No Amount Of Laws Will Prevent This!

Holly Bramley's life was barbarically snatched away when she was murdered by her husband of nine years. The 26-year-old had been isolated from her family by 'evil monster' Nicholas Meston, who convinced her that her family didn't love her. He moved her 50 miles away from them without telling anyone - and the pair eventually tied the knot.

It's a sad story, and a familiar one, a woman so lacking in self-confidence and a sense of self-worth that a man becomes everything to her, no matter what he does... 

In the nine years Holly was with Metson, she was alienated from her parents, who were never invited to her wedding and didn't know it was happening. Tragically, it would only be 18 months later that he would cut up her body into 224 pieces at their Lincoln home before dumping her remains in a bag for life in a river. In the run-up to her murder in March 2023, Holly had reported Metson to the police for killing her pets in a gruesome fashion. On one occasion, she found her new puppy dead inside a washing machine with the drum still spinning after her husband dumped the dog inside. Another time, she fled to a police station with her rabbits in a bid to escape after he had killed her hamsters by putting them in a food blender and a microwave oven.

And did the authorities act? Well, they tried.  

However, according to her mother, Annette, the RSPCA were never able to bring any charges against Meston because her daughter had withdrawn her statement.

And, unwilling to accept that she's somehow bred and raised a woman so lacking in the instincts of self-preservation, her mother wants to make it everyone else's fault, hence the inevitable demand for legislation: 

Her grieving mother, pushing for a new law, said she had done everything in her power to convince her youngest daughter to walk away from the deadly relationship.In a bid to help others in a similar situation to her daughter, Annette is now calling for Holly's Law. The proposed legislation would see a nationwide animal cruelty register created for individuals who harm or kill animals, to be brought into legislation.

Personally, I'm in favour of such a law, but purely on it's own merits, not to try to prevent more deaths like this one. Nothing will do that, except raising daughters to have enough self-worth that they don't subsume their entire personality to a brute.  

Annette's petition for an animal cruelty register has reached over 50,000 signatures as she remains hopeful it will be brought into legislation similarly to Clare's Law.

And when the next murder happens despite this, what will be demanded then? 

These Aren't 'Examples Of A Concerning Staff Culture'

...one of them at least is something everyone is entitled to think!

Home Office contractors are over-using restraint in immigration detention centres and failing to tackle the toxic culture behind bars, according to the findings of a new watchdog report described as “deeply concerning”.

Oh, boo hoo!  

It highlighted how routine handcuffing, particularly during hospital transfers, appeared to have become the default rather than the exception. In one case, a frail 70-year-old man was handcuffed despite paperwork noting no evidence of risk.

What about the risk of escape?  

The IMB national chair, Elisabeth Davies, said: “It’s about operational force being used for operational convenience.” She added that she has written to the Home Office “numerous times” raising concerns about the high levels of handcuffing and the lack of clear justification provided.

Frankly, operational convenience should always win out over the feelings of these bleeding hearts.

The report provided examples of restraint IMB is concerned about, including a man who was on constant suicide watch who was screaming and resisting removal. He took off his trousers and was carried naked from the waist down to a plane. Staff took turns to push his head against his seat. The report found the impact on his dignity to be “profound”.

What about the impact on the rest of the passengers? Or don't they count?  

It also reprinted a note on a detention centre staff whiteboard saying: “Thought of the Day: Handle Stressful situations like a dog. If you can’t eat it or hump it, piss on it or walk away.” Davies said the sign was not hidden in any way. She has called for changes in staff culture and said the sign was an example of staff culture: “I think that offers little reassurance.”

There are worse motivational signs and at least this one wasn't purchased in a job lot by an office dresser.. 

Another example of a concerning staff culture highlighted by the report involved an incident where a personal protection trainer told officers: “If someone’s coming at me, I’m going to keep myself safe. I don’t worry about what’s proportionate, I won’t worry about Serco or my job, my priority is to look after myself.”

Who could possibly argue that this was the wrong attitude? Well, except the bleeding-heart female manager of this wretched organisation, of course. 

Missed opportunities for de-escalation are also identified in the report, including a case where a man was restrained after failing to obey an instruction to stand up. The report finds no evidence of a trauma-informed approach, despite many detained people having experienced trauma, including torture and trafficking, with nothing to indicate that this was being considered when planning or executing force interventions.

If an order is given and someone fails to obey it, what should they do, Lizzy? Just wait until he feels like doing it?  Why is this wet blanket in her position, anywway? Were there no male ex-prison governors available for the job?

“We need meaningful cultural change and robust accountability to protect the rights of highly vulnerable people in detention. As national chair, I call on the Home Office to act urgently to strengthen oversight, embed trauma-informed practices, and ensure that force is only used when absolutely necessary.”

I call on the Home Office to ensure the right people with the right attitudes are given the job of IMB chair! 

Neurotics

Now there’s a girl who’s comfortable in her own skin,” my father-in-law said about my daughter, his granddaughter. She was about one year old and we were watching her bounce happily in her high chair, egg smeared across both cheeks as she shoved pieces of fritter into her mouth. I realised with pride it was true: she was comfortable. My pride was followed quickly by unease. How long had it been since I could say I was comfortable with myself?

Well, you’re writing in the ‘Guardian’ so probably ‘never’!

My daughter is almost four now and I’ve thought of my father-in-law’s words many times since that day. She’s at a precious age, no longer a toddler and still just on the precipice of childhood proper. She interacts with the world without self-consciousness and has not yet learned that society may expect something different from her. When she expresses hunger and when she eats, she does so with joyful abandon. When she takes a mouthful of something delicious we can see a whole-body response: she closes her eyes, tilts her head back and dances her shoulders up and down.

Because she’s a child and so lacks inhibition - part of growing up is of course learning social inhibition, which so many adults these days appear to lack. 

Many girls will learn, if not explicitly taught then by cultural osmosis, the notion they shouldn’t be outwardly hungry. Whether a girl’s hunger is literally for food or it’s yearning for something greater in her life – a high-powered career, an unabashed artistic practice, a passionate affair – she is often taught to not be so honest in her expression of it.

*sighd* 

Watching my daughter’s strong sense of self has forced me to reflect on my own adolescence through the early 2000s, when our wildly misogynistic pop culture filtered down to the schoolyard. I once overheard a high-school boyfriend say I looked ugly when I ate. Instead of dumping him, I simply stopped eating when we were together.

Teenagers do stupid things pt 732489... 

Later, in my 20s, when Instagram brought with it the first wave of diet culture masquerading as “wellness”, I was primed to try it all: juice cleanses, appetite-suppressing teas, “quitting” sugar. I once lied to a colleague that I was eating soup for lunch when I had, in fact, poured green juice into a bowl.

 Women trying to make it in work do stupid things pt 732489... 

These memories are horrifying to me now and thank God for that. Thank God that in my daughter’s world there is no morality ascribed to food, there is no good or bad, or that most disgusting of office kitchen diet-speak, naughty. There is just desire and pleasure and satiety.

It might be a little trite to say that adults can learn from watching children interact with the world...

It certainly is. 

Nothing Will Change Until There Are Consequences...

A woman whose ‘monster’ XL bully mauled three young girls after it reacted in a ‘very aggressive’ way to a knock at the front door was allowed to walk free from court yesterday.

Since she probably weighed less than the killer mutt, she resorted to a rather unusual choice of intervention when it pounced. 

Victoria Hewitt wrestled with seven-and-a-half stone pet Karma as it savaged and ‘dragged’ the ‘screaming’ children at her home and desperately tried to coax it away from them with ham she grabbed from the fridge.

A brave neighbour eventually wrestled the animal to the ground and Hewitt desperately yelled ‘Shoot the dog’ when police arrived. Officers sedated Karma, who was later destroyed.

What a waste of sedatives! 

Hewitt, 42, is understood to have registered the pet under a new law brought in weeks earlier that required them to be registered - but also stated they must be kept securely. The semi-permanent makeup artist appeared in court yesterday where she was handed an eight-month jail term, suspended for 18 months...

*sighs* 

Judge Anthony Bate heard the dog had belonged to an ex-partner of Hewitt who left it with her.

 🎵I might have known, there is always some man...🎵

She took steps to manage the risk it posed, including installing a pen and stairgates. Karma was also muzzled when out on walks and kept in a different room when visitors called by. But Judge Bate said while the precautions were ‘well intended’, they were limited and ‘inadequate’, allowing the powerful pet to cause the terrible injuries.

They were always going to be limited and inadequate because she had no chance of physically intervening when the mutt decided to do what it was bred for... 

He also ordered her to carry out a 20-day Rehabilitation Activity Requirement, in which an offender takes part in activities designed to address the behaviour that contributed to the crime and attend supervision appointments with a probation officer.

Good luck finding an activity designed to address the behavior that makes these women fall for unsuitable men who skip town and leave them holding a four-legged ticking time bomb! 

This Is Just Insider Language…

For me, becoming a mother was an experience as disorienting and confusing as moving to a new country. I had to learn new behaviours and customs as well as which brands of nappy and baby food to buy. And little did I know that moving to the Netherlands after the birth of my first child would entail having to learn a whole new tongue besides Dutch.

Which one? 

I’m not talking about motherese, the high-pitched singsong ways parents speak to their children, but about the highly specific language mothers and fathers around the world now use to talk about being parents.

Eh? 

Unsure of myself, I started reading parenting books and spent a lot of time on online forums, where I tried to find answers to my questions – or, when there weren’t any, then at least some support or understanding.

Not the place I'd choose to go to for that, but you do you, eh? 

It was on BabyCenter that I first discovered this new parenting language. I often found myself resorting to Google to understand what people were saying. I had to familiarise myself with acronyms such as DS and DD (dear son and dear daughter), CS (caesarean section), EB (extended breastfeeding) and CIO (cry it out).

All groups evolve their own language, didn't you learn that on the internet?  

It didn’t take me long to notice that even the things I read in Polish were translations of books by English-speaking authors such as Tracy Hogg’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, which I suffered through just to try to understand why my daughter would not stop crying. Spoiler alert: it did not help.

Well, since you're supposedly multilingual, what does it matter? 

My copy of American parenting expert Heidi Murkoff’s What to Expect When You’re Expecting was in English – despite being translated into 50 languages, including Polish – and after a while so was everything else I was reading.

And why is that an issue? I cannot wrap my head around what this column is really about...

And, of course, books and articles about the way parents in Europe and other places raise their children are extremely popular in the US and the UK. However, from my experience, US and UK parenting ideas have a bigger sway in Europe than the other way around. What does it mean if the English language has such power to influence the way mothers and fathers raise their children around the world?

I don't know, and you don't advance a theory, so why is it concerning you?