[Closed] Have we done "Muslim boy, 10, probed..."

meh.

And when I said I had an improvised explosive device at the airport rather a nothing to declare they couldn't see it was an honest mistake.
Fascist bastards.

Society is full of embittered small-minded Daily Wail readers who are only too ready to point the finger. We have my sick MIL staying and yesterday an ambulance man asked her about the bruises on her arm, which happened when we were trying to get her upstairs two months ago when she arrived at our house. "Oh, that's where they dragged me upstairs!" says she, innocently. I had a quiet word with her later about saying things like that; it worried my son because now he thinks we are going to be in trouble for assaulting her.

Well, that should teach him the importance of correct spelling.

The boy's family said they were left shocked by the 7 December incident and want both the school and police to apologise.

Storm in a tea cup assuming the plod were just polite and civil to them

Or could the teacher have just taken a breath and thought yeah, spelling mistake?

surely the teacher could have had a chat with the kid before calling the police. Once it's been reported to them that the kid says he lives with terrorists they can hardly do nothing (and it sounds like they kept it low key).

^^^^^^ this

surely the teacher could have had a chat with the kid before calling the police.

Thought I heard they were legally obliged to report it?

I would assume legally required if suspected to be true hence the arse covering.

Using worng word <> speeling mistake

Not as bad as this young boys plight:

http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2016/01/18/****stan-arrests-imam-after-boy-cuts-hand-off-in-blasphemy-error/

😯

Hmm, so they didn't report it and passed it off as a spelling mistake, 2 months later we have a 7/7 attack and the school gets taken to the cleaners for not following an obvious lead

they couldn't win really could they.

I guess no one is prepared to use their common sense anymore. People will sue for any perceived slight so why take the risk. Cover your arse, all the way up the line. Once the teacher's mentioned it, the head won't take a risk and onwards and upwards it goes.

If the teacher had asked little Tommy if he meant terraced instead of terrorist nothing would have happened.

Then the media and the Internet wouldn't have something to froth at the mouth about.

what if the kid had been from a white middle class family, would he have been reported, of course not, nice white middle classes dont live in terraced houses and their kids can al spel properly

The book says report so you report. Plenty of people out there would moan if a teacher didn't report and something happened.
Personality I think its just funny.

Thought I heard they were legally obliged to report it?

Institutions such as schools, prisons etc now have a legal requirement to try and stop radicalisation under the prevent type stuff. I presume reporting it to police is part of this legal requirement, although some of prevent is a bit controversial.

If the story had been "Armed police storm house of 10 year old Muslim boy who accidentally said terrorist instead of terraced, and shot dead entire family" then I can see a reason to be upset. Asking a few questions just to make sure it was all a geniune mistake, non-story.

And as has been said above, somewhere, in a parallel universe, there's a whole load of outraged Daily Mail readers because a teacher assumed it was a spelling mistake and some atrocity occurred that could have been easily prevented.

breatheeasy - Member

Thought I heard they were legally obliged to report it?

Legally required to report suspicion; question is, was this reasonable grounds. Doesn't honestly feel like it but I don't think you can blame people for being paranoid... And if the person making the report is pretty sure it's all fine, they're probably assuming the person who reads the report will just make a sort of "hhhhnhhh" noise through their nose and put it in the paranoia file anyway.

(hopefully it's clear that this wasn't specifically the kid being treated as a terror suspect! It's easily possible to see how a kid of an actual terrorist could innocently say something at school that gives away a family member, and that could be a very small thing indeed. It'd be like that time i accidentally grassed my grandad for buying fags)

There's any number of similiar situations where obligations have been pushed onto teachers, universities, landlords, employers, with high personal impacts if you screw it up. And they're teachers; they're really not specialists in terrorism or immigration. So we're creating a nation of amateur informers- and many of them will inevitably be uninformed, nervous, paranoid, unqualified, suspicious... racist, or malicious.

(I came across a similiar situation in finance, when I worked for a bank; you were obliged to report anything you might reasonably suspect be money laundering, but there were no clear criteria for what that really meant. So in most cases where I made an aml report, I was completely convinced that there was no wrongdoing, but made the report anyway purely to protect myself from being told I might have reasonably suspected something.)

In the uni, I now decline to do what was formerly part of my job, because it now requires us to take personal responsibility for something I couldn't put wholly in my control, frinstance. Flawed legislation's pushed us into a corner where people whose profession and skill set is one thing, but suddenly they're supposed to be anti-terror or immigration police too. This is a wee standout case but there's a lot of wider, everyday implications.

nice white middle classes dont live in terraced houses

you don't get out much do you.

some terraced houses
[img] [/img]

And they're teachers; they're really not specialists in terrorism or immigration

I'll have you know I had an hours training on spotting extremists!!!

I split this in two because it was pretty massive, this is the TL;DR part but here's how this informer culture gets twisted up; have a case study. This isn't directly connected but starts with the same problem.

In universities, educational attendance monitoring for foreign students means that it's now possible for a student to miss a small number of contact points (largely classes) and have to be reported to the ukvi and quite likely have their visa revoked. If the institution don't report them, they ultimately risk losing their ability to sponsor foreign students, which is a disaster.

But if a student is reported, it threatens their study and their future. This in itself is pretty divisive- all of a sudden lecturers and academics are supposed to report their students (their customers also!), you can see why many object just on principle.

But add ill-conceived policy to that, and you have a real problem. This works on "contact points"- certain events, such as registration, or particular classes, are set up as contact points and the student must attend and register. This is supposed to catch students who are, quote, "not satisfactorily engaging with their studies" but this is defined in such simplistic, inflexible, and artificial ways that a student can be performing well academically, but end up failing the criteria- for missing a small number of classes or even having bad timekeeping. The most important part- actual academic progression- is completely ignored when assessing this "engagement". Oh and incidentally, universities weren't consulted on how the rules would work, despite being massively experienced in assessing whether a student is engaging. Well we [i]were[/i] consulted, technically, but the only changes between the first and final versions were some spelling corrections.

Incidentally, it's completely possible to attend enough contact points to be visa-compliant, but absolutely nothing else, and only be at the university for a few hours in the year- so these rules not only create false positives, they fail to catch many of the visa abusers that they're supposed to. It's widely accepted that a visa abuser is less likely to be reported than an unfortunate/irresponsible student.

So, I know of a student who came within a bawhair of losing his student visa mostly because he skipped a bunch of first year classes that were too easy for him, then turned up late for some others, and missed some just in the way all students miss classes. The university sees him ultimately as a good student doing normal first year stuff and fannying around a bit before the course really gets going; the ukvi sees him as "not engaging". He's on track for a first but he was treated as a visa abuser

And because it's the home office, pretty much nobody has any faith in these things being done fairly or correctly. It's one thing to report your student when you're sure it'll be handled right, quite another when it seems to be a roll of the dice, and you don't even get to see the number.

So you have a mighty combination here; staff that resent being turned into informers... Mostly highly intelligent and questioning people, and often fairly liberal. Staff that sympathise and often identify with their students, and consider it their job to look after them and work in their interest. Good students breaching the letter of some daft rules in ways that don't break the spirit of the rules. Rules that at the same time don't achieve what they're supposed to, undermining them further. And an enforcement agency which they don't trust to act appropriately, run by Theresa *ing May.

Oh- and to cap it off, it actually counts against us as an institution when we report people- it's considered a failure of ours that we accepted them as students in the first place. So we're punished for enforcing the rules correctly.

if you wanted to design a system that'd lead to serious, professional, law-abiding people sticking up 2 fingers to the home office, that's more or less what you'd do. If you wanted to design a system that'd actually catch people abusing the system, you'd do pretty much none of it.

And yes Daily Mail fans, abusing the student visa system is totally how [i]I'd[/i] get into the country if I was a terrorist, even if I didn't know how badly the ukvi have *ed up the systems that are supposed to stop me.

If it was only about the phrase "terrorist house" are you telling me the teacher could not just have asked the kid: 'What does this bit mean?' & then corrected him when he said: "it means we live a row of houses with no gaps in beteween". But maybe more to this than the story says.

if you wanted to design a system that'd lead to serious, professional, law-abiding people sticking up 2 fingers to the home office, that's more or less what you'd do. If you wanted to design a system that'd actually catch people abusing the system, you'd do pretty much none of it.

Very good imnotverygood the only comment of any sense cos if you were a terrorist you would tell your child to publicise it and maybe get a plaque for the front door.

There is another item on the beeb site today regarding deradicalisation (clunky word that) of children.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35360375

Interesting comment from a headteacher:
"Just because a young person makes an off-the-cuff remark - it doesn't make them a terrorist. All young people will say things that they don't mean and it's our job as educators to make sure they understand what they're saying and that they can explore their ideas. If there was still concern, only then would a referral be made".

Which seems a bit more balanced than "must report it".

cos if you were a terrorist you would tell your child to publicise it and maybe get a plaque for the front door.

According to R4 the lad also wrote he'd been beaten by his uncle.

Assuming the Police were not heavy handed a fe questions to make sure all was well seem appropriate.

Yes reports to day said the police said that it was a child safety issue rather than terrorism issue they were dealing with

As noted once reported they all have to act in a certain way and as long as the police were tactful then its pretty much a non issue

Clearly wasn't a terrorist house as the door wasn't painted red...

My wife is a teacher and has recently completed "anti-extremism awareness training" on-line.
In short teachers are legally obliged to report anything suspicious so he/she was only following protocol.

Bit of a non-story really.

As for the kid in ****stan who cut his own hand off - it sums up everything that is wrong with fanatical Islamism when imposed on poorly educated people.