by Libby Brooks
There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, according to Franklin, nor are adults universally skilled decision-makers. Fifthly, ‘allocating rights according to an age principle is incoherent and arbitrary, with different age requirements for adult rights applying in different spheres of activity.’ Sixth, he argues that rights should be allocated according to individual competence rather than limited to the developmental hierarchy of age and stage.
Seventh, the denial of participation rights to children is unfair because they can do nothing to change the structures that exclude them. And finally, writes Franklin, ‘to define everyone under eighteen years of age as a child, or more accurately as a “non-adult”, obscures the inherent diversity of childhood and attempts to impose a homogeneity upon children which the plurality of their intellectual and emotional needs, skills, competences and achievements undermines.’
The crux of the matter is whether adults and children are ontologically different. If children are regarded as ‘naturally’ incompetent, do adults have a ‘natural’ right to exert power over them? The Norwegian academic Jens Qvortrup, one of the pioneers of children’s rights theory, has argued that, to justify this position, the actor-status of the adult must be qualitively more important than that of the child. It must also be beyond doubt that adults will always behave in the best interests of children. ‘It is more likely,’ he concludes, ‘that the adult world doesn’t recognise children’s praxis because competence is defined with reference to adults’ praxis.’
Despite their potential, children’s rights are poorly served in the UK. Children can, by law, be assaulted by their parents if it meets the requirement of ‘reasonable chastisement’. A young offender can be tried in an adult court and named and shamed in newspapers. And the widespread use of curfew orders allows police to pick up people under sixteen who are out after 9 p.m. without a supervising adult.
Meanwhile, across the globe, children are proving themselves time and again to be thoroughly competent. Ten-year-olds head households in war-torn African states. Child labourers unionise in India. One study found that three-year-olds could plan, budget for, buy and cook a midday meal at their playgroup. Because children can doesn’t always mean children should. But ordinary children in extraordinary circumstances are continually revealing capabilities that remain unexplored in their more fortunate peers. The possibilities offered by a rights-based approach need not deprive children of their childhoods nor dissolve into a reductio ad absurdam of votes for toddlers.
Lowering the voting age to sixteen is regularly proposed as a way of increasing young people’s participation in civil society. In February 2006, the report of Helena Kennedy’s Power Commission suggested as much, and was endorsed by Gordon Brown.
It has been argued that lowering the voting age would simply increase the proportion of those who don’t vote. Certainly, there seems to be minimal public support for the move – polling by the Electoral Commission, which in April 2004 recommended that the voting age remain at 18, found that only 25 per cent of the public wanted the age reduced. Nor do young people’s voting habits suggest otherwise. In the 2005 election, national turnout was 61 per cent, compared with 37 per cent amongst 18–24 year olds – down 2 per cent from 2001.
But others counter that only by giving young people the vote at sixteen will their democratic engagement increase. By treating them as citizens, they will they act as such. Research into how people develop voting habits has found that ‘vote early, vote often’ holds: those who are old enough to vote while still at school are more likely to vote again than those who have to wait until their twenties for their first chance. In the 2001 election, for example, turnout amongst 27-year-olds was 49 per cent, compared with 65 per cent among 28-year-olds who had been old enough to vote in the 1992 election.
It does seem absurd that sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who can serve in the army, marry, work and, above all, pay taxes should be denied representation. And citizenship education might be taught to better effect if it was addressing how students were imminently to use their first vote.
In her brilliant essay ‘Thinking About Children’, the philosopher Judith Hughes plays with the idea of extending suffrage to children much younger than sixteen. She argues that advocates of children’s political participation have failed to address the realities of childhood, because they hold to a model which demands that any difference between childhood and adulthood is construed as an inferiority on the part of children. ‘Must what is insulting to an adult – being treated like a child – be insulting to the child?’ she asks.
She uses the example of a toddler who yells ‘I hate you!’ at a parent while in the throws of a tantrum. The parent does not interpret this as a genuine expression of loathing, nor do they believe that the child means it in any lasting sense. But to respond to an adult’s ‘I hate you!’ in a similar fashion would be paternalistic. And so, she writes, ‘This is part of what treating someone as a child is; not denying that he thinks or feels but rather not leaving him in the loneliness of his judgements until he has learnt much, much more about what that involves.’ An adult who fails to respond to the anger of a two-year-old as the anger of a two-year-old is himself immature. ‘To treat children as equals here would be a monstrous form of oppression,’ she concludes.
Of course, toddler suffrage is a philosophical trope. Even the most radical proponents of children’s rights do not suggest that they should be at the ballot box before they can write their own name. But the point Hughes makes is a critical one: at times it is only by failing to treat them as equally responsible agents that adults can teach children how to assume responsibility for themselves. This is not to say that children are always without capacity, but that the changing relationship between adults and children which Mary John writes about must incorporate a respect for incapacity and dependency too.
Majid would vote at sixteen if he could. You can change the Prime Minister here, so there is a point voting for the future of this country, but it won’t change anything in another country. He’s stopped going to the lectures about the war lately. They’re boring. It’s depressing. They talk about the new government, what they should do, but no one’s going to hear them so what’s the point?
Something serious happened this week, that seems to have left him feeling a little hopeless: ‘They bombed ten metres away from our house in Baghdad. Nobody was hurt.’ He calls to his mother in Arabic for more details: ‘Who bombed Bibi?’ His cousin wanders in from the hallway to hear the story told again. He’s drinking Tango and his tongue is bright orange.
‘Many people died, a hundred people,’ says his mother. She speaks in angry fragments, apologising for her English. ‘They want to attack any people. My mum we call her, we call her every day to see what’s happened to them.’
‘They stole my cousin.’
‘Hostage,’ prompts Majid.
‘About two days ago. They wanted £20,000, that’s not normal. How they get this money? Go sell your house, sell anything you’ve got, after twenty-four hours we go kill your son, and the son is twenty-one years old. It’s terrible! Now they tell me, they sent him back, he’s scared of everything. They beat him with the gun. It’s terrible our country. They say it’s government, but there’s no government.’
It depresses his mum, says Majid, and he doesn’t like to see her upset. His dad gets upset too. ‘He cries when he watches the news. He gets angry about how many they kill. They say it’s bin Laden or Syria or al-Zaquarwi. They say it’s jihad. There’s no such thing as jihad! Their jihad is to kill. Our jihad is to do what Allah wants. Allah says thou shalt not kill.’
Majid suspects that America is sending these suicide bombers to Iraq. ‘ ’Cos half the Arab population are American dogs, they’re puppies. They say, “Go fetch, go kill.” They say, “We conquered the country, the country’s yours”.’
Somehow, his holiday week hasn’t been as much fun as it should have. He’s been trying to play football every day, but it’s be
en raining hard. Majid says you can get bored really easily. He’s very vocal this morning, full of exaggerated phrasing and noises, and though the unused footballing energy is finding other ways to expend itself.
His girl cousin is playing with his sister, making regular trips to the kitchen for chocolate fingers. He admonishes her for taking too many. He says he knows most about the Middle East, but he knows something about Africa too. ‘To tell you the truth some parts of it are really, really bad, worse than Iraq. Some people only have a tiny bit to eat. They’re malnourished. Their heads are big but their stomachs are flat in. Woah!’
‘I say thank God for every morsel I have. I say I’m going to eat every morsel on my plate, then I can’t! I don’t know what’s wrong with me!’ He riffs on his inability to grow fat one more time. ‘I say I’m going to eat it but I have about a quarter and then I can’t eat any more.’
He doesn’t know who could make things better in Iraq. His uncle says that Bush had the right idea, and then he messed it up, but now he says there’s hope. Sometimes Majid feels hopeful, and sometimes he doesn’t. ‘All these bombers, they’re catching more every day, but I doubt they’ll catch all of them.’
Sometimes Majid agrees with what his father and his uncle think, and sometimes he argues with them. ‘I just believe what I hear on the news. My uncle says there’s hope, my dad says there’s hope; I say, “OK, there might be hope.” The only thing I want to do is go back to my family. I want to see my grandparents, and take care of them.’
He brings through a snapshot that is normally stuck to the fridge door – of him and his mother with his grandmother and cousins on his last visit to Iraq. They are making bunny-rabbit ears behind each other’s heads, and grinning wildly.
Majid says he doesn’t feel British, even though he was born here. ‘I feel Arab. I don’t think anyone’s got the right to say where you can live and where you can’t, what you can feel and what you can’t. My blood is Iraqi Arab but I live here. Everyone has pride in where they’re from.’ He has pride in Britain too, though he doesn’t like the mice.
He thinks that when he’s an adult the world’s going to be very hi-tech and very chaotic. ‘ ’Cos if you look at the teenagers now, what will they be like when they have all those privileges?’ And politicians will still be dogs. ‘I don’t know why I’m stuck on politics,’ he sighs. ‘I get too involved in it.’ He doesn’t know anyone else his age who is as interested in world events. ‘That’s the stupid thing about me, I like getting into adult conversations. I love talking to peers my age, but I want to get into adult conversation too. It’s trouble.’
Ashley
‘I don’t really think you could grow up normal in Peckham. You’d still have a little mad thing about you.’
It’s a mad life. When you’re on the road, it’s like you’re two people. There’s the kind one. And then there’s the poor one, the one that’s got no money, that has to go out and hustle. Ashley plumps up cushions and arranges them tidily on the sofa before settling himself in this corner of the cacophonous youth centre. He is fifteen. He’s been drinking hot chocolate with spoonfuls and spoonfuls of sugar stirred in.
‘I reckon that people just see us as thugs. They don’t know where we’re coming from. It’s not like you mean to go on the street and rob someone. It’s ’cos you ain’t got no money, you get me, no one’s helping you, you get me, it’s just you alone. You see people with flash phones in flash cars, you think, “They’ve got it, why can’t I have it?” They take certain things for granted, like they’ve got a big Rolex but it’s nothing to them. They can go and buy another one.’
Money is everything. ‘You need money for clothes, you need money for food. When I see that they’ve got money, and they can do all that, and you have to have egg on toast for your dinner because you ain’t got money to go shopping, or go to the sweet shop and get some sweets, and you can get arrested for that, for thieving a chocolate bar.’ He shakes his head.
Ashley is an honourable thief. He doesn’t go for people that don’t have much because if he robs them they’re going to be in the same situation he is. He robs the people he knows can replace what they lose. He walks up and down the road half an hour and sees a man that’s got a nice watch: two people haul him up, run through the estate, go to the pawn shop.
He was nine when his dad moved out. He’s an alcoholic. His parents were always fighting. His mum’s white and his dad’s from Barbados. He says there’s no point in calling himself mixed race, because there’s black and there’s white in this world, and he’s more black than white.
Ashley likes to keep his baseball cap on at all times. He has yet to shed his little boy’s body, but his frame is poised for broadening, and he will grow a little taller. He must be aware that he’s handsome. With his smooth vanilla skin and dark eyes, he looks like he could get away with murder.
It’s years since Ashley went to school. ‘I get with a couple of my friends and they’d be like, “You want to eat?” We used to go to Bermondsey a lot, pull people out their cars and drive off. Or if there’s someone walking down the road with their trousers halfway down, pull off their trousers, you’ve got their wallet, everything, they run off in their boxers. Bare madness. Stealing cars to get police chases, just for fun. If there was more for people to do, but in Peckham it’s just full of crackheads. There ain’t too many parks where kids can go and play.’
Sometimes he feels guilty; it depends. All sorts of things go through his mind. He can’t sleep sometimes. He might stay awake all night because he thinks police are going to come to his house. He sets out the realities of this mad life quietly, with precision. His voice is low and insistent. His speech has a rhythmic quality, ‘like’ and ‘you get me’ punctuating the phrases into a musical metre.
Ashley has grown up on the estates of Peckham, an area of south London made infamous at the turn of the millennium by the murder of ten-year-old Damilola Taylor, who bled to death after being stabbed with a broken bottle on his way home from an after-school computer club. (In 2002, four teenagers were cleared of the killing, following a much-criticised trial. The case remains open.)
Ashley is one of the un-children, doubly excluded by society, once for the fact of being a child and twice for failing to conform to the narrow ideology of contemporary childhood. Childhood is supposed to happen inside society, inside the family, inside the school gates. Any child whose experience falls outside these strict parameters is denied the respect that they are so often charged with denying to others.
The current climate of child-panic deems that all children are vulnerable – to sexual predators, commercialism, media violence and so on. But in doing so, it has pushed the truly vulnerable minority – the un-children of the underclass – beyond this blanket sympathy. Children who express their vulnerability through antisocial behaviour, crime and violence are primarily considered a threat to social order and to the formation of economically productive citizens. The majority of interventions are based on society’s needs – for conformity, obedience, a future workforce – rather than their own.
The Children’s Commissioner, Al Aynsley-Green, marked his appointment by warning of a national ambivalence towards children, with adults investing enormously in the young people with whom they are intimately involved, while remaining equivocal about those growing up on the margins.
In a paper written two years before his appointment, Aynsley-Green suggested that British society is currently experiencing a turbulence similar to the upheaval of the Victorian era. He argued for a recreation of the reformist ‘movement for children’ that characterised that age. But if the immediate needs of children like Ashley might be met by a legion of modern-day Dr Barnardos, they will only thrive in a country that ceases to demonise the poor and the angry.
As Stanley Cohen noted in his acclaimed book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, first published in 1972, recurrent moral panics in Britain since the Second World War have related to deviant youth. Subcultures – like t
he Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers, skinheads and hippies – have occupied a constant position as folk devils, he writes. ‘The identities of such social types are public property and these particular adolescent groups have symbolised – both in what they were and how they were reacted to – much of the social change which has taken place in Britain over the last twenty years.’
But in devoting so much attention to the shapes that these folk devils can assume, the media and politicians may well amplify the original problem. Cohen explains: ‘An initial act of deviance, or normative diversity (for example, in dress), is defined as being worthy of attention and is responded to punitively. The deviant or group is segregated or isolated and this operates to alienate them from conventional society. They perceive themselves as more deviant, group themselves with others in a similar position, and this leads to more deviance.’
Put simply, if all young men wearing hooded tops are treated like violent thugs, they may well start acting that way. The present government’s ‘respect’ agenda could well amplify divisions instead of healing them. But demonisation of youth has a racial as well as a class context. Cohen was writing when analysis on grounds of race was in its infancy. But one of the most potent folk devils of our times is surely the young black male – a boy like Ashley. If there is a continuum from GCSEs to the prison cell, black boys are overrepresented at every wrong turn, in school exclusions, in stop-and-search cautions, on remand and in custody.
Ashley’s mum’s got three operations coming up. She’s got polio in her left leg, she’s got cancer, and a couple of other sicknesses. She needs a new knee and a new hip. Because his mum’s sick, he’s got to move with her, look after her. She just got moved to Catford, but Ashley’s not from Catford. Catford’s classed as ghetto, and he’s from Peckham, so the people don’t mix. There’s a lot of trouble when he goes home on the bus.