Thatcher's Children?: Politics, Children and Society in the 1980S

Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s JP: For Eddie and our son, Jack SW: For my friend Kathleen Mannering, with love Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s Edited by Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg Falmer Press (A member of the Taylor & Francis Group) London • Washington, D.C. UK Falmer Press, 1 Gunpowder Square, London WC4A 3DE USA Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007 © J.Pilcher and S.Wagg 1996 © Front cover photograph: Nigel Tanburn, London All rights reserved, No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publisher. First published in 1996 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available on request ISBN 0-203-98984-8 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0 7507 0461 6 cased ISBN 0 7507 0462 4 paper Jacket design by Caroline Archer Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book. Contents List of Tables and Figures vii 1 Introduction: Thatcher’s Children? 1 Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg 2 ‘Don’t Try to Understand Them’: Politics, Childhood and the New 8 Education Market Stephen Wagg 3 ‘Keeping It in the Family’: Thatcherism and the Children Act 30 1989 Karen WinterPaul Connolly 4 The New Politics of Child Protection 44 Nigel Parton 5 Back to the Future? Youth Crime, Youth Justice and the 62 Rediscovery of ‘Authoritarian Populism’ Tim Newburn 6 Gillick and After: Children and Sex in the 1980s and 1990s 78 Jane Pilcher 7 Growing Pains: The Developing Children’s Rights Movement in 95 the UK Annie Franklin and Bob Franklin 8 The Politics of Child Poverty 1979–1995 115 Carey Oppenheim and Ruth Lister 9 Killing the Age of Innocence: Newspaper Reporting of the Death 136 of James Bulger Bob Franklin and Julian Petley 10 ‘I’ve Just Seen a Hole in the Reality Barrier!’: Children 158 Childishness and the Media in the Ruins of the Twentieth Century Patricia Holland 11 Thatcher’s Working Children: Contemporary Issues of Child 176 Labour vi Michael Lavalette 12 Child Prostitution and Tourism: Beyond the Stereotypes 206 Julia O’Connell DavidsonJacqueline Sanchez Taylor Notes on Contributors 228 Index 230 List of Tables and Figures Table 4.1 Initial allegation of child abuse by final decision following 54 investigation Table 4.2 Family structure of reported cases of child abuse 54 Table 4.3 Operation of filters in child protection system 55 Table 8.1 The number and proportion of children living on low incomes 127 in 1979 and 1992–93 in the UK Table 8.2 Numbers of children in Britain in families living on or below 128 income support in 1992 Table 11.1 Work status of children in Great Britain (%) 192 Table 11.2 Types of jobs performed by children in the UK (%) 193 Figure 2.1 NUSS Policy Statement as Amended by National Conference 15 28/29 October 1972 Figure 5.1 Males aged 14–16 sentenced to custody 1971–1990 65 1 Introduction: Thatcher’s Children? Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg Regarding Children The French historian Philippe Aries first published his famous and important work Centuries of Childhood in 1959. Since then, sociologists around the world have, from time to time and with varying degrees of conviction, endorsed the book’s central tenet, namely that childhood is socially constructed and is, thus, specific to certain times and places in human history. On the whole, however, they have been reluctant to take the matter much further and, as recently as 1990, it was argued that the sociological study of children and childhood was in its ‘own infancy’ (Chisholm et al., 1990, p. 5). The criticism has been, not that there was a lack of research on children, but that the research which had been done was disproportionately concerned with the processes through which children became adults. It attended primarily to the development and socialization of children in families and schools. The notion that children were people —acting, reacting and helping to create their own social worlds—has taken longer to establish (see Alanen, 1992). In recent years, however, new approaches to the social study of children and childhood have been emerging. In a seminal account, Prout and James (1990) have, in effect, set out a new paradigm for the sociology of childhood. This paradigm is more interpretative. It challenges notions of the natural or universal character of childhood and it assumes instead that childhood is processual and perpetually in flux, subject to the understandings and experiences of children in their specific social contexts (Prout and James, 1990, p. 15). Two features of this new approach are particularly important. Firstly, childhood is now seen as an institution which represents the ways, varying across time and cultural place, in which the biological immaturity of children is understood. Secondly, there is a concern to ‘give a voice’, albeit by adult mediation, to children as social actors who are themselves engaged in constructing and reconstructing this institution (Prout and James, 1990, p. 8). Also central to the new view of childhood is the importance, following Foucault (Foucault, 1972), that is now attached to ‘discourse’—the concepts of children and childhood, the language through which these concepts are thought 2 JANE PILCHER AND STEPHEN WAGG and expressed, and the social practices and institutions from which, ultimately, they are inseparable (Prout and James, 1990, p. 25). This concern with discourse defines the purpose of our book. Each writer has explored some dimension of the contemporary political discourses of childhood. While we accept fully the new view of children as active, reactive and creative beings, it would clearly be foolish to assume that they were active, reactive and creative in circumstances of their own choosing. Although, adapting Sartre, children will always make something of what is made of them, it is important, we feel, to look at the ways in which children have been framed, and their range of possibilities defined, in the dominant political language and practices of the late twentieth century. During the 1980s and 1990s debates in Britain about social, political and economic affairs have been heavily circumscribed by the discourses of the New Right, which has made for a heightened public discussion of children and childhood. This discussion has taken place against a backdrop of important social and economic changes, which have been in train since the Second World War. For Alanen (1992, p. 6), these changes have brought a decreased significance of the traditional agencies of childhood (the nuclear family and the school) in relation to other agencies: child and youth services, the mass media and peer groups. It is the anxiety wrought by these changes that has found its most forcible and public expression in the discourses of the New Right. Indeed, children have often seemed to be at the heart of contemporary ideological wrangles. After all, in the most memorable political enunciation of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher declared: ‘There is no such thing as “society”. There are men. And there are women. And there are families.’ The assumed children of these ‘families’ have often appeared in the rhetoric of the New Right to hover between Heaven and Hell. In Heaven, the male head of their nuclear family, doubtless an entrepreneur now liberated from state control and trade union interference, provides them with love, discipline and selective education. In Hell, children are menaced by a gallery of social demons: single mothers, absent fathers, muddle- headed social workers failing to detect abuse, drug pushers, paedophiles, ‘do- gooders’ reluctant to punish young offenders, ‘trendy’ teachers, doctors prescribing contraceptives for young girls, media executives purveying violent and sexually explicit material, and so on. Most of the chapters in this book are intended to go beyond these often lurid and melodramatic representations. For, while commentators on the right have dominated political debates about childhood during the 1980s and 1990s, the left has nevertheless made its presence felt. Thus, while many among the New Right have foretold of a disintegration of childhood, many on the left have been exploring the possibility of extending the boundaries of childhood. Here long-established anarchist- humanist traditions seem to have combined with newer notions of empowerment to produce an active and influential children’s rights movement in several countries. In Britain, this manifested itself in successful campaigns on corporal punishment and bullying in schools, on child labour and on the rights of children both in local authority care and in hospital. INTRODUCTION: THATCHER’S CHILDREN? 3 Thatcher s Children? Although the book addresses other political discourses, Thatcher’s Children? acknowledges the key role played by the New Right in the mounting debate about children and childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. The political New Right was, as it remains, a broad and diverse grouping which cannot be reduced to a single party or government (Levitas, 1986); nevertheless, the Thatcherism of the 1980s can be seen as both heavily informed by, and an important variant of, New Right ideology (Smith, 1994; Hayes, 1994).

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