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At it’s best, there is nothing that compares to the brilliance that is radio. Working in radio was my first proper job, and despite moving into new media eight years ago I remain a total radio enthusiast. Not in the taking-photos-of-transmitters-and-collecting-jingles variety, but of the fact that radio, above all other mediums, can totally immerse you in an environment or experience. Programmes like From Our Own Correspondent or Simon Mayo or my friend Marsha’s excellent podcast interviews with comedians (I particularly recommend her chats with Andre Vincent and Micky Flanagan) all are ways that stories are told simply and powerfully.
It also appears that at its worse radio can be horrific. I still find it incredible that the biggest media story of last year involved a late night radio programme. However, the Ross/Brand affair is nothing compared to what happened in Australia, where two days ago an even more incredible example of when-radio-goes-bad was broadcast. The Kyle and Jackie O breakfast show, on 2Day FM, ran a competition where a mother made her 14-year-old daughter undertake a lie-detection test live on air. After some questions about whether she had bunked off school, she is asked whether she had ever had sex. A clearly distressed girl admits she had been raped when she 12. It is horrible car-crash audio.
From a radio producers point of view, I struggle to understand how such a stunt could have been allowed to go on air. The presenters have tried to defend their actions, claiming that’s one of the pitfalls of live radio, but I can not comprehend how they or their producers even let the competition go ahead, let alone allow the mum to ask her daughter about her sexual experience (even if they had no idea the answer would be what it was). Apparently their jobs are not under threat, despite Australian PM Kevin Rudd joining the chorus of criticism [Update. On Sunday 2nd August, Austereo, owners of 2Day FM, announced that Kyle and Jackie O would be suspended indefinitely as a result of this broadcast.].
Throughout the interview, you get the very real feeling that the daughter doesn’t appear to be a willing participant in the whole saga. Personally, I think there are huge questions the station has to ask about putting participants on air when they actively don’t want to be there; but perhaps the focus needs to be on the mother, who as one commentator described it was willing to “prostitute her daughter for a couple of free concert tickets.” As the daughter says after she admits the rape, and the mother concedes she knew about it, “yet you still asked me the question?”.
And that’s the real horror of this story. Yes the radio station was in the wrong, but it is the mother that really has questions to answer. What kind of parent would put their child through such an ordeal?
Sadly, it’s not the first time that such a thing has happened. A couple of years ago, an six-year old girl in the US had her prize revoked after she had made up a story about her dad being killed in Iraq so she could get some Hannah Montana tickets. Yet it was her mother who made the lies up, saying “We did whatever we could do to win.”
Let’s not forget the parents of Alfie Patten, who were quite happy to sell their son’s “young father” story to the tabloids despite the fact that he wasn’t the father and they should actually have been supporting him rather than running off to the papers.
And for the really sick parents, you need to look no further than the story of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old who committed suicide after an online ‘friend’ turned nasty on her. It turned out that the ‘friend’ was the mother of one of her real friends who wanted to find out what Megan really thought of her daughter. Lori Drew, the mother, was eventually found not-guilty because there was no law in place to cover such action.
None of these stories are anything other than individual examples of where parents go wrong. The vast majority of parents understand their obligations to their children; and would never dream of doing anything like the parents above. And yet, a small minority let them all down.
Isn’t that what they say about teenagers?
PS. I wrote something very similar a couple of years ago on YPulse.
Image courtesy of aloshbennett. Used under licence.
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It’s not often you end up thinking ‘if only they’d listened to Max Clifford’. But earlier this year, Max gave an interview to the Guardian where he said the advice he’d have given the family of Alfie Patten, the 13-year-old dad who wasn’t, was “don’t go public, don’t talk to anybody.” Perhaps I’m naive, but I’ve always thought Max Clifford is at least honest and upfront about his work, and often talks a lot of sense. Max recently repeated this sentiment, saying: “There’s no way that this should have been brought into the public domain – but it was.”
At the heart of this story is a little boy who has been pushed to grow up too fast, and a set of circumstances that led to his face being splashed across the front of the country’s biggest selling tabloid lying next to a baby, called Maisie, that he had been led to believe was his.
We now know that Alfie Patten isn’t the father; the girl in question is only 15 herself and yet it appears may had sexual intercourse with several other young people. This fact only came out after East Sussex County Council failed in its attempts to keep an injunction in place to prevent any mention of Maisie’s father being mentioned. The real father was just 15.
The Alfie-not-the-father story had already been carried by the Daily Mirror, but noone else ran with it and the Mirror pulled the story from its website (caught by Martin Belam) because of the legal restriction. There are still other restrictions on the reporting of this story.
The Sun, that broke the story initially, denied paying Alfie’s parents for the story. Instead, they’ve set up a trust fund to support whoever ends up looking after Maisie.
The Press Complaints Commission is investigating whether Alfie’s parents were paid for the story; and presumably a wider issue of why this story was deemed suitable for publication. Even if he was the father, Alfie wasn’t the youngest father in Britain (that honour goes to a 12-year-old from my home town of Bedford).
As every single young person involved in this story is under 16, and the story centres on their sexual activities, this then makes them all victims of a crime, given that it is illegal to engage in a sexual activity with anyone under the age of 16. Slightly perversely you can be both a victim and a perpetrator of this law, as there is no exemption if both parties are under 16. Nor does the sex of the victim or perpetrator matter. Nor whether it was consensual or not.
Here’s what the PCC code says about children who are involved in sex offences: “The press must not, even if legally free to do so, identify children under 16 who are victims or witnesses in cases involving sex offences.” It then goes on to say: “In any press report of a case involving a sexual offence against a child… The child must not be identified.” It’s difficult to find any room for interpretation in this rule.
So, maybe I’m alone in wondering whether the initial story should have been run, let alone splashed across the front page? Apart from the fact it simply wasn’t true, it also totally broke the PCC code. We know there is a teenage pregnancy problem in this country, and individual cases help humanise a story, but don’t the press also have a duty, as stated in the PCC code, to treat those under the age of 16 involved in sex offences as victims?
But, if this all seems a little depressing, I’m glad that Alfie was reported to have said how he wanted to be a good father to Maisie. Too often, young parents are demonised as uncaring and unwilling to give their children a proper upbringing. Amie’s comment at the bottom of this story should be mandatory reading for everyone who thinks teenager parents aren’t committed to giving their child the best start in life.
(I actually had a long think about naming people in this story, as this would be breaking the PCC code in itself. As Alfie Patten’s name is so well known, it was difficult to see any justification in not mentioning it, but I’ve not named anyone other than the baby).
Image courtesy of superkimbo in BKK. Used under licence.
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I spend an interesting afternoon yesterday at the Hammersmith HQ of Haymarket Publishing – the publisher of the youth sector magazine Children and Young People Now. They, along with the National Youth Agency, were launching a report identifying initiatives around the UK that aim to counter the negative public perceptions of young people.
I was a last minute stand-in for a colleague, but I was glad I went: catching up with the inevitable small group of people who work in this field. It was great to see (if not talk to) Fiona Blacke, the new Chief Exec of the NYA and recent Twitterer.
The discussion was useful, but it was preaching to the converted, and although I agree with UKYP’s Andy Hamflet that it’s great to see people coming together and starting a movement, we need to engage a much wider circle if we want to make a difference. It needs to be young person led, yet adults have to stand up and be counted when it comes to challenging the negative perception of young people by the media.
But, without doubt, the comment of the afternoon came from Lisa White at 11 Million. She said her colleagues had been discussing the horrific Baby P case, and a similar story that is going to become major news over the next few months concerning a recent incident in Doncaster.
The public have been rightly outraged at the abuse that Baby P (who we can now know was called Peter) suffered during his short life. And yet what Lisa argued, and a sentiment I totally understand, is that had Baby P survived, or had the abuse been inflicted on him in his teenage years, then the public’s sympathy for him would have waned the older he got. The words “suffered physical abuse as a child” is a phrase that we read far too often without thinking about what that actually means.
As Channel 4’s excellent Lost in Care programme highlighted, kids who are permanently taken away from abusive parents aren’t always placed into a loving, caring adoptive family. Baby P was young enough to still be attractive to potential-parents, as most adoptive parents go for children under five, but they also, on the whole, avoid children who have physical or mental health problems.
Had Baby P not been adopted, he would have most likely been fostered. Children can be placed in a foster parent for periods of up to six months. If Baby P was two when he was taken away, he would have been moved a minimum of 32 times before his 18th birthday. And, because of a lack of suitable foster carers, those moves would regularly be into other counties or cities. That there are children who come out of extended fostering reasonably stable is an enormous credit to them.
Baby P may have one of the 10,000 children placed into a care home. Unlike the rest of Europe, the UK prefers fostering over care homes (although that is starting to change, particularly with the introduction of social pedagogy). Many young people, particularly teenagers, live in collective accommdation rather than with individual families.
Children in care fall massively behind their peers when it comes to educational attainment. According to the DSCF 14% of looked-after children received five GCSEs A-C in 2008, as opposed to a national average of 65%. Children in care also are twice as likely to offend than the national average, and half of young people in Young Offenders Institutes have been in care.
The kids the Daily Mail see as feral are often the kids whose lives began in a similar vein to Baby P. Abused by their parents, taken into care, let down by the state and aged 18 kicked out on to the streets and told to fend for themselves. That’s not justifying the actions of out-of-control children, but there needs a more sympathetic approach to their plight.
Photo courtesy of DrGaz. Used under licence.
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Watching Question Time last week, which came from Toxteth in Liverpool, a member of the audience who identified himself as a youth worker asked the panel “When was the the last time you spoke to a young person who you didn’t know, but not in a professional capacity?”. David Mitchell fired back that he avoided speaking to anyone he didn’t know, but other than that, the question went unanswered.
Yet it’s an issue that’s been bugging me for a while, and I know others are concerned about it too. Whilst this blog is not intended to be about issues around Child Protection, there is a very real danger that the laudable attempts to ensure young people are protected from harm have also resulted in a seismic shift in the relationship between under 18s and those over 18. We have professionalised the relationship and lost the informal contact that existed less than a generation ago, when I was growing up.
Child Protection policies, whether directly or indirectly, have created an unwillingness among adults to interact with young people without permission (usually written) and outside of organised activities. Moreover, young people don’t get the opportunity to experience life as an adult until they become one, because their only interaction with adults prior to this is where there are clear role differences between the adult and the young person.
Does this matter? Well, I think it does. It’s part of an ongoing concern that I have of creating a cliff-edge between childhood and adulthood, rather than steps that recognise young people don’t wake up on their 18th birthday with anything new other than a bunch of birthday cards. The skills and maturity that young people develop to make them “fully-fledged members of society” (aka adults) don’t come about as a result of chemical or biological changes in their bodies. They come about because of the social norms and values the young people pick up. If we fail to give them opportunities to learn those norms we simply create a generation unable to cope with adulthood.
However, it’s very difficult to propose a solution that isn’t seen to be condoning activity that could provide cover for child abuse, or at least inferring that we have to accept an element of risk that that could occur.
Image courtesy of charliestyr. Used under licence.
