Sunday, 17 February 2013

Kids these days: juxtaprose 8

‘They have no fear of their teachers, they get into fights in their presence and talk back to them in the most offensive manner. They wear their rapiers not only on the street, but also in the school. They play ball during the church services and instruction periods, and even run wild in unseemly places.’

(Arnstadt City Council, 1706, quoted in).

 

(Previously juxtaprosed)

'An inspector said a 'core' of pupils had no boundaries, with some being ‘rude, aggressive and threatening violence’. One pupil was seen to tell the headteacher to ‘f’ off while others would just wander around the classroom. Parents complain about kids smoking on school property, bullying, fighting and rudeness to teachers.'

(Daily Mail, 2012).

 

 
17 Feb 2013 15:10:33 | Anti-social behaviour, Juxtaprose

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Little tiny fridge I don’t know when Sheffield City Council stopped being known as ‘the corporation’ but if you have any idea, you may be able to date this story about neighbours. I’ve no doubt it dates from those well-known halcyon days when men were real men, fridges were real fridges, and close-knit northern communities were real close-knit northern communities. BBC Radio Sheffield covered the topic of neighbourliness this morning (thanks for the heads-up Martin) and a lady called Frieda called in (for the next few days you can catch her remarks here at about 2:20.40). At the mention of ‘neighbours from hell,’ Frieda said in a matter of fact way, ‘I’ve ‘ad ‘em luv’ – ‘When I first came in ‘ere. They tried to make my life hell but I stuck ‘em out and they’re dead now… Anonymous letters, threatening me, threatening me children…’ Why was that then? ‘We’d just moved into our house… and we bought a little fridge it were, one of them that you used to buy for a pound off the corporation, we’d just moved in, bought this little fridge, and all hell were let loose. I don’t know why, but when t’police came, they said it were jealousy... Little tiny fridge. But I stuck ‘em out… for about four year, if not more.’
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Child poverty and family stability Last week I designed and helped to run a day long consultation event with about 40 children and young people in poverty. Once we've processed the mass of content, I'll try to blog in more detail, but here I thought I'd comment on a couple of the more striking issues that emerged. The event was designed to feed in to the government’s consultation on child poverty (now closed) around which, as the Guardian highlighted last week, there has been a degree of tension. The idea that Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, should be credited with a ‘theory that other factors aside from money caused poverty’ is odd. Apparently he is challenging ‘the tired arguments that poverty was about income alone,’ but no-one I have spoken to knows where to find those arguments. Obviously the question is not whether there are other factors, but how they are emphasised. You’d only ask ‘is child poverty about money or not?’ if you had a pitifully weak grasp of what it is. Of course it’s about money. It's also about of lot of other things – like access to transport, health inequalities, network poverty, lack of cultural capital, environmental poverty, poverty of opportunity and so on - which are exacerbated by lack of money. Perhaps also it still needs to be pointed out that wide wealth inequalities are wasteful and have all sorts of negative human and social consequences, which are expensive. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a lot of evidenced support in our event for the government’s idea that family stability is a key factor. Except, wait. There was one feature of the lives of participants in the event which could strongly affect family stability, and which kept coming up: death. It was surprising how frequently death was mentioned - of someone known to the participant or in the fictionalised scenarios they developed collectively. It may be that we helped to create an environment which allowed this theme to emerge more easily than it does in other contexts, I don’t know, but it was striking. Death in poor families can be particularly devastating in both emotional and economic terms, the more so if young people are dealing with unusual frequencies of death among relatives and family friends. Ah yes wait, I’m forgetting, there was something else that impacts on family stability, which kept coming up: imprisonment. The realities of someone they knew being imprisoned were clearly not too far away from the day to day lives of these young people to be dismissed. And some were acutely aware of the obstacles to rebuilding their lives that anyone could expect to be presented after a sentence has been served. There seemed to be genuine fear of the very idea of prison as a dead end to be avoided. Less obvious as a factor having an indirect impact on family stability were the numerous remarks about transition stages – especially the moment of leaving care, which can be far too abrupt for many young...

Kevin Harris

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