A Big Issue

That is a long title for an article, and it sounds very grand, but that was the title of the day conference we are reporting, and the theme is certainly a massive - and very important - one. To make such a significant theme chattier would be to dumb down, and people will not be put off the title if they want to take the subject seriously.

The Fourth Annual Christian Child Care Forum was held in London on 11th February 2004, and its aim was to consider the need for a National Commission on the subject. David Evans introduced the day by declaring that the theme was “a huge issue, staring us in the face, and a complex one”.

We face a mass of contradictions in the way we treat children today. We set up expensive bureaucratic systems to protect children against paedophiles but we leave them wide open to the exploitation of advertising on television. We know the importance of love, warmth and physical contact, but any professionals comforting a child with a hug do so in the knowledge that their action may be misconstrued and could cause real problems for their careers. These two practical examples are only a fragment of the welter of issues which we need to think through today.

Crisis Point?

Dennis Wrigley, writer, broadcaster and founder of Maranatha, took an uncompromising line, seeing the problems facing children and young people today as having reached crisis point. On the one hand, the traditional family had, in his view, broken down, law and order were threatened and the drugs subculture was well established. On the other, churches, which should have acted as bulwarks against chaos, were collapsing, and he said that it had struck him how it was often overseas visitors who had observed the implosion of standards in the British way of life.

Dennis argued that history will judge this generation harshly for the way it treat its children :

* While 40 million children die world-wide annually of malnutrition, there is a problem of childhood obesity in Britain.
* World-wide millions of street children have no homes, while in Britain families lavish wealth on their houses.
* Through pornography, children are sexualised and there is international trafficking and child prostitution, in the face of which Christians were “deafeningly silent”.
* Warnings about drug-taking were ignored thirty years ago, and now it is out of control.
* In some countries children were brutalised by being forced into armies and taught to kill.
* Six million children had been killed since David Steel’s Abortion Act had been implemented, making the womb the most dangerous place for a child to be : 20% of conceptions end in abortions.
* Marriage breakdowns cost the country £25 billion each year. Marriage was proven as the best setting in which to bring up children, but people had tried to undermine it.
* Promiscuity had led to a huge upsurge in the incidence of sexual diseases. We had lied to children about “safe sex”; many practices, such as anal sex, were not safe.
* The message had gone out that cannabis does no harm, when in fact it causes psychotic behaviour. Drug abuse costs the country £18.8 billion per annum.
* One million children have parents with drink or drug problems.
* 100,000 children run away from home each year.
* There was violence on estates, run by young tearaways. We had created “a generation of barbarians”.

We had in part created this predicament by subtle changes in language - stealing being described as lifting, for example, pornography as adult literature, and prostitutes as sex workers. All this had led to confusion and uncertainty. The former clarity about morality had gone. The absolutes of right and wrong had been rejected.

Dennis argued that time had run out. The crisis was now upon us, with the storm clouds overhead. It was time for a trumpet call for battle, and the people of God needed to assemble to fight. A powerful, but gloomy, message.

The Good Childhood

Bob Reitemeier, Chief Executive of the Children’s Society, was well placed to speak on the theme, as the Children’s Society already has a project focusing on this theme. He argued that as a society we had lost confidence in a corporate view of childhood and parenting. In many parts of the world, the whole community shares in bringing up children, but in Britain we fail children corporately in the same way that inadequate parents fail their offspring.

There were many examples :

* We fail to listen to children and to hear what they have to say to us.
* We treat them negatively, failing to acknowledge the positives, for example in the Anti- social Behaviour Bill.
* When their needs are greatest, locked up in prison, children have been denied the protection offered by the Children Act 1989. Young offenders have generally been demonised.
* By contrast, little children have been sentimentalised, and often smothered by overprotectiveness, driven to school or leisure activities, denied the chance to start to learn independence or to take risks by climbing trees or ride bikes.
* There is the mixed message that we leave children open to sexualisation through advertising, while at the same time they are taught to fear strangers as a sexual threat.
* The legal ages for children to be criminally responsible, own pets, vote, marry or own property are inconsistent.

The problem of the recent past was that people concerned about children had been simply reacting external events and pressures. We needed to have a vision of childhood, Bob argued, and if we were looking for change, we would need to convince the Government that what we were proposing would deliver outcomes that were worth the cost.

To reach that point, we needed to engage the public. People were looking for justice, fairness and trustworthiness. If we argued for the creation of “reasonable and just political and social institutions”, the proposals would be acknowledged as useful, be reaffirmed and would last.

A major problem was that our current vision of childhood is still largely based on the Victorian ideas which were the driving forces behind the Factories Acts of 1833 and 1884, the Education Acts which brought in compulsory schooling in 1876 and 1890, and the Criminal Law Acts which brought in the age of consent in 1832 and 1851.

These Acts were passed for a variety of reasons. Some were altruistic, to help children who had dissolute parents for instance, but it was also noted that “Perished urchins usually start insurrections”, and there were other motivations such as concern about law and order.

Bob Reitemeier ended by arguing that Christian values provide a base to help people explore the nature of personhood and childhood. As Mary Carpenter had said in 1850, “Children need love. [Without it] they are no longer children”. We lacked an overall vision today, and this was the place to start in creating one.

Where Next?

Isabel Carter spoke of the effectiveness of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which moved in a few years from four people sharing ideas over a coffee to a national campaign which brought 50,000 people onto the streets to campaign and influenced the Government.

After some constructive groupwork, in which a lot of ideas flowed and enthusiasm was engendered, Keith White gave a stirring speech (also published in this issue of the Webmag), and it was left to the Executive of CCCF to go away and plot the next stages.