BBC: Konnte Mutter Baby verhungern lassen, weil in unserer Gesellschaft Männern niemand zuhört?

Mit Bezug auf einen Bericht der britischen BBC schreibt Glen Poole auf der männerpolitischen Website Equality for Men:

"Nobody listens to the male in this country , nobody, there’ll be loads of fathers like me, all over, but nobody listens to us, nobody listens to the father and look what’s happened, I’ve got a dead son, I’ve got to live with this for the rest of my life…..who am I? Nothing! I can’t sleep no more, I can’t think no more, it’s driving me crazy."

These are the words of Aftab Khan speaking to the BBC, father of four-year old Hamzah Khan who was starved to death in Bradford, England, by his mother Amanda Hutton.

It’s difficult to imagine how this can happen in Britain today. The emaciated body of four-year old Hamzah Khan rotted and mummified in his cot while his mum, Amanda Hutton, continued for nearly two years to raise five other children (who were aged five to 13 when the body was finally discovered).

Hutton also had two young adult sons and she threatened the eldest, Tariq, now 24, that she would kill her five other young children if he told anyone what had happened.

The only serious intervention that the authorities seem to have made is to charge the children’s father with domestic violence and prevent him from being in his children’s lives.

The court heard how Aftab Khan begged police to check on his son in 2008, the year before he died. The boy’s father had been arrested for assaulting Amanda Hutton and in his police interview—which was played to the jury—he was heard repeatedly telling the police cops how badly their son Hamzah Khan had been neglected.

The boy’s father told police officers: "You’ve got to keep an eye on that woman. All I want you to do is get a doctor to check Hamzah, check how undernourished he is, check how neglected he is, see how he is."

According to Hamzah’s father, the mother was an overpowering alcoholic who would not let the father take his son to the doctor. Jurors heard that he told the police: "When it all comes out I’ll come back and see you and say I told you so… you guys are not listening."

When incomprehensible tragedies like the death of this young boy happen, our natural tendency is to want to blame and demonize people, despite the fact that blaming and demonizing doesn’t seem to prevent such tragedies from happening again.

A more resourceful question to ask is who is responsible here and ultimately every individual is responsible for their own actions. The father is responsible for assaulting the mother, the individual police officers are responsible for failing to respond effectively to a report that the boy was at risk and the mother is responsible for starving the boy to death.

In addition to these individual responsibilities, it’s also helpful to consider the cultural and systemic barriers that contributed to a four-year old boy being starved to death by his mum.

(...) Firstly the general view of gender is that women HAVE problems and men ARE problems. When we add to this fact that women are given automatic rights to be the primary carer of their children and men are not, then we have a system that treats mothers and fathers very differently and unequally.

Hier geht es weiter.