Why British police are beating children until they are “throwing up blood”
The recent student protests haven’t covered the police nor demonstrators in glory. The former have in some cases, against regulations, covered IDs and turned into mini Judge Dredds, dishing out a particularly unsavoury and violent form of ‘justice’; a minority of demonstrators have been violent, stupid vandals, hijacking the news agenda and ruining the protest for the civil majority.
Although approximately 99.9 per cent of the recent news on the protests centred around OH MY GOD ROYAL CAR HIT A BIT (never asking exactly why the Royal car was driven straight through an area with thousands of angry protestors), but a few people have at least asked why the police response to children has been so brutal. It’s one thing to respond in kind to someone who’s attacking you; it’s another entirely to ‘kettle’ 13-year-olds for many hours in the most exposed parts of London, to hit a 20-year-old simply trying to leave a ‘kettle’ so hard he suffered bleeding to the brain (and then have hospital offers try to eject him from Chelsea and Westminster, despite his condition), and to throw a teenager to the floor and beat him until he’s throwing up blood, before casting him aside.
The reason behind these disgusting acts seems to be summed up by 17-year-old Rachel Bergan in the last of those linked articles. As someone concerned about the hike in student fees, she’d decided to protest. When the police kettled students on Westminster Bridge, things started to get ugly; Bergan contacted her mother, who on police advice told her daughter to move to the front line and asked to be released. Predictably, this was a bad idea, because she and friends were then sandwiched between violent protestors and violent, unsympathetic police. Bergan’s report notes that while the first line of police let her through, a second forced her into a ditch and beat her friends.
However, this had the effect the authorities were no doubt looking for. Bergan, keen to demonstrate her dissent now has the following to say about subsequent protests:
I don’t want to go through that again.
The actions of the police and government aren’t about stopping protests getting out of hand—they’re about stopping protests coming from a suddenly motivated younger generation.
It is absoloutly disgusting. I heard this girl speaking on the radio and the poor girl sounded exactly how you would imagine- a broken little girl. I actually cried listening to her. Her mother also spoke to the radio and it was even more disturbing as i began to imagine what it would have been like if it were my teenage daughter. My heart goes out to the young protestors who simply went down there for a peaceful protest but were kettled by these so called ‘protectors’.