Friday 23 April 2010

Slavery and Stalking in Luton

This isn't a very pretty subject, so avoid these links if you're having a really good day.

The Watt family have been variously convicted of murder and familial homicide in the case of Michael Gilbert, who was kept as a slave by them from the age of sixteen, for ten years. Medawar will not use quotes or the word "virtual": they kept him as a slave.

The photograph the prosecution issued to the press, of Michael Gilbert, shows him in a sports shirt with a St George's flag on the shoulder. The jury returned their verdicts on St George's day. In doing so, they had to decide between murder and familial homicide for several of the defendants, and in effect, the verdicts directly reflect how much each family member was under the influence of James Watt. It is an interesting lesson in how a group of people, in this case a family, can collectively exhibit psychopathic behaviour, although perhaps only one key member could be individually diagnosed as a psychopath.

Throughout the trial, Medawar was constantly reminded of how like an organized stalking gang the Watt family was, and wondered if there might be some insight into the way such gangs work. Then, once the verdicts were returned, the press were free to report all the things that the jury could not be told, foremost amongst them being that the Watt family were indeed a stalking gang. Organized stalking is a force-multiplier for psychopaths. A rich psychopath might have hundreds at his disposal, a poor psychopath might have only his family and their partners to control. But the outcome, unspeakable cruelty, and in this case it really is difficult to speak about what was done, is the same, differing merely in detail. It's just that a wealthy psychopath can use hundreds of stooges to inflict similar levels of misery on scores or hundreds of victims. And they are less likely to face justice for it, even on a perfect St George's Day.

Sentence update: Life with a thirty-six year minimum tariff for James Watt. See link for details.

Also, this link is to a video, by James Reeves, showing the children's home where James Watt and Michael Gilbert met, together with one of the female defendants. The video was made before Michael's plight was publicly known, and about a year before he was killed. A longstanding weakness in the state-run care system was the abrupt cut-off of social work supervision and support when children were old enough to leave children's homes. In the more distant past, many children from Luton needing such care went to a home in Harpenden, run by the (methodist) charity National Children's Homes. NCH did sometimes manage to go on helping some "children" through college and even university, which local council homes never seem to manage. Medawar doesn't think that NCH would have let a vulnerable client such as Michael, come under the control of a psychopath like James Watt. But that would have required somebody to exercise initiative, which isn't allowed to happen in local government in the UK anymore. Local government is actually conducted in a more repressive manner than national government at the moment.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

An excellent tie-in to the psychopathic mind, M.

gangstalking-australia said...

Yes, how very much like organised stalking groups, so up there with the torture, humiliation, etc. Disgusting, at least this lot got put away. Albeit too late to help him.

Medawar said...

Welcome back. You were missed.