HOME

Science, People & Politics. First volume (1-3), Volume 2, issue 4, July-August, 2007. Final corrected posting 31.8.07, 6.27 b.s.t.

Everywoman in science, politics
and among people.

Science and politics are two of the most powerful tools the human race has today for enhancing and destroying life. What can I, personally, tell you of science (by which I mean science, technology and medical science) and politics in my world today in the north of England? I can tell you a tiny piece of my life.

I sit physically comfortably in my living room on a two piece green settee. A lamb broth cooks on the stove in my kitchen. On the oak coffee table to my right there is a glass of red wine. I am writing on my seven-year old 32-bit processor lap top. My 64-bit processor desk top has two mail boxes overflowing with unprocessed press releases about aspects of science and its policy. The second desk top is temporarily unaccessible. I do not know how much carbon dioxide my life style produces.

Today, 31st August 2007, a judge must decide what he or she thinks of a lawyer's representation of me as I seek to defend myself against charges that the Crown has brought against me of harassment without violence of staff employed by the Police Force of my country, which Police Force is tasked with upholding the law of my country. They did not uphold the law on my behalf. They derided and ignored and belittled me. There is a second similar charge in which I am alleged to have harassed the staff of a firm of local defence solicitors. Their job was to defend me. They did not do so. I did not realise that subtext at the time, but have since learned they were not doing so. I have already formally entered Not Guilty pleas to these charges.

Tonight, as I have since March 2004 when I know I was the victim of serious crime, as when I knew earlier I was the victim of petty crime, I must decide how I live with and in this Country of mine in which I was deprived arbitrarily of freedom, traduced, derided, drugged by criminals, actions which the police condoned by their tacit acceptance of those acts, and psychologically played with by those secretly entering without my knowledge or consent my living and work spaces. What else they did whilst in these spaces I do not know, nor do I know who they were and are nor when they started their activities.

I was made unemployable by the medical profession with maximum abuse and slyness. They falsely and knowingly created a lying medical record of major psychiatric illness that does not exist and on the basis of no consultation with me and which for some bizarre reason permitted them to treat me as if I were a danger to myself or others when I was not. They did this without telling me what they were doing or why. I absconded from the State-imposed arbitrary and unnecessary and abusive psychiatric imprisonment - in Scotland. I went to the Police in England, still thinking of myself as what I am, a professional woman, unaware the Police did not view me as a human being ann d also viewed me as mentally ill and as worthless junk they could ignore. On that occasion I was bullied and threatened, subjected to derisory amusement and locked in the middle of the night in the dark and alone in a small confined and caged space so that I could be transported to the hospital. I was transported like cattle and placed in a cold urine smelling room in a locked ward whilst a nurse guarded the door. This despite the fact that I have no mental illness save for the stress and anxiety-induced physiological changes caused by crime (serious drugging and a string of petty intrusive nastiness), fear, medical malpractice, legal disingenuity and lack of seriousness and explanation, isolation and the as yet, totally inexplicable police behaviour.

I was not defeated by these events until the end of 2006 when in mental exhaustion I submitted a debtor's petition for bankruptcy to Halifax County Court in West Yorkshire (Case 362 of 2006, 8th November, 2006).

What does this have to do with the title, Science, People & Politics?

Everything.

Science may save me from the State-sanctioned butchery of my mind by abusive Medics with a vested interest in covering up the crime against me and their abuse of me. Politics might help me get to a position where the abuse of the Medics, Police and crime against me might enable me to become employable again.

Science, People & Politics is a title that links arts and science via the humanities. And politics and human behaviour are among the highest manifestations of the humanities. It is a title that seeks to give science a fresh voice, one of many among many others in this human world in which we live. It is a title that acknowledges and wants to explore how the experience of science, people and politics differ in different geographic, economic, historical and political settings. It is a concept I have been striving for professionally for a long, long time though I had not envisaged creating a publication.

So much for the practical world in which I lived whilst I created this title, but what of my theoretical world, the world I believe in.

In that world none of the above would have happened. In that world people have a right to personal privacy, self expression through their words and actions, providing they do not take what is not theirs to take nor give what is not theirs to give. Science is one and one only manifestation of exploration of the world we live in. In this theoretical world of mine we offer informed consent to one another when we can. We do not take goods, nor life nor reputation. And in my world I see no need to hurt or damage, nor control nor exclude nor not seek explanation.

Helen Gavaghan, Hebden Bridge, UK. 31s August, 2007.

Today on 23rd December 2021, some 13 years later, and following acquittal of crime, I stand by the above item. I was not betraying a source. I was not accusing any specific person of any crime. I was concerned, with cause, there might have been an intrusion to my office, was worried there might have been one to my home (I was after all a victim already of a significant theft from my home) and know beyond any doubt there was an intrusion to one place I later rented, because furniture was moved. I accepted that my concern in June 2004 of a spiked drink was wrong, because, as requested by police, I went to my doctor, and the test came back negative. That is confusing because I am told I behaved in an uncharacteristic manner that night. But if so, I was behaving quite normally when two police (one male and one female) asked me only five minutes later to get in their car. I refused to go to A&E, and I do not to this day know why they asked someone walking sedately home at the side of a nearly empty moor top road to get in a police car. I do not know if that event of 17 years ago (I was 17 when my father died) was related to an earlier event when my computer was stolen just after I had filed my history of Eumetsat. The laptop was never recovered, but the handbag was, and it contained a white powder in a vial. These were not mine, and forensically that could have been proven. These things matter. Every solicitor I tried to talk to was blinkered, and medics quite literally are covering their own negligence, even as one of those medics was 2 years ago still advising Bradford Crown Court. This matters to more than me alone.

Science, People & Politics©. All rights reserved.