Now that we officially know that Karen Matthews is guilty of kidnapping her child in the interests of sharing the reward for finding a missing child, the floodgates have opened to headlines accusing her of being an evil mother. Personally I think it is a bit of a stretch to call her ‘evil’ given other examples of true evil in the world today … the mother of Baby P for example, or that Austrian gent who imprisoned his family underground and repeatedly raped them (or the English equivalent for that matter).<\/p>\n
Let us have a look at what she did. She asked (or forced) her boyfriend’s uncle to pick up her daughter from school and imprison her inside his flat until they could arrange for him to ‘find’ Shannon and collect the reward for the both of them. The words for this that come to mind are ‘cruel’, ‘greedy’, ‘uncaring’, ‘malicious’, and ‘deceitful’, but not exactly evil.\u00a0 The words of Shannon when she was rescued by the police (“Stop it, you’re frightening me!”) don’t indicate a child who was in chronic distress … it sounds like she was more distressed by the police barging into the flat!<\/p>\n
That doesn’t mean to say that Karen doesn’t deserve a lengthy prison sentence for what she has done, and the uncle (Michael Donovan) too, but labelling her ‘evil’ is putting her crimes on the same levels as those monsters who deliberately go out of their way to torture and\/or kill children.<\/p>\n
The tabloid press are obviously having a field day with this, often blaming the welfare state and the ‘scrounging underclass’ for producing a Karen Matthews. Firstly the crimes of Karen are not a product of her class, but a product of her greed. If she was a middle-class accountant, she would be fiddling the books; if she were a stockbroker she would be guilty of insider-trading. If she were a banker, she’d be running off to some nice warm place with stolen money.<\/p>\n
Secondly the existence of people whose lifestyle could classify them as ‘scroungers’ is just as irritating to me as anyone else, but removing the safety net of the welfare state does not seem to be a good idea. I might not like funding the lifestyle of the other Karens out there, but I would rather do that than risk harming the other Shannons out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now that we officially know that Karen Matthews is guilty of kidnapping her child in the interests of sharing the reward for finding a missing child, the floodgates have opened to headlines accusing her of being an evil mother. Personally I think it is a bit of a stretch to call her ‘evil’ given other […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7,12,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-media","category-politics","category-7-id","category-12-id","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-5R","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":910,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions\/910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}