Comment: Britain has an unhealthy relationship with its children
Cub Reporter
Our obsession with children's innocence is putting them in greater
danger.
By Ian Dunt
Politics.co.uk, UK: 27 May 2009
http://www.politics.co.uk/interviews/children-and-family/comment-britain-has-an-unhealthy-relationship-with-its-children-$1298645.htm
[ http://tinyurl.com/oogndw ]
As far as annoying, hackneyed phrases go, 'political correctness gone
mad' takes the number one slot. But every so often you come across a
verifiable fact which prompts you to blurt it out, unwillingly, in the
same way you yell when you stub your toe.
Health and safety regulations affecting children's playtime usually do
the job. Ashburton Junior School, for instance, managed to provoke a
barrel-load of Daily Mail bile when it ordered children not to play in
the playground 15 minutes before class in case they get hurt last
year.
Today, local government leaders have called on parents not to wrap
their children up in cotton wool, in a carefully planned press
campaign designed to rid the public of the idea that local councils
are responsible for the layers of health and safety regulations which
affect children.
It's insane and hugely depressing that we even have to talk about
this. It goes without saying that children's playgrounds should have
'adventure equipment' - tree houses and zip wires and the like -
without councils having to churn out proud press releases to go with
them. But we do have to talk about it, and it all stems from our
strange and unhealthy relationship with childhood.
As a country, we have a very weird relationship with children. We have
them into a depository for our better nature. All children are now
considered innocence and perfection rolled into one. While we - adults
and young adults (now known commonly as hoodies) - are the opposite:
evil-minded and untrustworthy. Obviously, adults are all potentially
dangerous. But we have started to consider them as if they are
innately dangerous.
For the record, children are usually not angels. They are, in fact, as
cruel and manipulative as any adult. They're just cuter. Some modern
psychology even sees them as far less moral than adults, their social
brains having not been formed yet.
In the 19th century, a German philosopher called Ludwig Feuerbach had
an interesting theory on God. He said humans have a tendency to
ascribe all their best qualities - compassion, kindness, love - to God
and keep all their worst qualities - selfishness, hatred - to
themselves. I'm simplifying to the point of inaccuracy by the way, but
Hegelian philosophers make it difficult to summarise their ideas.
It sometimes feels as if Britain has done this to its children. We
have painted them in absurdly pastel colours, as perfect little
angels, and begun to view adulthood as something inexplicably dark and
worrying.
We have paid a high price. More than a quarter of England's primary
schools now do not have a single male teacher, leaving 4,587 school
staffrooms populated solely by women. People in the street are extra
cautious even coming into contact with children, for fear of some mad
accusation being made against them.
The journey to adulthood has become a schizophrenic, jagged road in
which our little angels are turned into threatening hoodies, a sort of
sub-human faceless tribe dedicated to beating up old ladies.
The UK now regularly appears at the bottom of Unicef tables for child
well-being across industrialised countries.
Paradoxically, we have made our children less safe.
When we distance childhood from adulthood, when we create a sterile
space in between adults and children, we dis-incentivise well-meaning
strangers from looking out for children in public, we make
well-meaning adults think twice before they look after children
walking down the street on their own. We prompt suspicion and mistrust
in communities which previously did a perfectly good job of looking
after children themselves.
Paedophilia - the outrage from which all of this emanates - is,
scientifically, a kind of sexuality. It's a very tragic sexuality, but
a sexuality nonetheless. It's unclear whether it can be treated, for
many of the same reasons we cannot turn homosexuals into heterosexuals
or visa-versa, even if we wanted to. We can enforce psychological
counselling, and in some cases instigate pre-emptive incarceration if
we believe someone will act on their urges. In many cases - but by no
means all - the sufferer will be strong enough to resist their urges.
What we cannot do - or should not do - is hand the issue over to the
braying impulses of the mob. This can take the form of actual mobs,
like that we saw when the News of the World irresponsibly published
the names and details of convicted paedophiles in 2000, or the mob
mentality of shrieking tabloid over-reactions.
These merely simplify the issue and put children's relationship with
adults further into deep freeze. Parents become paranoid and that, in
turn, ultimately makes children less safe.
Children are part of our culture, even if they must be protected from
certain aspects of it. I'm the kind of person who generally believes
Britain has much more to teach Europe than Europe has to teach us. But
in this, we should take a lesson from how they go about things on the
continent.
Remember your last holiday in Spain or France or Italy? How children
played outside in the restaurants and caf�s at 11 at night, with their
parents happily drinking wine beside them? In Europe, children are
part of life, not a divorce from society. New parents do not withdraw
into a parallel world where no fun can be had and late nights are a
thing of the past. And childhood is not treated in the naive,
improbably perfect way it is treated here.
When we talk of children like angels, and turn all adults into
suspects, this is what happens; insane health and safety regulations,
a reduction in male teachers - with all the absence of positive male
roles that entails - and an increased danger to children from sexual
predators because of the overly cautious approach adults now take to
the young.
The path we've walked down has taken us to a very strange place. There
is a better way. We just have to get over our strange attitudes and
incorporate children into society. They are not angels. They are just
us, but earlier. We need to protect them. But we also need to stop
losing our sanity over how perfect they are.