Adults worry about children more than ever, but fail to listen to those
who need a voice most

Monsters in the making

May was not a good month to be aged under 16. Following New Labour's re-election pledge to foster “a culture of respect”, childcare was off the agenda and child-panic replaced it. Subsequent events seemed to justify this mood. A father of four was left fighting for his life after being attacked when he confronted a gang of youths who threw a stone at his car. A trio of teenage siblings, all already mothers, was held up as evidence of a generation's dissolution. A 16-year-old schoolgirl suffered temporary paralysis when she was beaten up by fellow pupils, who recorded the attack on a mobile video phone in a craze known as “happy slapping”.
The malevolent zoom lens of the media was swift to focus on the demons of this morality play: unruly pupils beyond teaching, neo-crims in hooded tops, wilful truants using Live 8 as an excuse for public disorder. Throughout, there was a notable absence of any voice offering a counter-balance; any cool head to remind us that policy responses based on a few exceptional cases can only lead to injustice when they are applied to the rest. I had blithely assumed that there was such a voice.

Professor Al Aynsley-Green marked his appointment in March as the first children's commissioner for England by querying whether, as a nation, we cared about childhood at all. He warned of a “deep ambivalence” towards children, with adults investing enormously in the young people with whom they were intimately involved, while remaining equivocal about other people's children — especially those growing up on the margins — and disconnected from any broader discussion of the condition of contemporary childhood.
But he has said nothing. His silence can be generously explained by the fact that he is not in post full-time until July, and may wish to keep his counsel before delivering his first report in the autumn. But his absence from the debate highlights how desperately children and young people need a public champion. Whether he is that person remains to be seen.
The term “moral panic” is employed far too lazily these days. Orchestration by the government and the media of public concern is hardly a new phenomenon. Nor does calling something a moral panic imply that such anxieties are entirely spurious. Yes, there is a debate to be had about children, but it is not this one.

In a paper written two years ago, Aynsley-Green suggested that British society was experiencing turbulence similar to that of the cataclysmic upheaval of the Victorian era. He argued for a re-creation of the reformist “movement for children” that characterised that age.
So what would we expect of a modern-day Dr Barnardo or Joseph Rowntree?
Aynsley-Green was right to point out the dissonance that exists between this adult version of childhood and the lives lived by actual small people. Childhood has become an adult-imagined universe.
Over the past three decades, concerns around children have amplified to an all-consuming pitch. Childhood has become the crucible into which is ground each and every adult anxiety — about sexuality, consumerism, technology, respect, the proper shape of a life. It is axiomatic that adults worry about children. But this is an era defined by a kind of child-panic, whereby to be concerned about children has become a definition of adulthood.
For all this hyper-focus, the reality of being a child is fraught with absurdities. Children are the only members of British society who can, by law, be hit. A defendant not old enough to buy a hamster legally can be tried in an adult court and named and shamed in newspapers. Last summer, more than 70% of England and Wales was subject to curfew orders that prevented people under 16 from leaving their homes after 9pm without a supervising adult.

So it is disheartening that Aynsley-Green is not, unlike his counterparts elsewhere in the UK, charged with promoting children's rights. Most advocates of children's rights take the United Nations convention on the rights of the child, finalised in 1989, as their template, which provides for rights to provision, protection and participation for children in all parts of the world.
In 2002 the UN committee on the rights of the child condemned the British government for its record on supporting children. A year later a coalition of charities warned that the UK was continuing to fail some of its most vulnerable children. Of particular concern was juvenile justice — there are around 3,000 children in custody at any one time — corporal punishment and school exclusions.
Children are poorly served in the UK. On a formal level, it can be argued that to be young is to meet without trying the definition of social exclusion — existing outside the political process, unable to contribute directly to the economy, criminalised for offences determined by your status rather than your actions, denied the most basic of rights. Of course children are substantively different. The fact that 10-year-olds head households in war-torn Rwanda is beside the point — because children can doesn't necessarily mean children should. But the possibilities offered by a rights-based approach need not deprive children of their childhoods nor dissolve into a reductio ad absurdam of votes for toddlers.

It could, for example, address the desperate needs of those we might call un-children. The ideology of childhood is such that those who fail to meet its strict standards are doubly excluded by society. It's an ideology with strict parameters — childhood must happen inside society, inside the family, inside the school gates. For all the sentimentality and protectionism that adults direct towards children, there are thousands of young people in this country who are invisible.
The nature of childhood is changing in fundamental and often unpredictable ways. Child-panic has singularly failed to limit the premature encroachment of elder experience. The inclusion of children's views in decision-making is neither laughably liberal nor impossible to implement. Of course children should be free from burdensome responsibilities that are beyond their ability. But, regardless of society's best efforts, children are getting older younger. Are they only to experience this passively? The body of work that already exists around children's participation indicates that when young people are asked for their views they don't just ask for free Smarties. Research into children's competence to consent to medical treatment, for example, has proved hugely beneficial to paediatricians.

Throughout history, the way we conceive of childhood has provided an insight into social mores. In a secular, pluralistic era, with an increasing gulf between rich and poor, and a greedy, coarsening culture, that insight is more important than ever.
It is ill-served by a government and a media that would only exclude children further from their own debate.

Is our new children's commissioner willing to rise to this monumental challenge? Generations will thank him for it.

Libby Brooks
7 June 2005

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,1500771,00.html

home / Previous feature