Children's rights - and other things

Citizens Today ‒ Do children have a right to vote in UK elections?

2011-10-08T21:42:00.003+01:00

(Academic article written November 2006 for MA in Childhood Studies at the Institute of Education, London. Peer reviewed in the sense that it received a distinction from course markers Professor Priscilla Alderson and Dr Virginia Morrow and the mark was ratified by the Institute, but not officially cleared for publication - hence its appearance in my blog rather than somewhere more academically kosher. Excuse eccentric paragraph spacing - Blogger doesn't like text imported from Word.)

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.

References

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Archard, D. (2004) Children’s rights to vote and sexual choice. In Children: rights and childhood, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, chapter 7.

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Cleaver, E., Ireland, E., Kerr, D. and Lopes, J. (2005) Listening to young people: citizenship education in England,Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study: second cross-sectional survey 2004. London: National Federation for Educational Research and Department for Education and Skills.

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Davies, L. and Kirkpatrick, G. (2000) The Euridem Project: a review of pupil democracy in Europe. London: Children’s Rights Alliance for England.

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Rock around the ASBO ‒ Re-evaluating the Teddy Boys through the terms of Blair’s Britain

2011-10-08T21:27:00.003+01:00

(Academic article written June 2006 for MA in Childhood Studies at the Institute of Education, London. Peer reviewed in the sense that it received a distinction from course markers Dr Jane Martin and Dr Vincent Carpentier and the mark was ratified by the Institute, but not officially cleared for publication - hence its appearance in my blog rather than somewhere more academically kosher. Excuse eccentric paragraph spacing - Blogger doesn't like text imported from Word.)

‘We have unparalleled prosperity,’ wrote Tony Blair in February 2006, ‘but also the break-up of traditional community and family ties and the emergence of behaviour that was rare 50 years ago.’ Used as a throwaway in an article seeking to rationalise New Labour’s policies against terrorism and anti-social behaviour, it defied critics who accuse the UK government of eroding personal liberties (Blair 2006). It was also a useful tool for gathering public support: if behaviour is unprecedented, then perhaps a revolutionary response is required.

But how new is the behaviour to which the Prime Minister was referring? The term ‘anti-social behaviour’ is now so much part of everyday parlance – with its own abbreviation (ASB) and its own response from authority (the anti-social behaviour order or ASBO) – that it has taken on the appearance of a new phenomenon, something to cause The Sun’s complaint that ‘the biggest change in society over the past 25 years is the way respect has disappeared’ (13 May 2005: 6). And yet, precisely 25 years ago the Daily Express also mourned the disappearance of respect when it judged there to have been ‘a revulsion from authority and discipline’ in society. Quoted by Geoffrey Pearson in his study of postwar hooliganism (1983: 4), this was one of many examples he used to illustrate a cycle which causes each generation to hark back to ‘a “golden age” of order and security’ (1983: 7).

In suggesting that today’s anti-social modes of behaviour were rare 50 years ago, Tony Blair identifies the 1950s as his golden age. It was, of course, a piece of quick rhetoric used to justify a strand of policy-making. But while it is hardly unusual for a politician to exercise selective memory in such circumstances, the Prime Minister’s comment does seem particularly forgetful; just a cursory glance at his ‘golden age’ reveals that every one of his words could have been used to characterise Britain 50 years ago.

The decade spanning the 1950s truly was an era of ‘unparalleled prosperity’, with the experience of new wealth felt by most groups in society due to full employment afforded by the postwar resurgence in building and manufacturing. Despite this very positive experience there was also a ‘break-up of traditional community and family ties’, as vast numbers of working-class families moved into new housing estates which isolated many in unfamiliar surroundings (Young and Willmott 1957). And there was, indeed, concern over the ‘emergence of behaviour that was rare 50 years ago’. Speaking at a conference on crime and punishment held in London in February 1953, the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, blamed a rise in crime on ‘the general decline in religion, in morals, in integrity and in family life’, while Dr John Spencer of the London School of Economics harked back more specifically to the period which had ended 50 years before. ‘In the society in which we lived to-day,’ he was reported as saying, ‘there was not the certainty that prevailed in Victorian days.’ He was speaking at the very dawn of the Teddy Boy era (The Times, 2 March 1953: 5).

Common sense would suggest that no single group of young people can be responsible for all juvenile crime and anti-social behaviour at any one time. But, both now and 50 years ago, specific groups have emerged as the focus for concern. In 2006, the spotlight is on ‘hoodies’ – young people who hide their faces by pulling the hood of a sports top (also called a ‘hoodie’) over their heads. In the 1950s, it was the Teddy Boys who engendered this alarm, and there are interesting comparisons to be drawn between the contemporary responses to each group. Of course, modern British society differs profoundly from that of the 1950s. It is vastly more diverse – culturally, racially and socially – and everyday life has been revolutionised by computer technology and access to global markets. Violent crime is more prevalent and alcohol consumption among young people has soared. Yet these and other very significant differences serve to shroud consistencies between the two periods and the cyclical nature of social dynamics, as identified by Pearson (1983). This is compounded by statements like Tony Blair’s, which appear to forget events of the past and claim the contemporary experience as unprecedented.

This essay seeks to banish that forgetfulness and, in recognition of the historian’s ‘duty to the people of the past’ (Aldrich 2003), to recall the concerns which surrounded juvenile behaviour in the 1950s. It will cast a contemporary light on the experience and impact of the Teddy Boys, re-evaluating them through the very terms used to describe apparently unprecedented elements of today’s society. The purpose, in recognition of a ‘duty to the people of the present’ (Aldrich 2003), is to inform current thinking by highlighting the existence of a continuum in some of the actions and social attitudes across the two eras.

Following a brief description of the Teddy Boys and their activities between 1953 and 1959, the essay will ask whether their behaviour would be deemed as ‘anti-social’ by today’s definition, and then look at their experience and impact through terms used to describe issues linked with anti-social behaviour in the modern context. Were the Teddy Boys ‘alienated’? Did they ‘lack neighbourhood attachment’? And were their actions the result of ‘poor parental discipline and supervision’? In answering these questions, it will draw an understanding of the Teddy Boys from current strands of policy-making and, in so doing, pass some comment on today’s views and practices.

Six years of the Teds

Accounts of the Teddy Boys pinpoint 1953 as the year in which they emerged from south London (Pearson 1983; Rock and Cohen 1970; Springhall 1986). Dressed in neo-Edwardian suits – from which their name was derived – they were easily identified and, just a year after they first appeared, had gained a reputation for violence. The Daily Sketch branded them ‘teenage toughs’ and linked them with a new drive by Scotland Yard to ‘tackle and beat juvenile crime’ (19 April 1954: 5). Even The Times, which tended to be more circumspect in its judgement, was confident in identifying them as ‘delinquent’ in an editorial published at around the same time (25 May 1954: 7).

These views were not unjustified because violence certainly was an aspect of Teddy Boy behaviour. Rock and Cohen (1970) record well-known episodes of extreme violence and vandalism, beginning with the murder of a young man by a ‘gang’ of youths on Clapham Common in 1953. There was a violent battle between two ‘gangs’ on a railway station in Kent in April 1954 and a series of ‘rock ‘n’ roll riots’ during 1956, in which cinemas across the country were wrecked when fights broke out at screenings of particular films, notably Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock. Finally, in 1958, they were involved in two well-publicised dance hall murders and blamed for starting race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill. Between these major events, Teddy Boys were linked to the increase in juvenile crime and many isolated incidents of vandalism, rowdy behaviour and intimidation.

Most Teddy Boys were adolescents aged between 15 and 18, caught in a curious hiatus between finishing school at 15 and compulsory national service at 18. ‘These were not Teds, but men,’ says Colin MacInnes’s shocked narrator as he describes a sudden massed attack on four black men in Absolute Beginners, a tale culminating in the Notting Hill race riot (MacInnes 1959). And the Teds were almost exclusively working class, as T. R. Fyvel made clear in his lengthy study of their culture. The opening paragraphs describe how, from his top-floor maisonette in the late 1950s, he would look out across a new public housing estate, built to provide ‘London working-class occupiers with better homes than the majority had known before’, and spy ‘dark figures of boys and half-grown youths … wearing the identical Teddy boy suits’ (1961: 13–14). The Teds’ working-class identity is key and will be discussed in this essay as it has in all analysis since the 1950s, be it in Fyvel’s journalistic scrutiny or the interpretation of academics such as Rock and Cohen (1970). Here, their views and others will be drawn into the modern context of New Labour’s campaign against ‘lack of respect for values that almost everyone in this country shares’ (Respect Task Force 2006), beginning with the core matter of anti-social behaviour.

Anti-social behaviour, gangs and government responses

On its website, the Home Office (2006) defines anti-social behaviour as ‘covering a whole complex of selfish and unacceptable activity that can blight the quality of community life’. Some of the examples listed, such as ‘nuisance neighbours’ and drug-dealing, are either anachronistic in a discussion about the Teddy Boys, irrelevant to their social group or refer to behaviour that is not mentioned in connection with them. However, three of the examples do provide the basis for some interesting comparison. They are:

rowdy and nuisance behaviour
yobbish behaviour and intimidating groups taking over public spaces
vandalism, graffiti and fly-posting.

The hoodies of today are certainly linked with these activities in the press and other media. In Rochdale, ‘youths’ were reported to have forced worshippers from a church, ‘having thrown stones through stained glass windows, pelted the building with eggs and terrorised a Mothers’ Union meeting’ (Bunyan 2005) and in Teesside a serial car thief was ‘hit with an anti-social behaviour order to stop him wearing any type of hat or cap in public’ (Allen and Roberts 2005). Meanwhile, the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, remarked that he had once been intimidated by ten ‘fellas in hoods’ at a motorway café (BBC 2005) and Tony Blair was reported in The Sun as agreeing that ‘“hoodies” and baseball caps had become symbols used by thugs to intimidate the public’ (13 May: 6).

Very similar examples can be drawn from the 1950s’ media. ‘Yobbish behaviour by intimidating groups taking over public spaces’ is certainly evident in reports of Teddy Boys fighting openly on the sea-front in Brighton (Daily Sketch, 21 April 1954: 16), ‘insulting and getting rough with customers’ in pubs (Daily Sketch, 19 April 1954: 5) and setting a dog on a nine-year-old girl (The Times, 27 May 1958: 5). Fyvel describes an event he attended at which

Youngsters making for the dance-floor shoved their way ruthlessly through the crowd; I saw cigarettes thrown on the floor or stubbed out on the tables; chairs were kicked out of the way or pushed over; at one spot, where crockery was smashed and stewards hurried anxiously to the scene, there were shrieks of laughter’ (1961: 126).

Rowdiness, intimidation and vandalism are all evident in these reports and, if the Home Office were to apply its current definitions, the Teddy Boys’ actions would certainly be identified as anti-social today. Clearly, individuals were either actively intimidated by the Teds or felt themselves to be so. But while their involvement in specific anti-social and criminal acts is not in question, commentators have disagreed about the extent to which Teddy Boys as a social group deserved to become the focus of a moral panic regarding their actions.

The pivotal area of discussion surrounds group behaviour, and whether Teddy Boys operated in organised gangs to be feared by individuals and even society as a whole. A similar debate continues today in consistent media reference to gangs of hoodies or ‘feral youths’ (Barkham 2005, for example), and is reflected by the Home Office’s concern over ‘intimidating groups taking over public spaces’. Fyvel, whose book was researched and mainly written during the Teddy Boy era, states that there were, indeed, ‘early large gangs’ (1961: 76). Referring to the Clapham Common murder in 1953, he specifically mentions the ‘gang’ which chased four unfamiliar teenagers and eventually killed one of them. Clearly, murder is considerably more than an anti-social act, but the reference to a ‘gang’ suggests a level of organisation whatever the activity, although Fyvel may not have intended this interpretation. The view that gangs existed was common at the time, making appearances in news reporting (‘a gang of 150 Teddy Boys armed with iron bars and clubs attacked a fairground in East London’ – Daily Express, 31 August 1957: 1) and in Absolute Beginners, where a local Ted threatens the narrator on the orders of Flikker, the leader of his ‘mob’ (MacInnes 1959).

With the benefit of hindsight, Rock and Cohen (1970) concluded that groups described as ‘gangs’ were nebulous in character and that, while individual incidents were often brutal as well as senseless, they could not be regarded as planned or organised. Their article rehearses many of the arguments that Cohen went on to publish in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, his analysis of the clashes between Mods and Rockers in the 1960s (Cohen 1972). Both publications lay the blame for moral panic at the door of the media which served to demonise the groups involved by ‘amplifying’ their ‘deviance’ so that, in their rush to report examples of group rowdiness and vandalism, they effectively invited the very behaviour that they condemned. In relation to the Teddy Boys, Rock and Cohen claim that this was compounded by ad hoc and inappropriate responses from the police and government which ‘served to reassure the public that “something was being done” and had the unintended consequence of giving the “menace” a structure that it never had’ (1970: 306).

Meanwhile, Jefferson (1975) discusses a strong allegiance to ‘the group’ among Teddy Boys – a theme to which this essay will return – but does not mention any organisation or hierarchy.

A detailed reading of Fyvel suggests that his use of the term ‘gangs’ in relation to the Teddy Boys was influenced by habitual contemporary reference, and more the result of a vibrant writer’s linguistic juggling than something intended to imply organised violence. In fact he produces evidence to the contrary. A long quotation from a social worker about his knowledge of young people refers to territorial groups bound by a mutual sense of belonging to a specific ‘clique’, but ‘with no foresight whatsoever in the way its groupings came about’ (Fyvel 1961: 23). An interview with a Teddy Boy also refers to his ‘clique’ but gives no impression of any leadership or organisation. Ultimately, Fyvel presents an image of Teddy Boy group mentality which accords with the analysis offered by the later writers: that it was an accidental allegiance forged by dint of being in the same place at the same time.

Despite the demonisation of Teddy Boys in the press and outrage expressed by some politicians – there were calls at the 1958 Tory Party conference for the return of flogging to deal with soaring rates of juvenile crime – the eventual legislative response to the Teds’ anti-social behaviour appears to have recognised that they did not pose more of a threat than earlier juvenile delinquents, and certainly showed no concern about organised gangs. Although Home Secretary R. A. Butler did announce the building of new short-sharp-shock Detention Centres at the 1958 Tory Party conference – a policy whose reputation has since been tarnished – it was seen at the time to be a moderate plan, designed to keep young offenders out of prison and to detain them for as short a time as possible (Rawles 1981). Additionally, Springhall lists a number of White Papers and legislation that appeared from the late 1950s and into the 1960s which were ‘uniformly soft’ on juvenile delinquency, and which laid the blame for the rise in youth crime not on the criminality of young people themselves, but on ‘deeper structural conflicts within British society’ (1986: 196).

Just as Teddy Boys were reported by the 1950s’ media to run in gangs, hoodies and ‘feral youths’ are said to do so now. The 1953 Clapham Common murder and 1958 dance hall murders served to demonise the behaviour of all Teddy Boy groups. Today, a similar view of hoodies has resulted from reports of the hooded ‘happy slapping’ gang who, appallingly, filmed themselves on a mobile phone while kicking a man to death in December 2005 (Laville 2005). What has changed is the response of government to the popular conception of anti-social gangs. R. A. Butler resisted the pressure of outrage from both the media and his parliamentary colleagues to take a punitive response that would have been out of step with more thoughtful views on social responsibility. His resolve was, perhaps, afforded by a more patrician distance between politicians and the public than is possible now. Even so, John Prescott’s widely reported recollection of being set upon by those ‘fellas in hoods’ and Tony Blair’s published views about hoodies appear to actively feed public indignation rather than step back from it, as Butler did. This highlights the shift in relationship between the government and the public, and informs the context in which ASBOs are handed out to young people today. Disquiet at their punitive impact has now been expressed by the government’s own chief adviser on youth crime. Professor Rod Morgan, chair of the Youth Justice Board, is reported as being concerned that ‘hysteria over “yobs” and “feral children” has led to record numbers of children being targeted by the police for behaviour which in the past would have just earned them a reprimand’ (The Independent on Sunday, 23 April 2006: 6–7). Interviewed in The Guardian, pensioner Colin Wadeson makes a related point.

In the evening when you’re out and there’s a group of youngsters in a dark area it can be threatening. It’s an impression. It doesn’t mean that they are causing trouble. Historically there’s always been this kind of thing. The teddy boys and the mods and rockers created fear (Barkham 2005).

Although speaking as an individual, Mr Wadeson’s words could just as easily apply to the direction taken by government; keeping an eye on the past can be helpful in gauging an appropriate reaction.

So far, this essay has established that the Teddy Boys would have satisfied at least some of New Labour’s definitions of anti-social behaviour, and that Tony Blair’s forgetfulness regarding their impact during the 1950s – whether real or expedient – may be a factor in the severity of the government’s response towards the anti-social behaviour of young people today. But what of the causes of anti-social behaviour? Can the experiences of the Teddy Boys be analysed in terms of the factors which are linked with anti-social behaviour today, and is there any continuity in the causal factors that were identified across the two periods?

Social factors linked with anti-social behaviour

The Home Office (2006) identifies no less than 20 specific risk factors for anti-social behaviour. Some of them are, again, not relevant to a discussion of the Teddy Boys, either because they were not a feature of Teddy Boy society (the availability of drugs and alcohol), not a factor recognised in 1950s society (school disorganisation) or because they have not been mentioned in connection with Teddy Boys (mental illness). However, the Home Office’s remaining risk factors present some interesting opportunities for study. As there is insufficient room to consider them all, the following sections will look at Teddy Boy society in the light of a key selection which are identified in the headings.

Alienation and lack of social commitment

In the context of 1950s Britain, where there was guaranteed employment for young people as soon as they left school, Fyvel describes Teddy Boys as being drawn from a narrow stratum of young workers that was a ‘class left over, left behind’ and explains how they were alienated from the newly ‘affluent society’ in the course of their education (1961: 122). Failure of the 11-plus exam excluded them from a grammar-school education which could open doors to well-paid white-collar employment, and subsequent failure to gain apprenticeships excluded them from gaining the skills that could lead to good blue-collar earnings. Both are linked to another of the Home Office’s risk factors – low achievement at school – and consigned the Teddy Boys to boring manual labour and an early stagnation in pay which eventually excluded them from the new prosperity.

Fyvel regards the Teddy Boys’ alienation from the affluent society as something new and as the cause of their inward focus on the group, or ‘clique’. Later academic studies disagree and, instead, locate the Teddy Boys on a continuum of working-class alienation. Rock and Cohen (1970) do refer to the Teds’ failure in school and at work but, drawing on David Downes’ theory of youth subculture, they explain this as a fundamental lack of interest by working-class youth in middle-class aspiration. In this analysis, the Teddy Boys had no expectation of success in mainstream society, and so their group was the only circle in which self-respect and autonomy were possible. Elsewhere, Jefferson (1975) identifies the Teds’ group loyalty as a reaffirmation of traditional working-class values, and this is reiterated by Pearson (1983) who sees their actions as being entirely in keeping with earlier forms of working-class gang life. Whatever the root cause, all commentators agree that the Teddy Boys were alienated from society and that they felt themselves to be so. The group became home, especially once alienation took the concrete form of bans from dance halls and cafés. As one of the Clapham Common Teds explained some years later:

The one place we couldn’t ever get barred from was the Common, that was open land and we could go up there and do pretty well what we liked, and no one could bar us from that (Parker 1965: 25).

A sense of alienation made the Teddy Boy group precious to its members, and this group loyalty was, in turn, linked to their anti-social behaviour. According to Jefferson (1975), the Teddy Boys’ actions were a defence of the group and a symbolic attempt to avoid being further deprived of what little they had left in a declining social status: the self; the cultural extension of the self (their personal appearance); and the social extension of the self (the group). So, in Jefferson’s analysis, when Teddy Boys fought with other Teds they were defending the social extension of themselves (their group), and when they fought with other people they were defending themselves and the cultural extension of themselves (their dress). Whether or not one accepts this interpretation, it is clear that group-mindedness was implicated in the Teddy Boys’ anti-social behaviour. As the same Clapham Common Ted goes on to say:

There were lots of different lads from all over the place – the Latchmere Lot, the Brixton Boys, the Elephant Mob. If you were on your own and they caught you, they’d do you up. So, if you caught some of them, you did them up, know what I mean? (Parker 1965: 25).

So, Fyvel, several academics and even the Teds themselves recognised that alienation was a factor in their anti-social behaviour. But did the Teddy Boys also have a recognisable ‘lack of social commitment’? Perhaps so. It is certainly suggested in the analysis of Rock and Cohen – that the Teds’ behaviour had its roots in traditional working-class disdain for middle-class aspiration – for if commitment to society is measured by those who control it (the middle classes), it would follow that young people who have no interest in the controlling group’s aspirations will have no commitment to its society either.

The terms by which today’s young people are alienated from society are, of course, very different from those which influenced Teddy Boy life in the 1950s. Discussion of a working-class subculture, for instance, has been replaced by debate over the existence of an ‘underclass’, one that is expressly defined by how it differs from the traditional working class (Buckingham 1999). The hoodie is a more amorphous character than the Teddy Boy, dressed not in a totemic uniform but in a piece of clothing which can be found in almost every wardrobe in the country. And the term ‘feral’ suggests that young people categorised in this way are even more alienated from society than any who went before them. Even so, the very fact that the modern risk factors of alienation and lack of social commitment can be interpreted as factors in the Teddy Boys’ anti-social behaviour suggests a continuum in the relationship between those who embrace and control society, and the young people whose behaviour offends them.

Lack of neighbourhood attachment

Efforts to move families out of the malignant urban slums created to house workers during the Industrial Revolution began in the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1950s this altruistic programme had become an imperative following German bombing during the Second World War, especially in London. Sprawling new estates were the solution to a chronic housing shortage and, for many at the time, they ‘embodied the early ambitions of the post-war welfare state’ (Fyvel 1961: 13).

But the experience of life on these estates was not all positive. Fyvel’s outlook from his apartment window made it possible for him to do more than just identify the local housing estate as home to many Teddy Boys. It enabled him to gain an impression of their relationship with that environment. And while, according to him, most inhabitants ‘considered themselves fortunate enough’ to be living on the estate, he observed the teenagers to be out of place and watched them ‘hanging about the stairs and courtyards’, then ‘drifting off in twos and threes or larger groups … as if drawn by a magnet’ to the city (1961: 13–14). In Fyvel’s view, the Teddy Boys’ anti-social behaviour stemmed from a deep sense of insecurity, and he finds reason to believe that rehousing was partly to blame for this. While applauding the end of slum living, he suggests that the demolition of grim 19th-century buildings which were the traditional home of working-class urban youth also broke the chain of family memory, leaving the young Teds cut adrift from traditions that would otherwise have sustained them.

It is an attractively simple theory, although detailed contemporary research with families who had moved into suburban housing estates from traditional communities in Bethnal Green found no evidence to support it (Young and Willmott 1957). Interviews with women who had left the old community revealed that they saw their mothers just as frequently as they had before the move – a finding which suggests that family memory would have been alive and kicking at the time. What Young and Willmott did discover was an opinion that the new estates were unfriendly, peopled by inhabitants who had no interest in getting to know their neighbours and who felt there was nowhere to socialise. The researchers observed that ‘In Bethnal Green there is one pub for every 400 people, and one shop for every 44 … At Greenleigh there is one pub for 5,000 people, and one shop for 300’ (1957: 116). So while the Teddy Boys may not have been completely cut off from the support of extended family, there was probably little incentive for them to become attached to the empty concrete of their new neighbourhood.

Johnstone and Mooney (2005) suggest that, after the Second World War, sociologists began to take an interest in the ‘decline of the community’ and the notion that ‘problem people’ lived on ‘depressed housing estates’. This being the case, the Teds would have been among the first generation of young people to grow up under the scrutiny of this analysis. Today, in Johnstone and Mooney’s view, New Labour has used these concepts as the basis for a policy of social control. They are the principles which underlie the Home Office’s opinion that ‘lack of neighbourhood attachment’ is a risk factor for anti-social behaviour, and they hold the key to why ASBOs are operated in the local area along with more positive community-building initiatives such as Sure Start and the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund.

Back in his apartment in the late 1950s, Fyvel clearly believed that lack of neighbourhood attachment was a factor in the Teddy Boys’ anti-social behaviour. Observing the movement of those local Teds, he would watch them take leave of the ‘social wasteland’ in which they lived and head for town in the very groups that would be reported as ‘gangs’ and whose behaviour caused national concern.

Poor parental discipline and supervision

A tendency to blame working-class parents for the behaviour of young people existed well before the 1950s. Humphries (1981) says that middle-class commentators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries blamed working-class parents for an inability to assert moral control over their children’s ‘savage’ instincts, and that this was cited as the reason why most juvenile crime was committed by working-class children. According to Humphries, this interpretation overlooked the impact of poverty and inequality on what were largely crimes against property and, indeed, were a form of unconscious social rebellion.

There is no evidence to suggest whether or not Humphries regarded the Teddy Boys’ behaviour as another embodiment of the class war, but there is no doubt that parental ineptitude and lack of guidance were still perceived as causal factors for juvenile crime and anti-social behaviour during the 1950s. Pearson recalls fury at the 1958 Tory Party conference over the ‘lack of parental control, interest and support’ and, in the following year, parents were condemned in the House of Commons for being ‘indifferent to their children and utterly without social conscience’ (1983: 13, 14).

As one might expect, Fyvel had clear views on the matter. He feared that the affluent society from which the Teddy Boys were alienated was also having a destabilising impact on family life and reported the views of family social workers who gave him the impression that:

More parents than before seemed content not to know where their teenage children roamed at night, just as the children now had more money to go further afield. The whole message of the mass culture seemed to sanction personal irresponsibility (1961: 225).

It was a new articulation of a well-oiled theme – the ‘mass-society’ theories first employed by social thinkers during the Industrial Revolution, and which judged the working classes to be brutalised by urban life and incapable of dealing with the subsequently overheated behaviour of their children – a view which brings us full circle to the very ideas criticised by Humphries (1981).

Given that parents have so long been blamed for crime and anti-social behaviour among young people, it is hardly surprising that the current government continues to do so – although the extent to which it has regulated parental responsibility is quite unprecedented. There was certainly nothing like the orders placed on parents of young people who are given ASBOs, which call them to attend counselling and may limit their actions. But it is interesting to note that such action against parents may have satisfied the Daily Sketch which, in a leader entitled ‘Bad homes – bad boys’, called for ‘heavier legal penalties where there is flagrant and persistent failure to give the children the care and attention which is their due’ (Daily Sketch, 10 April 1954: 16).

Conclusion

This essay has established that the behaviour of the Teddy Boys would, indeed, have been interpreted as anti-social by the Home Office’s current definitions. Furthermore, some of the social factors now linked with anti-social behaviour were also present in the experience of the Teddy Boys, and recognised as relevant at the time. But care must be taken not to over-emphasise these similarities. In identifying those Home Office definitions which do apply to the Teddy Boys’ actions it became clear that others bore no relation to their era, and the same was true of Home Office’s risk factors for anti-social behaviour. While the definitions and risk factors that do apply in both contexts point to aspects of a continuum across social experience, those which only apply to today highlight important ways in which society has changed. For example, the availability of drugs and alcohol is one of the Home Office’s current risk factors for anti-social behaviour and is perceived as relevant by the public, with young people in Bexleyheath describing their hoodie peers as ‘street rats’ who ‘sit on the street and drink’ (Barkham 2005). By comparison, young people in the 1950s – Teddy Boys and other teenagers – had no marked interest in drugs and alcohol, and so its availability was irrelevant as a risk factor for anti-social behaviour.

But an investigation of the Teddy Boys which uses the terms underpinning today’s views does draw the experiences of that period back into the modern consciousness. It highlights the duties not only of historians but of society in general towards both the people of the past and the people of the present. As Simon Jenkins put it: ‘Any event is part of a continuum. Without history we are infants. All good news becomes ecstasy and all bad news disaster’ (quoted in Aldrich 2003: 137). Attention to historical context is vital if we are to judge which of our experiences are ‘unparalleled’ and which are not.

References

Note on newspaper referencing

References to most newspaper articles appear on the text, with publication title, date and page number given in parentheses. However, articles which have been accessed on the internet do not have page references and so they cannot be referenced in this way. These have been included in the Harvard referencing, with full web-page details provided.

Aldrich, R. (2003) The three duties of the historian of education, History of Education, 32 (2), 133–43.

Allen, V. and Roberts, B. (2005) Reclaim our streets: hoodies and baddies. The Daily Mirror, 13 May.

Barkham, P. (2005) How a top can turn a teen into a hoodlum. The Guardian, 14 May.

BBC (2005) Prescott backing hooded tops ban. BBC news website, 12 May.

Blair, T. (2006) I don’t destroy liberties, I protect them. The Observer, 26 February.

Bunyan, N. (2005) Vandals force worshippers from church. The Telegraph, 5 May.

Buckingham, A. (1999) Is there an underclass in Britain? The British Journal of Sociology, 50 (1), 49–75.

Cohen, S. (1972) Folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the Mods and the Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee.

Fyvel, T. V. (1961) The insecure offenders: rebellious youth in the welfare state. London: Chatto and Windus.

Home Office (2006) Anti-social behaviour: what is ASB? Home Office website.

Humphries, S. (1981) Hooligans or rebels? An oral history of working-class childhood and youth 1889–1939. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Jefferson, T. (1975) Cultural responses of the Teds. In S. Hall. and T. Jefferson (eds) Resistance through rituals: youth subcultures in post-war Britain. London: Hutchinson, pp. 81–7.

Johnstone, C. and Mooney, G. (2005) Locales of ‘disorder’ and ‘disorganisation’: exploring New Labour’s approach to council estates. Paper presented to conference, Securing the urban renaissance: policing, community and disorder, Glasgow, 16–17 June.

Laville, S. (2005) Happy slap gang guilty of killing barman in Clockwork Orange-style violent spree, The Guardian, 15 December.

MacInnes, C. (1959) Absolute beginners. London: Macgibbon and Kee.

Parker, T. (1965) The Plough boy. London: Arrow.

Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: a history of respectable fears. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Rawles, J. (ed.) (1981) Home Office 1782–1982. London: Home Office.

Respect Task Force (2006) Respect action plan. London: Home Office.

Rock, P. and Cohen, S. (1970) The Teddy boy. In V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (eds) The age of affluence 1951–64. London: Macmillan.

Springhall, J. (1986) ‘Rock around the Clock’: the adolescent comes of age. Coming of age: adolescence in Britain 1860–1960. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, chapter 6, 190–235.

Young, M. and Willmott, P. (1957) Family and kinship in East London. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Putting an end to the ‘loving smack’: will the UK government and people ever choose to ban corporal punishment of children?

2011-10-07T18:29:00.009+01:00

(Academic article written February 2006 for MA in Childhood Studies at the Institute of Education, London. Peer reviewed in the sense that it received a distinction from course markers Professor Priscilla Alderson and Dr Virginia Morrow and the mark was ratified by the Institute, but not officially cleared for publication - hence its appearance in my blog rather than somewhere more academically kosher. Excuse eccentric paragraph spacing - Blogger doesn't like text imported from Word.)

This essay is about children’s rights, and specifically about their right to equal protection from assault. It concerns their human dignity and physical integrity, and looks for evidence of justice and fairness in the UK’s approach towards consulting and protecting them. As an essay about rights, it is also interested in the concept of democracy for all, hence the focus on whether the UK government and people might choose to end corporal punishment of children rather than be forced to do so. Choice is preferable to coercion.

These issues will first be explored through a description of the UK’s legislative approach towards corporal punishment of children. The essay will then consider the evidence of research and the broader human rights case against corporal punishment before turning to lessons that can be drawn from those countries which have introduced legislation to ban it. As each section throws light on current views, policy and practice in the UK, it will become clear that the UK government and people are unlikely to choose a ban on corporal punishment without external pressure. There are signs, however, that prohibition would have enough support to be meaningful in practice.

Corporal punishment in the UK

In 1979, Sweden became the first country in the world to outlaw corporal punishment of children. In the ten years that followed two more Nordic countries adopted similar bans – Finland in 1983 and Norway in 1987. They were joined by Austria in 1989. Since then, ten more European countries – Cyprus, Latvia, Denmark, Croatia, Germany, Bulgaria, Iceland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary – and also Israel have prohibited corporal punishment of children. Two other European states – Italy and Portugal – have domestic Supreme Court decisions interpreting their current laws as prohibiting corporal punishment, while two more – Slovenia and the Slovak Republic – have indicated that they will ban it (Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children 2005). Most recently, in June 2005, four Latin American countries – Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Uruguay – committed themselves to introducing such legislation, taking the movement beyond the boundaries of European cultural influence (Pinheiro 2005).

Throughout this period, the UK has maintained a legal position which permits the corporal punishment of children. Children are protected from assault by the same laws as those which protect adults, but with one condition. In England and Wales, parents, or someone acting in a parental role, may call upon a defence of ‘reasonable punishment’ as an explanation for hitting their children; a defence that is not open to them in any circumstances should they hit an adult.

‘Reasonable punishment’ is a new defence. Brought into effect by the Children Act 2004, it replaced the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ that had been part of UK law since 1860 and which, in 1998, was judged by the European Court of Human Rights to provide inadequate protection from ‘inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’ (a right stipulated in article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights). The Children Act 2004 was the UK government’s response to that ruling. But in the year when Romania and Hungary banned corporal punishment in reaction to censure from Europe, the UK government’s new law merely established a definition for what it regards as ‘reasonable’ in the corporal punishment of children. It concluded that ‘Battery of a child causing actual bodily harm [that which leaves a physical mark] to the child cannot be justified in any civil proceedings on the ground that it constituted reasonable punishment’ (Children Act 2004, section 58(3)). By implication, any punishment which does not leave a physical mark may be deemed ‘reasonable’ if a court decides that a child’s behaviour merited physical discipline. In Scotland, the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ was replaced by new wording in the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003. Another form of definition, it judges blows to the head, shaking or the use of an implement to fall beyond what is ‘justifiable assault’ (section 51(3)). The defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ remains in Northern Ireland.

In making their definitions, the new UK laws have drawn a clear line between corporal punishment and abuse. Anything which crosses the line is unreasonable or unjustifiable, and is therefore abusive. Children are, quite rightly, protected under the full force of the law from abusive physical assault. But these clearly defined lines betray the government’s failure to engage with the case made by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Council of Europe, that children’s human rights can only be served by prohibition of all corporal punishment, whatever its severity (Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children 2005). They even suggest that the government has not yet taken on board the messages of research into corporal punishment (reviewed below): that its use is associated with negative outcomes for children; its impact on helping children learn right from wrong is limited; and that children themselves find the practice to be both woeful and unhelpful.

A concerted effort to heed these messages could help the UK onto a path towards a willing ban on corporal punishment, and so this essay will now turn to look at what research has said about corporal punishment and its impact on children.

The evidence of research against corporal punishment

There is compelling evidence that children are hit frequently in the UK. Nobes and Smith (1997) found that more than 90% of parents in two separate communities had physically punished their children at some time, while 80% had done so in the previous year. Twenty-four per cent of mothers and 18% of fathers hit their children weekly or more, and younger children were hit more frequently than older children. Just over half of parents had used ‘mild’ punishment (as rated by the study), 21% had used ‘severe’ punishment, and around 15% had used implements. Across all the 99 families surveyed, only one child had never been hit.

Findings of Ghate and her colleagues (2003) are not quite as alarming, perhaps because they were derived from a larger sample of parents living across the UK whose habits were not restricted by the social norms of specific communities. Nevertheless, in this survey 50% of parents reported using ‘minor’ physical punishment while 9% reported their use of ‘severe’ physical punishment.

It is unlikely that the UK government is ignorant of these figures or that it is comfortable with them. What is in question is why the government, and a significant proportion of the British population, maintains any level of corporal punishment to be acceptable when research shows that its use is associated with negative behaviour in children.

The most exhaustive investigation into the effects of corporal punishment on children is a meta-analysis of 88 different studies (Thompson Gershoff 2002). Like the UK government, the analysis defines corporal punishment as discipline which seeks to cause pain but which does not result in physical injury, and then identifies a number of impacts on child behaviour which are associated with the kind of punishment that a UK court might rule as ‘reasonable’. Only one of these – better compliance with parents’ immediate wishes – could be regarded as positive. The negative impacts include:

poorer moral internalisation (referring to children’s deeper knowledge of why their behaviour is wrong and their related understanding of how to modify it)
increased levels of aggression
greater likelihood of delinquency and anti-social behaviour
poorer quality family relationships
negative impacts on mental health
an increased risk of being the victim of physical abuse
a greater risk of abusing a spouse or children in adulthood.

There is a popular perception in the UK that parents hit their children to achieve the single positive outcome listed above, that of immediate compliance. Certainly, 63% of parents surveyed by Ghate and her colleagues (2003) cited the need to stop a child from doing something dangerous as the only ‘acceptable reason’ for corporal punishment. But there is not a single reference to immediate compliance in Protecting children, supporting parents, the UK government’s consultation on physical punishment for England and Wales (Department of Health 2000). Instead, there are references to the occasional need for physical punishment indirectly linked to a loving family environment in which children need guidance (Department of Health 2000). Responding to the consultation, one group of people identified by a Department of Health analysis ‘defended the use of physical punishment on the grounds that it is an essential part of their approach to maintaining a loving discipline in the family, setting boundaries and encouraging responsible conduct’ (Department of Health 2001a: 5). The consultation implies, and these responses invoke the view, that corporal punishment can help children achieve a long-term understanding of what constitutes right and wrong; the very moral internalisation that Thompson Gershoff finds to be less in evidence among children who have been subject to corporal punishment.

The Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003 does state that, in deciding whether or not physical assault is ‘justifiable’, a court must bear in mind ‘any effect (whether physical or mental) which it has been shown to have had on the child’ (section 51(1)(c)). This suggests a recognition that corporal punishment can be associated with the kind of negative outcomes listed by Thompson Gershoff. In England and Wales, the government’s failure to attempt a justification for corporal punishment in its consultation document could suggest a similar awareness, if only by omission.

Unfortunately, a more open acceptance of the research cited so far is unlikely to take UK policy and public opinion closer to a ban on corporal punishment. This is because, while making little distinction in the initial statistics between different forms of corporal punishment, Thompson Gershoff’s wider analysis finds the association with negative child behaviours to be less marked when it is part of planned discipline in a loving environment. A report commissioned by the UK’s National Family and Parenting Institute makes a similar observation (Henricson and Grey 2001). This is just as measurable an aspect of the research as the associations with negative behaviour, and so must be given equal weight – thereby providing some justification for the concept of the ‘loving smack’ invoked by many of the individual respondents to Protecting children, supporting parents (see Department of Health 2001b) – though Thompson Gershoff does not say that negative behaviours are absent in a loving environment.

In terms of available social research, only the voices of children speak out against corporal punishment in all forms, by discrediting ‘smacking’ – the form of corporal punishment most used in the UK and most likely to be found ‘reasonable’ or ‘justifiable’ in a UK court. Their views were published in four reports, one for each of the UK countries (Crowley and Vulliamy 2002; Cutting 2001; Horgan 2002; Willow and Hyder 2001), all commissioned when children’s views were not sought by either Protecting children, supporting parents or a similar consultation run by the Scottish Executive. The reports in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each asked why children are smacked. None of the quotations from children suggest they perceive any thought-out plan in its use. Instead, they think it happens when children are ‘naughty, naughty, naughty’ (Crowley and Vulliamy 2002), and because ‘sometimes [adults] just get too carried away’ (Cutting 2001). No distinction is made in the studies between ‘mild’ and ‘severe’ smacks, and there is no evidence in what the children say that they perceive smacking as a loving act. Instead, one 10-year-old boy said, ‘You feel that your parents don’t love you, if it’s your parents smacking you, because why would they smack you?’ (Horgan 2002). In an interesting link, the children feel that adults do not smack each other precisely because ‘they love and care about each other’ (Willow and Hyder 2001: 5).

Responding to the question ‘How do children act after they have been smacked?’ two children do make reference to a positive learning outcome from smacking, one quite directly – ‘They start being good ’cause they don’t want to get smacked again’ (Crowley and Vulliamy 2002) – the other with considerable reservation: ‘Some of them, if they’re really naughty, they do the same mistake again and if they’re good they learn from their mistakes’ (Willow and Hyder 2001: 11). Other responses to the question express misery and fury in response to being smacked: ‘They get angry and grumpy and cross with their mummies’ or ‘They scream and cry on the bed’ (Willow and Hyder 2001: 11).

While some may discredit the studies for asking leading questions such as ‘Is it wrong to smack?’ and ‘How can we stop children from being smacked?’, the overwhelming impression of sadness found in them suggests that children do not find smacking to be ‘reasonable’ and that they might support a ban. But, in excluding children from the consultations that informed all the thinking behind its new legislation on corporal punishment, the UK government ignored the one area of research that provides the most convincing case against corporal punishment in even its ‘milder’ forms.

Understanding the value of listening to children could bring benefits across all areas of UK society, and is vital if a ban on corporal punishment is ever to be seen as desirable. But until children’s views are given greater weight, any research case against corporal punishment will eventually fail to shift opinion towards a ban, as it leaves too much open to be challenged. It is therefore necessary to look elsewhere for a persuasive argument.

The human rights case against corporal punishment

Paolo Pinheiro, leader of the ongoing UN Secretary General’s Study on Violence Against Children, finds it ‘difficult to understand how you justify what is and isn’t reasonable violence’, and says that laws to protect children from violence are a basic children’s right (Pinheiro 2005).

There are two articles in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which express government responsibilities to protect children from physical violence. Article 19 calls for governments to ‘take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social and educational measures to protect the child from all forms of physical or mental violence … while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child’. Article 37 declares that governments ‘shall ensure that no child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’.

Having ratified the Convention in 1991, the UK government accepts the authority of the Committee on the Rights of the Child in monitoring its implementation – and yet there is no sign of them heeding the Committee’s view that both articles require prohibition of all corporal punishment. In fact, it has been specifically ignored. Concluding observations on the UK’s second report to the Committee, submitted in 1999, remarked that ‘the Government’s proposals to limit rather than to remove the “reasonable chastisement” defence do not comply with the principles and provision of the Convention … particularly since they constitute a serious violation of the dignity of the child’ (UNCRC 2002: 9). And yet limitation rather than removal of ‘reasonable chastisement’ is precisely what the UK government did in passing ‘reasonable punishment’ and ‘justifiable assault’ into law.

It is in the last phrase of the Committee’s commentary that the human rights case against corporal punishment lies. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights says in its defining first article, that ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’. If the unequal protection against assault afforded to children by current UK laws is seen by the Committee on the Rights of the Child to violate the ‘dignity of the child’, then it also violates the Declaration’s universal statement of what defines a human being. It is also, surely, a matter of human conscience that the smaller and more physically vulnerable members of society should receive, at the very least, the same level of protection from violence as their larger and more physically powerful peers.

In addition to articles 19 and 37, the Committee on the Rights of the Child calls upon general principles in the Convention when arguing against the use of corporal punishment. In this respect it has cited article 3 (that the best interests of the child should be a primary consideration) and article 12 (children’s right to express their views in matters that concern them and for those views to be given due weight) (UNCRC 2001). The government’s lack of consultation with children has already been discussed, but there is also evidence that children’s best interests are given a low priority compared with the freedom of parents to act as they see fit. In defining ‘justifiable assault’, The Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2003 describes the defence as one that can be used by a person who ‘claims that something done to a child was a physical punishment carried out in exercise of a parental right’ (section 51(a)). Parents are seen by the Act to have de facto rights which they can call upon, but there is no balancing reference to the right of children that parents’ actions should be in children’s best interests.

The Protecting children, supporting parents consultation document calls on statistics which ‘suggest that public opinion would very much defend the right of parents to use physical punishment’ to justify its assertion that a new law must ‘command public acceptance’ (Department of Health 2000: 2). No figures are offered for whether or not public opinion believes corporal punishment to be in children’s best interests, nor does the best interests principle appear elsewhere in the consultation document or in the analysis of responses to it (Department of Health 2001a).

While the government expresses the view in Protecting children, supporting parents that a law on corporal punishment must ‘command public acceptance’, it makes little attempt to inform the public about its commitments to children under the UN Convention. Lack of public information about the Convention is criticised in the UN Committee’s concluding observations to the UK’s second report (UNCRC 2002: para. 20). It recommends that the government ‘substantially expand dissemination of information on the Convention and its implementation among children and parents, civil society and all sectors and levels of government’ (para 21(a)). If this were to be acted upon, a better knowledge of children’s rights could not fail to have some impact on the ‘public acceptance’ of corporal punishment and on the national disposition towards imposing a ban, however limited that might be.

The UK is also under pressure from Europe. In July 2005, the European Committee of Social Rights found UK laws on corporal punishment in breach of article 17 of the European Social Charter, which ‘requires a prohibition in legislation against any form of violence against children, whether at school, in other institutions, in their home or elsewhere’ (European Committee of Social Rights 2005). This resulted in a very positive development in the UK House of Commons, where an early day motion (EDM) noting the judgment and calling for equal protection for children as a matter of human rights was signed by 155 MPs (at time of writing). While still a minority of all those in the House, this is a relatively large signatory list for an EDM and suggests there is a movement for change in parliament. Pressure from Europe is likely to continue as, according to the UK Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (2004), the European Court is referring increasingly to the UN Convention in its judgments on children. If so, the interest of a large number of MPs could prove vital in helping to transform European judgments into a change in UK law.

There is more to be said about human rights and corporal punishment, and this will emerge in the course of discussing what can be learned from the countries which already have corporal punishment bans in place.

States that have banned corporal punishment

One might expect to find a certain uniformity in the cultural, social or political history of countries that have banned corporal punishment of children, or in their systems of government. But just one glance at the list of countries given earlier in this essay quickly dispels that hypothesis, even from quite early in the development of prohibition. The first three states to ban do share a good deal, as they are all Nordic countries. According to Therborn (1992), states in this group have a cultural context that is disposed towards recognising children’s rights, and an approach to political and legal decision-making which leads them to be in the vanguard of positive legislation for children.

But Austria, the fourth country to impose a ban, does not fit that pattern. Indeed, according to Therborn, Austria’s cultural and legal context place it in a group of countries with a tradition which, historically, has been much slower in according rights to children. Within this ‘Germanic’ grouping, he identifies Austria as being especially patriarchal and particularly slow to grant equality rights to marginalised groups.

In Therborn’s analysis, a ‘common law’ group of western states lies between the Nordic and Germanic states. This group’s record on children’s rights is traditionally better than that of the Germanic states and worse than that of the Nordic. The UK sits here. A fourth group – the Romanistic nations – has historically been the slowest of all to accord children’s rights.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of western states that have banned corporal punishment belong to Therborn’s Nordic group (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). But Austria and Germany are Germanic states, while Italy and Portugal – with laws that effectively outlaw corporal punishment – are both Romanistic. It would be difficult to place Israel or the banning east European states securely within any of these groupings due to their very different historical, political and social experiences over the past century. The four Latin American countries intending to introduce legislation fall outside Therborn’s western definitions, although their colonial past may suggest a connection with the Romanistic tradition.

In terms of Therborn’s analysis, the historical timeline for according children’s rights seems to have broken down with regard to banning corporal punishment. Countries that were previously slower than the UK to accord rights have taken on board the need to protect children’s physical dignity and have sped past the UK in terms of legislation. In order to do so, these governments have taken a common approach to public opinion, leading it rather than seeking to ‘command public acceptance’. A 2002 study of the countries with bans in place found that only the Finnish public gave their unconditional support to a ban (Boyson with Thorpe 2002). Elsewhere, opinion was divided or even significantly against a ban, notably in Austria. In Latvia, organisations such as Save the Children ‘face great challenges in protecting children from maltreatment’ (p. 40). Yet the Latvian government introduced a ban despite, or perhaps because of, high levels of stress experienced by impoverished families and a culture in which hitting children is a norm. Paulo Pinheiro, leader of the UN Secretary General’s Study on Violence Against Children, recognises the bravery of such a decision. He says that introducing a law to ban corporal punishment is ‘not an easy issue for governments. They have to act on the basis of their human rights commitments and do it ahead of public opinion [in order to] offer a framework for change in society’ (Pinheiro 2005).

So perhaps it should not matter if the UK public fails to support a ban. The government could simply lead the way. But to do so they would have to be brave in the face of public dissent, and the opposite seems to be the case. In its determination to ‘command public acceptance’, the UK government ruled out a ban on ‘smacking’ even before they received any views on the issue, saying in the preliminary pages of the Protecting children, supporting parents consultation document that ‘we do not [sic] consider that the right way forward is to make unlawful all smacking and other forms of physical rebuke’ (Department of Health 2000: 2). Rather than lead public opinion, the UK government decided what the opinion would be, and bowed to it. Certainly, while the vast majority of organisations working with children and families called for a ban in their responses to the consultation, individual respondents were overwhelmingly against any further limits being placed on parental discipline, with many stating quite clearly that ‘the law should not intervene in this area at all’ (Department of Health 2001a: 5).

Stuart Hall’s analysis of liberal democracy offers one explanation for why the UK government might set so much store by calls for privacy from state intervention in family affairs (Hall 1984). He describes clear ‘public’ (state) and ‘private’ domains, and identifies the family as one of two private spheres in society (the other being free-market economic transactions). In this sphere, he says, ‘personal, familial, emotional and sexual relations have long been deemed to be a “domestic” matter into which the state should not intrude’ (p. 20).

This view is clearly embedded in our society, though it is not a sufficient explanation for why the government refuses to intervene on ‘smacking’, as the UK is no longer a liberal democracy. During the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government set about dismantling the welfare state – which certainly did intervene in private life – and created a ‘neo-liberal’ democracy that has flourished under the New Labour government. McGowan (2005) explains that neo-liberal democracy differs from liberal democracy in its style of non-intervention in private affairs. The public–private divide is no longer clearly drawn and, instead of a laissez-faire approach, ‘free-market principles’ of choice and participation are used to ‘restructure social policy’. The New Labour government has embraced public participation in the policy-making process (Gustafsson and Driver 2005), as demonstrated in national consultations such as Protecting children, supporting parents. In this way, individuals are (apparently) involved in public decisions and their behaviour in private is shaped by a sense of responsibility for community decision-making. In principle, this should require the state to intervene less in private affairs (Tilley 2005), and perhaps this explains why the government will not intervene on corporal punishment.

But the issue is not so clear cut. Interpreting a report produced by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (2004), Tilley goes on to say that, ‘For Labour, personal responsibility implies a potentially greater role for the state, but a role that moves away from simply providing services to, in some cases, a greater involvement in people’s lives (through parenting programmes and so forth)’ (2005: 301). Some parenting programmes are now imposed by the UK government through Parenting Orders which require parents of truanting children to attend parenting classes. Indeed, the government is prepared to take this issue further, and to imprison parents if their children repeatedly miss school (eg Morris and Smithers 2002). This punitive approach is not one to endorse, but it demonstrates that the government is very willing to step into private family matters when it chooses to do so. A similar readiness could help to protect children from assault, especially given the evidence that public opinion may not be fully against a ban on corporal punishment.

While research into the prevalence of corporal punishment in the UK has confirmed that the majority of parents hit their children (Ghate et al. 2003; Henricson and Grey 2001; NFPI 2001; Nobes and Smith 1997), those reports which talked to parents about their views as well as their habits discovered that the majority did not support ‘smacking’ as a positive parental response (Ghate et al. 2003; Henricson and Grey 2001; NFPI 2001). Henricson and Grey describe this as ‘a shift in public opinion away from believing in physical punishment as right and proper to a belief that it is not effective or the best way to respond’ (p. 2). So while the public may appear not to want a ban on corporal punishment, it may be more amenable than expected if one were put in place. Those parents who continue to use corporal punishment but dislike it in principle may welcome the removal of an option to hit their children. States with corporal punishment bans have capitalised on this kind of unspoken support through national education campaigns that offer alternatives for family discipline as well as basic information on the ban itself (Boyson with Thorpe 2002). Such an approach could be effective in the UK as there is a wealth of experience in promoting positive discipline which specifically avoids the use of corporal punishment.

The National Family and Parenting Institute – an independent organisation established by the government – is opposed to corporal punishment and is an engine for distributing information to parents.
Local authorities supported a ban on corporal punishment in their responses to Protecting children, supporting parents, and are therefore likely to be effective in generating and disseminating information through children’s centres, health centres and other local services.
Nationally recognised organisations such as the NSPCC, Save the Children and the Children’s Society already provide publications for parents that encourage positive discipline.
There are even bestsellers – for example Biddulph (1998) and Leach (1997) – which foster an approach to raising children that does not contemplate corporal punishment because it has children’s rights at its heart.

The government has shown just how effective it can be in getting information and services to parents when it wants to. In its drive to encourage an early start with reading, it has thrown a great deal of energy and public money behind Bookstart. This campaign supplies good-quality books to every child in the country during their statutory health checks at 8 months and at 2 years of age, with the intention that parents should start reading with children when they are very young. So it is clear that the government can get a message through to families if they feel it to be important – and they can deliver materials aimed at benefiting children by changing their parents’ behaviour.

With evidence of potential for real success in disseminating information, all the UK government really needs is the same determination to make it happen that has been demonstrated by the banning states.

Concluding thoughts

This essay set out to find if the UK government and people may one day choose to ban corporal punishment of children. This might appear something of a forlorn hope, given the negative nature of the evidence presented. But there are some positive elements to be found. Not all of the pressure for change is coming from outside the UK. The domestic movement, led by the Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance, has an impressively long list of supporters (see http://www.childrenareunbeatable.org.uk), including most of the organisations calling for a ban on corporal punishment in their responses to Protecting children, supporting parents, many of which provide services directly to parents. They already discourage ‘smacking’ and promote positive discipline – and this has perhaps contributed to parents’ emerging disapproval of the practice.

In January 2006, the UK’s four children’s commissioners wrote to the Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly, requesting a ban on corporal punishment. The Department for Education and Skills rejected the call, repeating its view that discipline is a matter for parents alone. But the same response ‘stressed that it did not condone physical punishment of children’ (BBC 2006). This is consistent with earlier pronouncements. While the government has permitted parents to continue hitting children, it has never argued in favour of the practice. In fact, its very refusal to make a positive argument for a parent’s right to ‘smack’ was criticised by some respondents to Protecting children, supporting parents (Department of Health 2001a: 5). In this context, there is reason to be hopeful that the movement for change in parliament – signified by the 155 signatories to the early day motion on corporal punishment and children’s rights – also exists within the government. After all, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has changed his personal practices, saying that while he occasionally ‘smacked’ his older children, he has never done so with his 5-year-old son, Leo (BBC2 2006). The only cloud on the parliamentary horizon is the chance that a revitalised Conservative Party may return to government. Only one Conservative MP signed the EDM.

Despite some hope of a change in attitudes in the UK, continuing pressure from Europe and the UN, and by the example of other nations, is clearly vital if a ban on corporal punishment is to be achieved. And such a ban is necessary. It is hard work to be a parent, and hard work to be a young child learning about the world. Whatever approach parents take, there is stress involved in helping children to be safe and to behave well towards others. One could argue that it is all very well for parents to plan positive discipline if they have their health, live in conditions and an environment with which they are satisfied, and if they are content with their personal lives. But in difficult circumstances, parenting is hard whatever practices are used. It is therefore incumbent on the state to pass laws which offer all members of the family protection from each other in moments where stress becomes unbearable and tempers erupt.

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UNCRC (2002) Concluding observations: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. New York: United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Willow, C. and Hyder, T. (2001) It hurts you inside: young children talk about smacking. London: Children’s Rights Alliance for England and Save the Children.

My academic writing for children's rights

2011-10-07T08:43:00.004+01:00

I've decided to post my essays and papers written as part of my MA in Childhood Studies and, currently, for my PhD that part of my preparation for research into what enables the inclusion and full participation in early years settings of young children whose behaviour causes distress (otherwise known as 'children with emotional and behavioural disorders - though I will be looking into why that label is unhelpful).

My academic writing is all around the sort of subjects that might appear in my blog posts, but in considerably more in depth with full references. As the studies mean that I'm not getting time to write this blog, this seems like a good way to keep the conversation going.

Any discussion welcome, as ever.

USA schools' corporal punishment paddle confiscated as weapon of terror

2011-09-23T09:54:00.007+01:00

Returning home from the Global Summit in Dallas on Ending Corporal Punishment and Promoting Positive Discipline in June 2011, the American campaigner Nadine Block was stopped by security because of the wooden paddle in her suitcase that she had brought to show the delegates. The paddle, which looks like a wide flat cricket bat, is used to punish schoolchildren in nineteen states of the USA. The security officer called it a “potential weapon” and refused to allow it in her luggage. She was forced to leave it behind in Texas. Nadine said: “I told them that almost 50,000 kids are paddled every year in Texas so they need to let the legislature know it is a weapon."

(From the Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance September 2011 newsletter - which for some reason isn't up on the website yet, though it will no doubt appear.)

Michael Morpurgo - stupendous advocate for children's rights

2011-04-06T18:23:00.010+01:00

This year's Richard Dimbleby lecture was a storming piece of polemic in support of children and their rights, given by Michael Morpurgo. One of his great strengths as a writer is the humanity of his central characters - you believe not only their story but identify with their feelings; you are emotionally involved with them however different their lives may be from your own.

He brought the same skill to his Dimbleby lecture, drawing on the real lives of children as well as his own characters to tell the story of children's experiences in the UK and elsewhere, and the degree to which their rights are flouted. He weaved together the meanings for children of the very different personal crises they live with: the imprisonment of asylum-seeking children in British detention centres, which ended only recently; the enforced separation of Palestinian and Israeli children living on either side of the Gaza wall, and the murder of some who stray to close to it; the daily pressure of the goal-driven schooling endured by all infant and primary children in England. As I said, storming!

Sadly, the February lecture is no longer available on BBC iPlayer, so you can't hear or watch Michael Morpurgo deliver it, but you can still read the text of what he said on his website.

And if you've never read any of his books, my favourite is Kensuke's Kingdom, and I recommend it to anyone, whatever their age.

Should we smack our children? - online debate

2011-02-09T09:54:00.016Z

(Text updated 15 Feb)

A 2-minute film in which I say a little about my views on smacking and the Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance campaign for a change in the UK law was transmitted on Channel 4 on Saturday 12 Feb. It is now part of an online debate on the subject 'Should we smack our children?' Please do contribute your thoughts, either in response to my film or to the six others in the debate. Links to them appear to the right of my film.

Equal protection from violence - safeguarding children

2011-01-31T12:13:00.025Z

For the past two years I've been working to extend support for the aims of the Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance (CAU!) among professionals involved in child protection, and have done this primarily by talking to the 150 Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs) in England. LSCBs are incredibly important for child protection, as they are responsible for coordinating and regulating it in each local authority.

The Alliance' aims are to:

secure equal protection against violence for children by removing from statute the 'reasonable punishment' defence available to parents who 'smack' their children, and
provide a national programme of education that will enable parents to find alternative ways of helping their children stay safe and treat others well.

The Alliance has presented the core arguments for a change in the law to LSCBs: that the current legislation runs contrary to children's right to equality before the law under article 7 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and against their right under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to protection from being hurt (article 19).

I've also talked to the boards about how the 'reasonable punishment' law muddies the water for child protection. Social workers and others involved in safeguarding children often have great difficulty balancing their many responsibilities, including to keep families together, act in the best interests of children and keep communities solid. Sometimes, where corporal punishment in the home does not seem to be placing a child in immediate danger, professionals may feel that leaving the child at home is a pragmatic approach that is allowable in law. (This is one among many tough decisions they are faced with, and I remain highly supportive of the work social workers and others do in difficult circumstances.)

Trouble is that the physical and mental abuse of children often begins with smacks, and it's hard to know when the line will be, or has been, crossed. Too many children must suffer increasing levels of physical hurt on top of the degrading lack of respect that even the mildest of smacks represents. If physical punishment were against the law, parents and professionals alike would know that any level of hitting is unacceptable, and some of the decision-making would be more straightforward for those involved in child protection.

Some people worry that the introduction of a ban on smacking would criminalise ordinary families, and this was also a concern in New Zealand, where the government made it illegal to smack children in 2007. A review of the ban's impact on policing and family life after two years found that there had been no significant change in ordinary circumstances since its introduction. The New Zealand laws before the ban were similar to ours, and there is no reason why good law-making in this country would not have a similar outcome.

The tool that I have used most effectively to discuss all these matters with LSCBs is a presentation which also provides an argument for the boards' legal freedom to support the Alliance's aims.

The response from board members has been overwhelmingly in support of the Alliance's aims. At time of writing, 29 LSCBs have signed up to the Alliance's aims - that's one short of a fifth - and many more are considering their position. Some boards do not feel confident of their freedom to sign up to the Alliance - but even they consequently decide not to add their signature to the formal list of Alliance supporters, they have been at pains to express the informal support of all board members.

I would like to thank all board members for engaging so fully in discussion with me over the past couple of years.

On children - Sweet Honey inspiration

2011-01-27T13:46:00.027Z

A delicious piece of singing for you to enjoy, about children's place in the world. Enjoy for its own sake and, if you want to, read why I posted it today.

I'm still reading John Wall's Ethics in light of childhood. His ideas on what the experience of childhood reveals about the experience of humanity are incredibly liberating. He talks about 'creativity' as the essence of human being, about how each person lives within a complex pre-existing world while also making a constant impact on it: re-creates it in some way. We are each passive hostages to huge unstoppable forces - nature, history, culture, society - and actively creating new versions of those forces or of being within them.

This is true, Wall says, for all humans, but is most clearly visible during childhood. A baby is born into a world that already exists and is quite clearly vulnerable in relation to it. But from the moment of birth, the baby also changes that world, creates relationships that could not exist before and reshapes daily life by her responses to hunger, voices or warmth.

I urge anyone who is interested in revolutionary thinking about children's place in the world to read the book. But that's not why I wrote this blog post. No, this is the reason.

This morning, John Wall reminded me of the first spark of what was to become my world view about children, childhood and children's rights. Wall says (with apologies for the opaque philosophical lingo):

'A child is a "gift" in the complex sense of both being passively given her being by the world, and actively giving being to the world. She comes from us yet also comes to us. She is a 'being' in both the active and the passive senses of that word.'

This is so very close to Kahlil Gibran's words in 'On children' ...

'Your children are not your children

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself

They come through you but they are not for you

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.'

... that it took me back to a day in the mid-late 1980s when I first heard those words in Leeds City Hall, sung so beautifully by the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. It was one of those days, that come so rarely in life, when I actively felt my ideas changing. Those are good days, and Sweet Honey's version still moves me.

What life imprisonment says about children's status and humanity

2011-01-26T08:13:00.035Z

Two years ago, an 11-year-old boy living in Pennsylvania, USA allegedly shot and killed his father's fiancee and her unborn child. Now judges are to decide if he should be tried for double murder in an adult court, where he could be sentenced to life imprisonment. In Pennsylvania, life imprisonment is a slow death sentence. If convicted, the boy will never emerge from prison.

Loss of life is a terrible thing. Any act of aggression must be investigated and any proven act of violence must be punished. But is it right that this child could bear the full responsibility and ultimate penal consequences for the crime of double murder?

There is no minimum age of criminal responsibility in Pennsylvania, so in principle a child can be tried for and convicted of a crime at any time from birth. A quick websearch of Pennsylvania state laws and practices reveals the familiar pattern in which children are denied any balancing, positive responsibilities for decision-making in other areas of their lives.

School attendance is compulsory until age 17.
Marriage is prohibited until age 16 (unless the law decides that it is in the child's best interests) and parental consent must be provided until age 18.
Children are prohibited from doing most work until age 18 and may not be employed at all until age 16 (...er, except in the odd capricious instance. Which lawyer needed a 12-year-old child to caddy for his week-end games of golf, I wonder).
Consent to surgery for children must be given by their parents or guardians until age 18 unless they are married, have a child or are in the military. The Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania merely advises parents to involve 'teens' in the decision.
Alcohol consumption is prohibited until age 21.

You get the picture. Adults - in the form of government, local provision and parents - assume children's inexperience for decision-making in all aspects except criminality.

The potential for life imprisonment throws a sharp light on this double standard. But it's important to remember that, while children cannot be sentenced to life imprisonment in the UK, they are held responsible for criminal behaviour at age 10. From that point any child can be tried and committed of a crime, with the potential for serious penal consequences. The same child can have no legal responsibility for her own healthcare or education until age 16.

There are deep prejudices about children in the failure to trust their judgement except where they do wrong - a continuation of the ancient Greek disagreement over whether children are born sinful (Plato) or just without the benefit of adult rationality (Aristotle). For most things society prefers the latter and 'protects' children from the responsibility of making decisions in the belief that they cannot either know or rationalise the possible consequences. In doing so children are excluded 'for their own good' from the vast majority of social experiences, discussions and responsibilities - all of which would enable them to make more reliable decisions. How dare we, then, insist that children have sufficient experience of human relationships, society or morality to take responsibility for any acts that contravene the norms and laws of all three?

This reflects a fundamental inability to view the experience and responsibility of childhood in any kind of parity with the experience and responsibility of adulthood. In a new book, Ethics in light of childhood, John Wall argues that this is because our idea of humanity is entirely adult-centric and that children are, at the very deepest level, excluded from the full status of human being. That's a contentious thing to say, but the level of contradiction in society's relationship with children's reliability surely requires far-reaching analysis of this kind.

A rather heavy post - but this is heavy stuff. If children are to bear the ultimate consequences for human crimes, then they have the right for all their human contributions, rights and responsibilities to be respected too. Until that happens, adults must take a long, hard look at the social and structural reasons that might lead a child to commit crime - at their own part in it - and legislate accordingly.

Say no to more pressure on young children - petition

2011-01-14T09:26:00.018Z

Sign the petition against school league tables for five year olds.

Sign it today!!

The UK government is proposing to introduce school league tables based on the achievement of 5-year-olds in their Early Years Foundation Stage Profile, which records progress against a set of early learning goals that 'most children' are expected to reach by the end of their reception year. The proposal shows a continuation of the previous government's lack of interest in the broad agreement among educational experts, teachers and early years practitioners that some of the goals are set way beyond the reach of most. Insisting on trying to hit them means that most young children are effectively 'failing' at the age of 5. Even those goals which are reasonable for the majority are out of reach for some, so that all young children are likely to be 'failing' in some capacity.

Given the desperation of the current and previous governments to have all children reading as soon as possible, and now no later than 6, it comes as little surprise that the most unreasonable expectations for 5-year-olds appear in the goals for literacy, and especially these two:

Attempt writing for different purposes, using features of different forms such as lists, stories and instructions.
Write their own names and other things such as labels and captions, and begin to form simple sentences, sometimes using punctuation.

In 2008 I asked Michael Gove whether targets in education create pressure on children. He said, 'The pressure is less on the children, I would think, than on the schools to ensure that children are taught properly' (Early Years Educator, Sept 08, p.15). But last year's teacher protests against the Key Stage 1 SATs stressed that the need to perform to standards put enormous pressure on children throughout their primary schooling as well as on their teachers. If the existence of targets is putting unacceptable pressure on 11-year-olds, how much greater will the pressure be on very young children?

It is not acceptable to fix poor attainment further up the school by piling pressure on the very youngest in the system. They require a flexible, exploratory and entirely enabling learning experience that feeds inquisitiveness and confidence. Let them learn how to learn.

Sign that petition!

Changing education paradigms

2011-01-08T15:01:00.013Z

WOW! Excellent film about how children are chewed up by deep assumptions in the education system - and fun to watch while you're at it. This is the first time I've embedded a film in the blog and I can't get it to fit into the space. Go to the link to see it in its full glory.

Age limits – thoughts about responsibility

2010-07-07T13:24:00.012+01:00

I've been thinking, lately, about children and responsibilities - about the difference between those responsibilities that children take on themselves, those they are given and those that are withheld. What's behind the different approaches?

In the UK, children have criminal responsibility at the age of 10, which means that they can be charged with and convicted of a criminal offence. So the law judges that 10-year-old children have sufficient understanding of cause and effect in this context - and of right and wrong - to be capable of taking responsibility for their actions.

At the same time, children do not have the right in law to control decisions about their schooling, their medical treatment and where or with whom they live until they are 16. While younger children's views might be taken into account, the law judges that they do not have sufficient understanding of cause and effect in these contexts to be capable of taking responsibility for these decisions.

I've no doubt there are arguments which explain why the approach towards children's capability is so different in these two contexts, but they'd have to be bloody good to counter my suspicion that the law here has little to do with what children are actually capable of. I can see that there might be a case for saying that criminal acts have immediate effects which 10-year-olds can see and understand, while life-decisions have future effects that they can't possibly know. But that wouldn't do it for me. There are long-term effects of criminal acts that children will not know about (the impact on themselves of long-term imprisonment, for instance) and immediate effects of life changes that they might wish to benefit from (leaving a violent home, perhaps). I can't help thinking that what the law really reflects is that adults are happy to take responsibility for things that society values (education, health, family life) and desperate to pass it on for behaviour that offends.

I don't have any simple answers, but the values that build a system which is quick to blame children and slow to trust them must surely be re-evaluated. We live in a modern, liberal, technological society, but our ideas about children are built on a Victorian ideal: the helpless, innocent child who is pure in spirit and must be protected from all harm (think Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol). The criminal child doesn't fit this picture, nor does the child who makes decisions for her future (gawd, she may endanger herself by making the wrong one). A bit later on, theories about child development came along and science, apparently, confirmed that children are not biologically capable of making rational choices. The theories were grounded in that same idealised image, with a sprinkling of judgment about children's selfishness, for good measure.

There is usually some element of truth in a caricature, and there will always be individuals who appear to 'prove' it. But while we know it's important to reject characterisations that victimise, disempower or show prejudice towards people of different race, colour or sexual orientation, the idea that we should reconsider our image of children and their place in society seems to be off limits.

So, let's put deep-rooted ideals to one side and acknowledge that there's a simple matter of fairness to be addressed here. If children can be responsible for antisocial - criminal - actions then, surely, they can be responsible in constructive ways. Adults have all the power in this relationship so it's up to adult society to enable children to use those abilities well. They will make mistakes, of course, just as adults do. But children cannot begin to make good decisions unless they have the knowledge and the tools with which to make them, and until they are trusted and expected to use them. Citizenship lessons can't replace real-life decision-making.

Give children some real power to make decisions about all their life experience from the age of 10, then it might indeed be fair and right that they should have criminal responsibility at that age: they would have more control over their lives in general and so more choice in whether or not to commit a crime. Or else, find a better way than arbitrary age limits to consider whether or not children should take responsibility for their own decisions and their own actions.

Full-time education - privilege or torture?

2010-05-25T11:53:00.041+01:00

OK, you can stop giggling over there in the corner. This is not a stupid question! (Though I admit that it's intentionally eye-catching.)

So ... seriously now ... what is full-time education like for children? What is it for? How does it feel? Is it a privilege or a torture, a right or a duty? Is it all four? Does it matter that the ‘whining’ school-child creeps just as unwillingly to school today as in Shakespeare’s time? And why is that? What does it tell us about the terms under which children accept their fate?

Enough questions, woman! Time for some background. (And no dropping off at the back.)

Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, children have the right to an education (article 28) which enables them to develop their ‘personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential’ (article 29). So the UNCRC places a duty on governments to provide an effective education for its children − but doesn’t attempt to direct how that provision might look. It can't, because different societies have very different ideas of what constitutes children’s ‘fullest potential’ and how to go about nurturing it.

In the UK, our design for nurturing children is a full-time state education that is available to all children between the ages of 5 and 16. It’s something of a holy cow – the reward for a long, hard slog towards universal education, and one that is valued so highly for enabling children to achieve their potential that the last government was planning to extend the provision even further, right up to the age of 18. Who knows whether the coalition will follow suit - probably not - but the idea is definitely on the map of possibilities.

Educating children is a remarkably optimistic thing to do, and it is right that this optimism is extended to all children in the UK (well, all those who aren't asylum-seekers in detention facilities, at any rate). In the distant past I benefited from a good state education and, despite many changes of both government and education policy in the intervening years, my children are benefiting from one right now. But enthusiasm for the provision doesn't mean that we should stop asking questions about it.

So, I say once more, is full-time education a right, a privilege, a duty or a torture for children? Think about how long they go to school. It’s 11 years right now, and may one day become 13. Then consider that this is not a provision that children may take advantage of, it's a provision they must take advantage of. They can’t choose to turn it down, and everyone around them - other children as well as adults who have all the decision-making power - accept this as right.

But imagine how you would feel if it was illegal for you to leave your job. Under any circumstances. Wouldn't that be conscription? Or state-sanctioned servitude - slavery even, given that children receive no financial reward for attending school? (I've tried to think of less sensationalist ways to characterise it, but I can't.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that the decision about whether to go to school should be a matter for personal choice. That wouldn’t benefit children or wider society, nor would it fulfil children's right to an education. But it’s a good idea to think about what that legal requirement to attend school means for children, what it feels like and, perhaps, what could change for the better. Does it have to be full time? Does it have to be on school grounds? Must paper qualifications be the only measures of success? Might there be alternatives?

Let's look at those four possible ways of describing the experience of school: as a right, a privilege, a duty and a torture.

The UNCRC, as I've said, is clear that children have a right to an education, and to one which enables them to develop to their fullest potential. But it categorically does not say this right can only be fulfilled through full-time education over a period of 11 or 13 years. So let's throw that out immediately.

There are certainly arguments to suggest that such a long period of education is a privilege. Compare, for instance, the country-by-country literacy rates recorded by Unesco with the same organisation's list showing the duration of compulsory education (click on the link to UNESCO school ages.zip). While there are exceptions (ah, dear old Cuba), the exercise broadly shows that longer periods of schooling protect against very low rates of literacy and make top rates likely, while shorter periods of schooling offer less protection from low literacy rates and make top rates less likely. (See the end of this post for key stats that lead to this conclusion.)

Not all societies will see literacy as the best measure by which to judge whether children are reaching their 'fullest potential', but it's central to us in the UK and so the schooling that makes our high literacy rate possible should, I think, be seen as a privilege - though a qualified one. It's worth bearing in mind that 27 countries achieve the same or a better rate with fewer years of compulsory schooling - and this is more than the number that achieve the rate after 11, 12 or 13 years.

The idea of school as a duty is not new, and there is now a strand of thinking about childhood which sees school as the 'work' of children: the modern equivalent of children going into apprenticeships or working in factories or their parents' fields (see especially Jens Qvortrup (1985) 'Placing children in the division of labour', in P. Close and R. Collins (eds) Family and economy in modern society, London: Macmillan). It's vital for individual children, for their families and for wider society that children engage in their 'work', and so it must indeed be their duty to do so. A difference between today and the past is that children's 'work' no longer contributes to earnings or produces useful outcomes now, it only makes them possible in the future.

And this is important because it's in this context that school might be conceived of as a sort of torture. Children are expected to fulfil their duty to attend school, and to comply with the rules they meet there, to learn and comply with a complex social code, complete the tasks that are set and display a 'positive disposition' towards the whole affair - all with no tangible reward other than adult approval until they reach the very last years of schooling. That's all very well for gregarious children who find they are able to learn the things that schools are interested in. It's not so hard for these children to find purpose in what they're doing and even to enjoy it.

But what of those who struggle with the job of connecting written symbols to spoken sounds, who thrive in the company of one or two adults rather than 30 children, who grow up in homes that don't or can't support their learning, or who need to move about, to learn with their bodies rather than sitting down with a pencil and a piece of paper? There is no doubt that we must all learn to work positively within our society, but is it really necessary that schooling must bash all those young, individual square pegs into one unforgiving round hole?

Of course, there are alternatives to the traditional. There are Steiner schools and forest schools - and there's always Summerhill. But they are few and they are generally fee-paying. You must have money for these choices - and, in any case, there are different inflexibilities built into these institutions; other dogmas that will not suit some children. Soon, the new government has promised, there will be 'free schools'. Might these open up possibilities for children to learn at their own pace and in different ways within the state system? Well, no, seeing as the coalition government also insists that every child in the land should be able to read by the age of six and so intends to maintain the route march towards measurable standards. These new schools will not be about children's freedom to learn in ways that suit them best - to gently shave at their square peg in an institution that is willing to adjust the round mould so each child can learn to understand it - but about adult freedom to bash away at the peg in their own way, without interference from local government.

(And don't talk to me about home schooling. It's irrelevant to the government's responsibility to provide for children's right to an education and merely proves that the state fails to accommodate all needs. It's a useful safety net, of course, but is available only to children whose families feel confident that they can educate their children and who are passionate enough to take this arduous step. If home schooling is the only answer, then children who do not fit into the school system but whose families are not interested in education simply cannot access their right to an education that nurtures them to their 'fullest potential'.)

My work lies mainly with young children's education and so I'm especially aware of the pressures on these small people who have the least to gain personally from their duty to comply with schooling. The future that education prepares them for is so very far away that it can have no tangible meaning. What purpose the times table? Why can't you learn it out in the snow? Who cares that D is for Dad - all that matters today is that he should love me. And so, too many five, six and seven year olds in Britain creep very unwillingly to school - most especially those in England, where the national curriculum is particularly careless of their tender age - and persistently get into trouble when they are unable to sit still for long periods of time. If that's how your experience of education begins, are you really likely to embrace it later on? To make the most of it? To reach your full potential? Maybe so, but how can we have got to a place where we not only accept but insist that the right to education, its privilege and duty, must involve endurance? Why can't it be kinder?

The only effective solution will be for a wholesale upheaval of education - a revolution in the way that we view children and childhood, in what children need to know and should learn, how they contribute to society and the value that is placed on their work. But that's hardly going to happen tomorrow, next year or in any foreseeable future. In the meantime, all I have are these many questions that might help us take some baby steps towards a more generous approach to learning. Any helpful answers will be gratefully received.

Literacy statistics

A literacy rate is the percentage of people aged 15 and over who are literate, and the UK's literacy rate is 99%.

(1) There are 42 other countries with a literacy rate of 99% or more, but only 15 of them have compulsory schooling for 11 years or more. Eleven countries school for 10 years, 12 school for 9 years and 2 school for 8 years. Cuba and Georgia have compulsory schooling for only 6 years.

(2) There are 37 other countries with compulsory schooling for 11 or more years. For 12 of these Unesco doesn't provide a literacy rate. We already know that 15 of the remaining 25 achieve a literacy rate of 99% or more. A further 4 have literacy rates above 90% (but below 99%), 3 are between 80 and 90%, 2 between 70 and 80% and 1 between 50% and 60%. No countries with 11 or more years of compulsory schooling have a literacy rate below 50%.

(3) There are 24 countries with 6 years of compulsory schooling (just 8 countries worldwide have fewer years of compulsory education). Four of these (including Cuba and Georgia) have literacy rates above 90%, 8 are above 80%, 1 is above 70%, 4 above 60%, 1 above 50% and 6 are below the half-way mark. The lowest literacy rate after six years of compulsory schooling is 25.7% in Chad.

Hats off to ... the Children's Trail, Leicester

2010-02-08T09:53:00.016Z

The Leicester Children's Trail is a collection of public artworks on permanent display in the city's 'cultural quarter' of St George's. Each piece was made and installed by civic artist Jo Dacombe following hands-on consultation with children, and the result is beautiful, imaginative street art. Most art projects involving children result in work created by them - which can, of course, be both exciting and fulfulling for them. But the Children's Trail is different. It is mature art produced by a professional artist. Inspired by what interests children in order to invite them in to the urban environment, it is nevertheless designed to be appreciated by all. The children's ideas have been taken seriously for the impact they can have on everyone - which shows children a very inclusive kind of respect.

Think about the design of city centres. There are shops and restaurants, usually lots of cars, gyms, pubs, clubs - and loads of offices. But what is there for children? There aren't many climbing frames or calm streets at the heart of the city. Museums, perhaps, or the odd amusement arcade, but not much to do on the way from place to place other than endure it. I remember once taking my son to London's Covent Garden when he was two, and people kept walking into him. Nobody expected anyone quite so short and unsteady on his feet to be there. That's because children do not 'belong' in the city centre - they 'belong' in the suburbs, in housing estates, in residential streets, parks and schools. And because they don't 'belong' in the city they are generally left out of the planning.

So it's refreshing that Leicester City Council has funded a project aimed at drawing children into the city. The 'cultural quarter' is not, perhaps, part of the city's core business district - but neither is it a dedicated children's space relegated to the outskirts, and that's a real start. Here's what Jo Dacombe says about bringing children into the city, along with more detail about the Children's Trail - taken from an article on citizenship that I published in Nursery World on 2 April 2009 (link in sidebar on the right).

'Towns and cities are not very child-friendly,' says artist Jo Dacombe. 'They're full of shops and activities aimed at adults. If you want children to spend some time in town, you must have something that is for them and which makes it their space.'

This view led her to propose the idea of a Children's Trail to Leicester City Council. 'I thought, if I can put beautiful things in St George's - an area of the city that is full of industrial history - perhaps children will spend some time in it.' She was delighted by the council's response. 'They were commissioning public art in general and liked the idea of having something specifically for children.' The project was funded jointly by Leicester City Council and the European Regional Development Fund.

Although Jo Dacombe has worked on many projects enabling children to make their own art, the Children's Trail is a completely new venture into public art for children driven by their interests and created by a professional artist. Her consultation for the Children's Trail has its roots in her collaborative work with other artists in enabling children to express their views about their neighbourhood.

To create the trail, she ran a series of consultative workshops with children aged between five and ten. Following detailed research into the history of the St George's district, she borrowed several objects from the county museums for the children to consider. They included a bus conductor's ticket machine, tiny printing blocks with individual letters, a stocking stretcher from the days when Leicester produced woollen stockings, and an Imperial typewriter that was made in the city.

'The children started by trying to guess what each of the objects was,' Jo Dacombe explains. 'After all, how would you know a bus conductor's ticket machine if you've never seen one?' She noticed that the children particularly liked small things, that they were interested in detail and were drawn to numbers and letters.

Later on, a walk around the district enabled her to gather more information about what interested them. 'The children liked looking up and they noticed some small details, even if they were quite high up. They noticed a Victorian drain with a cast iron detail at the very top of a building.'

The result of this consultation is seven inspiring pieces of work that were recently installed in St George's as the Children's Trail. 'Each is a reworking of a real historical object,' Jo Dacombe explains. 'They appear as ghosts in their environment because they are solid objects made of clear plastic with a blue light glowing inside.' The artworks relate to the surrounding buildings and children can try to imagine how those things were once used in that place.

'The trail is contained in a relatively small, quiet public space, less than a square mile,' says Jo Dacombe. 'It will soon be pedestrianised and so will be very accessible for children and their families. That's what I was after.'

Thanks to Jo Dacombe for the picture. She sent me more, and I wish I could have worked out how to get them all on to the blog page without jostling each other.

For detailed discussion about how children experience city life, see Christensen, P. & O'Brien, M. (eds) (2003) Children in the city: home, neighbourhood and community. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Success in later life is no justification for smacking

2010-01-08T12:29:00.050Z

Last Monday, The Telegraph reported - with some glee - that research with 179 American teenagers had found that 'youngsters smacked up to the age of six did better at school and were more optimistic about their lives than those never hit by their parents'. A sister piece argued, as I would, that 'There is no need to smack', but I remain confused by what the writer was getting at. Her views seem pretty consistent with the government's: smacking's nasty, smacking's vile - so ... erm ... just you be careful with it!

More measured reporting appeared in The Times and the Daily Mail, both of which clarified that the 179 teenagers were a focus group within broader research involving 2,600 people, a quarter of whom had never been hit. I could find no evidence of reports about the research appearing in The Guardian, The Independent, the Daily Mirror or The Sun (though searching online is an inexact science - do let me know if I missed anything).

I guess I could get aerated that the reporting of this study includes no reference to existing research which has established clear links between physical punishment and negative outcomes for children, most of it also carried out in the USA. No mention, for example, of Murray Straus at the University of New Hampshire, who has published extensively on the impact of smacking on children, including evidence that children who are smacked:

have a slower rate of cognitive development than those who are not
achieve lower levels on a test of educational achievement
are at greater risk of crime as an adult. (See this paper for a discussion of the conclusions he has reached through research.)

No mention, either, of Columbia University's Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff who, in 2002, carried out a detailed statistical analysis of 88 studies into physical punishment and found only one positive outcome, that of immediate compliance with parents' wishes. There were seven negative outcomes for children:

poorer moral internalisation (referring to children’s deeper knowledge of why their behaviour is wrong and their related understanding of how to modify it)
increased levels of aggression
greater likelihood of delinquency and anti-social behaviour
poorer quality family relationships
negative impacts on mental health
an increased risk of being the victim of physical abuse
a greater risk of abusing a spouse or children in adulthood.

The Times makes an interesting suggestion that, until now, smacking has been so endemic that researchers have been unable to find enough interviewees who had never been smacked with whom to carry out meaningful comparative research. I appreciate that this might, indeed, have been a problem, but wonder whether Murray Straus would agree with the statement and, even if he did, whether it confers superior academic rigour on the new study.

But I'm not really annoyed by any of this. Failure by the press to report widely on all research is what I'd expect - not because I'm cynical, but because it's the way that news reporting happens. It's quick-fire stuff. A rigorous journalist or a specialist correspondent should pick up that sort of thing, but there's no guarantee they will, nor that their editors will be interested if they do. And, though I can't find any evidence of it online, Murray Straus and Elizabeth Gershoff may well have had their media moments in the past. I certainly acknowledge that both The Times and the Daily Mail provided background on the national debate about smacking and the UK's increasing isolation on this issue within Europe.

I am cross, though. And frustrated; tired of hearing the same old thing. Because all of this - the entire context of the new research and the discussion around it - is so very beside the point. It's all premised on the idea that only long-term outcomes matter. All's well that ends well. Hitting children's OK because 'it didn't do me (you, them) any harm'. In the long run.

But what about now, today? Doesn't it matter that, when asked, children express sadness and alarm at being smacked?:

'[It makes you] grumpy and sad and also really upset inside. And really hurt (5 year-old girl)
'Sometimes may feel that inside like their tummy hurts' (5 year-old boy)
'You're hurt and it makes you cry [and] drips come out of your eyes' (5 year-old girl). (From It hurts you inside: children talking about smacking - the views of five to seven-year-old children in the UK.)

What does it say about the relationship between children and adults that research which finds little evidence of long-term harm in the use of smacking with children under 6 is welcomed as proof that parents are right - and have a right - to continue with it? Why do we want to be able to hit young children? Mary Morrissey of the pressure group Parents Outloud explains in The Telegraph that 'It is very difficult to explain verbally to a young child why something they have done is wrong'. But nobody who works with and for young children would agree with that; nor do the screeds of positive parenting guidance aimed at helping parents cope with family life (not even the government's publication Being a parent in the real world, which I criticised in a post earlier this week).

We would be disgusted by any suggestion that we should hit older people suffering from dementia, although they might find it equally difficult to appreciate 'why something they have done is wrong'. Why aren't we also disgusted by this suggestion when it is made in relation to the smallest, least powerful and least represented members of our society? Why is it OK that the hurt of those three children above is precisely the impact that smacking is intended to create?

I don't have any answers to these questions. But I hope that, if we keep on asking them, the very need to do that will seem so ludicrous to so many that we will finally put a stop to legalised physical punishment of children and ban smacking. It won't be easy, but it will be the right thing to do.

'Being a parent in the real world' - critique

2010-01-05T12:48:00.081Z

Being a parent in the real world is a booklet for parents published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), offering advice on how to navigate family life as 'authoritative' parents - that is, with a style that offers children safe and caring boundaries and which is open to the children's own ideas. As opposed to 'authoritarian' parenting, which tends to belittle children and relies on punishment for discipline, or 'permissive' parenting, where there are few established boundaries to help children develop confidence and respect for others.

The publication has good intentions, sadly made all but worthless by the inclusion of one depressing element. I'll come to that in a moment. First: reasons why the booklet nearly worked.
Subtitled 'A supportive guide to being clear, staying calm and remaining confident', the booklet makes helpful comments to parents about consistency, routine and the importance of listening to children. While hardly groundbreaking, these short passages offer additional help by introducing parents to organisations such as Parentline Plus and the Family Rights Group which can give them real support.

Not much to get depressed about, surely? No, indeed. Left at that, this would be a laudible little publication advocating a caring approach to family life by offering parents understanding and providing the gateways to getting help. In fact, it does serve that purpose, but with one peculiar addition sneaked in through the back door: a double spread entitled 'Smacking: it's not the answer' which - believe it or not - supplies a list of the unpleasant treatment one could dole out to children and get away with under the law. That's not what the DCSF intended, of course, but it's what happens if you try to explain and justify legalised physical punishment.

This is what appears on page 9 of the booklet, as a guide to section 58 of the Children Act 2004 - the law on 'reasonable punishment' (I'm loath to reproduce this stuff, but can't really explain the problem without doing that):

The Government strengthened the law in 2004 to protect children from harm. Since then the defence of 'reasonable punishment' cannot be used in criminal proceedings for assaults causing actual bodily harm, or child cruelty.

It is important you know that this means that, although a mild smack is not unlawful, parents who smack their children and cause injuries including grazes, scratches, abrasions, bruising, swellings and superficial cuts may be charged with assault causing actual bodily harm for which the penalty is a fine of up to £5,000 or a maximum of five years in prison.

So far so uncontroversial. I might not like the law, I might dispute that it was 'strengthened' in 2004, but I cannot disagree that this is an explanation in clear language of the law's parameters. Problem is that it's not enough to clarify the law when offering guidance to parents because, left like this, it's possible to look at the words 'not unlawful' and conclude that it's quite OK to punish children physically, so long as you don't leave a mark. The government insists that it 'does not condone smacking', and so here's what the DCSF came up with to discourage that interpretation:

It is also important to be aware that even if a parent causes no actual injury to a child, some acts such as shaking a child, dragging a child by their hair, using a belt, cane, slipper or any other implement may not be acceptable by the courts as 'reasonable punishment'.

What a gruesome list of the cruelties that children suffer and from which they are not fully protected in law. And what a perfect illustration of why section 58 is so inadequate - provided by the very government which devised it. If a court might judge dragging a child by the hair not to be 'reasonable punishment', it follows that the court could equally judge that it is. (And if there's any doubt that the government's willingness to publish this paragraph is shocking, just replace the word 'parent' in the blue paragraphs with 'husband', and the word 'child/children' with 'wife', and try not to be chilled.)

I said earlier that the text on smacking was sneaked in to this otherwise inocuous publication. Why do I say that? Well, there are several clues. First, the booklet has four main headings. Three of them are the themes that appear in the subtitle ('being clear', 'staying calm', 'remaining confident'). The fourth is 'Smacking: it's not the answer'. No mention of that on the front cover.

Then there is the use of language in those headings. The three subtitle heads are all empowering; they acknowledge parents' existing skills at being clear, staying calm and remaining confident. But the title 'Smacking: it's not the answer' is an admonishment to parents, and a bombastic one at that. I don't disagree with the sentiment, but it's hardly in keeping with the touchy-feeliness of 'staying calm' and 'remaining confident'.

Design is another clue. These pages are more spartan and there is no direction towards helpful organisations. Effectively, the booklet wags its metaphorical finger at parents then leaves them stranded; it turns away. No better signal, is there, of its discomfort and embarrassment?

Pure speculation, but I wonder what the booklet's author, TV psychologist Laverne Antrobus, thought about the smacking pages. Or, indeed, how much of them she wrote.

If you come across Being a parent in the real world, take it to a public place, find a bin, attract as much attention as you can (without making a fool of yourself!) - and throw the darned thing away.

Children Are Unbeatable newsletter 1

2009-12-17T08:13:00.017Z

The Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance has posted its first newsletter. The Alliance works towards a repeal of the law allowing parents to use the defence of 'reasonable punishment' against a charge of common assault on a child (section 58 of the Children Act 2004). Repeal would end legalised physical punishment of children, including smacking (see previous post for a full explanation.

The CAU! newsletter provides details of progress towards the Alliance's aims in parliament and the courts and in building support in the child protection and religious communities. It also describes how children and young people are being involved in the Alliance, looks at new research and a depressing government publication called Being a parent in the real world, about which I will be blogging shortly.

Children on climate change frontline denied a voice

2009-12-15T17:44:00.008Z

Further to my facetious little post on the Unicef climate forum in Copenhagen (1 December), here's some rather more depressing stuff about the lack of involvement of children who are living on the front line of climate change. From the organisation Plan International and reported in Crinmail today:

CLIMATE CHANGE: Children on climate change frontline denied a voice, says NGO

Children already struggling to adapt to severe, unpredictable weather and environmental disasters are being denied a say in the climate change debate, says children's organisation Plan International.

Young people in developing countries are taking on more responsibility and initiatives to protect their homes and communities but are not being allowed to hold governments to account.

With two in five of the world's population under the age of 18, climate change is set to have a disproportionate impact upon children.

The impact can already be seen in some countries where it operates with shorter and unpredictable rainy seasons, severe typhoons, hurricanes and floods, long-lasting droughts, and repeatedly failed harvests.

Plan International's CEO Nigel Chapman said: "Extreme weather caused by global warming has the ability to undermine all the gains achieved in the areas of food security, water and sanitation, and the survival of young children.

'We have seen how a catalogue of disasters this year has damaged homes and livelihoods in many countries where we work, with children being the greatest victims.'

Increasingly, young people are now being trained in how to practically deal with the results of such natural disasters - and how to protect their homes and build the resilience of their communities.

But not enough is being done says Mr Chapman, to support these children nor to allow them to have their say in climate change discussions.

'Children all over the world are now showing their interest, capacity and valuable role in strengthening resilience to climate risks. But adults are negotiating away the viability of the world they will live in without giving the next generation a place at the table.

'As one of the groups so drastically affected, their voice must be heard now - both on how their communities are being affected today and will be increasingly under threat in the future.'

Plan is now calling for a number of actions at COP15 (Copenhagen climate conference) including:

* Children to be given access to dialogue and formal decision making mechanisms on climate change.
* Governments to invest more in education so the next generation knows more about managing the environment.
* Ensuring that National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) and other international, regional and national strategic plans on climate change protect and involve children.
* Emphasising the significance of children - in terms of impact and 'agency' - within the 5th IPCC Assessment Report

Beatrice, 13, from Kithyoko, Kenya, is one of a number of young reporters who will be attending COP 15 with Plan.

"Climate change is affecting my community directly," she says, "I am looking forward to the day when all the people will understand better use of resources and change the climate for better. We are the future leaders and if we understand the effects of climate change now, later in life we can save our countries.

Hats off to... Front-line social workers

2009-12-08T08:41:00.035Z

Time to give front-line social workers a break! Time to acknowledge the number of fragile lives that they support, often in very challenging circumstances. Mistakes have been made, some of them so disastrous that the government and the profession are heading towards important changes (see below). But there are many, many children who are thriving now, despite being dealt a difficult life, thanks to the efforts of their social workers.

If there is any doubt about the importance of social workers to children's wellbeing, here's a list of children's rights that their work directly and indirectly seek to uphold. The right to:

have adults always do what is best for you (article 3, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child)
not be separated from your parent(s), unless it's for your own good (article 9)
have your own opinion which is listened to and taken seriously (article 12)
have your privacy and family respected (article 16)
be brought up by your parents, if possible (article 18)
be protected from being hurt or badly treated in any way (article 19)
special protection and help if you can't live with your parents (article 20)
the best care possible if you are adopted or in foster care (article 21)
have your living situation checked regularly if you are looked after away from your family (article 25)
a basic standard of living: food, clothing and a safe place to live (article 27)
be protected from sexual abuse (article 34)
special help if you have been hurt, neglected or badly treated (article 39).

(Wording of these rights taken from Save the Children's excellent poster, 'Know your rights'.)

The point, of course, is that these rights can only be upheld for children by social workers and children's services that are of the highest quality. The tragedy that befell (Baby) Peter Connolly threw harsh light on the quality of children's services in one local authority and drew inevitable attention to the quality of these services across the country. National soul searching has been accompanied by vilification of children's services, with the most damning finger-pointing aimed directly at social workers. So not surprising that the profession has since hit a deep depression and the recruitment and retention of front-line social workers is currently very difficult. Well, I certainly wouldn't to do the job if everyone was hissing at me.

You can't get high-quality provision from a demoralised workforce any more than you can get it from one that is badly managed or blind to its shortcomings. So an important step towards change must be to stop with the booing and the catcalling, and to take a more positive direction. We have to change the way we think about social workers.

The government-appointed Social Work Task Force agrees, and changing the perception of social workers is one of the key recommendations in its recent report, Building a safe, confident future. Other recommendations include:

better education and training for social workers
universal standards for social services and other social worker employers
training for managers
continuing professional development.

These recommendations address the quality of social workers, social services, government provision and of all the structures that these imply, and the report sets out short-term and long-term actions that they believe will enable the recommendations to be implemented. Looks like a pretty good belt-and-braces approach which is respectful towards the children and families whose wellbeing is at stake and towards social work professionals themselves.

The report has been welcomed by the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) who now want to see some very quick forward movement so that the drive towards change is neither forgotten by the current government nor dropped by the next. I echo this view.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

2009-12-05T01:48:00.101Z

I've already talked a bit about the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and referred to articles within it - which isn't all that helpful without saying what they are and how comprehensively they deal with children's rights. As I'll be talking a whole lot more about the CRC and its articles.

This document is, of course, the dude - with text that was carefully crafted and agreed by the UN to describe 41 rights that belong to each child, and to make them water-tight. But it's also a long, legal document, written in language that just can't help but send you reeling for the Espresso machine. (Actually, I'm being a bit cute to keep you with me. I think it's beautiful, but then I'm a swot.) Thankfully, Save the Children has been equally careful in crafting a version of the CRC with concise language that makes it accessible to children - which, of course, means that it's a perfect introduction for anyone. It's in the form of a poster. If you can, please print the poster and display it somewhere prominent.

Each of the first 41 articles of the CRC describes a right, and a further 13 describe the duties of governments in relation to these rights. The 41 numbered points on the Know Your Rights poster correspond directly to the 41 children's rights. I've reproduced them right here so you don't have to keep linking back to the poster itself (and, yes, I know there are 42 points - the last one kind of wraps up the remaining 13).

The Know Your Rights version of the CRC
1 Everyone under the age of 18 has ALL of these rights. You have the right to...
2 Be treated fairly no matter who you are, where you are from, what language you speak, what you believe or where you live.
3 Have adults always do what is best for you.
4 Have all of these rights protected by your government.
5 Be given support and advice from your parents and family.
6 Life.
7 Have a name and a nationality.
8 An official identity.
9 Not be separated from your parent(s), unless it is for your own good.
10 Be reunited with your parent(s) if they have to move to another country.
11 Not be taken out of your country illegally.
12 Have your own opinion, which is listened to and taken seriously.
13 Find out information and express what you think through speaking, writing and art, unless this denies other people their rights.
14 Think and believe whatever you want to and practice any religion, with guidance from your parent(s).
15 Be with friends and join or set up clubs, unless this denies other people their rights.
16 Have your privacy and family respected.
17 Get reliable information from newspapers, books, radio, television and the Internet, as long as it is not harmful to you.
18 Be brought up by your parents, if possible.
19 Be protected from being hurt or badly treated in any way.
20 Special protection and help if you can’t live with your parents.
21 The best care possible if you are adopted or in foster care.
22 Special protection and help if you are a refugee.
23 Access to education and any support you may need if you have a disability.
24 The best health and medical care possible, and information to help you stay healthy.
25 Have your living situation checked regularly if you are looked after away from your family.
26 Help from the government if you are poor or in need.
27 A basic standard of living: food, clothing and a safe place to live.
28 An education.
29 An education that develops your personality and abilities, and encourages you to respect other people, cultures and the environment.
30 Enjoy your own culture, religion and language, even if these are not the same as most people in your country.
31 Rest, play and relax.
32 Be protected from work that harms your health or education.
33 Be protected from dangerous drugs and their trade.
34 Be protected from sexual abuse.
35 Not be kidnapped or sold.
36 Be protected from being taken advantage of or exploited in any way.
37 Not to be punished in a cruel or hurtful way.
38 Protection and care in times of war. If you are under 15 you should never be forced to join an army.
39 Special help if you have been hurt, neglected or badly treated.
40 Be helped and treated fairly if you are accused of breaking the law.
41 Be protected by national or international laws which provide better rights than the ones in this list.
42 ALL children and adults should know and learn about these rights.

In my very first post I explained that the rights fall into three categories: provision, protection or participation rights - otherwise known as 'the three Ps'. Here are a few examples of these Ps, with text taken from the CRC. (Try not to drop off in the back there; you can get a translation from the list above.) Each one has a brief commentary tying it to the UK context.

Provision rights call for high standards of services
Article 3: All services 'shall conform with the standards established by competent authorities, particularly in the areas of safety, health, in the number and suitability of their staff, as well as competent supervision'. Article 3 is the ultimate catch-all. It places a duty on adults to act always in children's best interests. Our human understanding of this duty lies at the heart of our soul-searching in the wake of terrible events such as those which ended the short lives of Victoria Climbie and (Baby) Peter Connolly.

Article 24: Children have the right to enjoy 'the highest attainable standard of health' and the right 'to facilities for the treatment of illness and rehabilitation of health'. Political wranglings over the National Health Service may not jeopardise access to a high standard of healthcare for all children. Any which threaten to do so must be challenged.

Article 29: Education should be directed towards 'the development of the child's personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential'. Every time we argue over key matters in education policy - SATs or no SATs? synthetic phonics or speaking and listening? - we're bound by the CRC to consider their impact on every aspect of a child's experience. Again, political interests that do not support children's best interests must be challenged.

Protection rights
Article 16: Children have a right to legal protection from: 'arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation'. This right would be contravened if the government engaged in illegal or unjustifiable surveillance of a child's home. It should also guide attitudes and policies towards invasions of children's privacy by the media (see my earlier post).

Article 19: Protection from 'all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse, while in the care of parent(s), legal guardian(s) or any other person who has the care of the child'. The Children Are Unbeatable! Alliance refers to this article in its challenge to the UK government's approach to smacking (see this post.)

Participation rights
Article 12: The government shall 'shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child'.

This is the right that binds the whole lot of them together. It locks on to the article 3 right that adults must always do what is best for children and strengthens it – because how can you be sure that you're doing what is best for a child unless you have weighed up their own views with any other contextual information you may have?

I'll be coming back to article 12 pretty often because it is so central to the the success of children's rights. It also needs to be picked at because it is frustratingly mealy-mouthed and leaves the way open to a conclusion that some children are not 'capable' of forming their own views. This tends to be particularly bad news for young and disabled children.

But I think that’s quite enough for now. You can stop with the Espresso now.

UK law on smacking contravenes children's rights

2009-12-02T14:15:00.009Z

Hold on to your hats. Some of this is a bit technical, but it's baseline stuff about the context in which corporal punishment of children is legal in the UK, and I'll be referring back to it in future. Let's be clear: adults are legally permitted to hit children in the UK. They are not legally permitted to hit other adults.

The good news is that children are protected from assault by the same laws as those which protect adults. The bad news is that there is a legal defence against the charge of common assault on a child which doesn't exist if you hit an adult. In England and Wales, this defence is called 'reasonable punishment' and parents, or someone acting in a parental role, may use it to explain why they hit their child - so long as they haven't left a mark. (In Scotland, the roughly similar defence is ‘justifiable assault’ and in Northern Ireland it is ‘reasonable chastisement’.) The existence of any defence for parents hitting children means that they are legally permitted to do so. There aren't any circumstances in which an adult can justify hitting another adult as 'reasonable' - though let's imagine if they could...

'I'm so sorry m'lud, but my father has been warned time again that he mustn't drink in his condition. He's an old man and it could kill him. I'm at the end of my tether with worry and I've tried everything else so I just had to give him a good cuff around the ear - to help him understand.'

or

'My client's pre-nuptual agreement clearly states that his dinner must be on the table at 7pm on the dot. The consequence of failure in this regard - agreed in writing by both parties - is that his wife should receive a careful slap on the back of her head designed to leave no mark but to make a clear statement of my client's disapproval. On the day in question, my client merely abided by the terms of that agreement.'

Too silly? OK, let's get back to some sense.

In England and Wales, if an adult hits a child in such a way as to leave a mark they can be charged with actual bodily harm, in which case the defence of 'reasonable punishment' is no longer allowed (Children Act 2004, section 58(3)). By implication, any punishment that does not leave a mark may be justified as ‘reasonable’ if a court decides the child’s behaviour merited physical discipline. The benchmark for actual bodily harm towards children is set much lower than for violence against adults (you have to do real damage to them!) and the government says this offers children better protection than exists for adults. So that's alright then.

Here's some background.

The defence of ‘reasonable punishment’ was brought into effect in England and Wales by the Children Act 2004. It replaced the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ that had been UK law since 1860 and which, in 1998, was judged by the European Court of Human Rights to provide inadequate protection from ‘inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’ (a right stipulated in article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights). The Children Act 2004 was the UK government’s response to that ruling. In the same year, Romania and Hungary banned corporal punishment after a telling-off from Europe. The Welsh National Assembly has called for a similar full ban.

Violence towards children contravenes their rights under article 19 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has persistently called for the UK government to recognise that the legal defence for hitting children demonstrates a failure to uphold the convention in this regard.

I know that it's easy to go cross-eyed with boredom at the sound of Europe and the UN and conventions and rights and blah, blah, blah. It can all seem a long way away from home. Unfortunately, at home is precisely where physical punishment lives for children. So here's what the CRC implies. Allowing adults to hit children is wrong. It's unfair. We shouldn't want to hang on to it. When you look at it that way, it's really quite simple.

There are many cast-iron arguments against legalised physical punishment of children that are called upon to counter the government's justification for continuing it. I've used many of them and will no doubt highlight some of them on this blog. They are all important. But, given the chance, I would never go further than to say that children have a right to protection from all forms of physical and mental violence. And I would ask one question. What is it, exactly, that we're so frightened of losing by making it illegal to hit children?

Children's climate forum.

2009-12-01T14:33:00.004Z

Here's a link to a Unicef children's climate forum, where 160 young people aged 14-17 from 44 countries are gathering to 'voice their opinion in the global climate change debate'.

My guess is that they're bloody cross.

Hats off to... Paisley Children's Centre

2009-12-01T09:56:00.005Z

I promised yesterday that this blog wouldn't be one long moan. So here's my first herogram. It goes to Paisley Children's Centre for the extent to which very young children are involved in the planning and organisation of the centre: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/citizenship/sharingpractice/earlyyearscasestudies/paisley/introduction.asp.

The centre's approach is explained in detail at the Learning and Teaching Scotland link but, in brief, it not only involves the children in their own day-to-day learning (which is what you'd expect in good early years practice), it also holds regular formal consultation and feedback sessions in a room specially designed for the purpose. It's a great way to show everyone - children and adults alike - that the children's ideas are listened to and taken seriously (article 12, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child )(CRC)).

In addition to this, the children are given important responsibilities. And here I would like to digress for a moment, to explain why this matters.

Every human being has the same rights. They were laid down in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the CRC has interpreted them for the special case of children (see yesterday's introductory post). If each individual has the same rights, each one also has responsibilities to acknowlege and uphold the rights of other individuals. In effect, the taking on of responsibility is an extension of your own rights and has a generous relationship with those of others. It should never be regarded as a stick with which to beat either children or adults (a point to which I will no doubt return when talking about the Every Child Matters agenda and the Personal, Social and Health Education curriculum in England).

At Paisley Children's Centre, the children belong to responsibility groups that fulfil meaningful functions for everyone in the centre. They might take charge of the contents of play bags that go out at the week-end (counting them out, counting them in again, chasing any that are missing), organise how activities are tidied away, ensure that hands are washed before meals or put together a display on taking care of teeth. This demonstrates an appreciation of the importance of individual and group responsibility to personal and shared rights. It's properly empowering stuff, which I've written about before (in the 'All about ... citizenship' piece) and will no doubt write about again.

There's more to say at some point about the difference between the approach to children's participation in the four countries of the UK. England doesn't do at all well, particularly in comparison to Scotland and Wales. But I will come back to that another day - or, more likely, on several other days.

Children on TV

2009-11-30T14:29:00.001Z

A report in The Times today says the Department for Children Schools and Families has backed away from proposed changes to regulations about the appearance of children under 14 on TV(http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article6936967.ece). According to the report, these proposals - which I understand were to have been presented in the form of a consultation - would have brought in legislation banning the appearance of under-14s in factual programmes unless they were singing, acting or dancing. They were dropped following lobbying by broadcasters and their representatives.

There's no denying the relish in The Times report: what a gift to find the government with egg smeared so publicly on its face by groups with no direct political interest. Notwithstanding The Times's glee, the withdrawal of any such proposals is to be welcomed. Imagine the irony of quality factual TV programmes made for children (Newsround and Blue Peter were examples given in The Times report) being forced to exclude them from telling their own stories or report on those of others.

It is so disappointing that the government should ever have considered such a proposal, especially given that the initial impetus for reviewing these broadcasting standards was a valid one. The consultation itself was kicked off by reaction to a Channel 4 documentary, Girls and boys alone, that went out in February and which followed a group of children aged 8-11 as they lived together for a period without adult support. Experts in child development complained that this was reality TV as abuse (reported thus in The Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article5728744.ece). From my perspective, the series displayed a shocking disregard for the rights of the participating children - with cameras watching as children who had not been prepared for independent communal living set about fulfilling adult expectations when they resorted to cruelty and violence (my, but William Golding has a lot to answer for). Both the programme's producers and Channel 4 breached the children's overarching right to have adults act primarily in their best interests (article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child), along with a whole raft of their specific rights, most notably to privacy (article 16).

So, a nasty piece of work - making it clear that the regulations certainly do need amending if the same kind of thing is to be avoided. But how depressingly clueless of the government to propose a solution that would have removed some of the few chances that children have to share their experiences and say what they think publicly. The reported proposals would have been a shockingly open breach of article 12 of the UN Convention (children's right to express their views and have them taken seriously) that the UK has pledged to abide by. It takes a special kind of cack-handedness to go about protecting children by gagging them.

Children's rights - background (1)

2009-11-30T10:25:00.004Z

The central focus here will be on children’s rights in the UK. This is the arena in which I work and which consequently tends to attract my most immediate views. Even so, I’m sure that I’ll wander beyond the national boundaries.

I make no apologies for what are likely to be many posts on society’s assumptions about children, and the impact they have. That said, this blog won’t be one big, long moan. You can’t encourage change by just wagging your finger (though you might have to do it a bit). You have to celebrate what’s going right as well. There are so many people taking positive steps to promote children’s rights in the UK and elsewhere. It’s exciting to reflect on them and essential to acknowledge the people involved.

It's also important to know that, even in an economically and politically stable nation such as the UK, there's a very long way to go before children will have the same access to their rights for protection, provision and participation as are available to adults. And those three words – protection, provision, participation (‘the three Ps’) – are also important. All children’s rights, as laid down in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), are interpreted under one or more of these headings. Any nation state that has ratified the CRC – every country in the world apart from Somalia and the USA (and Somalia recently announced that it is to do so: http://www.unicef.org/media/media_51841.html) – pledges to promote and address all of the CRC’s protection, provision and participation rights for children within that state. Their progress is monitored by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

The CRC interprets the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as it should be applied in the special case of children whose journey between wholly dependent infancy and legally independent adulthood means that, for a greater or lesser period between birth and age 18, they must rely on others for their physical, financial and emotional security.

It identifies each nation's responsibility to ensure that children have access to what they need in order to grow and develop as successful human beings. It covers basic physical needs such as access to food and water – challenges that might appear to have been dealt with in the developing world, although the levels of fat, salt and sugar in western children's diet have been interpreted as evidence that governments are not sufficiently protecting and providing for children in this regard (although I can’t find any evidence of this argument from a rights perspective on the web, which leads me to question it; any relevant link will be most welcome). Some other rights are to education, play, family, services, safety from harm and - most controversially (and most centrally) – to be consulted and to have their views taken seriously.

All of the rights laid down in the CRC address basic human needs. They are not about 'wants'. In the case of rights to education, for instance, they do not involve any child's 'right' to eg a place at their chosen school or to be taken to school in the car. What they involve is a child's right to an education that enables their personal human development now and in the future, and there is room for improvement in any society for that.

The CRC is one of the most successful international conventions ever. As I said earlier, it’s been ratified by all but two countries. That, of course, means that it has been adopted by many states with a questionable – sometimes overtly deplorable – approach to human rights. But the fact that they have ratified the convention means there is at least some way for the UN to monitor children's experiences and to hold these nations to account. This information informs NGOs who work in these difficult circumstances and enables them to better target their resources.