2. Are enough children and young people aware of the role of Children’s Commissioner?
Please explain your answer and suggest what, if anything, could be done to increase their awareness.
Yes.
We are not persuaded that there is a need for a children’s commissioner at all. The assertion is frequently made that children need ‘a champion – a strong independent voice to promote and protect their rights and to represent their interests’, but that ‘need’ is invariably assumed rather than demonstrated. There is a striking lack of evidence for the claim that all children need to have special mechanisms to represent their interests.
The overwhelming majority of children do not need independent representation for the simple reason that they have parents who are able to support them and promote their interests. Parents spend more time with their children than anyone else, care for them, know their needs and show a daily practical interest in their lives. They are therefore better placed to meet the needs of their children than any impersonal office will ever be.
For most children, the commissioner is an irrelevance. From a practical point of view it matters little whether they are aware of his/her role or not.
3. How great an impact do you think the Office of the Children’s Commissioner has had on the lives of children and young people?
Please explain your answer.
Very little or no impact.
Although the Office of the Children’s Commissioner has pursued an ideologically driven agenda that undermines the role of parents and poses a continual threat to the autonomy of the family, thankfully it has had very little impact on the lives of children and young people.
Parents, however, continue to have a major impact on the lives of their children. They protect, guide, care and provide for their children 24 hours a day, seven days a week during their most vulnerable and formative years. The overwhelming majority of parents do far more to promote and protect the rights and interests of their children than any statutory office will ever do. Parents are far better placed and equipped to represent the interests of their children than any impersonal bureaucratic machine and render the Office of the Children’s Commissioner unnecessary.
5. Should the Office of the Children’s Commissioner have a specific remit to promote children’s rights (at present the Commissioner is expected to take account of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child)?
Please explain your response.
No.
We are not convinced that the promotion of a ‘rights culture’ that this would inevitably engender would serve the best interests of children and families. ‘Rights talk’ invariably fosters a feeling of ‘them’ and ‘us’ and has the effect of driving people apart.
Towards the end of the previous administration, we noted the appearance of government documents speaking in terms of ‘balancing the rights of parents and the rights of children’. We reject the assumption inherent in this expression that the rights of parents and of children are in conflict. Rather, parents and their children constitute a family unit – they are on the same side, not in opposition to each other. We fear that the notion of needing to ‘balance the rights’ of parents and children is a mechanism that could be used by government departments and other statutory bodies to impose their own agendas on children and undermine parents.
In The Fight for the Family, Lynette Burrows writes:
State intervention into family life is feared and loathed by most children more than anything. They are more troubled by the state interfering than they are reassured by the protection offered. Children do not want rights, they want love and protection and…the majority of them do not want social workers or anyone else coming into their families and telling their parents they are not behaving properly.
(Lynette Burrows, The Fight for the Family, Oxford: Family Education Trust, 1999, p.54)
While we recognise that direct intervention in individual family homes falls outside the remit of the Office of Children’s Commissioner, we are concerned that giving the commissioner a specific remit to promote children’s rights would give the commissioner considerable influence over the development of policy with a direct bearing on family life.
We are also concerned about the arbitrary nature of what are frequently assumed to be ‘children’s rights’. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is framed in broad terms and does not specify how states should implement the aspirations contained within its articles. It has been subject to extreme interpretations at considerable variance with what was in the mind of its framers when they drafted it and at variance with states parties when they ratified it.
Lynette Burrows argues that the ‘rights’ which are frequently claimed for children are little more than the ‘desires’ of some adults to exercise more power over people’s private lives:
The assertion of children’s rights in their current form is both bogus and inconsistent. They do not, for example, propose to raise children to the level of adults where they would be named, prosecuted and punished for violent and disorderly behaviour. Neither are they proposing that children be allowed to choose if they drink, smoke or attend school… In other words, we are not talking about genuine children’s rights at all. We are talking about the right of some adults – and certainly not ordinary parents – to decide what children shall and shall not be allowed to do. Children themselves are just the means by which they achieve their aims.
(Lynette Burrows, The Fight for the Family, Oxford: Family Education Trust, 1999, p.74)
6. Is there anything you think the Children’s Commissioner’s office should be doing which they are not doing at present, or which they should stop doing?
Yes.
It is to be feared that the Office of the Children’s Commissioner is being used as a vehicle to advance a radical children’s rights agenda that is not at all in the best interests of children and their families.
(a) The Children’s Commissioner’s Office should stop trying to come between parents and their children and abandon its attempts to interfere in family life.
For example, it is not the business of the children’s commissioner to try to impose his or her personal view on the physical correction of children on every family by force of law. In his first annual report, Professor Sir Al Aynsley-Green stressed that it was the aim of his office not simply to consult with children and young people, but to ensure that they drive every aspect of its work:
We have made sure that children and young people have driven everything that we have done. From helping to establish our mission, aims and priorities and recruiting our staff, to designing our offices, we are making sure that they really are at the heart of the organisation.
However, it is not clear what part children had to play in the development of the commissioner’s policy to campaign to make it a criminal offence for parents to physically chastise their children. While children may not like being smacked any more than they like having privileges withdrawn and receiving any other form of discipline, they certainly do not want their parents to be prosecuted and criminalised for the use moderate physical correction; neither do they want social service intervention in their families, which would be the inevitable outcome of a ban on smacking.
We are concerned that this part of the commissioner’s agenda is not so much driven by children as by ideology – the same ideology that prompted the European Network of Children’s Ombudspersons to make a Europe-wide ban on smacking one of its two key priorities back in 2004, under the direction of its advisor, Children are Unbeatable co-ordinator, Peter Newell.
For an organisation that claims to be driven by children and young people, the commissioner’s agenda is remarkably consistent with the agenda of adult children’s rights activists, and the Office of the Children’s Commissioner has been resistant to children who have expressed views at variance with that agenda.
(b) The Office of the Children’s Commissioner should stop undermining the law on the age of consent to sexual intercourse and start upholding it.
According to the Children’s Commissioner’s office, ‘opposing mandatory reporting of sexual activity in under 13s’ fulfils the Every Child Matters objectives to ‘Be healthy’ and ‘Stay safe’. A paper prepared by Professor Carolyn Hamilton of the Children’s Legal Centre on behalf of the Children’s Commissioner suggests that a requirement on professionals to report a young person for underage sexual activity ‘could be considered an invasion of the young person’s right to private life’. The paper goes on to oppose mandatory reporting of sexually active under 13s on the basis that children under that age who were being abused would not seek contraception or confide in a professional if they if they thought they would be reported. (‘Working with sexually active people under the age of 18 – a pan-London protocol’, Response of the Office of the Commissioner for Children).
This policy undermines the protective principles at the heart of the law on the age of consent and even treats the sexual activity of children under the age of 13 as a private matter and a ‘children’s rights’ issue. This is an example of children’s rights ideology not only undermining the responsibilities of parents for the care and protection of their children, but also undermining the basic principles of child protection. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner should abandon its promotion of the ‘sexual rights’ of children.
7. Should the Children’s Commissioner focus mainly on the interests of all children or mainly on vulnerable children?
Please explain your answer.
Mainly vulnerable children,
We are not persuaded that there is a need for a children’s commissioner at all and would propose that the Office of Children’s Commissioner be scrapped.
However, if the Office is to remain, it should focus on the needs of the minority of children who do not have parents to represent their best interests and meet their needs.
8. Should the Children’s Commissioner have more powers to act directly on behalf of individual children and young people?
Please explain your answer and include examples of when this might be appropriate.
No.
It would never be appropriate for the children’s commissioner to act directly on behalf of individual children and young people.
The overwhelming majority of children are adequately cared for by their parents and do not require any state intervention. Where parents fail to provide an adequate level of care for their children or are unable to do so there are already mechanisms in place to provide the necessary support. There is no need for the intervention of the Children’s Commissioner’s Office.
11. If you wish to add any further comments about the role or powers of the Children’s Commissioner, that you feel may be helpful to the review, please insert them in the box below.
We are not persuaded that there is a need for a children’s commissioner at all and would propose that the Office of Children’s Commissioner be scrapped.
Policy on children and young people should be built on the twin premises that:
(a) due respect should be paid to the views of parents as those who have the primary responsibility for the care and nurture of their children, taking care to avoid the imposition of any particular parenting philosophy and style;
(b) children should be viewed first and foremost as members of a family, rather than independent citizens of the state. We are concerned by the growing tendency among public policy-makers to divorce children from their parents in their thinking.
Children are people with individual needs which are most effectively met in a personal way within the family. They should therefore not be viewed as subjects of the state in isolation from the family. They need parents to guide, direct and protect them. It is when society begins to lose sight of the importance of parents and the family unit that children are at risk of being treated as objects.
We therefore conclude that children and young people do not need a statutory office to represent them. What they need more than anything else is a mother, father and a loving home. If the government is concerned about promoting the best interests of children, the most positive thing it can do is to promote stable family life, based on marriage, and encourage children to value and respect their parents.