•
Back when I was a kid, we had one of those dial-telephones, which used pulse-dialing. My dad’s work had a switchboard that was literally that, the telephonist put plugs into sockets to connect incoming calls to the relevant extension. It was similar to the 999 centre we visited during an open day at the local BT offices. They also showed how they worked out phone bills: there was a huge wall of every number in the exchange, and they’d take photos of this wall, take the photo off to get processed, then sit and find each number and match it against the relevant account. Excitement was when we got a cordless phone, where you could answer the call in the kitchen even though the base station was in the hall. Itemised bills were a big deal.
Shortly afterwards, Rabbit phones allowed you to take or receive a call as long as you were within 50 metres of a Rabbit receiver. Then the first real mobile phones came along, but because they were analogue they were large, had poor reception and expensive. Gradually, analogue phones moved into digital, batteries became lighter and the infrastructure costs reduced making mobile phones cheap and practical. It meant that a few years ago I was able to sit on the banks of Lake Tana in northern Ethiopia and text New Years greetings to my friends in the UK at a cost that barely registered on my bill.
All this has happened in the last thirty years. It’s called progress; people have built on the knowledge that has been gathered around telephony, ever since Alexander Graham Bell made his first call.
Why does this matter when it comes to exam results? Because every year, when the results are announced and the usual suspects trot out the annual decrees that because an increasing number of students are getting higher grades, exams are getting easier; I wonder to myself what education has done to merit some special significance that means it is not allowed to progress. Surely teachers, along with academics of education, have looked at what their profession did previously, picked the bits that worked, dropped or changed the bits that didn’t work, developed new methods and systems in order to improve performance. The result being that standards improve and students get better exam results. Surely anything other than improved results is a failure?
Image courtesy of Krypto. Used under licence.
•
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.
Image courtesy of FatMandy. Used under licence.
Tags:
11 Million,
asbo,
children's commissioner,
house of commons,
islington,
jewish chronicle,
looked after children,
mosquitoes,
parliament,
quango,
sathnam sanghara,
sir al aynsley-green,
stephen pollard,
stop and search,
the times,
tony mcnulty,
ukyp,
un,
young carers
•
Melissa Suffield is an actress in Eastenders. Despite the fact the programme is made less than a mile from where I live, I never watch it. It’s only through osmosis that I know her character is Ian Beale’s daughter, Lucy.
On Tuesday night BBC Three aired a documentary, as part of their adult season, looking at the issue of lowering the voting age to 16. It was an authored piece by Melissa, who is 16 herself. If it was a requirement of contract agreement, she did an excellent job of appearing genuinely interested in the issue. In actual fact, it was pretty obvious that she was bothered about politics, and as one caller to a radio show that featured on the programme said “when you give up playing Lucy Beale, you’ve got a good job ahead of you as a political reporter.” (Good news, given her Eastenders profile lists political journalism as her future career ambition).
The set-up for the programme was that she had four weeks to find out about the issues around votes at 16. This involved extensive travelling around the UK, and the Isle of Man, in order to investigate whether the voting age should be lowered. It would have been all too easy to fall into the trap of mixing a few celebrities with a few opinionated teenagers, but refreshingly the programme steered clear of all the usual suspects. And along the way it tackled issues as diverse as volunteering, young carers, the BNP and citizenship ceremonies.
Being television there has to be some “visuals” to make the documentary more than just talking heads, and apart from a couple of silly costumes and a slightly pointless meeting of 30+ young people in Trafalgar Square, the programme was light on the fluff and actually allowed the interviewees to do the talking. Among the more poignant moments was the 17-year-old young carer, who had to look after her autistic(?) brother, who despite Melissa’s observation that she was one of the most mature 17-year-olds she knew, said she didn’t think she was old enough to vote. That reminded me of BYC chair Emily Beardsmore’s assertion that the very fact young people think that way is a demonstration of their maturity.
In fact her’s (apologies, I haven’t got names as iPlayer isn’t working very well on my computer) and a child psychologist’s were lone voices against the lowering of the voting age. There was a good sequence in the Isle of Man, the first country in Europe to have lowered the voting age, that offered some proof that young people would take their responsibility seriously. Asked whether there was a risk young people would vote because they liked the name or the colour of a party rather than its policies, the Speaker of the House of Keys (IoM’s parliament) pointed out that plenty of people in the UK voted for the Monster Raving Loony Party. And they were all over 18.
If I had a few criticisms of the programme they were that it focused on national politics, and didn’t look at devolved or local governments (who’s decisions tend to have far more of an effect on 16-17 year olds), and that in an effort to show that people were apathetic about politics asked the question “How many parliamentary constituencies are there?” Yes it was depressing that most people guessed numbers under 100, but actually not knowing what a constituency is doesn’t mean you are apathetic towards politics. (Being a political geek that I am, I can tell you there are currently 646).
The most interesting bits were the two sequences filmed inside a polling booth, at the recent European elections. The first was recorded on a mobile phone by a Brazilian woman who had just got her British nationality, and therefore was voting for the first time. The second was Melissa and her mum (who had decided to let Melissa choose who she should vote for). Both times, and I’m guessing this was just coincidence and not a very clever bit of electioneering, the party that was chosen was the Liberal Democrats. Moreover, I always thought it was an offence (with a custodial punishment) under the Representation of the People Act to communicate how someone voted.
Which, given that overall I thought it was a good piece of television, did leave me wondering whether it would go the way of another great BBC Three documentary, Tower Block Dreams. That programme fell foul of the 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act that prohibits any promotion of illegal radio services; meaning that whilst it is perfectly legal to interview a terrorist, you risk being thrown into jail if you do a programme about pirate radio. As a result, the series will never be screened again.
I hope that isn’t true of this programme. And that this isn’t the last time we see Melissa the political journalist.
Photo courtesy of David Spender. Used under licence.
Tags:
16: too young to vote,
bbc three,
bnp,
citizenship ceremonies,
eastenders,
emily beardsmore,
house of keys,
ian beale,
isle of man,
lucy beale,
melissa suffield,
monster raving looney party,
parliamentary constituencies,
representation of the people act,
tower block dreams,
trafalgar square,
volunteering,
votes at 16,
wireless telegraphy act,
young carers
•
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.
Tags:
2Day FM,
alfie patten,
Andre Vincent,
From Our Own Correspondent,
Hannah Montana,
Kevin Rudd,
Kyle and Jackie O,
Lori Drew,
Marsha Shandur,
Megan Meier,
Micky Flanagan,
radio,
Ross/Brand,
Simon Mayo,
XFM,
YPulse
•
My second post in as many weeks based on what I saw on Question Time. This week, despite being a ‘regular’ programme, it had a very much end-of-term feel about it.
Margot James, vice-chair of the Conservative Party and a prospective parliamentary candidate had some difficulty defending as a serious proposal an earlier announcement that young people who committed anti-social behaviour would have their mobile phones taken away. The audience and other panel members rubbished the idea, likening it Tony Blair’s much lamented suggestion that yobs could be made to pay on-the-spot fines by marching them to the nearest cash machine.
But one question led me to think about the relationship that young people have with their mobiles, and how it differs from older people. An audience member asked “Won’t they just replace the phone?”. Yes they might, said Margot, but they won’t have their sim card. Now, with the obvious caveat that this is not a definite rule, most of the young people I’ve dealt with are on pay-as-you-go, and it’s not just devices that are replaced regularly. The sim card, effectively the number and the contacts contained on it, has no value to them beyond the credit it has on it.
I’m old enough to be of the generation where you’d answer your home phone with your number “Hello, Bedford 55122*” (I’ve never quite understood why we all did that). 25-years-on, I can still remember one of my neighbour’s number, and if I thought about it hard enough probably another couple of numbers as well. And yet, I can only remember three mobile numbers; and they pretty much the first friends I knew who had mobiles.
Mobiles allow you can store numbers by name in your phone, in a way you never really did with landlines (you could set preset buttons, but it was often limited to 10 numbers). You also don’t have the problem of remembering the number when you are away from your house. Therefore, once you’ve programmed the number in, you don’t have to ever worry what it is. With mobiles, you often swap numbers by allowing others to type it in to your contacts, or text you. You may never actually look at the number. And increasingly, mobiles are integrating with services such as Gmail or Facebook so your friends’ details automatically drop into the address book.
I’ve had the same mobile number since I first got a phone in 1997, and when I changed network I took my old number with me. But actually that’s a fairly irrational choice to make; although I’ve got friends (and family!) who have known me since that time, the vast majority of calls/texts I get on my mobile are from colleagues or people who I’ve seen within the last month. It wouldn’t be that difficult for them to get my updated number. In the same period I’ve been through five primary personal email addresses (and three work ones), and although there may be people I’ve lost contact with as a result, they wouldn’t have any trouble finding me again if they needed to.
So apart from the obvious practical issues of removing a mobile, unless it was going to be illegal to have a mobile during that time, I can’t see how confiscation would be in any way effective.
* that’s not my number, btw.
Images courtesy of Flickmor. Used under licence.
Tags:
conservative party,
margot james,
mobile phones,
question time,
tony blair
•
On Thursday the BBC broadcast one of my favourite programmes of the year, Schools Question Time. It’s the annual edition of the regular Question Time but with a distinctly youth flavour: produced by student winners of a competition; a young audience; and for the third year running a “young person” on the panel. Because I was out on Thursday evening, I’ve only just got around to watching it.
For whatever reason, this year’s programme felt significantly more small-c conservative than previous editions. The audience definitely was older than before*, and the panellists, with the exception of 18-year-old Suzanne Burlton, could have been on any edition of the programme. And whilst all credit to Suzanne for her ability to participate in the discussion, I couldn’t help thinking she was a fairly predictable wannabe-politician and brought little to the table that wouldn’t have been said by someone twice her age. It’s a theme similar to my previous two posts, we need to engage young people on their level: not dress them up in suits and tell them to act like grown-ups.
Even the comments from the audience seemed a lot more restrained than other years, and certainly they seemed less vocal than we’ve seen on the programme over the last few months. A young person who suggested that others turn to drink because there was nothing for them to do on a Friday night was rebuked with the suggestion she should read a book. (Meanwhile a friend on Twitter said “they have the internet now FFS!” – I can’t quite work out whether he was joking).
Where was anyone, in the audience or on the panel, championing the right for young people to hang-out with each other on a Friday night? With the exception of one audience member, there seemed little support for the idea that young people might actually want places to go on Friday night and the weekend, and pointing out that if there isn’t the provision of suitable activities then they’ll create their own. There are moves to increase weekend opening of statutory youth clubs, but it’s still sketchy as best and there is plenty of resistance to the idea. And yet we know that young people respond positively to having activities to do – it’s often that there aren’t the adults to support them.
All this said, I still like the fact that we have this programme and would love to be invited to work on the show (or be in the audience one time).
On a related note, I was glad to see that John Bercow, the recently-appointed speaker of the House of Commons, stepped in to reverse a decision made by Commons authorities to prevent Cub Scouts being able to lobby their MPs because they were not old enough to vote. Luckily most MPs appear to have thought this was a patently absurd decision, but you do have to wonder how anyone reached that decision in the first place.
* it’s worth pointing out that reading up on how the programme is put together, I think the young producers can choose the age of the audience as well as the panellists.
Photo, showing David Dimbleby at another Schools Question Time event, courtesy of eyedropper. Used under licence.
Tags:
andy burnham,
bbc,
institute of citizenship,
jeremy hunt,
john bercow,
sarah teather,
schools question time,
shami chakrabarti,
suzanne burlton
•
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)
•
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.
Tags:
alfie patten,
daily mirror,
max clifford,
pcc,
teenage dad,
teenage pregnancy,
the sun
•
Sorry, I do keep meaning to write a blog post but I’ve been busy over the last few nights (admittedly some of it was watching The Apprentice!).
Anyway, both the Guardian and Independent appear to have done big features on “young people aren’t so bad” this week:
Also:
- Stewart Dakers on why compulsory national service is a bad idea (Guardian, Tuesday)
- And this, which is a year old but I only discovered today at work (I was doing some research on knife stats among young people, which for obvious reasons are difficult to confirm). If you read Speak Your Branes you probably end up wondering what the point of Have Your Say style comments on the bottom of news stories are. Well, I found the answer this morning. The top response on this article in the Telegraph, from Ruth Ray, is beautifully written and a brilliant assessment of what is happening to young people on our inner city estates.
Images courtesy of desvilla. Used under licence.
Tags:
guardian,
independent,
national service,
telegraph
•
You may have seen the story about the 18-year old who has tried cashing in on being one of the children in the class that Thomas Hamilton opened fire in during the Dunblane massacre in 1996. Naturally the newspapers have been forthright in their condemnation, and politicians have been lining up to attack the insensitivity and arrogance of someone digging up a terrible event for the sake of a few extra bucks, while everyone else has tried to get on with their lives.
Except you won’t of seen that story. Because it hasn’t happened. What has happened is a journalist, working for a national newspaper, decided to do that. Via Facebook and Bebo she befriended some of those who survived the shooting, and then used the information she gleaned from their profiles to build a story that the newspaper then decided should lead the front-page of their Sunday edition.
And what information did she obtain to make this story giving such prominence? That some of the youngsters, now 18, had “posted shocking blogs and photographs of themselves on the internet”. The paper claimed one individual, who was injured in the attack, had a Bebo account that contained photos of them making “rude gestures” and boasting of “drunken nights out”. This, typical, legal and in-no-way-related-to-the-massacre behaviour apparently “shamed” the memory of those who had died.
It is difficult to comprehend (a) what sort of journalist thinks that is an acceptable way to get a story, and (b) what sort of newspaper editor/publisher or other members of the newspaper staff deemed it an appropriate story at all, let alone one to splash over the front page? The only reason for choosing a cover story is because it boosts sales, so the only reason that the newspaper would have placed it on their front page is because they wanted extra income.
But what is possibly most galling is the total absence of any public criticism of the journalist or newspaper by either other newspapers or by politicians. There is a groundswell of outrage in the blogsphere, including Father Ted creator Graham Linehan, as well as 30 complaints to the Press Complaints Commission. But, accepting that there may be a feeling that continuing to talk about the issue prolongs the agony for the victims, there has been a distinct lack of reaction to this. It is, as if we just accept that this is what tabloid newspapers do.
Next time you see a newspaper splash a story about an out-of-control young person, consider whether the media has any right to hold these young people to account when they let one of their own get away with something as horrific as what Paula Murray and the Express pulled off.
“Be the person you want others to become.”
Update: The Sunday Express has since apologised for the story.
Images courtesy of Tillwe. Used under licence.
Tags:
dunblane,
express,
paula murray
