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Metaphorical jig-saw puzzles

26 January 2004

The government will get no where if it continues to make war against young people. Occupation, not punishment, is what they need.

Your two young children are playing in the next room. They begin to squabble over a toy and, before you know where you are, a full scale battle is in progress. The noise level is rising and someone is about to get hurt. Do you:

march in, read the riot act angrily and dispatch each miscreant to their respective bedrooms, or
bounce in with a cheerful smile and suggest in a pleasing voice that all three of you settle down to a jig-saw puzzle or that you read them a story?

Every parent knows which answer they would like to give. The first one offers the momentary relief of a burst of righteous anger, but after that both children will continue to be cross, with their superficial fury at each other transformed into a possibly deeper resentment at the world in general. The second one makes everybody happy, albeit at a temporary cost of your time. That investment in time will probably pay off in the long run, because the children will settle more quickly and allow you to go back to making their tea.

Of course, knowing the right answer isn't the same as giving it. We don't all act with perfect reason (or sweetness and light) all of the time. But, if we were going to write a policy to govern our behaviour, we probably know which of the two options above we hope that we would choose.

Not so the government, which, by giving the police powers to "break up" groups of young people numbering as few as two, has shown itself to be firmly in the "banishing to bedrooms" camp. And this despite the fact that the use of such powers will certainly deepen youthful resentment and fuel the desire to challenge in other ways. What is more, because the government is paying for it, this intervention comes at a cost. The government is actually paying to make things worse in the long run.

Teenagers hang around aimlessly together as naturally as younger children squabble over snakes and ladders. It's where they are in their lives. Challenging behaviour is part of the deal in growing up. Behaviour that is violent or threatening or otherwise out of control is not, generally speaking, qualitatively different from the norm. It's just that it is working from a different quantitative base. In some circumstances, to be seen as challenging you've got to be seriously challenging.

People who hark back to "the good old days of discipline" are drawing attention to the fact that children can be taught or conditioned to behave in any way that society wishes. If you wished children to be seen and not heard it may have been necessary to dampen their natural exuberance through the application of emotional or physical restraint (or pain), but there is no doubt that it could be done. The object was to accommodate children to an adult-centred view of the world, and if the transition to that view had been achieved by the age of twelve, growing up through the teens was a less obviously stressful experience. The teenagers may have felt the stress, but they didn't visit it on their neighbours. If they still hung around together, they did so more politely that they do these days. Yob culture could not flourish where respect had been so systematically instilled.

It is a fact, however, that since the end of the Second World War social attitudes have irrevocably changed. A child-centred view has slowly taken over from the long-standing perception of children as either babies or young adults. Childhood, at least up to the age of sixteen, but well beyond that in some contexts, is seen as having a distinctive character that is embodied in the specific rights that children are accorded. These rights are significant, because they characterise children as more than mere adjuncts of their parents. Just as the latter half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries saw a complete re-definition in the Euro-centric world of the independent rights and status of women, so the past fifty years have witnessed a similar process in relation to children. Women are no longer the property of their husbands and children are no longer the property of their families. Consequently they have rights that may go far beyond whatever their parents may wish for them.

The difficulty with this process is that, whereas women were, or were capable of becoming through emancipation, responsible for themselves, children are in a formative stage of their life that requires care and guidance. It is a defining characteristic of children that they are not capable of taking adult responsibility; indeed, one of the rights that society has given them is the right to grow up "as a child" in a context of nurturing care.

That context is generally assumed to be familial, but in reality is much broader than that. This is partly because increased mobility has seen the fragmentation of extended families, but is mostly because of an growing perception that children need formative care that goes beyond what their families can provide. Universal compulsory education is the most striking instance, but this is only a part of a network of social support to which children are expected to subscribe. It includes medical and social care services, libraries, youth clubs, sports centres and swimming pools, as well as a wide range of public or voluntary sector activity centres for young people. Each of these is designed to augment the traditional familial environment of upbringing, and most have their roots in a social impulse to provide opportunities for children from poor backgrounds who would otherwise be deprived of them.

Society, therefore, is consciously engaged in the activity of bringing up children. It has given them a raft of independent rights and it works hard to see that they are able to enjoy them. And, as if to confirm that society is right in this approach, psychologists have demonstrated that children are far more responsive to the influence of their peer group than to that of their parents in developing their patterns of behaviour. The formation of adults, therefore, is not only the business of society but it is something that society undertakes on a wholesale scale, with whole generations of young people using each other as their central point of reference.

Given the vast amount of nurturing that society invests in its young people, it is extraordinary how ready it is to undermine its own investment by turning upon them the full force of an adult-centred legal system. This system challenges the very rights that society upholds for children in other contexts. It holds children as young as ten criminally responsible for their actions, incarcerates increasing numbers in conditions that would be cause for grave concern if uncovered in a home environment and colludes in the adult-centred perception of children as a threat to social order. There is a powerful sense in which society gives up on its young people just at the critical point where a positive intervention could a make a real difference to the outcome of their lives.

It is easy to look after children when they are well-behaved, engaged, responsive and open to stimulus. Easy, that is, provided you have the willingness and energy to provide the stimulus required. It is harder to look after children who are ill at ease, obstreperous and resentful, but from the social point of view the benefits of engaging constructively with this group are significantly greater. To avoid creating proto-criminals society needs to put away its legal armoury and wheel out its metaphorical jig-saw puzzles - investing far more in providing facilities and facilitators for the difficult-to-engage. Next time an unruly group of violent-looking teenagers is marauding through a shopping precinct terrorising the passers by, the authorities would do well to think not in terms of breaking up the group but of leveraging the desire of young people to stick around with their peers. The key question should be; "What else is there for this group of active young people to be doing?" And, more importantly still, where is the positive spirit who is going to get down with that group on the floor, open the box and start turning up the pieces?