30 years is too long to be given the creeps

Right now I am sitting in Inverkeithing library. Wonder if I will still be popular with its staff after writing this.

As many folks will know, I am a survivor of, and very emotionally defined by, a horror experience of school, 30 years ago. The work demands and their enforcement became impossible to survive, there was no rational way to function, and the result was a stress collapse involving catatonic states, and it was even a fight to get it recognised as serious, a survival fight. When I have given full descriptions of it to parties with an obligation to take an interest in child safety, e.g. to the NHS in chasing up its past actions, or to the National Association for Gifted Children as I posted on here about recently, here is an important detail I have mentioned about the danger I was in at that time. That I was too frightened to run away, because if caught I would then be considered a wilful offender and as a result would not get the stress collapse accepted.

This I am always aware of, in profound distress, the more I hear of the ever worsening police state over children concerning school attendance, that the Blair government started. Because this has been going on while the political and media systems wilfully exclude from any consideration or any platform to be widely heard and appreciated by voters, the evidence that school can ill treat to an unsurvivable extent. In the Western democracies and in an era paranoid for child protection in so many ways that have put a lot of fear into adults' lives, this danger is selected to be totally unheard and unappreciated by voters.

So the distress of my memory and what I could be seeing happen has, just now, intruded onto my space as a library user. At close quarters, around the same table, I have seen a quite young child put through a grilling by the police in front of us all, on suspicion of truancy. It was the library staff who called them.

So long as experiences like mine, of having a survival need around destroyed life not to be in school, are not in the big scale public domain and are not being answered to by government departments over education, any kid who this happens to might be as unsafe as I was. In order not to tread on my damage and by it affect my emotional ability to focus on my own serious tasks, the library has a duty to its adult users not to do things like this until after anyone with evidence like mine has had the opportunity to share it as widely as we think necessary, by automatic right. What if this duty conflicts with the library being under orders from anywhere else to take these actions? Only resolvable by having that evidence brought out, not by in any way trying to avoid it.

Maurice Frank