Our adult-oriented culture exploits the
real needs of children
If we really like
children, why do we steal their childhood?
By now, we should be feeling pretty
good about ourselves. Even if we did not sit through the inevitable
newsreaders-in-drag sketches or EastEnders spoofs last night, we will
be glad when the BBC announces today that its TV and radio marathon
has once again raised a record sum for Children in Need.
No one can seriously be against it.
Even those who can't bear the sight of self-satisfied celebrities
promoting their careers and calling it charity will still be pleased
at the outcome. After all, children are the one group on whom we can
all agree. When Gordon Brown wants to redistribute wealth he does not
talk about handing cash to the poor, only of slashing “child poverty”.
The calculation is quite straightforward: while some might have little
sympathy for poor adults, everyone takes pity on poor children. We all
like kids.
Except maybe we don't. For there is too
much evidence all around us, from our shops to our schools and shot
through popular culture, that we are becoming a society that does not
look after, and perhaps does not even like, children.
At its mildest, it's the shock any
visitor from continental Europe or America has at the unwelcome we
give to kids here. It can be formal: the “Sorry, no children” signs
that still, incredibly, bar families from public restaurants. Or
informal: the glares rather than smiles meted out to kids on buses or
shops or cafes. It seems the Victorian attitude to kids, that they are
to be seen but not heard, is stubbornly persistent.
At its most extreme, there is the
staggering degree of pain inflicted on children every day. The numbing
statistics are that each week at least one child will die as a result
of an adult's cruelty; a quarter of all recorded rape victims are
children; a recent NSPCC survey found one in 10 young adults had
suffered serious abuse or neglect in childhood. Of course this is not
peculiar to Britain, but any society that tolerates violence on this
scale has to wonder if our claimed affection for the young is a veneer
— and what lies beneath.
For even in those places far away from
the darkness of abuse, in broad daylight, we are committing a crime
against children. It is the crime of theft: we are stealing their
childhood.
Of course it is essential that British
kids can read, write and add up and that we know what standards they
have reached. And, yes, that takes time. But too many primary school
classrooms have been turned into assembly lines, as teachers are
forced to drill their charges in literacy and numeracy, for hour after
hour. Children desperate to let their imagination run free, to play,
draw or run around are being turned into little box-ticking machines
that can pass tests and make the Sats grade. They complain of boredom,
as the joy of childhood is squeezed out of them.
We can hardly blame the schools; they
are doing what they are told. Besides, the wider culture is up to the
same game — depriving kids of their youth. A current TV vogue is for
shows which make children into mini-adults, for our entertainment. It
can be kitsch horrors like the Junior Eurovision Song Contest or a
Stars in their Eyes “kids special” where the sight of a hair-gelled
nine-year-old, in a shrunk-down version of his dad's suit, can make
your stomach churn. The people behind this dreck would borrow the
pornographers' argument, and tell you the kids enjoy it. But the
pleasure seems to be confined to the whooping, air-punching parents in
the audience, as pushy as the stagedoor mothers of old, willing their
child to victory — and to imagined riches for their own pockets.
But let's not be snobbish about this.
Upstream from ITV1 trash is E4, Channel 4's digital sister. It would
doubtless cite “irony” in defence of its Little Friends comedy show,
which blends the techniques of Trigger Happy TV and Ali G with a new
twist. The people duping unsuspecting interviewees, or stopping
strangers in the street, are not adult comedians but children. One
episode saw a young girl asking three men in the street to hold up
placards: one featured a graffiti-style drawing of a phallus. The same
girl was then shown interviewing an elderly gay couple, asking them
about their sex lives and beginning one question, “My Dad says he'd
bet his cock... ”
This horrible little programme is
queasy in more than one way. It rests on the hope that an adult
audience will share a toddler's sense of humour and find something
funny in hearing a child use rude words (one boy is required to slip
four-letter words into an interview with Michael Caine). It takes a
childish need — to pretend to be a grown-up and to take risks — and
exploits it for our titillation. Little Friends (slogan: Children in
Need... of a slap!) has a whiff of the dirty mac in its demand that a
young schoolgirl approach male strangers and ask for help. And it
turns children into adults, knowing and ironic. It steals from them
and steals from us, by asking us to see kids differently: to see them
as old before their years.
Predictably, it is in the sexual sphere
that the crime of childhood-robbery is most prevalent and most
dispiriting. It can be the teen magazines, whose editors insist
provide healthy, valuable sex education — but which look sleazy and
pressuring to the naked eye. “Why don't you have a boyfriend,” nags
Cosmo Girl!, average age of reader: 14. Inside it offers this useful
instructive tale: “He wants sex 24/7... I love him and don't want to
lose him.” And J-17, whose average reader is 15, with its sex surveys
and its “seven ways to make him come back for more”. The advice inside
may actually be useful, even responsible, and there is no doubt that
some girls have genuine anxiety about either having sex or not having
it — but these magazines are making good money out of that angst.
Or it can be the new US-made Bratz
dolls, which have edged out Barbie to win the hearts of eight-year-old
girls. In their crop tops, tiny waists and huge breasts, they are
miniature J-Los and Beyoncés. They are sexualised, and so cannot help
but sexualise the children who play with them. As Miriam Arond, the
editor of Child magazine, told the New York Times, the Bratz mirror “a
society in which we're treating really young children as if they were
much older”.
It's hard to work out what's behind
this, why we might want to steal our kids' childhood before they're
ready to let go. But we must get some kind of kick out of it. How else
to explain the recent fashion magazine spread featuring a model who
certainly looked no older than 12, with a man's hand reaching towards
her nipple? Or the Chapman Brothers' trademark mutant infant
mannequin, sporting an erect penis, anus or vagina where its nose,
mouth or ear should be. Calling these pieces “Fuckface” or “Two-Faced
Cunt” seems to be playing the same trick: casting children as sexual
objects.
For artists and magazine editors, this
doubtless seems terribly cutting-edge. They are slashing taboos,
unafraid to expose the sexuality of the young. But I don't see it that
way. I see them as part of a wider malaise, one that is stripping away
the protective layer that should insulate children from the appetites,
neuroses and lusts of adults. Children are indeed in need — of a
society that will care for them properly.
By Jonathan Freedland
25 November 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1090852,00.html
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