The Social Fly-tippers

What kind of awful, odious human being would steal from a vulnerable adult or child? Another vulnerable adult, it would appear. Certain types of crime are so abhorrent to us as a society: child abuse, sex trafficking, the exploitation of the elderly or cruelty to animals, that our media knows it can easily hit its sales targets by printing lurid details of the offence. The British public, after decades of almost Pavlovian classic conditioning, is so primed to be indignant, outraged, furious or wrathful that it is easy to engage when a heinous act is uncovered. In one such case in the last few months, a care home worker has been found guilty of stealing from residents in order to pay for her gambling addiction. In this instance we as a society have been called on to despise, detest and loathe this woman; without of course exploring on a deeper level the facts of the case. One only needs to leaf through any national newspaper and find the adverts for bingo, bookies and online poker to understand the reticence on the part of the editorial staff to explore the hold that gambling now has over our society and the destruction it has been licensed to wreak. In this case, Rachel Stokes, a care home manager from Gloucestershire admitted to stealing £1,000, though the total figure is more than likely higher, in order to pay for her addiction to online bingo. She was rightly jailed for eight months in April, though the families of her victims understandably demanded a longer sentence for her actions. Her accomplice, on the other hand, was spared both the trauma of the court room and the indignity of the press report. The online gambling industry, much like its counterpart the alcohol business, is free to saunter away from the scene of the crime. Our legal system has no conception or framework for assessing culpability when it comes to the actions of our addiction industries. Instead, the addict must shoulder the sole responsibility for the tragic consequences of their addiction and must be vilified and held up to the glare of public opprobrium for the rest of their lives. There is no disputing that Mrs. Stokes breached a trust placed in her and should be punished, but the simplistic ideas that we have about criminal culpability and agency are out of date in an age of mass addiction. Mrs. Stokes was not acting alone, she was acting in tandem with a multi-billion pound industry that relies on addiction, desperation and loneliness. She admitted her addiction in court, to the great indifference of the nation - to our knowledge this article is the first that has been written on the culpability of the gambling industry. The biggest expansion in gambling in Britain’s history is having vast and, for the most part, unseen consequences in the lives of countless people, many of whom are as broken by their addiction as the victims of their acquisitive crimes. We as a society are prohibited from placing the blame at any other door than that of the addicted individual, partly because our legal system has no other way of thinking, but mainly because vested interests in the addiction industries find that set-up most convenient for them. It is time we thought of them rather like social fly-tippers, dumping the messy by-products of their trade and scurrying away, evading the bill for the clean-up. Wynford Ellis Owen Chief Executive Living Room Cardiff / Stafell Fyw Caerdydd