In this issue:
Changes and Challenges
‘Adolescent health’
Sexual health meeting at Stormont
Words of wisdom from Melanie Phillips
Harry Benson on domestic violence
The Other 3Rs
Annual General Meeting
The Art of Loving Well in local libraries
News in brief
Changes and Challenges
A message from the Chairman, Arthur Cornell
In an uncertain world, where the pace of life shows no sign of slacking, one of the few things that we can be certain about is that there will be constant change. How we respond to it and manage its implications determines our future. Family Education Trust is preparing for two significant changes.
The first relates to the location of the office. We have been in the office in Waterloo, which we share with Civitas, for over three years, and now the lease is coming to an end. The trustees always envisaged the arrangement as a temporary one, which was beneficial to both organisations, but the time has come to find new offices, which will not be in central London. We are in negotiations at the present time and we will keep you informed of the outcome.
The second change involves our director. We have been privileged to have Robert Whelan as our director since Valerie Riches relinquished her role to become founder president. Robert, who is also deputy director of Civitas, brought his experience and skills to taking the work forward. His expertise with the media has been formidable, making him a familiar voice, and his reputation meant that he was frequently quoted in the national press. Robert continued the trend of creating a profile for FET on all matters relating to the family and its implications for the well-being of society as a whole.
We are indebted to him for the unique contribution he has made. We are also grateful that we will not lose his insight or wisdom, as he will continue to be involved as a trustee, as will Valerie Riches. Our new director is Norman Wells who has worked with Robert for the past three years as our administrator.
Norman is well known to most of you, either in person, over the phone or through his writings. He is an expert on the children’s rights movement, with its related issues of the discipline of children and the appointment of children’s commissioners. He has written excellent submissions on our behalf to government bodies on this issue. He prepared our factsheet on the morning-after pill and provided invaluable assistance for Valerie Riches in the revision to Sex and Social Engineering, which is now re-published as Sex Education or Indoctrination?
Norman is a talented researcher and writer, well able to put the case for the family. Together with his wife Nicola, he was the recipient of the Family Life Award in 1999 for his involvement in founding Families First, to uphold parental freedoms and responsibilities. They have six children and live in West London, where we expect our new office will be situated. We welcome Norman to his new role knowing that he has the support of all our trustees as we enter this new era.
The climate in our culture suggests that the family, and young people within it, need our continuing support as never before. We invite you to stand with us, to support our initiatives and to make the work known to others who express concern on relevant issues but don’t know what to do about it.
Arthur Cornell
Chairman
‘Adolescent health’
This report, from the British Medical Association Board of Science and Education, focuses on four important areas in adolescent health: nutrition, exercise and obesity; smoking, drinking and drug use; mental health; and sexual health. For each area this report discusses the prevalence of the problems involved, examines which adolescents are affected, describes the interventions used to address the issues and evaluates the effectiveness of these strategies.
This report is intended to raise the profile of adolescent health and to help inform future policy. In addition, it acts as an information resource for healthcare professionals, providing an overview of adolescent health issues and the policy environment.
The report is a highly useful resource on the extent of the problems in adolescent health.
- 21% of 13-16 year-olds are obese or overweight
- 23% of 15 year-olds smoke
- The average weekly alcohol consumption of 11-15 year-olds who drink is 10.5 units – an increase of 5.3 units since 1990
- 11% of 11-15 year-olds had used drugs in the previous month
- 1 in 17 11-15 year-olds have attempted suicide or self-harm
- 30% of boys and 26% of girls have had intercourse by the age of 16
- Around 10% of sexually active women under 25 are infected with chlamydia
With regard to risk the report is comprehensive in its analysis. The importance of the family is noted as early as p.2 where ‘Coming from a non-intact family’ is recognised as a risk factor for smoking, drinking and drug use. The individual sections on these and STIs also note that coming from a lone-parent family increases health risk (doubling it in the case of STIs in adolescence).
However, in the sections on improving health, no thought is given to reducing the incidence of non-intact families. All the action is directed at providing a more efficient ambulance service at the foot of the cliff rather than strengthening the fence above. However, even some aspects of damage limitation are of doubtful worth, such as needle exchange schemes noted on p.24, but with no reference to any evidence showing they are effective.
Predictably, sexual abstinence education is damned with faint praise and by reference to an outdated six-year-old NHS review. However, the carefully worded assertion that ‘school-based sex education can be effective in reducing teenage pregnancy, especially when linked to contraceptive services’ is made, as usual, without any supporting references whatsoever.
The report is available (free) on the internet and I would encourage FET members to read it. It will spur us on to take positive action about the fundamental family-structural roots of adolescent ill-health and see how vital intact loving families are in all four areas examined here.
Trevor Stammers
http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/AdolescentHealth
Sexual health meeting at Stormont
There will be a repeat of last year’s highly successful meeting in Portcullis House on sexually transmitted infections at Stormont in Northern Ireland on 1 March. David Paton of the University of Nottingham, Daniel Low-Beer of Cambridge University and our trustee Dr Trevor Stammers will speak. If you would like to attend please fax Love for Life on: 028 3882 0550.
Words of wisdom
Melanie Phillips has become one of our leading commentators on moral and cultural issues, especially relating to the family. Her regular columns in the Daily Mail are unrivalled in the national press for their insight and forcefulness. Many of them are accessible online at www.melaniephillips.com. We reproduce below some paragraphs from Ms Phillips’ article on the Soham murders (Daily Mail, 19 December 2003) because it combines unarguable truths about those terrible events with observations on the wider issue of the degradation of the culture. The title of the article says it all: ‘Huntley flourished in a sub-culture in which norms of sexual restraint and parental responsibility have catastrophically broken down’.
‘The collapse of sexual order does not merely provide the swamp in which people like Huntley swim. It helps create them in the first place… Part of our society has degenerated into a fetid stew of anarchic sexual activity, leading to a terrifying loss of human empathy and even predatory violence. Individuals whose sense of self has been pathologically damaged by the break-up of their own families prey upon others, including children who may themselves have become detached from established codes of behaviour, law and self-restraint through a similar collapse of family structure. These codes are in turn no longer policed by either parents or a governing class who have simply turned their backs on moral responsibility and on enforcing the fundamentals of a civilised society.’
Tough on domestic violence: wilfully blind to the causes of domestic violence
The Home Office has recently published its summary of responses to a consultation paper on domestic violence entitled ‘Safety and Justice’. There is a remarkable omission in its pages. There is no mention or reference to the most obvious and plausible cause of domestic violence – which must necessarily be problems in relationships.
The summary of responses and the government’s own comments both discuss ‘prevention’. But they talk only of raising awareness and providing better information about domestic violence, as well as encouraging earlier intervention. Although none of this is wrong, it does not sound like prevention to me. Mention of risk factors involved in domestic violence is limited to drugs, alcohol, and pregnancy.
However, the Home Office’s own research, published in 1999, based on the National Crime Survey, found that the two largest predictors of domestic violence – by miles – were separation for women and cohabitation for men. Twenty-two per cent of separated women had experienced domestic violence in the previous year. Eight per cent of cohabiting men had experienced domestic violence in the previous year. By comparison only 2% of married women and 3% of married men had experienced domestic violence in the previous year.
This means that family breakdown and family structure both appear to be major risk factors at the very least, and most likely causes as well, of domestic violence. This is what you would expect. If you had to guess, you would say that domestic violence is likely to depend on both structure and quality of the relationship. However, the government appears not to be interested in either issue.
In terms of family breakdown, for every £20,000 of taxpayers’ money the government spends on mopping up the effects of family breakdown, it spends £1 on trying to stop things getting worse. This is hardly a policy that takes family stability seriously. A serious and effective policy, for example supporting Community Family Trusts throughout the country, would still only put this ratio at around £400 to £1.
In terms of family structure, the government has just announced it is abolishing the term ‘marital status’ so as not to offend same-sex couples registering for the new civil partnership scheme. The consequence of pandering to political correctness is to prevent future researchers from investigating the influence or otherwise of family structure. Since these links are already known to be strong, this is like depriving cancer researchers of any more information about people’s smoking habits. That the Home Office ignores Bristol Community Family Trust’s response to their consultation is entirely understandable. That they ignore their own research findings is not. That the government then abolishes the means to investigate the issue any further is downright suspicious.
I believe the Home Office – and the government in general – must answer three reasonable questions:
(1) Why has the government entirely overlooked the biggest risk factors in its policy on domestic violence?
(2) Why does the government appear so disinterested in the promotion of family stability?
(3) Why does the government appear so antagonistic towards the idea that family structure matters?
Harry Benson, Project Director, Bristol Community Family Trust
http:/www.bcft.co.uk
The Other 3Rs
Our website version of The Other 3Rs (www.theother3Rs.org.uk) becomes more and more successful. As of the end of December, it had been accessed by 3,050 visitors, who had downloaded 1,989 modules. In response to the article about it in the last Family Bulletin, Ann Rignall, one of the authors, wrote:
‘I have just read the FYC newsletter. I was most encouraged to see the success of The Other 3Rs on the web. Last March I was in Ghana where I had been invited to give training to some teachers from Methodist schools on the 3Rs. They were planning to introduce it into their schools. However, since then the head of the national education system has said she wants to introduce into the national schools, too. I heard yesterday from the man who initiated all this – Ben Gabrah – and he says the fact that the 3Rs are on the web is of added interest as the schools are going ahead with the introduction of IT in a big way. So there may be even more hits in the future!’
Annual General Meeting
We are delighted to announce that our new sponsor, Professor Dennis O’Keeffe of the University of Buckingham, has agreed to speak at our Annual General Meeting on 12 June at the Royal Air Force Club. Professor O’Keeffe, who is a well-known expert on education, will be speaking on the true purpose of education: the inculcation of virtue.
A new initiative to promote ‘The Art of Loving Well’
As a result of last summer’s promotion of the PSHE curriculum resource, The Art of Loving Well, we received over 150 requests for inspection copies from secondary schools throughout the UK, with some purchasing multiple copies for classroom use.
In an attempt to further promote this anthology of literature on the theme of relationships, we are inviting supporters to donate a copy to their local public libraries. If you would like to support this initiative, please let us have the name and address of your local library and we shall write to the librarian with a copy of the promotional leaflet, offering to send a complimentary copy of The Art of Loving Well for addition to the library stock.
News in brief
‘The London Marriage Guidance Council became the Relationship Council for London yesterday after revealing that only 40 per cent of its clients were married. Nowhere are couples more likely to settle for cohabitation than in the capital, where 30 per cent of people live together compared with 34 per cent who are married.’
Metro, 18 November 2003
‘On 5 December the Scottish Daily Mail revealed that while teenage pregnancies have fallen in Scotland generally, they increased by 10 per cent among 13 to 15-year-olds in the Lothians. This is remarkable because three years ago, the Scottish Office set up its Healthy Respect scheme for teenagers in Lothian. Intended to cut unwanted teenage pregnancies, Healthy Respect is a sex education programme that offers free condoms and morning-after pills to any young person who asks for them. Twenty-four pharmacies, including Boots, are taking part and even under-age girls are advised that the service is “free and completely confidential. We will not tell anyone you have used this service.”’
From the Winter 2003 newsletter of the Campaign for Real Education, www.cre.org.uk
Clare Phillipson, the director of Wearside Women in Need, has announced that her charity will no longer be providing condoms for underage girls. ‘“The reason is, firstly, sex under sixteen is illegal, secondly, we have a responsibility to parents, and thirdly, young women who we come across who are having underage sex are not having it with their peers but with older men. We don’t think they should be sexually active, and if they are, we want to give them support, not condoms. We don’t want to be sending out the message that we think it is alright for children to be having sex, because we don’t, and we certainly don’t want to be helping abusive men cover their tracks.” Ms Phillipson believes it is all about control, and her charity, which helps women fleeing abusive partners, knows that older women will not tolerate domestic violence, another reason why certain men are targeting young girls.’
Sunderland Today , 3 January 2004