On 7 June 2001, a mere 59% of the UK’s registered voters took part in the general election that would return New Labour for a second term (Electoral Commission 2003). It was the lowest voter turnout recorded for a general election since 1918, with lack of interest particularly marked among young voters. At just 39% the turnout among 18 to 24 year olds set off alarm bells about the future for democracy in the UK and inspired some urgent research and consultation aimed at re-engaging young people’s interest in civic life.
The government’s research with young people – the YVote?/YNot? project – covered a broad range of issues, including young people’s own views of politics and politicians, their political activities and the quality of information available to them about engaging in the democratic process (CYPU 2002). It invited ideas for how to improve young people’s involvement in our democracy and, in response to a recommendation that arguments for lowering the voting age should be seriously considered, the project report suggested that the independent Electoral Commission might wish to investigate further. Duly, the Electoral Commission ran a broad consultation on the issue, called How old is old enough? (Electoral Commission 2003). It reported that the majority of responses to the consultation were in favour of lowering the minimum voting age to 16, but that a separate ICM poll – conducted to cancel out the ‘self-selecting’ bias of consultation respondents – had shown that most people preferred to maintain the status quo (Electoral Commission 2004). With ‘no significant or even consistent majority of young people calling for the right to vote’, the Commission concluded that there was not ‘a sufficiently strong argument that change now would affect the level of political engagement between young people and the political process’ (Electoral Commission 2004: 61). It recommended that the minimum voting age in UK elections should remain at 18, for now at least.
In considering the experience of young people in the UK, both consultations asked important questions about how to engage young British people in the democratic process, some of which will be raised in this essay. But is it really enough to ponder over young people’s interest in politics? In a consultation about whether to extend the vote to a disenfranchised group, is it sufficient to examine how their access to the democratic process can be made more vibrant, more relevant and more reliable? Critically, should we be satisfied by a public debate about children’s involvement in democracy which is triggered by concern over the low level of voter participation? When John Stuart Mill called for the vote to be extended to women in 1869, he was not interested in drawing more voters to the polling stations; he spoke of women’s subjection in society at the hands of men, of their right to protect themselves against it and their intellectual capacity to do so (Mill 2006).
This essay seeks to turn the debate for lowering the voting age in the UK away from structural concerns about delivery of the democratic process, and towards a deeper investigation of the perception of children in society and the nature of their citizenship. It will start by looking at the notion of citizenship and what it means to have the vote. It will then analyse the extent to which children are, and should be acknowledged as, citizens in the UK before considering their right to the vote.
What is a citizen?
Despite the bald definition for the word ‘citizen’ given in the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, as being either ‘a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth’, discussions about the meaning of citizenship agree that a citizen in a democracy is more than this. A democratic citizen is someone who takes part in the decision-making of the state or commonwealth in which they are a recognised subject – and a citizen’s right to vote is key. ‘In a democracy,’ says David Archard (2004: 98), ‘suffrage is the mark of citizenship. A citizen is someone who participates in the government of their society and, where that government is democratic, does so by casting votes in elections’. Ennew (2000: 1) questions the relevance of ideas about full citizenship to children’s citizenship status, but she does not question that these perceptions exist nor that they link full citizenship to personal autonomy, with characteristics that include economic responsibility such as employment and entering into contracts, and social responsibilities such as getting married without parental permission. Ahead of all these defining qualities, she lists the right to vote.
And yet, while the vote clearly has great symbolic power, its instrumental value for individual citizens is severely limited, as the meaning of a single vote disappears among the many thousands that either concur or disagree with it. Even when the outcome of an election positively reflects a citizen’s vote, there is no guarantee that the resulting administration will use the power delegated by that voter in the manner intended. So why does the vote matter so much?
It matters precisely because it is symbolic. Political status is generally seen to be conferred on those who have the franchise, and withheld from those who do not. The very term ‘disenfranchised’ implies much more than being deprived of the vote. It is used in everyday speech to describe the experience of being on the outside: of having no say, of not being listened to – of not being heard. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary explains that it also means being ‘deprived of a right or privilege’. And it is important to remember that privilege remains inherent in the decisions made by society about who should have access to the vote. It points to the divisiveness at the very heart of the original concept of democracy, in which only free-born ancient Greek men were citizens, and signals the inequality which continues today wherever there is a dividing line between those who may and those who may not vote. Simplistically (and also highly symbolically), this is a line between those people whose expressed views must be taken into account, and those people whose views can be disregarded.
In the UK today, the firmest dividing line is that which separates everyone who is over 18 years from everyone who is not. Denial of citizenship rights to children, as Michael Freeman points out, ‘means they are not active agents and their interests can easily be ignored’, but lowering the minimum voting age would, in his view, have a ‘symbolic importance in directing the attention of politicians to the lives and interests of children and in putting children on to the political agenda’ (Freeman 2000: 287 and 288). This being the case, the extension of a symbolic power to children could have a genuine impact on the real power wielded by politicians.
But if the franchise were to be extended to British children, would it confer a citizenship status that they do not currently have, or would it be confirmation that they are already citizens?
Are children citizens?
The question of whether or not children are citizens is, of course, intimately associated with how citizenship is conceived. By the Compact Oxford English Dictionary definition in which a citizen is a ‘legally recognized subject or national’, British children – who have the right to a passport from birth as a mark of their individual nationality – are most certainly UK citizens. But if, as is widely believed, citizenship is conferred only on those who can vote and who shoulder responsibilities which require autonomous decision-making (Ennew 2000), then children in the UK are not regarded as citizens – or at least not as full citizens.
There is another definition that muddies the water still further. The Advisory Group on Citizenship, which culminated in the Crick Report on citizenship education in schools (QCA 1998), stressed the importance of what it called the ‘good’ or ‘active’ citizen. This understanding of citizenship encompasses the social definitions identified by Ennew (2000) but places greater emphasis on civic responsibilities such as volunteering as the defining acts of citizens. According to the report, such acts embody the reciprocity between citizens’ rights and duties which, along with a need to be politically literate, is necessary for individuals to behave as active citizens (QCA 1998: 10). The report is comfortable with passing a many-layered judgement on children’s political literacy – many school leavers, it says, have only the ‘basic’ understanding that can be achieved by ‘well-taught primary school pupils’ (QCA 1998: 15) – but it shies away from discussing the duties that children already carry out and the rights they imply. In so doing, it avoids the issue of reciprocity between children’s existing duties and rights and so neglects to undertake a proper consideration of their status as the active citizens it seeks to create. Lockyer criticises the report for ambiguity in this regard when he notes that, while it refers to ‘pupils as active citizens’, it also discusses preparing them to ‘becomeactive citizens’ (2003: 121 and 122, my italics). Analysing the report in its entirety, he judges the latter mode to be dominant, with the implication that ‘during their school years young people are not yet “fully citizens”, either by function or entitlement’ (2003: 122).
So the Crick Report judges that children require specific forms of education in order to become full citizens, and this judgement on their status has influenced the direction of citizenship education in the UK. The report recommends a programme to provide knowledge and experience of three inter-linked areas – social responsibility, community involvement and political literacy – and these three strands underpin the curriculum that is being taught today. If children are seen by the Crick Report to require targeted education in these three aspects, it follows that they are deemed by the report to lack the associated knowledge and experience. According to this reasoning, children are excluded from full citizenship status by their lack of experience as well as by their lack of autonomy and crucial lack of the vote. But while the exclusion of children from the vote is currently a matter of fact, their lack of personal autonomy is a matter of interpretation, as is their lack of experience regarding social responsibility, community involvement and political understanding.
Children and social responsibility
It is certainly true that most children – at least most of those under 16 – have little or no access to autonomous decision-making with regard to the economic responsibilities that Ennew indentifies in the conventional understanding of citizenship status (2000). It is also true that the UK does not permit children under 18 to make fully independent decisions on some social responsibilities such as getting married. However, where it suits society to do so, children are enabled to take on social responsibilities that are more usually judged the work of adults. The How old is old enough? consultation document quotes Department of Health estimates of there being ‘between 19,000 and 51,000 young carers in England alone’, carrying out ‘domestic and caring responsibilities above and beyond normal household tasks’ (Electoral Commission 2003: 13), while Underdown (2002: 57) suggests that even the number of 51,000 ‘underestimates what is still essentially a concealed population’. Child carers can be very young – there is no legal minimum age – and may have significant responsibilities for a sibling or, at the furthest extreme, act as sole carer for a parent. Some cope alone with a parent’s drug or alcohol abuse, others with a loved one’s disability or mental illness. In doing so they carry out a civic responsibility by relieving the state of some expense in health and social care costs, while continuing at school (a social responsibility which all children undertake and which contributes to their future economic independence). In this position, many young carers make significant autonomous decisions regarding emergency healthcare as well as daily choices about feeding, dressing and heating. Some also work to supplement household income. Yet while they cope with significant social responsibility, the skills they acquire remain hidden. Many young carers report being isolated and in need of recognition so that flexible solutions can be agreed with schools and social services (Underdown 2002). They take on significant duties and yet, because they have not reached the statutory age of majority – because they do not have the vote and so are unable to force their concerns on to the political agenda – they are not properly acknowledged. As their responsibilities are overlooked so are their rights and, according to their own reports, they do not receive the kind of state support that exists for their adult citizen peers.
The reality of daily life for lone young carers highlights the extent of what children can do when responsibility is delegated to them. But their experience is still relatively uncommon. More instructive are the widespread responsibilities taken on by the vast majority of Underdown’s ‘concealed population’ of carers: children across the country who contribute to their families through part-time work or by sharing the care of themselves, siblings or other family members. Economic, social and civic responsibilities such as these are often shouldered by young people from disadvantaged backgrounds whose very classification as ‘socially excluded’ marks them out as more disenfranchised than other children and less likely to be regarded as having the qualities for full citizenship. This judgement is borne out by their experiences in early adulthood, when informal decision-making skills acquired during childhood are ignored by potential employers (Barry 2005) and disillusion sets in among those who, having received little help with childhood responsibilities, see no benefit in continuing with them as adults (Bentley et al. 1999).
While there are, of course, significant numbers of children and young people in the UK who do not undertake ‘domestic and caring responsibilities above and beyond normal household tasks’, the trenchant view of children as incompetent feeds an assumption that they are incapable of shouldering such responsibilities – leaving those young people who do take them on without proper support. There can be no reciprocal relationship between the duties fulfilled by these children and the rights accrued by them, as neither duties nor rights are acknowledged, so under the Crick Report’s own terms they are being barred from active citizenshhip. A paradoxical situation, indeed. If these problems exist in the Crick Report’s implication that children require education in order to take on social responsibility, what of the two remaining strands in the citizenship curriculum?
Children and community involvement
According to the 2004 Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study – a survey of more than 500 teachers and over 6,000 students – citizenship education in the UK is delivered mainly through traditional classroom techniques (Cleaver et al. 2005). According to the survey, many schools attempt to breathe life into those classes by offering the opportunity for students to volunteer in the local community, while school councils give them access to a democratic school ethos. The authors seemed encouraged by these findings, although the report goes on to recommend that students should be involved ‘more fully in the running of schools, beyond school councils, and in negotiation of their teaching and learning experiences’ (Cleaver et al. 2005: vi).
Evidence of genuine involvement along these lines exists in some European countries where schools are legally bound to involve pupils in key decisions (Davies and Kirkpatrick 2000). In Sweden, this includes a statutory obligation for schools to involve children in curriculum planning, while in Danish schools children are invited to assess the quality of their teaching. There are no such legal structures supporting children’s active involvement in UK schools and, as Alderson (2000) points out, the Crick Report did not take the opportunity to propose involvement in the school community as a method of delivering the citizenship curriculum. Instead, it emphasised the use of formal classroom methods, and the findings of Cleaver et al. (2005) indicate that this comfortable recommendation was taken up.
Democratic school councils are a significant part of the legal structures in those European schools surveyed by Davies and Kirkpatrick (2000). In the UK, Cleaver et al. (2005) are satisfied simply by the prevalence of school councils, but they make no reference to Alderson’s (2000) research which concluded that they are far from universally democratic. Even where they are run along good democratic principles – views of the student body properly canvassed, recommendations of the council taken seriously – the experience of sitting on the council is had by just a few. Decision-making power ends for most students when they elect their representative: an effective simulation of what it means to have the vote, perhaps, but limited experience of active community involvement. Barriers to children’s community involvement are compounded by the fact that not all schools offer students the opportunity to volunteer in the local community and, where they do, not all students take up the option. On several counts it seems fair to suggest that, despite the enthusiasm expressed by Cleaver et al., the citizenship curriculum fails to offer children access to genuine community involvement and so falls short of its duty to provide the relevant knowledge and understanding.
Despite inadequate school-based education in this field, many young people gain knowledge and experience of community involvement. Research with 110 young people in Leicester into their perceptions of citizenship found that the ‘great majority’ had been involved in some kind of constructive community participation (Listeret al. 2005). Drawn from a variety of social groups, these 16 to 23 year olds had engaged in a range of activities including formal voluntary work, altruistic acts (such as giving blood) and reciprocal neighbourliness. Of course, this study was carried out with a relatively small number of older teenage and young adult participants in a specific area of the country so cannot be said to represent all children and young people in the UK. However, that the ‘great majority’ of just 110 participants from a variety of social backgrounds should be actively involved in their community suggests young people elsewhere in the UK may be similarly involved. Even if this were not the case, the research demonstrates that a very significant level of community involvement existed among these 110 young people. They did not require education in order to become active citizens through community involvement; they were being active citizens in this way.
Children and political literacy
It would be foolhardy to suggest that young people in the UK have a strong grasp of the political process, as they have openly said the opposite. Research carried out both before and after the 2001 election revealed that young people feel alienated from mainstream politics. The YVote?/YNot? project questioned over 1,000 young people aged 14 to 19 and gave them the opportunity to make suggestions for how they might be drawn into the political landscape (CYPU 2002). Those very recommendations – that politicians should ‘talk to us in language we understand’, ‘talk to us directly, regularly, and in our environments’, ‘listen and respond to our concerns’ – point to the ways in which they feel distanced from mainstream politics. Crucially, they asked the government and the Electoral Commission to ‘give us the information and understanding we need’ in order to know how to use the vote once they have it (CYPU 2002: 8). These views concur with earlier research carried out with 14 to 24 year olds from a range of social and cultural backgrounds (White et al. 2000). Although a few of these 193 interviewees had a high level of commitment to politics, two-thirds reported a lack of interest and said that they found it boring, dull or serious. When asked about the barriers to their participation, they mentioned the limited opportunities to participate in politics, the difficulty they encountered in being heard and their lack of knowledge about the political process.
These responses suggest that even young people who are approaching, or past, the age of statutory adulthood, do not feel involved in the political process as full citizens. Without adequate information about that process or the opportunity to experience truly democratic activities, it is hardly surprising that many of the young people interviewed by White et al. (2000) had little interest in it or that the majority involved in theYVote?/YNot? project felt that new strategies were needed to help them gain a level of political literacy that would make them viable active citizens under the Crick Report’s definitions. The citizenship education inspired by that report appeared in UK schools after both the cited pieces of research were carried out and was intended to help fill the information gap which clearly existed prior to its introduction. But it is demonstrably failing to do so. In the 2004 Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study, the least-taught subjects were voting, elections, parliament and governance (Cleaver et al. 2005), while Ofsted recently admitted that the national curriculum was ambiguous in relation to the workings of government and the electoral system (Ofsted 2006).
Despite being effectively excluded from learning about politics by the political establishment and by patchy education in the political process, many children are involved in political action while others are more conversant with the principles and processes of democracy than they might realise. Some of the young people interviewed by White et al. (2000: 17) who were identified as being interested in politics said that their interest was activated by ‘joining a society, joining a youth forum or school council, or embarking on a campaign in support of a particular issue’. While the question posed did not ask about young people’s political understanding, it reveals a level of participation in informal politics that would encourage their political literacy – at least in relation to their given field of interest. The report into the YVote?/YNot? project confirms this kind of involvement, saying that research evidence suggests ‘young people are open to non-traditional forms of involvement in civic life such as petition signing, taking part in boycotts, campaigning on local issues, carrying out charitable/voluntary activities and joining campaigning groups’ (CYPU 2002: 17). The same research also reveals a sense of responsibility towards the vote, pointing to an awareness of its meaning in a democracy. More than half of the 1,000 young people questioned believed that you should only vote if you ‘care who wins’, while most of the 110 young people questioned by Lister et al. (2005) felt it was more irresponsible to vote in ignorance than not to vote at all.
This is hardly proof that children and young people are politically literate but it does imply that, given more opportunity to learn about political processes and more experience of democracy, they might be able to demonstrate their active citizenship in this sphere. Extending the franchise to children would activate the need to inform them properly about democracy and the political process. It would also contribute towards a recognition that children are already being citizens in many ways, that more have the potential to do so and that all require the proper support with which to continue their active citizenship. Despite this positive potential impact on the lives that children are already living, the vote continues to be denied them. So what reasons are given for their continued exclusion? How can those reasons be challenged and, most important of all, do children have a right to the vote?
Children’s right to vote in the UK
Article 12 of the UN Convention is the key statement on children’s participatory rights. It says that children have a right to express their views ‘freely in all matters affecting them’, but qualifies this freedom. The right to express views freely is held only by a child ‘who is capable of forming his or her own views’, and these views are given due weight ‘in accordance with the age and maturity of the child’. Michael Freeman (2000) suggests there are improvements to be made in the wording of Article 12, but he does not question these particular points. This highlights the problem that terms such as ‘capability’ and ‘maturity’ are open to interpretation.
For those people who are interested in the evidence of children’s competence, their maturity and their capability to form personal views are not governed by age. For example, Alderson’s (1993) research with 120 children aged 8 to 15 who faced painful ongoing surgery found that their competence to consent to more surgery was linked to their experience of the treatment so far, not to their age.
But those people who wish to see maturity as something bestowed by age call upon it as a reason for withholding the vote from anyone under 18. In its deliberation over whether to lower the voting age to 16, the Electoral Commission’s consultation report eventually decided that received wisdom on young people’s maturity should hold sway on the issue. Having stated that social responsibility is a key definer for maturity and then cited evidence of young people displaying such maturity, the report’s concluding discussion of how to judge whether 16 and 17 year olds are ‘sufficiently’ mature to vote rested not on the evidence presented, but on ‘the broad views of society as a whole’ (Electoral Commission 2004: 25). The Electoral Commission effectively bowed to popular opinion, allowing the convention that young people are incompetent and immature to trump the empirical evidence.
In a more balanced approach, the commission might have used their own examples of young people’s maturity as a jumping-off point for looking into further evidence of children’s competence. While Alderson’s work on the competence of children in a medical environment may not have been understood by the Electoral Commission as directly related to their potential competence as voting citizens, there is plenty of evidence for that potential in the research cited throughout this essay. There are also examples of competence that children have shown in parliamentary contexts, such as the working children in Rajasthan, India, who attend night schools and all vote to elect their representatives for a Children’s Parliament which has the power not only to govern those schools but also to influence decisions that affect the whole community (John 2003). And in Slovenia, representatives to the Children’s Parliament are elected through a democratic process that begins with representation in schools, extends to local planning and convenes to discuss issues with the elected national government (Pavlovic 1996). This is a very different institution from the UK Youth Parliament which meets in a vacuum and, in 2006, received a flying visit from the Education Minister who used it as an opportunity to make a speech defending exam results rather than to hear the views of young people in the conference hall. Instead, according to Pavlovic’s account of the early years of the Slovenian Children’s Parliament, children’s views were actively canvassed and listened to by government ministers, and the uncomfortable points they made about powerlessness – through their angry mode of expression as well as what they said – were welcomed and acted upon in such a way as to encourage the young people’s increasingly constructive suggestions for change. The parliament continues to this day.
Of course, the experience of working children in Rajasthan is not the same as the experience of children in the UK. And it is important to take care when holding up the Slovenian government for praise on the issue of children’s participation, given that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child had recommendations for change related to participation in its concluding observations to Slovenia’s most recent periodic report (UNCRC 2004). What both examples do provide is evidence that, with the respect and partnership of adults, children can and do make competent, mature political decisions. The Children’s Parliament in Rajasthan was established by adult social workers as a tool for educating children about politics and political processes, but because decisions made by the elected child representatives were acted upon – including the firing of inadequate (adult) teachers – the power invested in the children was fully embraced and carefully exploited by them. Meanwhile, in Slovenia, the acceptance of the children’s early anger as valid comment by politicians with national decision-making power was taken as a cue by the children that they were no longer powerless: it was worth their while to fully engage with the parliament, to offer constructive ideas and to take responsibility for change in their own milieus.
In these examples, four key elements in adult behaviour and opinion served to swing the balance of power towards the children involved and to give them a genuine role in democratic decision-making. These were:
- the initial adult impetus to educate, consult and involve young people
- a continuing partnership between adults and children
- consistent respect for the children’s competence in a political arena
- the fundamental belief in the children’s right to a meaningful voice.
In the UK, where the Electoral Commission’s recommendation to deny the vote to 16 and 17 year olds was based on ‘broad views’ that children are not mature enough to make political decisions, there is clearly no widespread respect for children’s competence in the political arena, and so no corresponding desire to set the ball rolling on their involvement or to work in partnership with them. Put more plainly, the UK does not currently believe that children have a right to vote in parliamentary and local elections. With just a two-year reduction to the minimum voting age causing such trouble, we are clearly a conceptual universe away from the ideal expressed by child liberationist, John Holt (1974), who said that all children – from birth – should have the vote. He regarded the right to vote as a matter of simple justice, in which anyone affected by decisions should have the right to a say in them. As children were, in his view, more likely to be affected by government decisions than anyone else, he believed they should accordingly have the opportunity to influence them.
If this view is so completely beyond the reach of opinion and practice today, where does this leave children’s right to vote in UK elections? Does it matter that their current and potential active citizenship is not given an outlet at the ballot box? The simple answer is: yes, it does matter. It matters that children have no say in directing policies that affect them, it matters that they take on responsibilities for which they are not credited and in which they are not supported, and it matters – both symbolically and actually – that elected governments do not need to take notice of their experiences and opinions. Enfranchisement seems the only way to change that situation. Having the vote may not be a perfect system for granting power to individuals in a democracy but, as Pavlovic (1996) says, ‘a better system is still to be invented’. And so children must have the right to vote in the UK. The process towards enfranchising them should start immediately with 16 and 17 year olds who, in law, already have access to ‘adult’ responsibilities such as taking on full-time work and starting a family.
There would, of course, remain a chasm between any acknowledgement that 16 year olds should have the vote and the right of younger children to do so – not least because extending the vote to 16 year olds is already on the agenda and now a matter of fact in the Isle of Man. Enfranchisement of children younger than 16 would require an understanding among adults of their own responsibility to create the kind of supportive, respectful and enabling environment for children’s active citizenship shown in Rajasthan and Slovenia. And it would require a commitment to do so across all levels of society – not just in schools and not just as part of a citizenship curriculum. However, with the removal of 18 as the incontrovertible age of maturity, the UK could begin a journey that would enable and embrace all teenagers and perhaps eventually younger children as full democratic citizens in which their lived experience and views were respected as equally valid as those of adults for policy-making, and in which they were granted the vote. A new conceptual universe, indeed. A social revolution.
Conclusion
One hundred and thirty years ago, John Stuart Mill campaigned for the right of women to be consulted through the ballot box. While we now take this right for granted, there was deep opposition at the time to the idea that women should involve themselves in public matters and that they could have the necessary competence to cast their vote (Harrison 1978). Mill challenged the preconceptions of his time and contributed to a social revolution which eventually saw women not only get the vote but also stand for and be elected to parliament. His view of children’s position in society, however, was entirely in keeping with the age. They belonged in the family which was, for them, ‘a school of obedience’ and of ‘command for the parents’ (Mill 2006: 42). While we may no longer adhere fully to the concept of children’s ‘obedience’ to their parents’ ‘command’, their potential contribution in the public sphere will not be fulfilled until their existing acts of citizenship are recognised and their rights to autonomous participation as competent citizens are taken seriously.
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