Wednesday 21 August 2002

Sick society...

I know that the abduction and murder of two innocent little girls is about the most heinous thing that any person could do short of genocide. But it really troubles me that so-called civilised people feel the need to abuse the ALLEGED perpetrators before they have even been tried! I thought someone was innocent until proven guilty?? I mean talk about lowering oneself to the moral standards of a lynch mob! What if it turns out that these accused people never did anything wrong, then what? There are so many cases of people being locked up for crimes they didn't commit and this sort of hysterical behaviour only serves to ensure that the likelihood of a mis-trial is increased. The police and courts find themselves under unbearable pressure to make an arrest and so there's a possibility that mistakes will be made in the haste to bring the case to trial.

Our whole justice system is topsy turvey, we spend all our time being outraged that this sort of thing can happen. But at the same time it's perfectly acceptible to turn a young not-alltogether-uncute teenager like Brittney Spears into a sex-symbol and get her to wiggle her arse on stage so that it increases the sales of records. Am I the only one who see's something wrong with that...? I think we should stop abusing people who have yet to be convicted of anything and look to our own society and what we can do to make sure that things like this don't happen. Simply locking them up (or even murdering them through some state-sanctioned form of brutality) is NOT THE ANSWER and it will not stop this from happening again!