written by the Bitchy & Narrow Minded Carol Sarler above !! (Freelance Journalist)

I’ll tell you what’s Ugly … this shameful appetite for misery porn

Carol Sarler is a freelance writer and broadcaster as well as a  loud mouth, uneducated twit that writes nothing but crap and doesn’t think before she writes her columns! A pure and total show off that is trying to make a name for herself in the world of the media! She also likes to write about the same old boring crap in the Guardian (what I thought was a respected paper), not to mention the other newspapers she freelances for. Why on earth are editors letting her write about same old crap day in and day out? Currently her favourite subject is attacking victims of child abuse and their Memoirs.

Carol we get the message you have got a bee in your bonnet! - Who gives a shit what you have to say. OMG I don’t know why on earth I am giving you so much coverage on my blog. Here you can be known as the loud mouth, you really don’t know when to give your mouth a rest!

Please feel free and e-mail this bitchy loud mouth

By Carol Sarler

Memoir: the autobiography of Constance Briscoe

Whatever the outcome or merits of the case, the sight of a mother and daughter feuding so bitterly that they end up on opposite sides of a courtroom, unable even to look each other in the eye, is  -  to use the word advisedly  -  ugly.

Ugly is also the name of the autobiography of Constance Briscoe, a highflying barrister and part-time judge, in which she alleged that she was abused as a child, assaulted by a stepfather and beaten by an unloving mother who repeatedly criticised her looks.

Indeed, in a sequel she called Beyond Ugly, Ms Briscoe described the lengths to which she has gone not to be considered ‘ugly’ any more.

These included having costly cosmetic surgery to narrow and straighten her nose and to make her lips thinner  -  all in an effort to escape the self-loathing she attributes to her mother.

Her mother, however, says that none of it ever happened. Now she is suing her daughter for libel.

So it is that we, along with the jury at London’s High Court, will spend the next ten days watching and listening as allegation and counter-allegation fly between two women who, in a better world, would be relishing the traditional closeness of their relationship.

The wider point, of course, is not about the truth of what was written, but rather that whatever one relative says about another, it would never have become a public  -  let alone legal  -  matter, unless a publisher had known that there was a market for every hurtful titbit.

And, goodness knows, there is.

Misery porn: A literary feast for the decade

Misery porn is becoming quite the literary feast of the decade. Nobody’s childhood is any longer to be recollected through a prism of rosy contentment.

Don’t even think about happy days when the earth and every common sight ‘to me did seem apparelled in celestial light’, as Wordsworth put it. That old stuff? That’s for wimps.

These days, only the most harrowing of memories make it to the bestseller list. Let’s take just five, in this year alone.

Not Without My Sister: The True Story Of Three Girls Violated And Betrayed By Those They Trusted… The Silent Boy: He Was A Frightened Boy Who Refused to Speak… Hidden: Betrayed, Exploited And Forgotten, How One Boy Overcame The Odds … Tell Me Why, Mummy: A Little Boy’s Struggle to Survive … Cry Silent Tears: The Heartbreaking Survival Story Of A Small Mute Boy.

Don’t Tell Mummy: A number one bestseller

You could weep your way through the titles alone. Yet these books have already sold, on average, well over 100,000 copies each, presumably to people prepared to elicit entertainment  -  for that is, after all, what a book is generally for  -  out of the agonies of children they never did and never will meet.

Sometimes misery porn comes pretty close to common porn. In a single week last year, the top ten paperbacks invited you to enter the world of Don’t Tell Mummy (a number one bestseller), Betrayed (’a memoir of child abuse’, in which a girl accuses both her parents of sexual assault) and Silent Sisters (siblings on surviving abuse).

Meanwhile, the hardbacks put up their own fight with Our Little Secret (’boy molested from age of four’), Damaged (’involving a sickening paedophile ring’), and Daddy’s Little Girl . . . oh, I really can’t be bothered. In any case, you’ve guessed already, haven’t you?

I do not suppose for a moment that the vast majority of the purchasers of such books are themselves able, willing or prepared to damage a child, sexually or otherwise.

Indeed, they probably have all sorts of excuses why they read them: that they seek ‘greater understanding’, for example. That they are interested in the psychology or the sociology or some other ology of the human spirit.

But textbooks are for the schoolroom or the college library  -  these books are pored over on beaches and buses and trains, with an enthusiasm that veers between the dangerously obsessive and the plain grubby.

And which, either way, amounts to a further abuse of sorts.

It has always seemed to me that for an adult reader to enjoy any kind of frisson  -  even the starched thrill of disapproval  -  from the suffering endured by the authors of these memoirs is abhorrent.

The fact that the child in question is now an adult and seeking to make a few bob out of old abuse is neither here nor there; to say they freely chose to write it is on a moral par with saying of a damaged kid who ends up a hooker: well, she’s happy to sell, so what’s wrong with me buying?

It is surely an abuse, also, of any child who may see these books in shops and airports  -  even lying around at home.

Harrowing: Cry Silent Tears has made it onto the bestseller list

We should not underestimate what it means for them to see, over and over, lurid titles of ’sickening’ accounts of childhood, ’suffering’ and ‘molestation’  -  for how can it do other than teach them that pain, injury and assault on their small bodies might be a source of grown-up titillation?

Not to mention making it seem more commonplace than it is.

Most of all, is it not also unfair to the parents in the stories? Described, as they always seem to be, as perpetrators of the worst kinds, they are laid bare to the world  -  but, nine times out of ten, they are unable to defend themselves because they are safely out of the way. Or, to put it another way, dead.

Kathy O’Beirne’s 2005 memoir, Don’t Ever Tell: Kathy’s Story (it sold 400,000 copies and starred a ‘torturer’ father), was challenged by her family  -  as Constance Briscoe’s account now is.

By and large, however, such memoirs are one person’s memory of what happened a long time ago.

And while there isn’t cause to believe in any particular error, perhaps one person’s ’strict but fair’ is another person’s ‘brutal’.

For the dead, unable to answer back, and for those who might otherwise remember them fondly, the undefended trashing of their memory is the ultimate posthumous insult.

Let us, by all means, expose the real barbarians  -  few and far between as I think they will be.

At the same time, however, we might do ourselves and our children more good to push vicarious prurience to one side and remember that for every parent like, say, Baby P’s mother, there are a million others who would give their lives before they would harm a hair on their child’s head.

We parents, God knows, get it wrong. Sometimes.

But it would be nice, and very probably true, to say that most of us nevertheless deserve to be remembered with the gracious words used by Lorna Luft when asked about her hopeless, addled and addicted mother, Judy Garland.

‘She was’, said Miss Luft carefully, ‘the best mother she knew how to be.’ Amen to that.

Joe Peters Says:-

I don’t force anyone to read my books or buy it for that matter of fact, Carol Sarler you live in day dream wake up and smell the roses, who gives a damn what you have to say. Some stuck up Journalist that hasn’t got a clue!!! Only if you knew what child abuse is, i feel sorry for you!. (I guess we are all liars, get over it you naive idiot)

Comment by Louise:-

Hi Joe

I have been enraged about the case of baby ‘P’ (wish I knew his name)I am equally enraged about the lack of reality shown with regards to survivors of abuse, that we have experience and knowledge that could help so many others as you do, not without a fight I know. The papers have been full of social services trying to justify their failings in this case and the other day I read an article in the Daily Mail that made my blood boil….. This may be of interest to you as your book was used as an example this is my posting on my blog…
In strong response referring to the article written by Carol Sarler in the Daily Mail on Wed 20th Nov, ‘I’ll tell what’s ugly… this shameful appetite for misery porn’
 
Can I firstly say this is Child abuse she is talking about not porn! As there are thousands of victims of child abuse suffering right now as we read the paper, there are also thousands of survivors of abuse who have kept the secret for their perpetrator to protect them for 30 years or more. The writer is saying that it’s ok for a child, now an adult to have been abused and still silent so as not bringing to justice their perpetrator, that the ‘hurtful titbits’ as she so disregarding puts it are merely a bit of gossip that have got out of hand within a family… what planet is she on?
 
In the article, it seems to me that books written by survivors of abuse are being slated as untrue accounts that are exaggerated for point of sale, also that the survivor has only one objective to writing their memoir and that is to make money from a story. These are true accounts of terrible violations and experiences that as children they were subjected to and have kept secret like they were told. Why? Because they felt dirty, they felt like it was their fault and that they were in the wrong. They were not wrong, bad or dirty.
 
The writer of this article clearly lives in a gloriously protected world filled with hearts and flowers where there are pink fluffy rabbits running in daisy filled meadows. Happy memories you say, well actually if you ask any survivor of abuse what they remember about that time and they will tell you that at the time there were some happy times, the bits they grabbed for comfort and life as an abused child at the time feels ‘normal’. Normal is pretence; normal enables survival because they know no difference.
 
The reason these books are so popular? Just maybe statistics could be a little out and there are many more survivors of abuse and violation out there that maybe interested may need camaraderie and may need as an adult survivor to not feel alone anymore… Just maybe? What do you think? I cannot believe that someone would generalise this type of book as disgruntled adults that have had a bad time and want pay back.  I cannot understand how anyone can attempt to justify any form of abuse unless they are an abuser.
 
The article states that ‘these books’ are seeking to make a few bob out of old abuse’ Old abuse! What! You think that once the touching, the rape, the violence, the years of being tortured and keeping the secret is over, it simply goes away?
 
Let me tell you it doesn’t, a survivor of abuse in childhood carries the belief they are worthless and inadequate into adulthood, thus unable to form healthy relationships, unable to be rational at times, unable to be free of the filth inflicted on them and the confusion of feeling guilty, taking responsibility for the blame they have had to carry because they dare to mention they were wronged. But most of all ‘us’ the survivors are aware that it exists, it is real not just a story. By telling the story, the once victim, now a survivor gives the story clarity and truth that has gone unsaid, it gives the story worth and by unleashing the awful truth the survivor is able to be free of it, put it in the past and use it positively to grow as a person and help others.
 
In the article it also mentions that, ‘these books’ on the shelves at home, in shops and in airports read by holiday makers are not acceptable reading for our children. That she says, in fact, by having these books on our bookshelves we are inflicting abuse on our children, the children the government feel the need to teach sex education to at 5yrs old to prevent teenage pregnancy. So, we don’t give that sort of information, we protect the children from reality from potential risk, we keep abuse a deep dark secret so if, God forbid, our children were approached by an abuser we have actually taught them that this violation is just an unsaid secret as the perpetrator will confirm as he/she whispers ‘this is our little secret’  is that what we do? Or do we make it known that unfortunately in our society there may be some bad people and we have to keep ourselves safe and tell someone we trust if something that doesn’t feel right is happening. Perhaps every parent should have a trusted person as an extra confidant, maybe it could be a good idea to make it clear to our children we are there for them and it’s safe to tell us anything.
 
These books are written from a place of compassion, from a place of passion and deep deep self discovery, so don’t slate them, don’t take away their clarity and don’t try to disregard these real human beings that have survived the worst of violation to a child, the betrayal of trust taking advantage of a venerable trusting child. These books have reason for being, to give insight and awareness to the very person who wrote the article because ‘what do you know?!’

by Louise at http://www.make-it-matter.co.uk/

 

Well said Louise

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Interesting Reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.