06/02/2012 Inside Out South West

Hello and welcome to Inside Out Southwest. Stories from where you

live. Tonight, we are on patrol in

Torquay with the emergency service that is powered by prayer. The day

you are not shocked by what you see, you should stop doing it.

Also tonight, the south-west victims of internet bullying.

I got home that night and it was all over Facebook, she's a Taxi,

she is dirty, she is not washed. And can David Stafford master a

traditional craft in north Devon? This is not going to be funny. I am

really going to do it. I am Sam Smith and this is Inside

They're an alternative emergency service equipped with prayer, and

some pink flip flops. Inside Out spent the weekend in Torquay with

This is a new world tonight. Lord, we go out in your name. We are

doing work that has never been done Father, as we work to help the

different agencies in the community - the police, the council, the

We are there to get outside the four walls of the Church and put

our faith into practice. And if we can make somebody's life or their

night safer and ensure that they get home safely, albeit in an

Friday night and a new mission for Ros Ede and her team - opening the

public toilets at night for the first time. That's a good place to

put the tip box as well. The shop owners are upset because they use

the doorways of shops to pee. It is very unpleasant. Especially if

we're dealing with somebody in a doorway, you do not know what is

going on. We asked the Council if we could have the toilets open. The

pastors are linked by radio to police, doormen and the town's CCTV

operators. Since they started in 2008, they've dealt with more than

2,000 incidents. We had one woman come up and say thank you for

saving my life. Her husband had left her with two children, one of

whom is autistic, and she did not feel as if she could carry on. She

came here to finish her life, to get drunk and end it all. But she

met her team and somebody sat and talked with her. She came back and

thanked us for saving her life. We don't know the consequences of what

we do. These guys, at this time of night, they came round. Give you

coffee to keep you warm. I know they are dealing a lot with young

drunken people. Where are you going We are local people. It has been

nice and peaceful. We do have people praying for peace. How are

the toilets? They're fine. The last inspection, they were fine and that

is good news .. I can be like... I can be like a... It's early

Saturday night and the walking wounded are already arriving. Up

the street, 18-year-old Ashley is in trouble. He's been in a fight

and has hurt his knee. He's brought back to the safe place a converted

van that the pastors park on the harbourside. It's a refuge for

anyone who needs help. It's going to get more painful. I think you

should go home. If it wasn't for these guys, he would still be

sitting over there. He would be waiting for an ambulance. Thank God

these guys are here. Are you going to go home now? I am going to sit

Now you have nowhere to stay? If the temperature drops to zero, they

will take you in. It's about six degrees at the moment. John spent

last night in a car park. Now he's back on the street. The next

casualty is a girl who says she is 18. A lot of people drink too much,

don't they? It's a safe environment for them to either sober up or get

home or get an ambulance. I done it myself when I was younger. Fair

play to them, as long as they don't act too silly and start fights.

Within minutes of having said goodbye, Ashley is back. We pinch

the ears and twist his hair to see if we can get a response. But we

were getting no response. Because of that, we have called an

ambulance. I've got children and grandchildren who I would not want

to see in that position, the position some of these kids are.

It's good to have somebody out here looking after them. While one team

deals with Ashley, the other helps a young man who appears to be the

worse for drink. Last year, Torbay had the biggest rise in alcohol

related hospital admissions in the south-west. When they're very young,

yes, it distressing. The day you're not shocked by what you're seeing,

you should stop doing it. The pastors' presence seems to have

a calming effect on the streets. Since they started, Saturday night

crime in Torquay has fallen by more than 30 per cent. We are not

confrontational, we're not trying to enforce any kind of law. We are

mums and dads, grans and grandads. Thank you so much. Stay safe.

What shocks you most about what you see? Parents who don't care. Being

a parent myself, I can't understand that. How you can give birth to

your son or daughter and not care. The pastors have become well known

I'll give you some money for these. If they end up in A&E with a cut

foot, that costs, I have been told, Back at their prayer base, the

pastors receive a call for help. The young lady outside now. Just

round the corner. It is 2am and a 31 year-old man has been found in a

I'm just going to check your pockets to make sure you have a

wallet. The first thing we have done this evening is called the

Street Pastors who normally help us in this sort of situation to free

up some emergency services time. But he is too much in drink to be

of any help. If we can't get him sorted out, the police will take

matters into their own hands. Try to find out where he's been

drinking. They don't like places that continue serving alcohol to

people when they have had too much to drink. A little bit cold.

Waiting for the ambulance. He hasn't got anyone at home so we

have to call for an ambulance to take care of him. The pastors'

shift ends at 4 am. Tying up loose ends. You check yours and we will

check ours. I'm not as young as I was. Some nights, it can be quite

tiring. I think tonight was quite challenging. But we've had a lot of

good times as well. So it's been worthwhile. Ashley was treated and

eventually went home with friends. But two casualties of the night

went to hospital. The pastors will probably never know what happened

to them, but they are determined to persevere with prayer and practical

help. There's no such thing as retirement in the Bible. I've

looked for it. It doesn't happen. So as long as we're needed, we'll

Social networking sites like Facebook can connect you to the

rest of the world, but they can also be a forum for cyber bullying

which has been linked to the If you know who is doing the

bullying, you can probably do something about it. But what if the

abuse is anonymous? We've been investigating. My name is Dawn,

this is Sarah. We teach young people on safety issues. We are

here today to show you what can happen to people who have been

cyber bullied. An internet safety workshop in Bovey Tracy. And a

stark reminder of the dangers of online abuse. Pictures of five

young people whose suicides have been linked to so-called cyber

bullying. It's not like it was in the old days when, if anybody was

starting on anybody, it would be face to face, in the classroom or

the playground. Cyberbullying is such an easy way to target somebody.

I don't want to be around the racist comments, seeing people in

the town saying, there's that girl. Jade Sarwar was cyber-bullied after

being assaulted by a girl in Newton Abbott. I got home that night and

it was all over Facebook. She called me a Taxi. And because I

didn't reply, she got other people involved. I showed my mum it. I was

crying because there was stuff they were saying that I didn't like.

They were going on about, she's dirty, she doesn't wash, the colour

of her skin. Loads of people got involved. There was 19 pages of it.

Jade went to the police. The teenagers who posted the abuse

trolling as it's known ended up in court. Magistrates said they were

deeply concerned by the cyber- bullying and gave referral orders

to the five girls responsible. first, I was nervous about going to

the police. But it was a good thing because they dealt with it

straightaway and made a good job of it. If I hadn't gone, I don't know

what would have happened now. knew who the bullies were because

their postings were on Facebook, which discourages anonymous and

abusive postings. But unlike Facebook, there are social

networking sites where people are allowed to be faceless. Sites like

Little Gossip. I don't see the point of it. Nobody posts anything

nice about anybody on it. It's not like Facebook or Twitter where

there are in interaction tools. It is spiteful and pointless really.

Now studying in France, Bianca Coughlin was in her second year at

Exeter University when she discovered she was on Little Gossip.

It was referring to my reputation and how promiscuous I had been,

which I hadn't! It wasn't very flattering. It must have seemed

like a private joke to the people who posted about their friends, but

it would not be funny for parents or an employer. In fact it did turn

out to be a joke by one of her friends. But one that didn't seem

so funny when that friend tried to delete the post. That's when she

said, I can't. That's when I realised the dangers of this site

because no one has the power to remove it. The posting was

eventually removed but Little Gossip, which operates in more than

50 countries, is still rife with abuse posted by anonymous users.

I've come to London to meet the young entrepreneur from Taunton who

created the site in 2010. discovered a hit TV series called

Gossip Girl which is based in America. There is also a Facebook

group called Gossip Girl Taunton. I saw lots of gossip from nights

before, of people going out. It was all light hearted, funny banter. I

thought it was an amazing idea. Ted had unleashed something big.

The site quickly snowballed out of control. We had 33,000 hits in the

first hour. We had more hits than Facebook did. The servers crashed.

It was impossible to police, just myself. Ted was soon swamped with

complaints. If you have 60,000 pieces of gossip and 10 per cent of

them are genuinely malicious, that is 6000 pieces of gossip which I

have to try and find and delete. It is a huge amount of work. After

just four days, Ted sold the site for, he says, $50. I didn't sell it

for financial gain. I sold it to get rid of it. Why did you not just

close it down? That was a mistake and I am sorry for that. I set up

the site with good intentions and I should have just shut it down when

I knew that it was spiralling out of control. Little Gossip goes on

under its new owners. The business that Ted ahead set up as a harmless

bit of fun has turned into a global Internet phenomenon, but one with

It's the anonymity allowed on sites like Little Gossip that experts say

makes them harder to police. If you are a victim of that online abuse,

it is very difficult to get recourse because you do not know

who it is that's making those comments. It's not just young

people who are being targeted. Rate My Teacher features praise, but

also abuse about staff at schools and colleges across the world. We

spoke to a south-west teacher who says he has been bullied on Rate My

Teacher for 14 months. We've disguised his identity. It's been a

really tough time. I am leaving the teaching profession because of it.

It was almost on a daily basis that comments were being left about me.

In the end, there were over 200, which, quite frankly, I thought

appalling. I felt helpless to do anything about it. I am sure it

affected my performance in the classroom. Action against sites

like Little Gossip and Rate My Teacher is made harder by the fact

that they appear to operate out of Getting sites closed down is

virtually impossible. Many sites are hosted, not in the UK, but in

the US. Free-speech is in the US constitution, people have a right

to say what they want to say, and from the UK perspective, we are not

We tried to contact Little Gossip to ask why they don't remove

abusive comments, but our email racist abuse she suffered. It took

me a while to get over it all. About 18 months ago now. I haven't

heard anything since. But it was Jade's story shows that the courts

can bring online bullies to book, Governments appear unable or

unwilling to tackle the operators of sites, which seem to tolerate

There's a website you can go to for advice and report abuse: These

kilns are an impressive clue to the fact that the south once had a

pottery industry. One man is keeping that tradition alive making

beautiful jugs that have buyers This is North Devon. Now a couple

of hundred years ago this place was pottery central all down here were

Potteries and the air would have been thick with the smoke from

their kilns. These days there's just a handful of people carrying

on that old tradition. One of them lives up the road there, Harry the

potter. Every day he practises before

getting down to work. Harry. Good This is extraordinary. It's

beautiful. Thank you very much. long have you been a potter?

years. 64 years! A long time. a good life. Yes, I love it. You've

got all sorts of stuff here, small and large jugs and plates and

dishes and all sorts of stuff. What's your favourite stuff? I have

a reputation for making these harvest jugs. These things here?

Yeah. They're a tradition in the area. Going back to the 17th

century. My son is throwing today and he'll demonstrate this. He's a

very fine thrower. You'll see him working. Fantastic.

Watching Nick working is a bit like turning the clock back five

centuries. The clay still comes from a quarry nearby. The technique

and shape have stayed more or less the same since the 17 hundreds. The

jugs were the potters' contribution to the harvest supper celebrations.

They take along one of these filled to the brim with local brew, golden

cider. I love throwing. I could sit on that wheel all day and keep

going. Unfortunately, you know, I'd fill the place up in a day. I can't

throw all day. But that's my love. That's what I like doing, yeah.

he does it to the same world class standard as his father, proudly

producing work of incredible quality and beauty. I don't see it

ever becoming a thing that will die out or not be used or not be

treated as something that's creative. The classic shape is then

prepared for its decoration, using a process that was popular in

renaissance Italy, they're dipped in a thrin coating of white clay.

Into this Harry will scratch out the designs for which he is world

famous. At the age of 79 Harry is one of the last potters to keep

this tradition going on a commercial basis. He trained as a

fine artist. The jug proz vied the perfect blank canvas. What's this

called? This is the technique called scrufitto. I scrap through

the surface of the white into the brown. The tools look plainfully

familiar. They're dental tools. They keep their edge. I used to use

bamboo at one time. But I discovered these are much easier to

use. You must need incredible confidence just to go at it.

get that through doing it. When you've been doing it for 64 years,

I suppose the knack does come to you! It does.

The technique can take anything up to a day. I'm going to let Harry

get on with it and pop over to the Burton museum to look at

traditional jugs. Harvest jugs were originally made by ordinary folk,

but now examples such as these fetch extraordinary prices, tens of

thousands of pounds. They weren't just made for the locals. Some were

lends itself to bold design and sometimes poetic messages. "When I

was in my native place, I was a lump of clay and I was digged out

of the earth and brought from thepbs away. But now I am a jug

become through potter's art and skill and now your servant am

become and carry ale I will." There is a tradition with sort of

film that it has to end with the presenter having a go at the wheel

for comic effect. This isn't going to be fun yip because I'm going to

do it. Show me what to do. Take your ball of clay and smack it on

the wheel. Smack it? Yeah. Smack it hard? Yeah. Wet your hands. And the

clay. Very gently and firmly squeeze it into a nice, round shape.

Now then, put your left hand inside, with your fingertips, bring it

right up. Right off at the very top. Is that all right? Very good.

That's perfect. Now draw it up. You mustn't go too fast. It must be an

even Spiral. Beautiful technique. You have a potter's thumb. Gently.

There you are, very good. perfect teacher. Thank you very

much Harry. Fantastic. Is this always the moment of truth?

Yes, it is. They seem to have worked. There you are. Wow. This is

naughty post cards. I don't think I can read any of them to a family

audience. This is made with the Queen's Foot Guards having a bit of

a celebration. A bit of a knees up. This is for the Diamond Jubilee.

That's right. Harry's jugs have now developed something of a fan club.

Buyers from around the world are happy to pay �400 a throw for the

finest examples. But for Harry, it's not just about the money. It's

about something much deeper. would say it was the rhythm, the

rhythm of music and the rhythm of working, the rhythm of throwing

pots on the wheel, pulling handles, decorating, it's got to be ridge