To keep tabs on vulnerable children, the British government is widening its
surveillance network. Parents may not like that
Suffer the little children
Victoria Climbié was eight when she died three years ago, tortured by
her great-aunt and a man. An official inquiry into her death blamed lack
of professionalism and poor communication among the many police,
hospital staff and social workers who had dealt with her. Nothing new
there—over the past four decades, dozens of inquiries into abused and
murdered children had reached similar conclusions. But this time, the
official response was much more far-reaching.
On September 8th, the government revealed plans to reform the
child-care system, and greatly expand its reach. In future, education
and children's social services will come under the control of new
“directors of children's services”. As soon as it proves technologically
feasible, every child will be given a tracking number, the better to
allow doctors, teachers and social workers to share information about
them. Those who might regard such a step as an intrusion of privacy are
neatly brushed aside: “The government wants to prevent situations where
a child does not receive the help they need because of too rigid an
interpretation of the privacy of the child and their family.”
Uncompromising stuff—but as Nigel Parton, an expert on child welfare,
points out, this week's announcement merely pushes forward reforms that
are already well under way. In an unambiguous display of reforming zeal,
the Labour government has involved itself more and more closely in the
lives of younger children. It has laid on free nursery education for
three- and four-year-olds and funded hundreds of Sure Start programmes,
which provide basic education and health care in poor neighbourhoods. By
next year, it hopes, 400,000 children will benefit from them. Older
children get Connexions, a new counselling and referral service; they
are also subject to increased scrutiny of their behaviour, thanks to an
ongoing crackdown on truancy and anti-social behaviour (see article).
The notion that governments ought to protect children is not new. It
was popular in the 19th century, thanks in part to writers such as
Charles Dickens. There was another burst of concern during the second
world war, when young street urchins evacuated from urban slums stunned
polite rural citizens with their ignorance of domestic hygiene—and then,
in many cases, went home to fatherless households. The needs of the
nation's youth were perceived to be so great that, in 1948, local
authorities were asked to set up children's departments—a harbinger of
this week's announcement.
As far as government perceptions are concerned, though, two things
separate Oliver Twist from the modern Sure Start child. The first has to
do with numbers. From Dickens's time until recently, the main focus of
policy was to rescue small numbers of seriously endangered children.
Current thinking is that prevention is better: get to more children at a
younger age, and later catastrophes can be avoided. Demographic change
has made it easier to scrutinise the lot. There are now fewer than 3.5m
children under the age of five—down from 4.5m in 1971—and as a
proportion of the population, they are much less numerous than the
Victorian urchins.
The prevention agenda means widening the net beyond the destitute,
dysfunctional families that have hitherto come in for the most intensive
surveillance and treatment. The expansion of nursery schooling has
already achieved this, in a benign manner. And tougher stuff is on the
way. This week's announcement of a child tracking system came along with
a question: at what point should detailed information about children,
collected by doctors and social workers, automatically be shared with
schools and the police? If the bar is set only at parental
conviction—one of the hints thrown out by the government this week—that
will catch many: 7% of schoolchildren suffer the imprisonment of their
father. Lower it much further, and complaints will be heard about the
Big Brother state.
The other innovation is to treat vulnerable children as potential
troublemakers. Oliver Twist, despite his involvement with criminal
gangs, is presented as a victim. These days, troubled children are
treated as future offenders. Nurturing them is therefore seen as a good
way of avoiding future grief and expense. Not surprisingly, Sure Start
was imported to Britain by the Treasury, which was impressed by
cost-benefit studies showing returns of up to 7:1 for American Head
Start programmes (nearly all the assumed returns come from reductions in
crime and court costs).
Now that the government's double agenda has emerged into the light,
it may prove a difficult sell. Parents—particularly middle-class
parents—tend to believe that close scrutiny is a good thing, provided
that other people's children are involved. They will be inclined to
support measures that make the streets safer, the more targeted the
better. They may be less willing to support the expensive growth of
universal children's services, if, as now seems clear, those services
will be used as a means of keeping tabs on them.
From The Economist print edition
12 September 2003
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2054458
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