Anthropology Those Poor Darling Burglars You Can't Afford My Radical Life

Visitors In The Night

February 13, 2023 by David 109 Comments

Time for some thoughts on crime. From the pages of the Guardian:

Having my home invaded left me anxious and angry, but so did the calls to lock up the children who did it.

Being a Guardian contributor, the author, Ms Anna Spargo-Ryan, a resident of Melbourne, is of course conflicted. Her feelings, it turns out, are something of a tangle. We’re told of the uncontrollable shaking, the shattered sense of safety, the fear for a missing cat, and the experience of subsequently finding items of stolen clothing discarded in the street. “I am so frightened,” says our columnist:

These fuckers have me jumping at shadows. Every sound is someone breaking in.

All understandable, and far too commonplace. And yet, simultaneously, the experience is dismissed by the author as one of being merely “inconvenienced for a few days.” “The relative impact of this one night on the whole of my life is nothing compared to setting up a child to reoffend,” says she.

Messages, I think, that are ever so slightly mixed.

Before we go any further, I should point out that the words child and children, used throughout the piece, may be a tad misleading, as the identities of the burglars – who stole, among other items, knives, keys, jewellery, a wallet, and a car – have, at the time of writing, not been shared, or, one assumes, determined. The culprits, who presumably still roam free, are assumed to be teenagers, out for an invigorating spree of robbery and joyriding.

And the word child is so much fluffier. Ah, bless those rosy cheeks.

Likewise, the fretting about “setting up a child to reoffend” may be somewhat misplaced. Not least because people who choose to violate other people’s homes, in the middle of the night, in order to steal their possessions, and while armed with carving knives, have notoriously high rates of recidivism, and it is highly unlikely that the people who robbed our Guardian contributor were on their debut outing. Just as it is unlikely that the nocturnal adventure in question will be their last, whether apprehended or not. In reports of such crimes and belated arrests, the words multiple counts appear reliably. Which makes Ms Spargo-Ryan’s chosen framing seem a little perverse. The reoffending she speaks of is almost certainly underway. Achievement unlocked.

Still, there’s hand-wringing to be done and piety to signal:

I can afford to talk to my therapist about how it’s made me feel. I can replace my stolen car. I will sleep again.

And gushing with pretentious sympathy for criminals is so much easier when you have the means to replace any wrecked or stolen items, and when you can afford a therapist to listen to your contradictory outpourings. And when you know your peers will hail you as a “beautiful person” for being so understanding.

Those who have none of the above – and who find the idea of being robbed in their homes by people armed with carving knives somewhat objectionable – are mentioned only in passing.

We’re told that when a local politician noted other incidents of similar predation in the area, dozens in recent months, Ms Spargo-Ryan felt a need to take to social media and air her dissent:

I’m a member of the alleged wave of Bayside victims of aggravated home invasion and I don’t want those children to be locked up.

A position that resulted in several replies from people less lofty in their moral complications:

But when I tweeted this position, a lot of people were angry. Someone could have been killed by my [stolen] car. Was that what I wanted? If they hadn’t robbed me, these tweets claimed, they would have robbed someone else. Was that what I wanted?

Fair points, I’d say.

“If you feel bad about it,” said one, “visit them in prison.”

Indeed. And it occurs to me that a person breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night and stealing their possessions is sending a pretty strong signal about who they are. And about how much concern, or how little, the rest of us should have for that person’s wellbeing.

Our Guardian columnist has of course taken a higher path, one much more sophisticated and statusful, and is seemingly relieved that the budding sociopaths are unimpeded by physical consequences. Plus, she’s had her locks changed and has bought a new car. So, everything is fine:

I check every lock a dozen times and hide my new keys in a different spot every day. Some nights I find myself simply staring at the dark garden in case someone is there.

And just when things couldn’t get rosier, another upside is revealed:

So there’s that.

Update, via the comments:

Readers may wish to ponder how someone can tell us, vividly and at length, about how distressing the experience of being burgled is – the anger, the shaking, the persistent sleep loss, the sense of violation – and who can simultaneously dismiss that same experience as a minor inconvenience, a mere bagatelle. As if it were “nothing” compared to the imagined woes of the monsters who treated her with utter, unequivocal contempt, by violating her home and thieving her belongings. Monsters who, statistically, have almost certainly done it before and will likely do it again. And who, with practice, will get bolder.

Readers may also wish to ponder the implicit conceit that the burglars – the ones brandishing carving knives – are the real victims and should therefore be spared any meaningful consequence of their own chosen actions, their own sociopathy. Because, apparently, one should sympathise with the people breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff. In one’s own car.

Perhaps these are skills only available to Guardian columnists.

Update 2:

In the comments, I Was Burgled Last Year adds,

Leniency for burglars makes her look good to her friends but it hurts victims of burglary.

Well, indeed. It does seem rather selfish. But as Darleen discovered in the thread below, pointing out the possible corrosive effects of sympathy for criminals – rather than for their numerous victims (and future victims), who are very often poor – is precisely the kind of thing that will get you blocked by Ms Spargo-Ryan. Because, obviously, she cares so very much.

As Theodore Dalrymple put it,

Conspicuous forgiveness becomes a kind of sadism, an additional burden to bear for those to whom the evil was done: for as I know from clinical experience with my patients, the lack of proper punishment of the perpetrators of evil is itself a punishment of the victims of it, a punishment that is often long-lasting… This is because it removes from the victims all confidence that there is justice in the world or that anybody cares what happens to them.

Pretentious leniency can be taken as a sign that one doesn’t take the lives of the preyed-upon seriously. They, it seems, are as nothing compared to having oneself applauded as a Higher Being, gushing with forgiveness and moral sophistication. “A beautiful person,” as one of Ms Spargo-Ryan’s many admirers put it. And the extent to which this pretension can be taken – its remarkable perversity – is illustrated quite vividly in the last two paragraphs here.

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