But what I mainly found encouraging to read in the article is the recognition of malicious complaints. I won't bring up the details again on this blog because I have given the background information at least twice previously in other blogs, but I was publicly called racist on social media because I dared to insist on seeing the provisional licence of a pupil. The mother was so beside herself at this request, that even though not a single penny crossed hands between pupil and instructor, she still found it acceptable to attempt to rubbish the name of my driving school by saying my request was racially motivated. Appalling, utterly shameful behaviour from the mother which for some reason our society finds tolerable; a point I do not understand.
I listened this morning to a podcast where Douglas Murray talks about the equally shameful quality of journalism surrounding an interview with Roger Scruton. It transpired that the interviewer was somewhat economical with the truth of remarks made in the conversation surrounding homophobism. Murray proposes to introduce a mechanism by which people who make such slanderous remarks of fake racism, homophobism should themselves be subjected to criminal charges of equal weight to the false allegations they have concocted.
Having been on the tail end of a malicious allegation, which I sincerely hope no reader on here is subjected to, I can wholeheartedly agree with Murray's sentiments. It is too easy for people to make false allegations, and there really should be at the very least a possibility of committing a criminal offence by anyone who chooses to take such action. Choose they most certainly do; the mother in my example had no earthly reason to make her remarks that she did. She never claimed that I had uttered a racist comment towards her daughter. She didn't even voice any complaint with me at the time, formally or informally. Instead, having concluded that my request to see a provisional drivers licence, can only have been related to the colour of her daughter's skin; she some weeks later decides to express her conclusions on social media. It makes me sick to my stomach. All this does in my mind is to increase the likelihood of having in-car training video recorded. I wonder whether the mother would be so quick to raise her allegations of racism when faced with the prospect of a criminal conviction as my conversation with her daughter could be disclosed in a criminal court due to the recording of video evidence?
But even with that in-car conversation recorded it still does not stop people like this mother coming to their conclusions about the motivation of others. I told her that my request was a legal requirement, but that made not the slightest difference in her mind. In the mind of the mother, her daughter was prevented from doing what she wanted to do (take a driving lesson), and ignoring the reasons given by me as a DVSA qualified driving instructor, she knew better and concluded that the only possible reason for my request, must be related to me being racist. I repeat that the mother did not allege that I had verbally made one single racist remark to her daughter, it was only due to my actions of asking to see the provisional licence that made me racist.
No comments:
Post a Comment