In this issue:
The Challenge Team
The Other Three Rs goes live!
Ronald Butt CBE
The Dutch Utopia
Book Review
News in brief
Some recent publications available from Family Education Trust
And finally . . .
The Challenge Team
In the autumn of 2002, for the third year running, member Sue Relf arranged a visit to the UK by the Challenge Team, a group of young people from Canada who make presentations on abstinence in schools and youth venues. Here she reports on what will be the final visit by the Canadians, and attempts to set up a similar movement in the UK. She can be contacted on 01323 638744, email sue.relf@care4free.net.
Two Challenge Teams returned to Canada in early December tired but happy. Eight students, four young men and four young women in their early twenties, toured the UK for three weeks, following a five week tour of Ireland. The Teams visited schools up and down the country, from Cornwall in the West to Gravesend in the East, and from the Isle of Wight in the South to Redcar in the North. The response was tremendous. The message was clear and simple. Over 5,000 pupils in England and Wales aged 13-plus heard that sex has consequences. Being a young single parent is not fun. Contracting a sexually transmitted infection is not fun. Contraception reduces risk, but does not eliminate it. In the teenage years contraception is particularly unreliable for a variety of reasons. Sex is special – it is the most intimate gift that a man and a woman can give to each other. It has a unique bonding quality. Emotional pain is the result of casual sexual encounters which inevitably end in broken relationships. Saving sex for a future marriage partner increases the chances of that marriage being happy and lifelong. Saving sex for marriage eliminates all risk of unwanted pregnancy and disease. Practising chastity encourages respect for the sexuality of the opposite sex. Saving sex for a future, as yet unknown, marriage partner tells them how much you love them before you even meet them.
The Team spends one to one and a half hours delivering their message through a variety of means, including personal stories. The Team members practise what they preach. Teenage audiences sat in rapt attention as they listened. You could have heard a pin drop. A total of 31 schools were visited, and, including youth groups, 53 presentations were made in all.
Students responded to the presentations with words such as: ‘wicked’, ‘really cool’, ‘I really respect them’, ‘I’m glad I’m still a virgin’, ‘I’m going to wait till I get married from now on’, ‘It really made you think’.
At one school London Weekend Television were busy filming. The whole of the Challenge Team was filmed by the TV crew (who incidentally appeared very interested!). It is not yet known whether the footage will be shown, but June is the expected month, and I am to be kept informed.
In East Sussex, County Councillors and members of the local SACRE were interested to watch a presentation, following criticism of the Team in 2001 by members of the local Sexual Health Forum. The five who attended were invited to stay for coffee afterwards by the headteacher, and one by one all gave a positive response. This is to be reported back to the whole Council.
Assessing the feedback from the schools is the next step. A questionnaire has been sent to each school visited. Each school has been asked whether it would be interested in a further visit in the autumn of 2003. On the basis of this response, and it seems that it will be overwhelmingly positive, plans to repeat the tour will be made. Next time, we in the UK need to form our own teams. This is something that we will need to work on, but it has to be possible! A Steering Group is currently being formed, which will have its first meeting in early 2003. Rebecca Visser, the founder, has promised us her support, advice and materials.
Sue Relf
The Other Three Rs goes live!
The nine modules in our series The Other 3Rs are still in demand for use in PSHE classes in the UK, as well as overseas. We therefore took the decision to put them on the internet, rather than reprint them, and the site went live in November. If you visit www.theother3rs.orgyou will find that there are two versions of each module, a web version for easy access and reading on-screen, and a PDF file which, when printed out, will look exactly the same as the published version. The PDF files are designed for use in the classroom.
The site was visited by 133 people during December, with 112 downloads of the full PDF file, and we are glad to have been able to make this valuable resource, written for us by Ann Rignall and Joy Weeks, freely available to schools and parents everywhere.
Ronald Butt CBE
Members will have been saddened to hear of the death on 12 December 2002 of Ronald Butt at the age of 82. He had been associated with our work since its inception in 1972 and became a Trustee of the Family Education Trust in 1992. During the war he served in the Normandy campaign and in the Army Intelligence Corps. After demobilisation he read history at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and became a scholar journalist, who for nearly 35 years was a national political commentator, respected and noted for his deep thoughtfulness.
He was political correspondent and later political editor of The Financial Times before he became an assistant editor of The Sunday Times and subsequently an associate editor of The Times. His first book The Power of Parliament was published in 1967. This was followed in 1989 by The History of Parliament: the Middle Ages. Both books were highly commended by critics, some of whom thought that they should be set reading for history courses in the universities. Ronald became much concerned with the moral issues of politics. He saw many of the policies which arose from the permissive society as attacks on the family, and therefore hostile to the good of society.
As an historian he became deeply concerned that Britain was entering into what he described as ‘the most dangerous period of its history’ as our culture was being steadily destroyed, and he deplored the role that sections of the mass media played in this. Ronald was very much a family man. His loyal involvement in the work of the Family Education Trust was largely an outcome of his own happy family life, which we experienced when for a period we lived nearby in Highgate. He was devoted to his wife Margaret whom he married in 1956 and to their two sons and two daughters, by all of whom he is survived.
Valerie Riches
The Dutch Utopia
Dr Joost van Loon’s new book, Deconstructing The Dutch Utopia: Sex Education and Teenage Pregnancy in the Netherlands, will be published by the Trust in February. It is a most important and ground-breaking piece of research which shatters a number of myths which have grown up around the low teenage pregnancy rate in the Netherlands, which is attributed by sex education and family planning lobbyists in this country to early and explicit sex education. As Dr van Loon, a Dutch academic, currently a reader in social theory at Nottingham Trent University, is able to show, it probably has more to do with the fact that the family is more intact in the Netherlands and welfare benefits for teenage mothers are low.
Dr van Loon will be speaking about his research at our AGM on 28 June at the Royal Air Force Club, Piccadilly. We also look forward to hearing from Dr David Paton, whose research into the relationship between the provision of contraception to underage girls and the teenage conception rate caused such a stir when it was published in the Journal of Health Economics last year (see Bulletin 107).
Book Review
Good Children: A Common-Sense Guide to Bringing up your Child
by Lynette Burrows (Family Publications, 2002) 160pp £8.50 ISBN 1-871217-38-5
The publication of this revised and expanded edition of Good Children will be welcomed by parents seeking encouragement and help based on time-honoured principles. Writing in an engaging style, with a good dose of humour and drawing on her own experience of bringing up six children, Lynette Burrows sets out ‘to pass onto other mothers the simple, practical, time-honoured ways of making child-rearing less of a chore’.
She is unafraid to call into question the received wisdom of many modern childcare writers who have made bringing up children ‘appear tremendously difficult’ and have shaken the confidence of many parents in their own natural instincts and abilities. She observes how many popular guides to child-rearing are written either by men or by professional women who have very little hands-on experience of bringing up children, and have tended to pursue what she describes as ‘mad, passing theories’.
Mrs Burrows identifies two inextricably linked ideas that lie at the heart of the traditional approach to bringing up children: ‘Number One is that your children must fit into the family and into the world – rather than the other way round. Number Two is that the job is absorbing, rewarding and absolutely essential for any orderly society to have as its basis.’ In view of the importance of the task, she reasons that it is not something that should be lightly left for someone else to fulfil. Reflecting on time she spent as a childminder, she expresses the view that ‘other care’ will invariably be inferior to ‘mother care’.
The book contains a wealth of down-to-earth practical tips on a wide range of subjects, from the early-years issues of feeding, weaning, sleeping, potty training, early language and pre-school education, through discipline and ‘the dynamics of spoiling’, to sex education and the positive nature of sexual abstinence outside of marriage. This revised edition also contains a new chapter entitled ‘a handicapped child’, in which the author gives a warm, personal account of life with her second child, Matthew, who was born with Down’s Syndrome.
From beginning to end, Good Children is refreshingly free from modern fads and unproven theories. A new appendix on smacking takes a brief look at the research evidence and finds that it supports the use of moderate physical correction within the context of a secure and loving home, along the lines outlined in the earlier chapter on discipline.
Mrs Burrows recognises that every family has its own unique internal dynamic and it is therefore not to be expected that readers will necessarily follow her in every detail. Nevertheless, she points to a number of underlying principles which will be found in every happy family: ‘love, mutual respect, tolerance, co-operation, discipline, some freedom of movement and enough space for everyone to feel they can develop’.
Norman Wells
News in brief
Adoption and Children Bill
We are grateful to supporters who wrote to peers to express concern about the proposal to allow the adoption of children by unmarried and homosexual couples. Judging from the copies sent to the office, the letters were of high quality and doubtless will have contributed to the outcome in the House of Lords on 16 October, when peers voted against the proposal by 196 votes to 162. However, following a reversal of this vote in the House of Commons, the Bill returned to the Lords for a second vote on 5 November. On this occasion, a number of peers who had been absent for the first vote were in attendance to register their support in favour of allowing unmarried and homosexual couples to adopt children by a margin of 215 to 184. We shall now need to monitor developments closely and do what we can to safeguard the best interests of vulnerable and needy children in what is set to become a most unsatisfactory situation.
The Marriage Problem
On 29 January the American author James Q Wilson will be speaking in London on the subject of his book The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families. Professor Wilson is regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on the family, and this will be a valuable opportunity to benefit from his research. The meeting is being hosted by Civitas, and will be held in Elizabeth House, where we have our office. If you would like to come please ring the office, or send us an email.
Family Symposium
A one-day conference entitled Family Matters: Are We On Track? will take place in Magdalen College School, Oxford, on Saturday 8 March between 10.00 am and 4.00 pm. Organised by Oxford Family Forum, a group of young couples wishing to re-affirm the importance of marriage, tickets cost £20.00 per family, including lunch. Details from Cornelia Oddie (01865 439473) or Maria Kemp (01235 523030).
Some recent publications available from Family Education Trust
Work-Lifestyle Choices in the 21st Century: Preference Theory, by Catherine Hakim, Oxford University Press, 356pp, £15.00 plus £3.00 p&p.
Broken Hearts: Family Decline and the Consequences for Society, by Jill Kirby, Centre for Policy Studies, 37pp, £5.00 plus £1.00 p&p.
HIV & Aids in Schools: The Political Economy of Pressure Groups and Miseducation, by Barrie Craven, Pauline Dixon, Gordon Stewart & James Tooley, IEA, 97pp, £5.00 plus £1.00 p&p.
Children as Trophies: Examining the Evidence on Same-Sex Parenting, by Patricia Morgan, Christian Institute, 159pp, £7.00 plus £1.00 p&p.
Prophets and Priests: The Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement, by Ann Farmer, St Austin Press, 188pp, £9.00 plus £1.00 p&p.
And finally . . .
‘Liberalism has been supposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still call themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over property, trade, wages, hours of work, meat and drink, amusements, and in a truly advanced country like France control over education and religion; and it is only on the subject of marriage . . . that liberalism is growing more and more liberal.’
George Santayana, ‘The Intellectual Temper of the Age’, 1911.