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Title: Lost innocence Author: Solidarity Federation Date: Summer 1999 Language: en Topics: children, youth liberation, Direct Action Magazine Source: Retrieved on April 7, 2005 from https://web.archive.org/web/20050407003451/http://www.directa.force9.co.uk/archive/da11-features.htm Notes: Published in Direct Action #11 — Summer 1999.
Why have we declared war on the world’s children?
New Labour is considering electronically tagging children as young as
ten, in its drive to deal with the expected rise in young people held in
custody, caused by implementing the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act.
Already, children aged ten to fifteen are being tagged in two pilot
projects run by the Youth Justice Board, in Manchester and Norfolk. The
pilots will continue until March 2000. After this, the Government will
decide on extending its plans nationwide.
Jack Straw is a real charmer — even more reactionary than Michael
Howard. Speaking recently at a Family Policy Studies Centre Conference,
he expressed surprise that, at any given time, 3,500 children under two
years old are in local authority care. At the same time, childless
couples are waiting many years on adoption registers.
Straw said: “It is in no-one’s interest, not the mother’s, nor the
child’s, nor the prospective parents’, to allow a situation to develop
where a crisis point is reached in the baby’s first year, because the
ability of the mother, often a teenager, to cope has been misjudged by
well-meaning but misguided people”. Here we have, in New Labour guise,
the Tory hatred of the single/teenage mother. And it goes far beyond
negative stereo-typing of grubby and stupid beer-drinking plebs. Straw’s
blatant discriminatory middle-class fear and loathing of working class
people is remarkable — was he bullied at school, or did he just have a
rough time potty-training?
Single parents need support. They are generally doing a good job with
little practical help, in spite of the negative stereo-typing and
right-wing ideology which masquerades as, on one hand, common sense, but
also as ‘social science’.
There are over 300,000 child soldiers world-wide, some as young as
seven. They are mainly concentrated in Africa. Because of developments
in weaponry, such as lightweight materials, children can carry, handle
and operate such arms. These new weapons are produced mainly by Britain,
France, Russia and China.
Currently, there are some 15 million children who are refugees, of which
5% are orphaned or abandoned. In many cases, they have witnessed the
murder of their parents or family members. They have been
psychologically scarred. As a result, many want revenge.
Children are regularly kidnapped and forced to fight. Through this, they
have again been forced to participate in and witness atrocities. In
Uganda, a gun can be bought for the price of a chicken.
The NSPCC has recently launched a campaign to end cruelty to children
called “Full Stop”. It reports that one child under five dies each week
in the UK as a result of parental abuse and neglect. Recent
Government-sponsored research found that more than a third of all
children in 400 ‘ordinary’ families were punished ‘severely’. ‘Severely’
was defined as the ‘intention or potential to cause injury or
psychological damage’.
In Sweden, smacking and physical punishment was outlawed more than 20
years ago. In the 1980s, no Swedish children died and, between 1990 and
1996, 4 children died as a result of physical abuse. Prosecutions for
abuse also showed a decline in trend during this period. This trend is
most marked amongst parents in their 20s who grew up in this
“no-smacking” culture.
The British Government now seems to have accepted that the law on
physical punishment should be changed following the ruling that a
British stepfather’s caning of a young boy breached the European
Convention on Human Rights. The Children are Unbeatable Alliance have
called for a complete ban on smacking and physical punishment. However,
in spite of many parent education programmes, physical punishment is far
from dying out in Britain. Still, over 90% of children are smacked by
parents and carers, including babies under the age of one year.
Once it was thought it was acceptable for men to hit women, specially
their wives. Now we believe that the concept of zero tolerance promoted
by campaigners against domestic violence should be extended to all
children, who are surely the most vulnerable members of society.