by Libby Brooks
He’s seen a few people smoking weed. He makes a face. ‘Stinky, expensive, fake. Yeeeuh!’ Alcohol is against his religion.
But he’s not that sensible, he appends. ‘I have a big mouth. I speak a lot. I never used to do that before.’ He’s more confident now. ‘I have to look out for my sister. Like she was in an argument with some girl in her class the other day and I had to sort it out. ’Cos the brother of the girl and me, we’re friends, so I spoke to him, sorted.’ He crosses his arms, a man.
Majid thinks it’s easier to grow up as a boy than as a girl. ‘ ’Cos girls do a lot of make-up and stuff, and, “Ooh, does this boy like me?” As a boy you don’t care!’ He spits the word out like a bad taste. ‘As a Muslim girl, my sister can’t go swimming, but I can. She has to be careful who she talks to, what she does, how she reacts.’ Does he think that’s fair? ‘It’s a way of respect. You don’t want her becoming one of those girls that dresses in miniskirts.’
Majid doesn’t worry about what girls think of him. ‘No! I just judge them, whether they’re nice or not.’ And does he ever wonder about marriage? ‘I’m not even thinking about that right now!’ He seems stranded between girl-hating and girl-desiring, not quite sure which way to jump. Would his future wife have to be Muslim? Yes. Who practises? ‘Not necessarily,’ he says. ‘I’d turn her into one.’
As Laura observed in the previous chapter, ‘loads of teenagers don’t really know who to try and be’. If adolescence induces the struggle to fathom identity, how much harder has that become for boys, now that the male role is so in flux? The 1990s witnessed anxious debate about ‘the crisis of masculinity’. It seemed that boys were struggling more than girls to adapt to the major changes taking place in society, falling behind at school, falling into delinquency, unable to imagine their place in a new economic landscape that valued feminine skills more than traditional masculine ones. Negative portrayals of men in the media, unsuitable role models and single mothers were all variously accused of contributing to a lack of confidence among young males.
Meanwhile, lingering conventional expectations of what it is to be a man can narrow the range of boys’ responses to these challenges. In their book Young Masculinities, the psychologists Stephen Frosh, Ann Phoenix and Rob Pattman describe this process: ‘The ways in which masculinities are “policed” by peers and adults communicate to boys a message that alternative … ways of being are abnormal for males – that they are girlish and hence subject to opprobrium and exclusion.’
The book is based on an extended research project, interviewing 11–14-year-old boys in London schools over a number of years. The authors found that their subjects characterised masculinity as involving ‘toughness, footballing prowess and resistance to teachers and education’.
They saw how boys’ behaviour and appearance were powerfully regulated by a set of gendered contrasts. ‘Boys were seen, by boys themselves and to some extent by girls, as “naturally” active and energetic, physically tough, easygoing, funny, brave and sporty, while girls were passive, fragile, obsessed with their appearance, easily offended, emotionally weak and academic,’ they observe. These contrasts were assumed to be present in all activities, and so the performance of boys and girls ‘was constantly examined by their peers for signs of gender conformity or deviance.’
One form of ‘deviance’ to which the boys in the study frequently referred was homosexuality. Calling somebody ‘gay’ was a generic insult, rarely based on any concrete evidence about a person’s sexuality. Often being gay and being girly were seen as interchangeable. ‘Homophobic and misogynistic repetition,’ note the authors, ‘may be understood as a continual attempt to construct an ever-elusive masculine ideal.’
They described the ubiquity of homophobia among the boys they spoke to, and the way in which they used it to publicly assert their ‘normal’ masculine identity. When I broach the subject of homosexuality with Majid, his reaction is immediate: laughing, cursing, embarrassed. ‘It’s wrong, really wrong!’ he cries. ‘I’m racist against it!’ At school, if someone says you’re gay it can mean something else, not in a homosexual way, like you’re annoying.
What would he do if one of his friends told him that he thought he was gay? He points to his father’s walking stick, which is leaning against the fridge. ‘Take that,’ he says deliberately, ‘bring it down on his head.’ Even if he was your friend before that? ‘It’s WRONG!!!’ he shrieks. ‘God made man and woman for a reason, not man and man. It’s going against the rule of nature.’ If a gay person told him they couldn’t help it, he’d tell them to get a doctor. Doesn’t he have any sympathy for them? ‘Hell no! Eeeyeuh.’ He squirms on the settee, tugging at his tracksuit leg in agitation, disgusted.
Like Majid, many of the boys in the Young Masculinities study used the football pitch as a site for exploring their male identity. When comparing themselves with girls, an important difference they highlighted was that they were more interested in sport. Like the boys that Angela Phillips spoke to, they expressed bafflement at what girls actually did during the lunch-hour when the boys were playing football.
The authors describe the ‘opposition between the active and productive use of time in playing football, characteristic of boys, and girls’ aimless sitting, walking and talking … “Just” talking was understood as talk for its own sake, as having no other purpose and therefore as pointless and obsessive. When boys talked, it was for a reason.’
The following week, Majid’s been up late watching a video. It was about a good president and an evil president, and there’s this guy who has to take out the evil one.
His exams were quite easy, apart from English, which was hard. ‘They gave us this text and most of the questions were based on opinion so we had to use PEA: point, evidence, analysis. It was about being watched all the time. Somebody wrote a book in 1948 called 1984, “Big Brother’s watching you” kind of thing. The second part was “how do you feel about CCTV?” ’ Majid doesn’t have CCTV in his block, but they’re getting an entry gate because there are loads of druggies downstairs.
There have been more fights, he laughs, showing off a fresh crop of purplish bruises. ‘Yesterday I got taken down by eight people! It was a play-fight. My friend started it off, he kept cussing all these people, and I went to join in for my friend, then he just ran and I had to take on eight people that were strong! They kicked me down but I was kicking back and they said, “This one’s a warrior, keep him alive.” ’
The distinction between play-fights and real ones is subtle, but significant. He had a real fight on Thursday. One nine-year-old and one eleven-year-old, they wanted to have a go at Majid from when they moved into this block [of flats]. He said, ‘No, ’cos I’ll get in trouble, but they kept on: “You’re scared”, other language, bad language. Then on Thursday, they started fighting me, and they hit me in the face which hurts a lot ’cos I have braces and it cuts your cheek, then one of them punched me so I ran after him and I punched him in the face but he was wearing glasses so it cut his eye.’
His mum was very angry. ‘She said, “You’re stupid, you’re older than them, you could have put him in hospital.” ’ But it wasn’t Majid’s fault. He had to defend himself. As punishment, he’s not allowed to play football downstairs for a year. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to play down there anyway.
There are a lot of play-fights at school, but some of them are serious, and the teachers break them up. Sometimes you just get an incident report and it goes into your record. Sometimes you get held back after school.
The worst punishment Majid’s ever had was a phone call home which was for swinging on his chair and for calling out. His voice rises in indignation. ‘ ’Cos some teachers, I hate them so much ’cos they know you want to answer the question, they know I want to do it right and they don’t pick me for the fun of it. They see me getting frustrated and they want me to get in trouble, ’cos I have this urge to call out, and it’s their fault if they don’t pick me!’
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p; His teachers think he’s naughty but they think he’s all right. ‘I’m intelligent, but I’m naughty.’
Over the weeks that Majid had been discussing his school – the boy who made the rape threat, the good teachers who are flexible, the bad ones who pick on you for calling out – a minor wave of child-panic about classroom discipline was sweeping the country.
In April 2005, Channel 5 screened a documentary by the film-maker Roger Graef, who had equipped a supply teacher with hidden cameras to expose the extremity of insolence and disruption she encountered. The National Association of Head Teachers condemned irresponsible parents who sent children into school lacking basic social training. New figures revealed that the number of physical assaults on teachers had doubled in the space of a year. At the beginning of May, Education Secretary Ruth Kelly called for ‘zero tolerance’ of disruptive behaviour in the classroom, while the Conservatives offered up the dubious panacea of fast-track expulsions.
In the same period, the annual report from the chief inspector of schools, David Bell, received selective coverage, fuelling the impression that the nation’s schoolchildren were beyond control. But, as Fiona Millar pointed out at the time, Bell actually reported that discipline was satisfactory or better in the majority of schools, and poor in 1 per cent of primary schools and 9 per cent of secondary schools. ‘In short,’ she concluded, ‘there is a chronic problem in several hundred schools, most of them secondary schools with an above-average number of children on free school meals.’
Since leaving Downing Street, where she worked as an aide to Cherie Blair for many years, Millar has proved herself a passionate but cool-headed advocate for the state education system. She noted that, while many schools with generally good behaviour did suffer the kind of low-level disruption that the education secretary was talking about, blaming parents was not the answer.
‘Most parents of low-level disrupters are doing their best,’ she wrote. ‘They can be let down by an unstimulating curriculum, headteachers who don’t manage behaviour consistently and teachers who can’t hold their pupils’ attention.’ Which is certainly Majid’s experience. ‘A programme of behaviour initiatives won’t work without acknowledging that children also have rights: to be well taught in schools where expectations are clear.’
It is hardly surprising that teachers, as well as pupils, struggle with the imperatives of standardisation and centralisation, though many continue to create stimulating learning experiences in spite of the strictures of the National Curriculum. Latest educational theory is moving away from grading, towards a more comment-based approach, and the Department for Education and Skills’ own five-year strategy emphasises that the child is ‘a partner in learning, not a passive recipient’. But in socially and ethnically mixed innercity schools, where the aim is to get all children – no matter how unable or unwilling their parents – to a useful level of literacy and numeracy by the time they leave, perhaps a degree of plodding is inevitable.
While Majid may not be exemplary in class, he has the sense and the family support to work hard when it’s important. When he grows up, if Spanish footballing doesn’t work out, he says he’d like to get a job with cars, designing them. And he’d like to open a restaurant, or a business of some sort. ‘The thing that I would want is a McDonald’s that is hallal, ’cos you’d get much more custom. The Muslim people that go to McDonalds, they only buy the Filet-O-Fish [he pronounces it the French way] which they don’t even like. But if you do it the hallal way you’ll get much more profits.’
The following weekend, it’s the beginning of the spring half-term holiday, and Majid is planning to play football all day every day. His mum says she’s going to feed him like a pig! He’s too skinny. Sometimes I wonder if his noise and bluster are an attempt to take up the extra space he’d like his body to. But the thing is he’s fussy about food. He doesn’t like fried onions and he doesn’t like aubergines and they’re in Arabic food a lot. So he eats junk food, but they say that it makes you obese, and he’s still skinny. He pats his slim tummy.
He’s already had some of his exam results back. In maths he got two down from the very top grade. But he failed his art. ‘I don’t care about art! I’ve got no passion for it!’
At school this week there was excitement over crutches. ‘My friend, he broke his leg. He fell on the stairs with his bike. He came in yesterday and everyone started borrowing his crutches and fighting with them! And in my history lesson, I was just playing with his crutches and I got in trouble! For no reason!!’ Majid has an unsurpassable talent for this.
He has some homework to do this week too: a thousand-word essay for geography on ecosystems; some maths questions; and for English they have to make a holiday brochure about a city. But mainly he’ll be in the park. Sometimes when he’s playing football, older people come and play with them. It’s like a manhood connection.
‘If I wanted to I could just deceive my parents and say I was going to the park then go to Oxford Street. When my parents let me do something, I don’t take advantage of it. I do the thing I told them I would.’
Majid isn’t sure whether children deserve more rights. ‘Yeah and no. Yeah is because when I went to a funfair I wanted to go on the bumper cars but you had to be fourteen. Little minor things like that. But no for major things like drinking and smoking.’
He thinks that if children had proper rights they would go over the limit. ‘But sometimes, because they’re children, people say they can’t do stuff. When we play football in the park, if there’s adults they say, “You can’t join us ’cos you’re too little”, when we’re sometimes better. Or in Apollo you can’t buy DVDs ’cos you’re under sixteen. And you can’t pay for petrol in the petrol station for your uncle when he’s in a hurry. There’s an airline called Ryanair and you can’t travel by yourself if you’re under sixteen.’
Majid shows little confidence in his peers’ capacity for moderation. ‘As things are going now, it’s kind of corrupting, with drinking and that. Some people, their parents smoke weed and then they get into it. Or some music has songs about violence, saying you have to do it. They think if you’re being bad you get respect. They’re all in groups, they all look like they’re going to pull something off.’
Majid says he feels unsafe on the streets. ‘Anyone could come and jump you.’ He acted it out in drama yesterday, because it happens all the time. ‘My friend who was on crutches, I was in his group. My and my other friend, we acted as we were brothers, we jumped him and took his phone. My friend on crutches went to his dad, then my other friend who acted as his dad came to get us, and he beat me up. And then my friend who had crutches came and beat me up for real!’ He rotates his arm to show the latest bruises. ‘He jumped me for real in front of the teacher, and she thought it was acting.’ He chuckles noisily. Once in drama they pretended to be Taliban and beat up the Americans!
Children’s confinement has reached troubling levels in recent years, but being outside can have consequences too. It is other children, not adults, who are mainly at risk from young people’s antisocial behaviour. Young males in particular are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of street crime. Increased surveillance of childhood has not resulted in increased security. Majid has the right not only to be outdoors, but also to feel safe when he’s there.
Many of the policies that most curtail children’s rights, like curfew orders or ASBOs, may also be seen as an avoidance of adult participation in socialising children. What used to be the responsibility of a whole community is now left to parents and, in extremis, the police. While adults invest hugely in their own offspring, they have neither energy nor inclination to get involved in the upbringing of other people’s children.
It follows that children’s rights cannot be exercised in isolation. Their rights to provision, protection and participation laid out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child must be balanced with adults’ responsibility to facilitate them, and children’s own responsibility to exercise those ri
ghts with consideration for others.
But children’s rights need not be an affront to adult authority. As Mary John, a developmental psychologist widely recognised for her work on children and power, writes: ‘Children are not out to grab some of the action of invested power. What is involved [is] changing the relationship between adults and children so that, through participation and voicing, each person works towards understanding and respecting each other’s realities.’
Betrand Russell issued the challenge that ‘no political theory is adequate unless it is applicable to children as well as to men and women’. But it is a far more paternalistic philosophical tradition that has prevailed in modern times. John Stuart Mill insisted that children should be ‘protected against their own actions as well as against external injury’. Liberty was only an inalienable right in the case of adults. For children, well-being – achieved through altruistic adult interventions – took precedence. And Kant denied that children had the ‘reason’ that affords individuals the ability to make rational choices for themselves.
In some ways, this is akin to how women’s and ethnic minorities’ rights – or lack of them – used to be framed. Indeed, it has been argued that children are now in the position once occupied by the idealised bourgeois wife and mother, as historian Harry Hendrick puts it: ‘pampered and loved, an essential ornament serving as testimony to domestic bliss, but subservient to male power.’
In his introduction to The Children’s Rights Handbook, Bob Franklin offers a number of sensible grounds for rejecting this paternalism. Firstly, plenty of research evidence exists to show that children can make informed decisions and do reveal a competence for rational thought. Secondly, if children are not allowed to make decisions because they have no experience, then how will they ever get started? ‘It does not follow that children should not make decisions simply because they might make the wrong ones. It is important not to confuse the right to do something with doing the right thing.’