through sexually transmitted infections, should be given an equitable pat on the head. Right now Disability Rights UK is mobilising the troops, having them mail their MPs to oppose the Welfare Reform Bill and its associated miseries, and they could probably do with a hand. It’s fair to say there’s not been a great deal of success in attempts to curb the evilness of the evil coalition’s evil plans but maybe a few quid thrown in the direction of campaigners will help. Campaigning’s how we got the Disability Discrimination Act after all, and I could have done with a spot of that back before it came along. You can give them a few quid too, here.
And you’re dead right in thinking how charity shouldn’t be the safety net here because a safety net shouldn’t be needed, but them’s the breaks when the country elects a government of complete bastards and their thin yellow line of enablers.
