 |
Presentation by Terri Dowty at the Detached Youth Work conference 07/12/05 This work may be freely copied and distributed, but please include the credit ©2005 T.Dowty in any reproduction |
||
|
ASBOs |
|||
  |
Can I say first of all how pleased I am to be here today. The invitation arrived in amongst the usual sea of bad news, and it took me less than 30 seconds to say yes. We hopelessly woolly liberals with a penchant for civil liberties and a concern for young people seem to be a rather oppressed minority at the moment, so it’s good to be amongst kindred spirits. I hope I can contribute some thoughts that might be helpful to the ongoing debate about antisocial behaviour, and to the whole ‘problemisation’ of young people. It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that they’re responsible for most of society’s ills. Spoilt yobs that that they are, they are ruining the architectural heritage of Moss Side and Tottenham, they take pleasure in terrorising elderly ladies by ‘looking at them funny’, they’re all out of their heads on drugs and alcohol, they bully each other and bunk off school every day, and to top it all, their greed and lack of moral fibre cause them to become mentally ill. I’m surprised nobody has managed to pin the Tsunami or Hurricane Rita on them. Believe me, I hear this kind of stuff whenever I mention that I work in children’s rights, though sometimes it’s dressed up in quite intellectual-sounding arguments. What really interests me is children and young people’s civil rights, a very underdeveloped subject. We are very conscious of protection rights in the UK, perhaps because the general public finds it easiest to empathise with children when they are so obviously vulnerable, and we have reached a point where we at least make a noise about children’s entitlement to provision, but civil rights are ones that speak of the child as a person of power, and many people find that idea unpalatable. I’m talking about the rights of children and young people to be a visible and audible part of society; to contribute what they’re able and to take what they need; rights to have their views taken seriously; to protest; to know what the law is, and to have a fair hearing. I’m the kind of person who attracts the derision of the ‘asbo pioneer’ of Manchester, Basil Curley, who told a journalist that he is proud of his record and tired of "people who live in Surrey" talking to him about civil liberties. Actually, I object strongly to any implication that I live in Surrey, because I’m actually very fond of the deeply unfashionable area of NE London where I live – a place called Leytonstone, which crops up in the news occasionally for all the wrong reasons. I’m attached to it, because I love the continuity of being somewhere my family has belonged for nearly 2 centuries. I like passing my grandfather’s old barber’s shop – even if it is a minicab office now. I like walking through the grounds of the local hospital, where my other grandparents used to have romantic assignations behind the nurses’ home. I like seeing the railway line, where my father and his friends used to balance pennies and squashed tin cans on the rails because they enjoyed the noise and sparks when a train ran over them. They of course didn’t have asbos in the 1920s. I’m very lucky to have that sense of rootedness and belonging, and because I’ve brought up my own sons in Leytonstone, I’ve also had the chance to watch a lot of people grow from little boys into young men. One or two of them have become quite difficult and to live alongside, but then that doesn’t surprise me because I’ve seen just what a war of attrition their childhoods have been. Some of the others can be an absolute pain – but again, that was inevitable. When I say there’s nothing for young people to do in our area, I mean just that. Not even a patch of waste ground to kick a ball. If children play in our street, they are harassed by our self-appointed community wardens – three older people who believe there’s nothing wrong in ‘confiscating’ footballs – stealing property - and being thoroughly foul to children. And then some of the young people I know just like to chat to their friends on the street, in the same way that I stand around talking to my neighbours - the difference is that I don’t seem to alarm or distress anyone any more. But then, you know what I’m talking about. I don’t really need to tell you what goes on: that ‘antisocial behaviour’ is increasingly a term used to bully the young into doing what older people want. That it’s a quasi-pathological term for the things that, often, young people have always done – whether out of playfulness, boredom, curiosity, or because they are young and still learning the complexities social behaviour. Antisocial behaviour is also a term used to avoid listening to children and young people where they are angry, or where they really do need help, or are trying to draw attention to their distress at lack of support, space, money, adult time and proper containment, and their behaviour tips over into undeniable delinquency. As far as I can see, it is inseparable from the issue of mental health. It is also inseparable from the rights to health, development and adequate housing; from the right of children and young people to have their views heard and taken seriously. I wrote a comment piece in the Guardian recently about asbos where I used the word ‘containment’, and in the spate of poisonous emails I subsequently received, it was fascinating how many people assumed that, by containment, I meant prison! Well, at least they agreed with something I’d written, but the assumption speaks volumes about attitudes towards young people. I mean ‘containment’ in its richest sense. It’s what good parents and professionals do when they really listen and try to understand what’s going on in a child’s life, when they help them to make sense of it all, when they relieve unbearable pressure or mediate between the child and the world. Containment is about making a young person feel understood, helped and comforted, that they can depend upon being held securely, that there is always someone to help them sort things out when it becomes all too difficult. When it descends to mere physical confinement, proper containment has failed. Some of you might guess from the particular way I understand ‘containment’ that I have some grounding in psychotherapy, and it’s in the ideas of the therapist, Donald Winnicott, that I’ve found some useful things in pulling together the apparently disparate strands of the problems that threaten our young people. One of Winnicott’s most famous papers was entitled ‘Delinquency as a sign of hope’. Winnicott did a lot of work around deprivation and delinquency, believing that the two were inextricably linked. He saw delinquency as the protest a young person makes when the environment is just not good enough; when it fails to contain properly. He regarded delinquency as a hopeful sign because it expressed a young person’s belief that things could be made better. The delinquency is an angry demand, an attempt to force an unresponsive outside world into meeting basic needs and entitlements that the young person knows are lacking. It’s about a search for true containment; for structures that work to alleviate the deprivation that the young person feels. In Winnicott’s terms, delinquency is infinitely preferable to the situation that arises when a young person doesn’t hope to get a better deal out of life. In that situation, instead of railing against the failures of the environment, the young person internalises the failure and blames him or herself for not being good enough. It’s out of that despair that depression and self-destructive, self-hating and self-harming behaviours are born. I find this idea useful because it makes a deeper understanding possible. It says that, rather than lots of separate problems, there is a central issue that is creating a range of symptoms: delinquency, depression, self-harm and destructive behaviour are about environments that don’t adapt to the child. Certainly, some children show an extraordinary resilience in surviving all kinds of difficulties, and there has been a lot of talk recently about finding how we can make more children ‘resilient’, but that seems to me to be missing the point. I believe that morality and human rights demand that we ought instead to be looking at what makes life so difficult for some children that they need special qualities to endure it. The point about human rights instruments such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is that they are about the entitlements of each individual. They outline what any person should reasonably expect in return for agreeing to co-operate in building a civilised society. With rights come responsibilities, we’re told. That’s absolutely true. If we’re going to enjoy our own human rights, we have a corresponding responsibility to make sure that everyone else can equally enjoy theirs, otherwise the whole concept of human rights is meaningless. Bluntly, if we want young people to respect the rights of others, we first have to make sure that their rights are being met. We can hardly expect a young person who is deprived of basic rights to sign up to a one-sided social contract that binds them to not spoiling the party for other people. So what rights are we talking about? Well, there are the basic ones of provision: housing that doesn’t have damp running down the walls; sufficient family income to pay the heating bills and put nutritious food on the table: in other words, the right not to grow up in poverty. That really ought to be possible when we live in the 4th largest economy in the world. A couple of years ago, the Guardian ran a big article on children’s rights. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child had criticised the UK on 12 different grounds, and so I was asked to find 12 young people – one for each ‘category’. For example, they wanted to interview a young drug-user; a teenage mother; someone who had been in prison; a young person in care. They also wanted to talk to someone growing up in poverty. I cringed at the list because I didn’t see how I would find, say, a 15yo willing to admit publicly to drug-addiction or a criminal record. By the end of the week, though, 11 of the spots were filled. The 12th was poverty, and I hadn’t found a single young person willing to talk about it. I discussed it with someone at ATD 4th World, who said: “Listen, I’m looking out of my office window at a block of flats, and you can bet that every single family in there is on the breadline. Nobody is going to talk about it though, because it’s too embarrassing.” Poverty is utterly destructive of children and young people. Having no money is bad enough; the shame of it is something else. Every time we talk about ‘working your way out of poverty’, we are also implying its corollary: that if you’re poor you haven’t worked hard enough. By neatly making the political into an entirely personal problem, we ensure that to be poor is to be ashamed of yourself. If you’re young, poverty means you can’t join in with things. You can’t afford to go out with friends. You can’t develop your talents. You can’t become an Olympic swimmer or a concert pianist because your parents will never afford the lessons. It means, too, that your parents may not be much help, whether because they’re out working all the hours possible in low-paid jobs, or maybe they’re exhausted, or struggling with their own feelings of failure and despair. But in the middle of all that, young people are meant to ‘have aspirations’ (so long as they’re fairly modest) pull themselves up by their bootlaces and work hard to ‘get away’. Back in the 1930s, when only the most basic education was free, my father passed the scholarship exam to go to grammar school. Even in his old age, he remembered his mother hugging him and saying: “so you’ll be the one to get away from all this!” He said he suddenly felt as if he were completely alone in the world, and that everything he valued was somehow tainted and shoddy. We ought to consider the subtle, damaging messages we give to young people when we encourage them to leave their environment behind. As I said earlier, our roots matter. And so does a child’s right to have respect shown to his or her parents and culture. We live in a society where, increasingly, people are valued by what they can earn and what they can consume. And there goes another right out of the window: the right not to be exploited. Young people are subjected to a barrage of advertising that tells them- and everyone else - they’re only worth the logo on their chest. Or hat. Or trainers. Growing up poor tells you that you’re just not a proper, full human being. You’re entitled to nothing. A couple of years ago, my sons and I had been up to town and dropped in at the National Gallery which, like lots of things in London, is free. When we got home, one of their friends, who lived in the flats over the road dropped in. We’d got postcards of a few of the pictures in the gallery, and he really liked them. I said “you ought to go up and have a look – just walk in the door, and there they all are.” He said: “What, anybody can just walk in off the street?” “Yep.” “Do they even let in people like me?” Last year, 3.5 million children and young people in the UK were living in poverty. That’s more than a quarter of the child population. Too many young people’s basic provision rights aren’t being met, and the same goes for education rights. Last year just under 10,000 children were permanently excluded from school, two-thirds of them with SENs. 19,000 people left school with no qualifications at all. Nearly half of 16yos didn’t have baseline qualifications – nearly two-thirds in some places. Boredom and truancy are commonplace. How many young people would go to school voluntarily? That’s the human rights benchmark: children are meant to enjoy their education. They’re meant to find it relevant, and useful; to quote the CRC, something that offers “the development of their personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest potential”. That quite clearly isn’t happening for far too many young people. How can we possibly do such damage? What sort of an education system takes in curious, toddlers and turns out disenchanted young people who are convinced that they are complete failures? But rather than reform the system, as the Tomlinson report might have done for instance, and rather than introduce democratic structures that might make young people feel like members, rather than victims, of a school, we coerce compliance. We bully children into doing what we want. There isn’t even an option of voting with one’s feet: you may be rounded up by a police patrol, be put into care while your parents go to prison, or be chucked out altogether. The education system, like the army, does not do dissent. And then there’s the whole public attitude to young people – and to children. To be a respectable member of the parent club, you’re meant to grumble every time a school holiday comes around, make it clear that you’re a saintly martyr and claim that you can’t wait for term to start. The shops are selling ‘Back to School’ gear by the first week in August, giving children the message that society can’t wait either. The newspapers – and the government - have more derogatory terms for young people than the Eskimos have for snow. Even amongst those who aren’t openly hostile towards young people, it’s OK to make sweeping generalisations about ‘teens’ that, if they were prefaced instead by ‘women’ or ‘black people’, would quite rightly cause a public outcry. Young people are an amorphous blob, and we are warned to expect trouble at every turn – maybe it’s just that the authors of parenting books like the alliteration of ‘terrible tots and troublesome teens’! There again, maybe it’s that we try to avoid letting children grow up. I do think we infantilise our young people to a ridiculous degree. Is it surprising that young people protest? In my twenties, I used to protest at being treated like a second-class citizen in a world defined by men, and I was profoundly offended by jokes that implied I couldn’t drive, couldn’t think and didn’t have any opinions worth listening to. The coercion to conform was huge: when I was 20, single women couldn’t even get a mortgage! Women of my mother’s generation were medicated for despair – a whole generation bombed out on Valium and Librium. It’s only in the last 3 decades that society has recognised their depression was, at least in part, a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. As an aside, I find it interesting that women were controlled in part by being defined either as madonnas or whores. Much the same thing happens to children and young people now: they are either angelic, suffering victims or despicable demons. Never just ordinary individuals of average virtue. It seems to me that a lot of young people are being forced into pretty intolerable situations, and if necessary we’ll cut off their arms and legs to make them fit the space we define for them. Sometimes I think that we’re intent upon waging civil war on our young people. And like all powerless creatures, they fight amongst themselves – and then we call them ‘bullies’. The poet, Cavafy, wrote a wonderful poem called ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ – it’s about the feverish preparations for a barbarian attack, except the Barbarians never actually show up, and he concludes: “What shall we do without the Barbarians? In a way they were a kind of solution.” Young people are our last officially-sanctioned group of Barbarians, and too many adults are complicit in keeping them there. They are our scapegoats. Ignoring causes and dealing with symptoms as if they were entirely separate, inexplicable phenomena, and quashing dissent are very efficient ways of stoking protest and maintaining the status quo. If we really want change, we have got to do some serious listening and thinking. We have got to stop bullying and segregating a quarter of our population. We need to welcome young people as active, vital contributors to our society. And actually, I think the human rights instruments provide a very good starting point. Who knows, if adults could grow up a bit and stop saying “well, they started it”, if they could dispense with their need for Barbarians and begin containing young people properly, we might actually, as a society, start making a decent job of bringing our young up as happy, confident people.
|
||
