Saturday, 17 November 2007

Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect

School_play It may be that the story about the delinquent Brooklyn sidewalk-chalker could be trumped in England. According to this BBC report yesterday, children in this country have been arrested (unh, arrested?) for:

  • drawing hopscotch on a pavement
  • taking a slice of cucumber from a sandwich and throwing it at another child, and
  • damaging a tree while building a den.

Not perhaps in the same league, but we've also had the heinous disgrace of flip-flopped feet on seats.

Meanwhile, the risk aversion debate has received significant renewed momentum from publicity following Tim Gill's No fear, published recently. (Various links currently on the Gulbenkian home page). And some energy is being coordinated in the US with Playborhood.

Questioning risk aversion was a rumbling cross-departmental sub-theme in Whitehall in the early years of the Labour administration at the end of the nineties, but it didn't stick. Maybe the urge to control took over, and anyway the culture is highly resilient, resisting some passionate challenging, eg What are we scared of? And yes I do accept the importance of recognising, as the Health and Safety Executive put it, that the term is shorthand for 'excessive risk aversion.'

It seems as if there are two trends in tension here, with two related themes - risk and respect - but I'm not clear how they are related. On the one hand we have attempts to program most risk out of children's lives (which is profoundly disempowering, and means that many seem to grow up expecting and accepting disempowerment as what society does to them). But measured exploration of risk can be stimulating and creates bonds: games and sport, still occasionally practised in some quarters (although very much subject to risk averse policies) offer semi-formal arenas in which such exploration can be played out.

And on the other hand, we have created neighbourhood contexts in which learning the give-and-take and cheek-by-jowl rubbing-along of socialising, getting along with people you might not necessarily choose as friends, is structurally minimised. And we have overseen a degree of family disintegration so that many young people can avoid having more than the most minimal contact with older people, and the separated generations are often bewildered by each other. Result, a crisis of respect. On its own, transforming the design of neighbourhoods won't cure this combination, it seems to be a deep cultural problem.

I was having a conversation the other day with a teacher who was telling me how depressing it is to have to try and deal with young people when they relentlessly swear and spit (in the classroom or corridor, this is, when in conversation with a teacher). It's unambiguously disrespectful behaviour, which must have some basis in the sense of not being cared about or valued.

How does that square with a society which appears obsessed with protecting its children from risk? I think it's partly because systematised risk aversion is in conflict with notions of genuine caring, it reflects self-interested detachment that says - children are too much trouble to be bothered about, we must constrain what they do. Bollocks.

The teacher and I reflected on the fact that we both know plenty of remarkable young people - far more mature and socially-supportive than most of us were in my day, inspiring young people who are a privilege to be with. And we were left wondering whether there is some kind of divide developing, between those who have had the chance to explore their own potential and responsible social relations, and those who haven't. I suspect I'll be revisiting this theme.

17 Nov 2007 22:27:27 | Mobility and change, Neighbourhood relations, Social capital

1 Comment

Wow. This is a great article!

I find one thing you wrote here particularly inspiring: "systematised risk aversion is in conflict with notions of genuine caring, it reflects self-interested detachment that says - children are too much trouble to be bothered about, we must constrain what they do." Sorry, but I'm not entirely what "bollocks" are.

Anyway, you said at the end of the post that you were pondering the divide between kids who have the opportunity to explore and those who don't. Well, in our first Playborhood local site for Palo Alto and Menlo Park, California, we have a regular high school blogger. Check out his post on gaining freedom to roam from his parents. It's at http://pamp.playborhood.com/site/article-2/freedom_and_fun_in_downtown_palo_alto/

Posted by: Mike Lanza | Friday, 23 November 2007 at 07:23

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Consulting older people On the question of consultation with older people, to paraphrase Gandhi, I think it would be a good idea. I've just found out about some interesting work that Urban Buzz funded in the London Borough of Lewisham as part of the Thames gateway development, which resulted in the publication of a toolkit and guidelines for consultation with older people, prepared by The Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths. It's a thorough and welcome document and appears to try and cover everything about the process they went through, which included field trips and mental maps of the neighbourhoods. It's important because the sense that many older people remain inexcusably excluded from consultative processes is widespread. But some of the tone leaves me a wee bit bothered. Like this: 'It is important that you present your project in a way that makes it relevant to them.' Radical stuff eh? There's more. 'Incorporate older people’s knowledge in the planning process, by consulting them if an area is going to be changed. Make use of their old photos, listen to them talk about the history about the spaces.' 'Free lunches and refreshments should be provided to offer something for their time and effort.' So long as the points get made, what am I bothered about? Well, I'm uncomfortable thinking that I live in a society where it's really necessary to make such points. It implies that there are people charged with 'consultation' for whom such things are not fundamentally obvious. But maybe the authors are right, maybe it does have to be pointed out. Many people are emerging from an embedded non-consultative authoritative culture and this is strange stuff for them. <Shudder> If I were being picky, and it's not unheard-of, I'd have added a section suggesting that people doing consultation didn't feel the need constantly to refer to one another as Dr, Professor, 'professional' or 'expert.' The entire document is suffused with a sense of the implied superior status of such people, and of councillors, over older residents. It reinforces my desire to keep pushing for a neighbourhood-mapping process designed by older people themselves.
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Collective responsibility for children and young people There is a perception among adults that the community is currently fractured and that it needs to unite and recognise the collective responsibility of all for the children and young people in their midst. People see the role of the community as providing guidance and support for young people, but also spending time with them and providing activities for them to do. This suggests the potential for the community to get more actively involved with young people, giving time, skills and resources to promote happy, healthy and safe childhoods. This comes from a lengthy consultation report published today by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which summarises 'knowledge on the wellbeing of children and young people in England today' and will form the basis of the forthcoming Children's Plan, due next month. It incorporates the views of children, young people and adults. It's unfortunate how a statement like this one (especially the last sentence quoted) suggests the resilient notion that there is something called 'the community' which government still feels it can exhort or conjure up for a given cause. Off-hand I can think of a few points to be taken into account before the problem can be cured by community involvement; such as - the extent to which informal social control has been designed-out and people encouraged not to occupy their own neighbourhoods, and to drive all over other people's; the difference in scale between the mental map of 'community' held by an official (local government or similar agency) and the neighbourhood as perceived by even moderately localised residents; the contribution made by policy over the past ten years towards a culture which vilifies young people (the Blunkett legacy). But meanwhile, it's reassuring that the importance of informal social control emerges when government starts talking to people and listening to what they say. Press release.

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