In this issue:
Teenage pregnancy strategy fails teens
The Children Bill
– Tracking children
– Children’s commissioner
– Threat to reasonable discipline
Challenge Team UK
Annual General Meeting
Change of Address
Please note that the Family & Youth Concern office has recently moved to:
Jubilee House
19-21 High Street
Whitton
Twickenham
TW2 7LB
Tel: 020 8894 2525
Fax: 020 8894 3535
We are gradually settling into our new premises which are located a stone’s throw from the international rugby stadium at Twickenham and less than half an hour by train to central London, providing easy access to meetings at Westminster.
We are grateful to our supporters and customers for their forbearance during the time surrounding the move.
Government pregnancy strategy fails teens
Recent weeks have seen the publication of statistics which raise serious questions about the the government’s teenage pregnancy strategy.
The provisional data for under-18 conceptions in 2002, published in February, showed a small increase of 0.7 per cent between 2001 and 2002. But more significantly, rates have risen more rapidly than the national average in areas where particular initiatives have been put in place in an attempt to reduce teenage pregnancy.
So, for example, in Oxfordshire, where Bodyzone clinics operate in the county’s secondary schools offering confidential contraceptive advice and supplies, the under-18 conception rate rose by 7.3 per cent. And in Cornwall and Torbay, home of the ‘confidential and non-judgemental’ school-based TIC-TAC health service, which was commended in the government’s response to the first annual report of the Independent Advisory Group on Teenage Pregnancy, the rate of conceptions to under-18s rose by 16.4 per cent and 22.4 per cent respectively.
This was followed, in April, by a paper suggesting that while the expansion of family planning services for young people is having little impact on teenage pregnancy rates, it is jeopardising sexual health. Professor David Paton of Nottingham University Business School told the Royal Economic Society conference in Swansea that ‘recent increases in the number of youth family planning clinic sessions did not lead to reductions in teenage pregnancy rates, but led to significantly higher rates of diagnoses of STIs [sexually transmitted infections] amongst teenagers’. He also reported that the vigorous promotion of the morning-after pill had resulted in a further increase in STI rates since 2000.
While there had been a 23.2 per cent increase in family planning clinic sessions for adolescents between 1999 when the teenage pregnancy strategy was adopted and 2001, over the same period there had been a rise in STI rates of 15.8 per cent for all teenagers, 16.6 per cent for 16-19s, and 16.4 per cent among under-16s.
Professor Paton suggested that the data indicated that the teenage pregnancy strategy’s reliance on targeted family planning services for young people combined with promotion of the morning-after pill was proving counter-productive. Rather than promoting the sexual health of young people, the perceived reduction in risk afforded by contraception and the morning-after pill seemed to be providing some adolescents with an incentive to become sexually active. Professor Paton concluded that it was not enough for the government to introduce measures aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy rates without considering the impact of those measures on the behaviour of young people themselves.
* These recent findings are in line with our own report, Why the Government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy is Destined to Fail, published in 2002. Copies are available from the office at £1.00 incl p&p.
‘Tracking children: a road to danger in the Children Bill?’
In early March, the government published its Children Bill which sets out to ‘maximise opportunity and minimise risk for every child and young person’ in England and Wales.
The Children Bill represents a further move on the part of the government in the direction of assuming greater control over children’s lives. No longer is the state content to focus its attention and efforts on children who suffer abuse or neglect. Rather, every child is now the object of its attention. In the words of the government document, Every Child Matters: Next Steps, which was published alongside the Bill:
‘We need to shift away from associating parent support with crisis interventions to a more consistent offer of parenting support throughout a child and young person’s life. We will work towards a mix of universal and targeted parenting approaches, including advice and information, home visiting and parenting classes’ (para.3.6).
One of the most intrusive measures proposed in the Bill is a provision which would empower the Education Secretary to set up or arrange for the establishment of one or more databases containing information on every child in England and Wales. The Bill does not contain a detailed blueprint for the database, but is open-ended. As currently drafted it is merely a facilitating measure which would allow the Secretary of State to set out the operational details in regulations and guidance at a later date. It would be within his power to authorise the establishment of a database at a local, regional or national level and there is scope for him either to operate it himself or to appoint another body to do so. The Bill does not specify precisely what information would be stored on the database nor who would have access to it. These are all matters to be included in the Secretary of State’s regulations.
This proposal to establish such a database was the subject of an afternoon conference held at the London School of Economics (LSE) on 6 April, attended by a wide range of academics, professionals from the fields of social work, health and education, child care workers and other interest groups. Entitled ‘Tracking children: a road to danger in the Children Bill?’ the meeting was chaired by Dr Eileen Munro, a reader in social policy at LSE. Dr Munro explained that the idea of a national database had arisen out of concerns about social exclusion and not child protection as was commonly understood.
The focus of the Bill was on ‘children at risk’ – not only from abuse and neglect, but also at risk of becoming social problems (e.g. through delinquency, teenage parenthood, poor educational achievement, and social exclusion) or at risk of failing to fulfil their potential. She expressed concern that a child who failed to reach his or her full potential would be classified as being ‘at risk’, and raised the question as to who was to decide what a child ‘needs’ or what is in ‘the best interests of the child’. Was it the child himself? His parents? The community? Professionals? Or the government?
Dr Munro noted that traditionally the government had interfered with family life only in cases of abuse and a diversity of family styles had been tolerated. But the current Children Bill shifted the balance in the direction of more state coercion, with professionals not so much advising as dictating. While the Bill was strong on professionals sharing information with each other, and assessing and meeting the needs of children, it contained only one reference to the role of parents. However, she noted, while professionals care about children, it is parents who love them, as will be seen in the difference in attitude between a nurse and a parent in a children’s ward.
In view of the importance of the topic under discussion, it was disappointing to learn that the Minister for Children, Margaret Hodge, who had been scheduled to speak, had withdrawn and that no one from the Department for Education and Skills had been available to address the conference on the thinking behind the government’s plans.
Di McNeish, Director of Policy and Research at Barnardo’s began her contribution by stressing the need for humility, given the misguidedness of policies pursued by children’s charities in the past. She took it as a governing principle that if a policy doesn’t work for children, it doesn’t work. On the proposal to grant powers to the Secretary of State to establish and operate databases containing information on children, she was troubled that the powers referred to in the Bill were very broad and not very clear and that no threshold was stated for ‘concerns’ to be recorded. She recognised that professional judgment varied in many cases and feared that resources would be lost to cases of genuine need and that many unnecessary interventions would be triggered.
Terri Dowty of Action on Rights for Children spoke of the profound insult felt by parents at the implication that they are untrustworthy and incapable of doing their job: ‘Placing families under surveillance alters the whole dynamic of family life… It will certainly cause parents – and children – to consider whether they want to ask for help, if by doing so they risk opening their family life to scrutiny.
‘Just as the state should protect children whose parents abuse their power, it is parents’ duty to protect their children from an over-mighty state. When parents are not actually abusive, however muddled, fallible or imperfect they may be, the alternative is a state vision of child-rearing, and history tells us how dangerous that is. The Children Bill has made far too many parents feel that they are being subjected to some kind of state takeover bid.’
Mrs Dowty expressed some particular concerns about the proposal for a database:
* The child protection system could collapse under the weight of data to be collected in a climate where professionals would want to report everything rather than risk accusations of negligence
* Government databases do not have an impressive track record. There will inevitably be errors in data input. The Metropolitan Police discovered that 85 per cent of their records on the police national computer contained mistakes – most of them libellous
* There was a risk of hackers breaking into the system, or that personnel with legitimate access might accidentally or deliberately disclose information on the database
* ‘Responsible parents do not put their children’s details on the internet. But the government, in effect, proposes to do just that.’
* ‘Why does the government believe that families need to be observed in order to “see what services they need”?’
Mike Cushman of the LSE Department of Information Systems, suggested that ‘the child at risk’ was now being so broadly defined that it encompassed just about everyone: ‘What I see in the A&E department today may mean something very different to a social worker or a police officer 100 miles away and five years on.’ He was concerned that professionals would be inclined to record unnecessary details on the database to cover their backs.
There would be social workers knocking on doors where there was little or no risk to the child. Children at genuine risk would be hidden away among all the other children on the database. The pain and distress caused to families falsely adjudged to require social services attention would be immense. Mr Cushman concluded: ‘Technical fixes to cultural and organisational problems will not work.’
Dr Peter Reder, a child psychiatrist, asserted with reference to inquiries into cases of fatal child abuse, that: ‘There is little evidence that problems with existing policies or the organisational structures of services contributed to children’s deaths.’ He held that the problems have rather to do with ‘assessment and communication, deficiencies in the skills of certain staff and work settings that hindered rather than supported them’. Yet, he said, public inquiries tended to focus on practical and bureaucratic remedies rather than addressing the human factors that influence practice.
A computerised database was ‘likely to encourage practitioners to contribute in a meaningless way, fulfilling their obligations but not thinking about the information they are entering or its relevance… Even though a database on each child appears to represent the need to integrate information, what confidence will there be that, presumably voluminous sets of data on each child will be studied and interpreted appropriately by those charged with doing so?’
With reference to the findings of the Victoria Climbié Inquiry, Dr Reder expressed doubt that a computerised database would enable practitioners to distinguish between essential and incidental information. There was no substitute for having competent staff to evaluate the importance and relevance of information to reach an accurate understanding.
Dr Reder concluded: ‘In my view, we do not need more inquiries, structural or policy changes or mechanical assessment and communication devices. There must be a recognition that the effectiveness of any policies or technology ultimately depends on the quality of the people operating it.
From the floor, Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, considered that the government’s proposals were more about tracking parents than children, and that children were being used as the ‘way in’. She feared that professionals were being asked to spy on parents and that it would lead to ‘coercive parenting’ in line with a fixed state-approved model. Representatives from the Alliance for the Improvement of Maternity Services expressed concern that new mothers would be afraid to seek treatment for post-natal depression for fear that it would be noted on the database and that they might be referred to social services and run the risk of losing their children.
At the end of the meeting, the question: ‘What does the government want to do that it cannot do at the moment?’ received the following telling response from Dr Munro: ‘It wants to be able to share information where no danger of abuse exists.’
* Further details of the meeting together with full transcripts of a some of the papers and other useful links on the Children Bill will be found at:
http://tracking-children.lse.ac.uk/
Norman Wells
The Children Bill: other concerns
(a) The Children’s Commissioner
The government’s stated intention is that ‘the views of children [will] drive the work of the Commissioner.’ (Explanatory notes, para.26). Given that children are not a homogenous group, it remains an open question as to how the commissioner will ascertain their views. However, the government makes it quite clear that the commissioner is not bound by what children tell him anyway: ‘The Commissioner will be expected actively to gather and take into account the views of children and young people from all backgrounds. However, the Commissioner will also use his own judgment in determining the interests of children, and he may decide that they are not what children say they are’ (para.20). So, in effect, it doesn’t really matter how the child-driven commissioner sets about obtaining children’s views, nor does it matter what they tell him because he is quite free to totally disregard them if they don’t tie up with his own ideas. More a case of championing his own views than those of children!
The children’s rights lobby has expressed dismay that the powers granted to the commissioner in the Children Bill would not enable him to take up individual cases. It is quite likely that this will be the subject of amendments as the Bill makes its passage through parliament.
(b) Smacking
Amendments to the Bill will almost certainly be moved in an attempt to ban or limit the use of reasonable physical correction by parents. David Hinchliffe MP has pledged to move an amendment when the Bill reaches the House of Commons, and a number of peers spoke in favour of such moves in a recent House of Lords debate.
However, any such measure would represent an unacceptable intrusion into family life and would not do anything to provide increased protection to those at risk of genuine abuse. Almost all the arguments advanced against the idea of a database for tracking children apply equally against a ban on the physical correction of children by their parents.
Challenge Team UK – First Tour
Following successful visits to the UK by teams of young people from Canada, touring schools with a message promoting sexual abstinence before marriage and faithfulness within marriage, a UK-based Challenge Team has just completed its first tour. Consisting of second year students from Moorlands College near Bournemouth, the team of two young men and two young women spent four weeks on the road during February and March 2004. Four Canadians who applied independently toured separately at the same time.
Presentations were made to 6000 secondary school pupils in locations as far apart as the Isles of Scilly, Cornwall, South Wales, Hereford, Worcester, Bath, the Isle of Wight, Southampton, Hove, Eastbourne, Bexhill, Hastings, Edenbridge, Sittingbourne, Gravesend, Oxford, Cambridge, Leicester, Peterborough, Ilkeston and York. Thirty schools were visited in all and 13 youth groups.
Audiences listened in rapt attention as myths that the team members were anti-sex or ugly were dispelled and then a new word was introduced: chastity. A lifestyle of chastity was presented as possible and desirable. Respecting your own and the sexuality of others was a great way to live. Freedom from sexually transmitted infections or fear of contracting them, freedom from unwanted pregnancy or fear of unwanted pregnancy, freedom to be friends with people of the opposite sex, have lots of friends, plan for the future, look forward to meeting Mr or Miss Right one day and be able to say that their special gift of sexuality was saved just for them, freedom from fear of rejection or meeting an ‘ex’ were all presented in simple, punchy ways. A few salient facts about sexually transmitted infections and the damage they can cause, a few personal stories, the limitations of condoms which can only reduce risk and not eliminate it, and a few funny sketches interspersed the programme. Rape and abuse were sensitively covered, as was making a fresh start. It made an hour’s compelling listening.
As the teams toured a mixture of Church of England, Roman Catholic, state comprehensive, and independent schools, the emails came in:
‘Very, very good. The staff assessment was ‘excellent’. The young people got a lot out of it. They were brilliant. As a Youth Worker I am very impressed and appreciative of the Challenge Team UK’s work and ministry.’
‘Just emailing to say how much we appreciated the visit of the Challenge Team to our school today. Great fast-moving snap shots of drama, factual information and anecdotes. The presentation held the Year group’s attention throughout. The team connected well with the students.’ Head of PHSE
‘The team came today and gave an excellent presentation which was very well received. This service to schools offers a radical alternative to the current cultural assumptions.’ Deputy Head Teacher
Before setting out on the road the team members set up a confidential email site for pupils to write in with comments or queries. Seven or eight messages were received every day. Some were rude or silly, others asked for personal help and others made comments such as the ones below:
‘I’m 17 in a few days. Yesterday a team came to talk to my local youth group which I help out with and gave a short talk on their beliefs about chastity. Not normally someone to take this sort of thing seriously (I’m not religious) the team’s message really appealed to me. Recently I’ve been thinking about the direction my relations with others have been going, and I ‘m no longer wholly content with where everything’s headed. I’m interested in the lifestyle the team talked about.’
‘I just wanted 2 say how good it was because you tackled quite a sensitive subject with humour and facts and u didn’t patronize us in any way! which is a great change from sum of the wayz we are taught. I’ve decided to practice chastity.’ Year 9 pupil
Sue Relf
Further tours will be organised next spring. For further information contact Sue Relf, Challenge Team UK, 11 Coastguard Square, Eastbourne, BN22 7EE or visit the website at: www.challengeteamuk.org
Don’t forget the AGM & Conference!
Saturday 12 June 2004
The Royal Air Force Club, 128 Piccadilly, London W1
10.30am-5.00pm
Speakers during the afternoon session will be:
* Peter Dawson: ‘The Race Between Education and Catastrophe’, and
* Professor Dennis O’Keeffe: ‘The True Purpose of Education: the inculcation of virtue’
For further information about how to book, please ring the office or email us.