Suffer the little...need I go on?

Poor wee Mikaeel.

I came home from a night out tonight to hear that Mikaeel is dead and his mother is being questioned about his death. At the press conference, you could hear how shocked journalists were and see how upset the police were at this outcome. The community that put in so much time and effort looking for a missing child, must be devastated.

The death of a child is never taken lightly because a wee child has had not just an early death but probably no life at all.

In my family, when we're annoyed - and we're easy annoyed - we do a lot of shouting. We sometimes threaten each other: 'I'm gonna mollocate you!' (No, I don't know what it means either). And I sometimes wonder if it's possible to talk people to death, as we seem to do, but at least talking is a good way to release anger. Ill-treating a child? No, we don't do that.

My sister tells a good story about our poor mother lining the three of us up and interrogating us about some major family crime:
- Mammy: So who was it? Was it you?
- Me: no!
Slap
- Wee sister: no!
Slap
- Wee brother: And it wizny me either!
Clout - sound of wee brother getting a thick ear, because it definitely was him - it always was.

Our mammy must have been hard pushed to reach the stage of hitting us and fifty years later, we remember this incident and laugh over it because it was so unusual. But I accept that there are homes where wee children suffer this kind of treatment as a matter of course and probably on a daily basis. I'm just not sure what we can do about it.

Mikaeel's family were 'known' to the 'authorities' in  Fife and Edinburgh (and where else, I wonder?) and, no doubt, in the next few months, there will be demands for enquiries into how social workers, doctors, teachers and the police dealt with Mikaeel's situation. But the vox pops with neighbours over the past 48 hours are interesting: they knew the family or knew of them, saw the kids playing on the landing outside their flat and never saw anything to make them contact the 'authorities'. In other words, everybody observed as much as they could be expected to but, as my bro in law always says: when people shut their front door, there's no way of knowing what's going on.