Jayeless

A few weeks ago I wrote about the “mosquito”, a weapon gaining currency in the UK as a device to be used against young people. Essentially, it plays an extremely high-pitched noise, so high-pitched that those aged over 25 cannot hear it, whenever young people are partaking in suspicious anti-social activities like standing still. Because God forbid that ANYONE would EVER stand still. In this day and age, we keep going and going day and night that’s how busy we are, and no one ever stands still without malicious intentions!!

Anyway. The manufacturer of this weapon seems to be in two minds about the whole thing. On the one hand, the manufacturer is keen to trumpet just how effective the weapon is — because it almost got banned in the EU for being a violation of human rights, it has to be effective, right? But then on the other hand, the manufacturer doesn’t want to be known as the guy who aided and abetted gross violations of human rights, so they tried to play down its effectiveness at the same time. They made a whole bunch of claims about how ineffective their product really is, such as:

• it sounds just like a mosquito
• the sound only becomes unpleasant after 5-10 minutes of exposure
• not all teenagers can even hear it

LIES, ALL LIES. Well, maybe point #3 isn’t a lie — some teenagers are deaf, after all. But points #1 and #2 are definitely lies, at least judging by The Oatmeal’s Teenager Audio Test.

See I stumbled upon this test somehow, and foolishly I thought, “Hey, I might as well find out what that supposed mosquito sound sounds like. Know thine enemy and all that.” And I pressed the button to play the MP3 to find out.

I was not prepared for how horrible the noise was. Since it’s marketed as something that sounds like a mosquito, I was prepared for, you know, SOMETHING THAT SOUNDED LIKE A MOSQUITO. That thing did not sound even remotely like a mosquito. I’m struggling to think of an adequate analogy, but it’s a bit like a train screeching to a halt while you’re standing on the platform. Except it’s much higher-pitched and much louder. So maybe it’d be more like the train screeching to a halt while you were lying under the train.

Within about one-fifth of a second I slammed down on the “I CAN HEAR IT!” button repeatedly to make the noise go away. (I didn’t have to hit it repeatedly, I just did in case it’d make it go away faster.) As you might have noticed, one-fifth of a second is quite a small fraction of a second, but it is an even smaller fraction of five to ten minutes.

Let me tell you, if I had to listen to that noise for five to ten minutes, I think I’d burst into tears and start pleading with whoever was playing it to tell me what I had to do to get it turned off. The noise is that bad.

So funnily enough, hearing the actual noise involved in “mosquito” weaponry did not change my mind about its morality. Stories have emerged from the UK about children unable to sleep at night, desperately trying to cover their ears, because some idiot neighbour has installed this hideous device on their property and it has kept going off. Devices and high-pitched noises like this can be — and inevitably will be — used against people under the age of twenty-five who have done nothing wrong and don’t deserve to have that noise assaulting their hearing. They could easily be used as devices of torture in war (for instance, where US soldiers at Guantánamo Bay now use — or have in recent times used — Barney the Dinosaur’s “I Love You” to try to break their inmates, they could also use this). I could even envisage unscrupulous teachers using them against their students, having lost all faith in the normal disciplinary system.

I admit, if such people really want to harm youths with high-pitched noises they can produce them regardless of the existence of this product. However, I feel the “mosquito” device legitimises the use of such techniques. Before it might be that such techniques would be considered torture, but now the EU Human Rights Whatever has declared it totally acceptable… well, how can you consider it torture? Even if that’s exactly what it is? The EU said it’s okay!

But it seems to me that one middle-aged person has gone up to another middle-aged person and made the kind of decision that may benefit middle-aged people, with no risk to them if it doesn’t anyway (except losing £350). What’s the betting that the EU people who said the “mosquito” was okay were not young enough to be susceptible to it? But where’s the consideration for those of us under the age of twenty-five — don’t we get the chance to say this thing is wrong?

Yesterday I was paying attention to @sbsnews’ coverage on Twitter of Rudd’s latest apology. The apology given to the Stolen Generations in early 2008 caused some consternation here, not least because people didn’t think it was the Australia of today’s place to apologise for the wrongdoings of our history. I haven’t seen so much consternation over this one, but then again, I hadn’t seen so much discussion of this one at all until today. People care more about political issues like the latest asylum seeker “crisis”, our dodgy proposed ETS or upcoming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

However, yesterday Kevin Rudd apologised to thousands of people, the “Forgotten Australians”, who were abused in state care between 1930 and 1970. I’m a bit confused about the numbers, but it seems that Rudd is apologising to half a million people abused in state or church care (and seeing as our population is only 22 million, it’s a big achievement for us — not in a good way — to have abused that many people), including 7,000 to 10,000 “child migrants” who were forcibly deported from Britain. In total, Britain deported 130,000 of its children¹, but the Australian Government can only apologise for what Australia did. Apparently it has just yesterday occurred to Gordon Brown that the UK might have something to apologise for, too.

What was done, both physically and psychologically, to these children is abhorrent and it’s about time their plight was recognised. Many of the children in state or church care in Australia were not orphans; they’d been taken from their parents either in Britain or here because the state deemed their parents unfit. Perhaps many of them were, but the state, and the various churches, were no better. Many were taken away simply because their mothers were single, or because their families were poor². And in the case of the British children, they were exiled to the other side of the world, separated from their families. There was an explicit policy of separating brothers and sisters. Some children were told that their parents had died and that they were all alone in the world, regardless of the truth.

The children endured an upbringing that no child should have to endure. The institutions in which they were imprisoned were largely terrible places. This SBS article describes briefly the kinds of things that happened:

Often children who were abused or neglected, with untreated health problems or who were subjected to constant accusations of stupidity and worthlessness found it difficult to concentrate in a learning environment.

Many Forgotten Australians suffered physical deprivation.

During their childhood, some often lived in unhealthy conditions and even forced to do hard physical labour as part of their daily lives. Demanding and difficult tasks were also given as punishments.

Many children reported being beaten when punished for very small things, such as bed wetting. There were also reports of children being locked in a cupboard or solitary confinement.

Even before you get to the accusations of sexual assault (this BBC article describes a particularly horrific example) these places sound like places of great cruelty. Children were forcibly separated from their families and told their parents were dead when they were not. Children were told they were stupid or worthless. Children had to do hard labour and children as young as eight were forced to earn an income for their institution³. Violence was frequently used against them. Solitary confinement was used against them.

Keep in mind that the victims of this abuse are called “Forgotten Australians” for a reason. Unlike the Stolen Generations, no one goes to any great efforts to publicise their ordeal. I’m not saying that the experience of the Stolen Generations is any less horrible just because people know it happened and don’t know about the abuse of white kids, but clearly Australia has a long way to go in terms of facing up to its history.

At school, Australian history is forced upon us constantly. “Learn about this explorer! This settlement! This other explorer! These leaders!” People always complain that it’s boring, and it is, because the ones who write the curriculum make sure to leave out all the interesting parts in case people are offended by it. The exception to this is that we get to learn about Australia’s past as a racist state. Great, I’m glad we get to learn that, but there are so many other issues in our history! How about our existence as a heavily militarised state in the 1910s and 1920s? I remember once being on the site of a former jail and reading about a fifteen-year-old kid who was imprisoned in solitary confinement in a cell, three by two metres, for weeks because he hadn’t turned up for military training. HE WAS FIFTEEN. He was required to do military training, and imprisoned for failing to, AGED FIFTEEN. Why do we never learn about events like that?

@sbsnews’ Twitter feed is littered with quotes from the Prime Minister’s speech, and I feel a couple of them bear repeating here. The first is this statement of what must be done regarding the Forgotten Australians:

We must begin to make right a great wrong… and as a nation, apologise and make sure it never happens again.⁴

Which is good advice, isn’t it? I’m not sure about accepting responsibility “as a nation” — surely offering an apology implies you’re accepting responsibility — considering that the vast majority of us have had no involvement in this issue. An apology given on behalf of the state and the churches, permanent institutions which are not really constituted by the people in them but by their traditions and powers, would be more appropriate. However, the nation does bear the responsibility of never allowing anything like this to happen again. We must be wary of our governments and churches, we must be willing to object and speak out when we know their actions are wrong, and we can’t ever trust that they know what’s best and are only doing what’s best. Because we know that’s wrong.

Rudd also had this bastardisation of a more well-known quote to contribute, about the importance of remembering events in our history even when they are unpleasant:

a nation that forgets its past is condemned to relive it⁵

I’m not sure about this one as a general rule. I think you could probably forget your entire history and still not repeat most of it, because circumstances are different. You’re not necessarily going to act the same way twice.

However, there’s something to be said for being vigilant against threats you’ve already experienced. As Australians, we already know how the institutions of church and state can be used to destroy lives even in a relatively liberal democracy. Do we want to keep letting our institutions do that, or do we want to have the alertness and political consciousness to make sure they can’t get away with it?

It’s important to use this knowledge we’ve gained from past experience, and present experience, and the experience of other countries, to not repeat the same mistakes we’ve made in the past. It doesn’t mean we inevitably will repeat them if we decide to be ignorant people who don’t know a thing about history, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier.

1. UK child migrants apology planned, BBC News, 15 November 2009
2. Apology for ‘Forgotten Australians’, World News Australia, 16 November 2009
3. Who are the Forgotten Australians?, World News Australia, 27 October 2009
4. Twitter status update #5750460849, @sbsnews, 16 November 2009
5. Twitter status update #5750930533, @sbsnews, 16 November 2009