Cameras could be the best protection against crime of abuse

Back in the days when I was a junior reporter with RTÉ and the Troubles were going on north of the Border, a mad young producer got the idea that someone should go Up There and capture covert recordings of just how difficult the British Army and the RUC were to people from the Republic. 

I was picked, mainly, I suspect, for two reasons, the first being that I was a gormless-looking young one. The second reason would have been my inability to refuse based on the week-to-week contracts on which virtually all of the women in radio were kept subservient at the time.

A technician nobody had ever seen before arrived to fit me with a wire. These days, a sweep of a hand over an iPhone would do it. Back then, it required that a yoke the size of a thick paperback be secured to my person and an attached microphone threaded up through my clothing to just under my polo-neck jumper. I was uncomfortable and terrified. The technician shrugged at the first and seemed puzzled by the second. He didn’t think, he told me kindly, that an RUC officer was going to order me out of the car in Strabane and make me strip on the side of the road. I agreed, but only because nobody was planning to send me to Strabane in the first place and when you’re a fat teenager, the very word ‘strip’ is infinitely more upsetting than the prospect of a life sentence in a Northern Ireland prison for bugging an officer of the law.

The young producer swore that, even if I was found to be wired, nothing bad would happen to me, so off I set and nothing bad happened to me. Nothing bad happened during the recordings, which, rather to the contrary, demonstrated that RUC officers were punctilious beyond the call of duty when dealing with a moronic southerner who required street directions and explanations thereof, and that British Army officers were positively chuffed to chat about nothing in particular with a kid in a car carrying a southern registration number.

When I got back to RTÉ and unpeeled the Elastoplast holding the recording device to my back, what I had captured amounted to unbroadcastable disappointment. Even the most paranoid researcher on the programme couldn’t find even one comment made to me which could have been construed as contemptuous, and when he got down to suggesting significance might be attributed to pauses in the dialogue, the producer told him to take the recording device back to where it belonged and forget the suggested item. I had clearly done my best, he acknowledged, but what can you do in that situation? We were there, he said, (turning me plural), to check out the truth, not provoke or instigate action which might otherwise never have taken place. We certainly were not, he said in a lordly way, in the business of entrapment.

One of the emerging side issues that fascinated me about the whole exercise was how sketchily my own recollection of encounters made just a few hours previously accorded with the reality captured on the tape recorder.

My fear of the British Army in general and more particularly of the guns the soldiers casually carried while they talked to me ensured that my brain was full of static, rendering me unable to apprehend what they were saying to me. This worked out well at the time, because they could see how dumbfounded I was, and in response became much more helpful and kind, each syllable of their guidance duly picked up by the hard plastic device digging into my spine. At the time, I had a fuzzy sense that they were being civil to me. What the tape slowly circling in the playback machine revealed was that they had been much more than civil to me. They had been patient and gentle.

That’s the great thing about tape recordings. They shear away emotional involvement, partisanship, and editorialising. Unless tampered with, their playback represents what happened, no less than what happened and no more than what happened. You cannot characterise and disqualify a recording as you can characterise and disqualify a human being. If a human being complains to any system about the operations of that system, the system automatically defends itself by characterising and disqualifying the complainant. So if a mother arrives to give out about the way her child is being dealt with at school, that mother becomes typical of single mothers from a particular neighbourhood. If a patient complains about the way they were treated in a hospital, those involved remember that patient as obnoxious from the moment they arrived and refusing to listen to good advice being offered.

The worst example of this tendency in action happened decades ago, when mothers (it’s nearly always mothers) who fought for the treatment of their mentally challenged children were blamed for whatever intellectual disability or illness was suffered by the children on the basis that the women involved were “refrigerator” mothers.

When RTÉ put a recording device into Áras Attracta, it removed argument around a whole series of issues. Anybody looking at the footage could see precisely what was happening. It was so clearly obvious, the abuse, that RTÉ rightly decided to pull the camera-operator from their position within the institution lest leaving them there rendered them – and RTÉ — complicit in the continuation of abuse. Presenting the data to An Garda Síochána and going public with it in advance of showing the programme ensured that, whatever else happened, the abuse filmed would stop dead.

Inevitably, questions arose about how Hiqa could have managed to miss what seems to have been chronic and constant abuse. The fact is that if you give even 10 seconds of an advance warning of an inspection, behaviour changes to match expectations and standards, so no matter how often Hiqa arrived in Áras Attracta, it was going to seem squeaky clean in terms of the behaviours of carers to cared-for.

One suggestion is that all people applying for jobs caring for older people or people with an intellectual disability, particularly if the latter makes them unresponsive or hostile, should undergo psychological testing in advance of employment, so that any deep pathology they carry can be outed.

There’s a case for that. There’s also a case for suggesting that only a camera will do it. Whatever the invasion of privacy implicit in the use of recording devices, the fact is that when it comes to abuse and crime, they work. They may not always prevent, but they can help identify wrongdoers and have a good recent track record of aiding in the apprehension and conviction of rapists and murderers.

The sad fact is that we tend to act like better mothers, fathers, and carers when we have an audience, and the best protection for those who cannot protect themselves may be an inanimate object with an uncaring eye and a capacity to record the truth as it happens in front of it.

Recording devices may not always prevent, but they can help identify wrongdoers