Last week, Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard wrote a rather dreadful comment piece in The Times lamenting the role of the Children’s Commissioner and suggesting that there wasn’t any need for such a position: “How about a Ginger’s Commissioner, for the rights of us redheads?” he asked. “What about a Wii Commissioner, for those who want access to computer games?”
As I’m sure many others did, I sighed, tutted and wished once again that columnists of his ilk would get out of their trendy Islington townhouses and dig a little deeper before putting pen to paper. So I was glad to see that Sathnam Sanghara composed a fantastic response to the piece; answering the criticisms with a robust defence. His standfirst said it all: “If this column were about puppies being held in indefinite detention with no judicial oversight, my inbox would be full.”
Attacking government quangos and those paid to head them up is easy fodder for op-ed writers, and I’d be lying if I hadn’t ever seen the title of a government agency and thought: ‘my taxes go to pay for that!?!’.
But I struggle to think of a section of society more worthy of a publicly-funded body that stands arms-length from government and calls it to account. Those under 18 are heavily reliant on the state, from the education they receive, the healthcare they need, or the thousands of them who are looked after through fostering, care-homes or social services. Many young people come into contact with the state through getting into trouble with the police, but for every young person under 18 with an ASBO, there are around 200 who are providing substantive care to a parent or sibling*; massively subsidising the nation’s social care bill as part of a workforce that would be illegal if it was recognised. All this, and yet because they haven’t yet turned 18, the state isn’t accountable to any of them. Earlier this year, young people were even banned from entering Parliament.
Perhaps Stephen thinks that young people should get together and form their own lobby group to ensure their views are heard and counted, just like every other sector does. There are, of course, organisations that do this, and I’ve seen some brilliant examples of where this is occurring (tomorrow for example, young people will sit in the House of Commons chamber to discuss some of those issues). But, by the very nature of their age, young people don’t have the financial resource, or the time, or the knowledge of how the system works, to effectively campaign amongst professional policy makers and politicians. They need adult support and funding. Especially if English isn’t their first language, or they’ve had an unstable upbringing, or they are simply too young to engage in a debate with adults.
Stephen picks on a single comment made by the current Children’s Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, as demonstration of the pointlessness of the role. Last year, Sir Al was quoted as saying that using stop and search powers to prevent knife crime could antagonise young people, and this was seized on as ridiculous both by a government minister (Tony McNulty) and a raft of pundits who get paid as much as Sir Al does to file their columns. The original quote follows the introduction of new powers that the police were given to stop and search people even if there was no reasonable suspicion that they were carrying a weapon. Sir Al, quite reasonably, said: “There is a balance here. On the one hand for young people to feel safer by having the presence of the police – but on the other hand making sure the new powers don’t create further antagonism by increased stopping and searching.” To my mind, that is exactly what someone paid to stand up for the rights of children should be pointing out: especially when I know teenagers who line their walls with the Stop and Search receipts they’ve received.
Sathnam highlights the work 11 Million (the organisation that the Children’s Commissioner heads) has done defending the rights of children who are detained, without legal representation, because of the action of their parents.
But if I was to highlight another reason we need a Children’s Commissioner, it is the effect Sir Al and his team had on the use of Mosquitoes, the devices that emit a high-pitch audio sound that only younger people are able to hear. It is appalling that it took the intervention of the Children’s Commissioner to highlight how indiscriminate these devices were before councils and other agencies started considering and regulating their use. Until then, it seemed no-one in authority concerned themselves with the legal, let alone ethical, consequences of using these devices.
Perhaps when red-heads are subjected to audible irritation because their demographic is deemed a nuisance; or gamers are locked away in cells, without access to any medical facilities, because their mums and dads broke the law, then they will deserve a commissioner who makes sure the government is looking out for them. But whilst the UN deems the UK to be the worst place in the developed world for children to grow up in, then we absolutely need someone paid to argue the case for young people.
Like Stephen, I would love to compile a list of government quangos that should be got rid of, and put the Children’s Commissioner on that list. But unlike Stephen, I’d like that to happen because the state recognises and respects the rights that young people have, rather than his approach: simply deny there is a problem in the first place.
* Calculation based on the statistic of 869 ASBOs issued to young people aged 10-17 in England in 2007, against 175,000 under 18s who are classed as Young Carers by Ofsted’s Supporting Young Carers report.
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.
There’s been quite a lot of discussion over the last couple of weeks about the decision to allow BTCV and the Wildlife Trust to run a programme of volunteering for young people in London to regain their free travel passes.
Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone introduced a radical scheme that allowed every young person under 16 the right to free transport on the capital’s buses. It was widely heralded as a positive step in order to tackle social exclusion, on the simple premise that if young people couldn’t get to places they couldn’t participate.
Young people who’ve caused anti-social behaviour, and other offences, have had their passes taken away (which in itself has led to discussions about whether that is the correct punishment). In order to get them back, they need to undertake a period of volunteering with the above charities, as outlined last week.
It’s just another example of the increasing stretching of the term volunteering, particularly by government, to fit a whole host of programmes and projects. I may be a volunteering purist, but I get worried that too many initiatives are muddling volunteering with participation, work experience or community service.
Volunteering obviously comes from the word “voluntary”, which means optional. If you are asked to make a voluntary contribution, you can decide not to give. If you are asked to volunteer some information about yourself, you can choose not to. All this makes a mockery of both the government and opposition proposals for compulsory volunteering.
But volunteering isn’t just about making a choice to do something. My favourite definition of volunteering is “philanthropy of your time”. The great 19th-century philanthropists (and today’s philanthropists) didn’t donate their money for personal gain, but because they believed in the greater good. The libraries, art galleries, hospitals and trusts that enriched public life in this country came about because those people understood the basic principles of social return on investment.
And that’s why some schemes appear to be betraying the concept of volunteering on two related fronts. Firstly, whilst I’d never deny the right of volunteers to use their volunteering to develop skills and gain experience, nor that people should be stopped from volunteering because they want to improve their CV, I get particularly worried when volunteering is promoted as primarily about skills development and increasing job prospects. Hospital radio has always been the way budding DJs got to practice their ‘art’, but certainly at my hospital radio station it was always made clear that you were there to serve the patients; the skills you developed were a by-product. Volunteering is not simply about personal gain.
Which is my second point – volunteering is about doing something that makes a positive difference for someone else (or at least something else, in the case of environmental volunteering). That’s why I get a bit nervous by things like the National Talent Bank that appear to be about promoting volunteering without a single mention that volunteering is a means to an end; not the end in itself. Even v appears to be about counting the number of volunteers placed rather than the effect those volunteers can have.
And if I could have a third point, it would be that volunteering has to involve a sacrifice. I’m all for new ways of volunteering, including current thoughts around micro-volunteering, but I’d get slightly worried if you could count yourself as a volunteer because you had re-tweeted a message on Twitter. That’s akin to counting yourself a philanthropist because you dropped your 1p of spare change into a collecting tin.
Does this matter? Well, I think so. Five or so years ago, before the current rush to push volunteering, lots of people (including young people) engaged in positive volunteering opportunities because they believed in the cause and wanted to make a difference. I certainly don’t want to rubbish the new initiatives that have tried to engage new people into volunteering, but we need to be careful we don’t lose or de-value that level of volunteering, or muddle good citizenship (participation) with the extra effort required for an activity to be counted as volunteering. Because, if a young person who helps run a Brownie night every week is compared equally with a young person who once spent an afternoon in a recording studio making a music track, we’re in danger of losing the real value of volunteering. And that is the effect it has on others.
So what do I think should have been done to give back travel passes to young people? Well, my suggestion would have been the creation of young people’s courts, to introduce the principle of being judged by peers. Part of what the “jury” would look at was what pro-social activities the young person had been involved in. That could include volunteering, but it wouldn’t make the direct connection between volunteering and returning the pass. And the jury should of course focus on the effect that the volunteering had.
If you type the name Darryl Marfo into a search engine, you may find yourself ending up in pretty despicable racist forums. You may well find yourself reading the national newspapers that covered his arrest in April. What you won’t find, unless you specifically look for it, is news that all charges against him have been dropped.
Darryl was the inner-London student, brought up by a single mum, who won a scholarship at the prestigious £25k-a-year Pangbourne College in Hampshire. Not only did Darryl win the scholarship, but he excelled, playing rugby for the England Under 16s team, chairing the school council, helping write the school newspaper and ending up as ‘chief cadet captain’, aka Head Boy.
And then, in April, Darryl was at a house party with other students when some sort of fracas broke out. Darryl was on the end of some racial abuse, apparently from a solider from nearby Aldershot barracks, and allegedly “grabbed a kitchen knife”. No-one was hurt in the incident, but the police were called.
Two people were subsequently arrested as a result of the incident. One of them was Darryl.
I’m not for one moment condoning using any sort of weapon, and I wasn’t there, but “grabbing a kitchen knife” could mean a variety of things. Not surprisingly this turns into ‘pulling out a blade’, ‘brandishing a weapon’ and ‘knife brawl’ for the benefit of good newspaper copy.
Several national papers ran the story (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and most stated that parents of other children were demanding that Darryl be suspended from the school. A mother was widely quoted telling the Daily Telegraph: “We are paying £25,000 a year to this school and it’s not what we expect.” Another said that parents would be writing to the school’s governors to demand action be taken against Darryl. The school, to its credit, said it wouldn’t take any action until the police investigation had concluded. This was especially important as Darryl would be sitting his A Levels whilst on police bail.
Meanwhile, another student (on condition of anonymity) contacted the local paper in Reading, where the other boy who was arrested lived, demanding that this student was innocent: “In our eyes he was a hero. He should never have been arrested… He was identified by mistake by someone who was not at the party.” An email to Reading’s evening paper (from someone whose sex is known but is not identified) said that the unnamed boy had removed the knife, and stated: “We are proud of what the other Pangbourne pupil did and he should be praised and rewarded.”
But something didn’t stack up with this story. Only the Telegraph made it explicit that it was the other, unnamed boy, who was arrested on the night. Daryl was arrested several days later after he contacted the police about the incident.
And here’s another question: Why was Darryl’s name so freely bandied about (complete with obligatory Facebook photo) when the other boy’s identity was never revealed? Obviously Darryl was the better newsline, but there was no legal reason not to name the other individual, and if it was that easy to get Darryl’s details then it couldn’t have been that difficult to get the name of the other individual? Why did no-one else (not the eyewitnesses, or the people who contacted the local papers, or the concerned mother) want to be identified? Why are the only young people named in any of the newspapers Darryl and his younger brother (who also happens to be at the school)?
And another question: Why were the parents so determined that Darryl should be suspended, but not the other boy who had been arrested? Darryl’s crime was serious, but it also appeared that he had been the victim of racist abuse that night, so surely there were some mitigating circumstances for his alleged actions? There was no suggestion that he had actually threatened anyone with the knife, let alone caused any injury.
And what action, if any, has been taken against the unidentified solider who was responsible for the racist remarks? Why didn’t any newspaper bother itself with investigating this angle? And which of the boys stood up for Darryl against the racist abuse (because they should be named and praised).
I really hope that this is a serious of coincidences, and there is nothing sinister here. But I couldn’t help feel somewhat uncomfortable when I saw the original story, and nothing I’ve seen since has made me feel any better.
Image courtesy of welshwitch36. Used under licence.(The photo has no relevance apart from it was taken in Pangbourne and I quite liked it)
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.
Having grown up watching those public appeals on daytime ITV (best example I could find is at 3:23 here) I, like many people, was aware of the name but knew little about the organisation. Indeed, until recently I couldn’t have told you if it were a government agency, a part of the police or something totally independent. Apparently I’m not alone in this lack of knowledge.
Crimestoppers is, as I’ve since discovered, an independent charity that initially was set up to solve one murder: that of PC Keith Blakelock who was killed during the riots on Broadwater Farm estate in 1985. People had information about the killer, but for a variety of reasons didn’t want to approach the police direct. The organisation had one simple mission: collect information anonymously, and then pass it on to the police.
But since then, nearly 90,000 people have been arrested and/or charged as a result of Crimestoppers information, and on average 17 people are arrested every day thanks to information provided by Crimestoppers. One in five murders in London is solved thanks to Crimestoppers. All impressive stats.
The day was actually about strategic planning for Crimestoppers London, although given the significance of the capital it involved people from the national office as well as the local volunteer board. And like many similar organisations, one of the key concerns was getting the Crimestoppers message to younger people who didn’t necessarily know about the organisation, and can’t be targeted in the more traditional ways that charities feel comfortable with. I was there as a representative of YouthNet, to try and bring some of our expertise from that field.
I’m not quite sure how much I helped beyond throwing a few ideas and comments in, but from a personal point of view it was fascinating seeing an organisation at the very early stages of youth engagement try and grasp what it was about. It made me realise how far down the path (not surprisingly) YouthNet is, as is Headliners. Even the charity I volunteered for, St John Ambulance, whilst not a model of best practice has the feel of an organisation comfortable with the notion of young people making strategic decisions.
And what I think I benefitted most from the day was that it reinforced the notion that young people, like everyone else, respond to things that they feel are genuine. Making a MySpace page, creating a Facebook page, adding yourself to Twitter: these things mean nothing if you don’t embrace the culture where these things live. Of the things I remember saying on Thursday, one of them was that “online and offline don’t exist in separate entities” and I think that patently true. There’s no point in having a fancy-pants online operation if those values aren’t reflected in your offline offer as well.
My only other contribution of note was, when asked to describe what I wanted the organisation to look back in 2012 and say “this is how we did it”, is that it defies convention. (I initially suggested ‘breaks the rules’, but that’s probably not a good message from Crimestoppers!). Doing things differently is a sign of an organisation confident about what it stands for, and gets ‘cut-through’ in a saturated enviornment.
As an example of an organisation prepared to do something differently, I told them to search for Mystery Package on YouTube. Because I think it is possibly the best video of 2008 (even if it is a bit long), I’ve added it here:
Posted in community, crime by Olly Benson
March 30, 2009
Yesterday I was having a look round Yahoo! Answers, as I occasionally do, and I found this question. It made me a little upset and depressed about the society the next generation are growing up in.
The question was from Maz, a 14-year-old, worried that she’d done something that could get her into trouble and end up with a criminal record. And what was the heinous crime for which she was scared of being hauled up in front of a beak (or at least given a theoretical slap-on-the-wrists down at her local police station, not to mention no doubt being added to the DNA database and a conviction she’d have to declare if she ever wanted to work with children or vulnerable adults)?She had written, in pencil, on a paving slab, a message to a boy whose number she didn’t have.
I genuinely can’t thing of anything more cute and innocent that a teenager could be caught doing. And yet rather than going to bed dreaming of the boy in question, she’d got herself so full of worry that she’d logged on to the internet and posted a question to gauge the likelihood of being thrown in the slammer as a result of her action.I don’t know what annoyed me more – that she’d be conditioned to believe that writing in pencil on a paving slab could result in a criminal conviction, or that several of the responses suggested that she should/could be in trouble for what she’d done.
Now I get as irritated of spray-can and scratched graffiti as the next person, and I’d perfectly happily send down someone caught daubing walls or etching their tag into a bus window. But I’d far prefer to live in a society that allows public expression of affection that get washed off in the rain than a society known for it’s clean pavements.
Maz, if you are reading this, I’ll buy you some chalk for next time.
Image courtesy of byronv2. Taken on a street near Park Circus in Glasgow. Used under licence.
One of the strange things I remember from my time at university in Bradford was that the toilets at the Interchange (the train and bus station) were lit using blue lights. This was supposedly to stop junkies from using the lavatories to shoot up—the idea being that the blue lighting made it difficult for them to find their veins—although apparently most regular heroin addicts could get a hit with their eyes closed.
The same idea is being used by Layton Burroughs Residents’ Association in Mansfield, except it’s pink light they’ve installed in a subway and their target is young people not drug users. Pink lights are used by beauticians to highlight skin blotches, and the idea is that highlighting young people’s acne makes it less desirable to hang around at that spot.
I’m glad to see the National Youth Agency appears to have criticised this, although their statement isn’t particularly strong. But it follows the Children’s Commissioner’s attacks on mosquitoes (the audio devices used to stop young people hanging around) and it’s good to see agencies that should be promoting young people’s rights publicly defending them.
I was at an RSA event in Hertfordshire last year, discussing young people and anti-social behaviour with several members of the local police force. One the frustrations a police officer said he had was that too often they were called by residents who wanted the police to do something before any crime had been committed. Media and politicians have helped fuel a perception among the public that young people are a threat if they hang around, and that hanging around is a crime.
Undoubtedly young people hanging around can be a nuisance, and their presence can make other residents feel vulnerable. But that doesn’t make it wrong or illegal. And simply introducing a device designed to make it uncomfortable for them won’t solve the problem.
At my local supermarket there are often young people hanging around outside the entrance, particularly if you go there on a Friday or Saturday night. One night recently I witnessed some young people giving the security guard some agro, which provoked the guard to react and chase one of the teenagers until he caught him. As soon as he’d grabbed him the security guard didn’t know quite what to do (he could hardly beat him up in the middle of a Tesco car-park, and equally he couldn’t hold on to him because he hadn’t committed any crime), but what I found more interesting was the reaction of the young person he’d caught. From laddish bravedo, as soon as he was caught he turned into a petrified child screaming not to be hurt and begging for forgiveness.
That incident reveals one of the key reasons young people choose to hang around the places they do. Because they feel safe. Because there are people to watch over them. Because aged 14-15, you want the independence of meeting outside of the family home, but still with the protection that adults can give.
And if we started considering that when trying to deal with the “problem” of anti-social young people, we might finally start getting somewhere.
Images courtesy of dieselbug2007. Used under licence.
