Murdered for being different

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From BBC website:

"Sunday

This Sunday a new documentary about the murder of Sophie Lancaster is being shown on BBC3.

"The centre piece of the season begins with Murdered For Being Different - following the 2007 brutal attack of 20 year old Sophie Lancaster, in a small town in Lancashire. Sophie was kicked to death in a park by a gang of kids she didn’t know. Her boyfriend Robert Maltby was severely beaten into a coma. The two of them were randomly attacked because they were dressed as Goths, but Rob survived."

Can't believe this was 10 years ago.

Reading a bit more about it I found this:

"Within days David Cameron backed the [Sun Newspaper's “Broken Britain”] campaign, accelerating his own crusade to mend “our broken society”, a phrase he repeated throughout his Conservative party leadership."

Awful awful attack by mindless bigots.

Nevertheless, interesting to consider how the actions of the Sun and David Cameron have mended or further broken our country in the decade since.
 
garnett said:
From BBC website:

"Sunday

This Sunday a new documentary about the murder of Sophie Lancaster is being shown on BBC3.

"The centre piece of the season begins with Murdered For Being Different - following the 2007 brutal attack of 20 year old Sophie Lancaster, in a small town in Lancashire. Sophie was kicked to death in a park by a gang of kids she didn’t know. Her boyfriend Robert Maltby was severely beaten into a coma. The two of them were randomly attacked because they were dressed as Goths, but Rob survived."

Can't believe this was 10 years ago.

Reading a bit more about it I found this:

"Within days David Cameron backed the [Sun Newspaper's “Broken Britain”] campaign, accelerating his own crusade to mend “our broken society”, a phrase he repeated throughout his Conservative party leadership."

Awful awful attack by mindless bigots.

Nevertheless, interesting to consider how the actions of the Sun and David Cameron have mended or further broken our country in the decade since.
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Still happens, quite a few mates have been beaten, glassed or verbal abused when leaving the gay village
 
I remember this but I don't remember if there were prosecutions. Thanks for the heads up I will give it a watch.

That was around the time youth movements kind of fizzled out. People play at "rock look" or "Urban look" now but I don't see very many people dedicating themselves to a music or style movement anymore. We are in far more conservative times when it comes to a lot of the youth these days.
 
This doesn't shock me, in many ways it has been part of growing up in UK if you oppose the ideas of the local youths. I'm sure most of us in some way have experienced some sort of abuse from being nerds to bum fanciers etc. Just the way it has been, but thankfully less and less acceptable. It won't ever go away though.

Plus, Bacup is an absolute hole. It's one of the poorer and dismal places of the UK. Embedded in the countryside in some respects but not particularly affluent or inspiring with little going on.
 
Dup said:
Just the way it has been, but thankfully less and less acceptable. It won't ever go away though.
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This saddens me.

I accept that my parents generation and my grandparents generation that it's different to suddenly accept people from all walks of life.

But for my generation and the younger generation, i was hopeful that a lot of this would have died out as being around various people (religions/race/sexual orientation) just makes it the norm.

There was quite a cute story i read a few months back, there was a young white boy, and a young black boy who were good friends at school. The white boy wanted to be more like the black boy, and in his eyes the only thing he needed to do to change was to have his hair cut shorter. It's nice to think that the difference in skin colour wasn't even a thought in his mind.
 
Semple said:
This saddens me.

I accept that my parents generation and my grandparents generation that it's different to suddenly accept people from all walks of life.

Snip
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I can't help but reject that sort of attitude. Not only because it demeans the intelligence of people of that age, but also because ignoring it in many way validates it.

I think one of the biggest problems we have as a society is over use of the word 'tolerate'. 'Acceptance' would be far more appropriate.
 
The older generation pass on their xenophobia and homophobia etc to the younger generations. Kids are only as good as the environment they grow up in. In certain areas and walks of life, things haven't evolved and that lends itself to the poorer chavvier Daily Star reading side of life in my experience. I can only imagine that some of the offenders, given a few more years growing up when they are out in the world and seeing more than just the small bubble they grew up in, they might actually learn to think differently and this wouldn't have happened. But too late for them sadly.
 
Tolerance and acceptance are products of society without significant resource pressures, which is what the West has enjoyed for much of the last fifty years. But living in peace and harmony is not a natural state of affairs for humans and we will always bully and murder the different. The ingroup/outgroup psychology is an evolutionary trait, you cannot overcome it with saccharine stories about "different is good".
 
Schlong&Stable said:
Tolerance and acceptance are products of society without significant resource pressures, which is what the West has enjoyed for much of the last fifty years. But living in peace and harmony is not a natural state of affairs for humans and we will always bully and murder the different. The ingroup/outgroup psychology is an evolutionary trait, you cannot overcome it with saccharine stories about "different is good".
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Pretty true. As much as we may suppress it we will always have natural instinct to kill.
 
DrToffnar said:
I can't help but reject that sort of attitude. Not only because it demeans the intelligence of people of that age, but also because ignoring it in many way validates it.

I think one of the biggest problems we have as a society is over use of the word 'tolerate'. 'Acceptance' would be far more appropriate.
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It's not a case of demeaning the intelligence of older generations. In fact (sweeping statement) i suspect that those in the older generation who have been educated to a reasonable level, are probably more acceptable of peoples different ways of life.

You're right with the problem in society "tolerating" these people is wrong - frankly it's absolutely none of our business which god they preach to, or which sex they choose to form relations with.

In my own eyes, as long as you keep your own opinions/thoughts/beliefs/feelings to yourself and don't inflict them on me, then i'm perfectly acceptable to accommodate people from all walks of life.
 
MookJong said:
That was around the time youth movements kind of fizzled out. People play at "rock look" or "Urban look" now but I don't see very many people dedicating themselves to a music or style movement anymore. We are in far more conservative times when it comes to a lot of the youth these days.
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I don't think that's true, they just have a more homogeneous style to them.
 
harry5522 said:
In the right circumstances i assure you, you would do it.
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That's hardly exclusive to humans though, when you put it into those terms, every living creature has an "instinct to kill" when it comes to survival.

Most humans will only kill* when there is no other choice, and I would imagine in those cases it is more of an "instinct to survive" rather than to kill.


* other humans - obviously we kill plants and animals to eat, and some people kill for sport.
 
Semple said:
i suspect that those in the older generation who have been educated to a reasonable level, are probably more acceptable of peoples different ways of life.
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I wouldn't think education is a factor.
The attitude toward black GIs in WW2 is an excellent example of how accepting the British public have been, many of whom were working class and almost certainly did not go to uni or anything...

Semple said:
In my own eyes, as long as you keep your own opinions/thoughts/beliefs/feelings to yourself and don't inflict them on me, then i'm perfectly acceptable to accommodate people from all walks of life.
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Inflict is perhaps a poor choice of words, especially since a big key in acceptance is understanding, which comes from knowledge.
People can have differences of opinion, belief, feeling and still live alongside each other...
 
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