QUESTION: The age-gap relationship doesn’t appear to raise any moral issue with me personally. A lot of young women in this country married at age sixteen or with a child and lives independently. It is now clear to people that the newspaper articles have not reported the truths of this man’s case. My concern is where the newspaper said that the lady was a school girl at the time. Does this not suggest the reason the school teachers got involved in the case to make the lady prioritised her education above going into marriage?
ANSWER: The newspapers’ articles copied their stories from a single source i.e the police/prosecution, where the clinical name for the learning difficulty was not disclosed to the Courts, and hidden from both the Jury and the media. The learning difficulty in fact is Dyslexia. The impacts of dyslexia on the individual, parents and society have been shown in several scientific research to be characterised by negative thoughts which, in turn, tend to worsen self-image and can lead to clinical depression [1]. It is public knowledge that dyslexic people do badly academically and form high percentage of school drop-outs in their teenage years. This lady cried and begged her parents on almost on a daily basis that she wanted to drop-out of school, but she was not allowed to do so and was continually forced to go back to school to avoid problems with the Social Services.
It was very clear that this young woman suffered mental health from being forced into school life and forced education that she clearly had no social capacity for due to her dyslexia. As soon as the lady turned sixteen, she entered into this relationship with Spencer. Apparently, Spencer was known in the community to be a single man and had expressed strong desire to marry and to settle down. Spencer, being an autistic man that conduct his affairs strictly based on rules, demanded that due to her age by law parental consent must be sought before they can forge such relationship. This is actually in conformity with Spencer’s African culture as well.
Parental consent was refused at the initial stage. The lady expressed distress and got in a commotion with her parents for their abrupt refusal. Without going into the specifics of this woman’s mental distress, knowing what we know about mental health in teenagers in general and their tendency to self-harm or commit suicide. In 2018, 759 young people took their own life in the UK and Republic of Ireland, data shows. In the UK, suicide rates among young people have been increasing in recent years. The suicide rate for young females is now at its highest rate on record.[5].
About 7% of people have attempted suicide by the age of seventeen and almost one in four say they have self-harmed in the past year, according to a paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry…The data, which is nationally representative, can be extrapolated to the UK population to give figures of 52,427 17-year-olds having attempted suicide at some point in their lives and 170,744 having self-harmed in the previous 12 months before Covid hit….“So we have widespread societal driving factors which are most certainly impacting on children.
The other issue is education has been a huge stress for young people,” she said, adding that a general rise in mental health problems was contributing to a rise in self-harming.” “I think it’s important that all children are able to thrive in the education system. We know 50% of young people make it to university and another 50% don’t, and within that group there are lots of disadvantaged children with learning difficulties or autism or looked-after and traumatised children. We need equal chances for all children,” she said.” The report said: “Age 17 marks an important age before many key life transitions, including the ending of compulsory education and moving away from home [5].
The emotional impact of a lifetime of shame and feeling stupid should not be underestimated. Students with learning disabilities like dyslexia have a three times higher risk of attempting suicide [2]. Having dyslexia, or another learning disability, is still stigmatised and misunderstood in many school districts, and many public schools do not have the resources or knowledge to educate students that require additional accommodations adequately. These combined forces have contributed to a staggering drop-out rate for students with special educational needs [3]; which is another upsetting consequence of our unwillingness to understand teenagers living with dyslexia in their need for practical education and their desire for particular social needs. Adults who experienced four or more adversities in their childhood are four times more likely to have low levels of mental wellbeing and life satisfaction [6].
As parents, should we forced our morality on our teenagers and drove them into irrecoverable mental health for life or suicide, or guide them on their chosen life paths through counselling and advise to let them grow and learn through their own lived-experiences? The parents chose the latter and eventually grant her the parental consent to marry Spencer, knowing that there was already an history of teenage self-harming in the family. One of her parents expressed education. She reiterated her wish to drop-out of school, to marry Spencer and to go into a business.
Research have shown that work options at sixteen for the young person who does not wish to continue formal education due to negative experiences of school because of dyslexia may be limited. Many dyslexics who left school at this age, such as Richard Branson and Lord Sugar, have made their millions, but not everyone can do as well as them. Interestingly, though, research from the Cass Business School in London found that more than a third of the entrepreneurs surveyed (35 per cent) identified themselves as dyslexic [4]. In the case of Spencer and his partner, there was certain talk about starting an off-licence shop/Art shop business following her particular interests and desires as an individual. Research have shown the many positive aspects to having dyslexia and a lot of sixteen-year-olds choose careers suited to their unique characteristics. Indeed, there are successful dyslexic role models in many walks of life, such as architect Richard Rogers and chef Jamie Oliver [4].
Spencer, being a highly academic man, intervened and pleaded with her to complete her ongoing last term at school at the time before starting the business venture planned for her. She was scheduled to finish in a few months anyway, and the reasoning Spencer gave was simply that going to school is not about passing exams and that it’s about learning the process of something; and that to have a failed educational certificate is beneficial than to have known at all – This is a common mental reasoning with academics. If not of Spencer, she would no longer be at school at the time of his arrest. Even though she was not happy going back to school, she accepted Spencer’s advise to finish the last school term she was already on, in recognition of their enduring family life relationship and set plan to open a business that suited her unique interests in arts.
It is generally accepted by the experts in dyslexia that the answer to managing dyslexia is not to have special schools, as the disabilities are subtle and often mild, but to get these young people accommodated in the mainstream schools, with special support. Dyslexic people need to believe that they are not stupid but have a disability that can be overcome once it is properly understood [1].
Teenagers with dyslexia are struggling in school and are dropping out at astonishing rates as soon as they enter age sixteen. Why? Because we have evidence that the Special School this lady was placed failed in their duty of care to teach her how to read in the way she learn before Spencer was arrested. It was in 2015 during the Court proceeding that the School added additional years to her school leaving date and taught her how to read and write moderately, in response to Spencer’s case against the school authority. Apparently, it was Spencer who took the responsibility to teaching her how to read and write in the course of their family life relationship.
The prospect of setting a realistic and attainable goals with Spencer derailed the lack of opportunity that the achievement of educational failure presented to this dyslexic woman. Her emotional needs were met; she no longer express feelings of mental health or the negative feelings of being forced to go to school and passing exams; marriage date was set to February 2017; there was plan to move in to their own 3-bed house under renovation at the time; they walked hand-in-hand on the streets and do normal things in any given relationship. All of these helped her to live above her dyslexia and recovery from long exposure to mental health, depression and social discontentment with life.
All the investigating police officer Donna Hector cared about was to add Spencer to her long lists of sexual offending conviction of men to advance her own egoistical desires for work promotion and Queen’s medal as at 2015/2016. We have carried out our investigations about who done what and why. All she saw was how the public image of black man, dreadlocks, coupled with sexual relation between age-gap could be manipulated to give a certain public narratives, and that’s enough for her to falsified evidence against the innocent and win conviction. How pathetically narcissistic!
This raised particular problem when, in our 21st century, our Criminal Justice System is still operating on the old arm of Anglo-Saxon law template (that spans approximately in the six centuries from 410-1066AD) and places the establishment of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in the same prosecuting field over the police, as opposed to placing the police in lower field arbitrator capacity directly with the Courts. Quite often we see Police and CPS collude together to convict someone and the Judges had to throw the case out of courts most of the time; wasting courts’ time and resources. Hence, a lot of police are not conversant with the law they purports to wield their power with and they have to be educated all the time by ordinary members of the public.
Whereas, if the Criminal Justice System operates in line with the 21st century advances, the police would have to apply directly to the Courts administratively for an ‘Overture’ hearing before a formalised charge can be brought against a person for an offence. Any such notice of an overture hearing against an individual would carry equal parallel power of a charge with imposed restrictions, but is less of a charge in itself.
To put it simply, an overture hearing is merely a proposal for a charge with the defendant in attendance if wish to do so, in which the conclusion of that hearing would result in the court’s verdict for a charge and a preliminary hearing for a plea will be set. Obviously, if a defendant do not attend own overture hearing and a charge is brought, it will in the eye of the court make the individual pose a higher risk of being remanded in prison pending the conclusion of the case. Administratively, the CPS would be on-call by the order of the Courts to represents the public interest or the proposed victim against the defendant in the existence of a criminal charge after such overture hearing.
In Spencer’s case, the case was almost thrown out of courts, with particular emphasis that the case was not fit for a criminal trial. It was dragged on for a year between 2015 and 2016. When the minutes of this case is published, if we do get to that stage in this process, the world would see the lies, deception, intimidation, bully, threats, perpetrated against a lone vulnerable man by individual parties they put to the courts to push the case to trial by force of deception. Sometimes when a group of people colluded together to destroy someone’s life with a lie, they forgot that their own lives too can be destroyed in the same fashion with the truths.
REFERENCES:
[1] Al-Lamki L. Dyslexia: Its impact on the Individual, Parents and Society. Sultan Qaboos Univ Med J. 2012 Aug;12(3):269-72. doi: 10.12816/0003139. Epub 2012 Jul 15. PMID: 23269947; PMCID: PMC3529660. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3529660/
[2] Why We Should All Care About Dyslexia. https://dyslexiauntied961254870.wordpress.com/why-we-should-all-care-about-dyslexia-the-societal-impacts-of-dyslexia/
[3] Understanding the dyslexic drop-out: why students with learning disabilities graduate at a lower rate than their peers, By mcd49 on . https://campuspress.yale.edu/edstudiescourses/dyslexic-drop-out/
[4] Coping with dyslexia post-16. By Katrina Cochrane. https://senmagazine.co.uk/content/specific-needs/dyslexia-spld/1239/coping-with-dyslexia-post-16/
[5] About 7% of UK children have attempted suicide by age of 17 – study, by Sarah Marsh, Sun 21 Feb 2021 16.00 GMT. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/21/uk-17-year-olds-mental-health-crisis
[6] Mental health is a big issue for young people. https://www.youngminds.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/mental-health-statistics/
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