Social change has consequences

This feigned shock at the public disregard for children is more than a little disingenuous after forty years of feminism:

One little girl was clutching her favourite toy while her younger sister was sucking her thumb – and both looked utterly lost and forlorn. In a bygone era, a concerned adult might have stopped to ask them where their mother was. But in a damning indictment of modern Britain, hundreds of busy people simply walked on by.

The girls stood for an hour on a Saturday morning in a busy shopping arcade looking for 'help', as part of a social experiment for television. Hidden cameras recorded Uma, seven, and Maya, five, who took it in turns to look lost. Astonishingly, over the whole hour only one person, a grandmother, took a moment to find out if there was a problem. All of the 616 other passers-by completely ignored the girls.

How can anyone living in a society that denigrates children and child-bearing, which regards pregnancy as an evil to be avoided, and attacks men who pay attention to children as probable pedophiles, be surprised that most adults are not inclined to lift a finger for a child for whom they bear no responsibility.

Posted in: Society