Public Space and the Culture of Childhood

Gill Valentine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351907637
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Géographie humaine

Children are at the heart of popular and public debates in North America and Europe about the culture of public space. On the one hand there is increased anxiety about children's vulnerability to stranger danger, on the other there is a rising tide of fear about out of control and dangerous youth. This book addresses both these debates about children's role in public space, setting them within an academic framework and drawing on a range of interdisciplinary work on childhood, young people and parenting. It is therefore relevant to practitioners and policy makers concerned with the nature and future of public space, and to academics researching or teaching about childhood, family or public space in the disciplines of sociology, social policy and geography.

1
Childhood in Crisis?

In the summer of 2002 two British schoolgirls, aged ten, went missing from Soham, Cambridgeshire, a peaceful rural town, and were subsequently found murdered. Their disappearance and tragic deaths attracted media attention around the world, and was marked by public mourning, the like of which had not been seen before. During the same year two boys, who had abducted and murdered the toddler Jamie Bulger in Liverpool, Merseyside in 1993, while only ten years old, came of age and were released from juvenile custody. The decision to release them rather than send them to an adult prison, and to provide them with new identities and protection to start a new life provoked an equally loud media and public response. These two examples of childhood in the UK capture twin contemporary fears about children as both at risk in public space, and as a cause of trouble in public space. This book is about these fears and the extent to which childhood might be considered in crisis.

The binary conceptualisation of children as both vulnerable and in need of protection, yet also potentially menacing and dangerous have a long history. The remainder of this chapter traces some of these debates about this moral landscape of childhood. This outline is not intended to be a detailed historical account, but rather seeks to draw out some of the key arguments that have characterised diverse understandings of what it means to be a child. The chapter then introduces academic understandings of the family, and of the concepts of space and community, before going on to outline the research about contemporary childhood and space that is used as evidence in the following chapters. Finally, this chapter outlines the structure and content of the remainder of the book.

Defining Childhood: Angels and Devils

The history of both childhood and parent-child relations are complex and contradictory. Aries (1962) (perhaps the most famous child historian) argues that in the Middle Ages children were seen as miniature adults, rather than as being in a distinct social category defined by biological age, and consequently no special provisions were made for them. Once children demonstrated capabilities such as reason, concentration and strength they took on adult roles including domestic service, apprenticeships, and education. It was only in the sixteenth century that children started to be defined in opposition to adults, and from the Enlightenment onwards, that this understanding of children – as a particular class of person – came to dominate our social imaginations (Jenks 1996). In other words, childhood is a social invention. As James and Jenks (1996) argue ‘[t]he biological facts of infancy are but the raw material upon which cultures work to fashion a particular version of “being a child”.’ This is a process ‘suffused with moral assumptions’ (Jordanova 1989: 4). Most notably, two contrasting narratives have come to dominate the way that we think about children. Jenks (1996) labels these Dionysian and Apollonian.

Dionysian understandings of childhood regard children as the inheritors of original sin, as possessing animal-like instincts: a wildness. Children are regarded as developing towards adulthood out of this state of primal animality. This is a conception of the child as a little savage or devil who is inherently unruly, and troublesome but who can be disciplined and socialised into adult ways of behaviour. It dominated understandings of childhood in the seventeenth century. For example, Takanishi (1978: 11) observes how at this time, ‘[t]he child was viewed in the child rearing literature as innately sinful but potentially redeemable through the constant and determined efforts of his [sic] parents.’

By the end of the seventeenth century a group of academics known as the Cambridge Platonists (including Ralph Cudworth and Richard Cumberland) began to propose a re-evaluation of childhood (Sommerville 1982). They advanced the notion that children possessed an innate goodness that is then corrupted by the social world they grow up in. According to Sommerville (1982: 121) ‘[t]his went even beyond the notion of the innocence of the baptised child. For “innocence” may only mean a neutral state – neither positively bad nor positively good. These men postulated principles of innate “sympathy” or “benevolence” that formed the basis of conscience and sociable behaviour’. This is the Apollonian understanding of childhood.

What followed in the eighteenth century was a debate on the nature of childhood in which Apollonian and Dionysian understandings of childhood were openly contested. On the one hand, there was a strong romanticisation of original innocence amongst contemporary novelists and poets, such as Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Rousseau’s Emile (1762), for example, explores the story of a boy growing up and how he develops naturally from birth under the guidance of a wise tutor. It is a sympathetic and sentimental portrayal of childhood that is often credited with marking the transition from the Dark Age of demonised childhood to a period of enlightened concern (Sommerville, 1982).

On the other hand, at the same time there was a backlash against the pro-child lobby. With the late eighteenth century rocked by the European revolutions and instability, notions of the rights of children were challenged in the UK by conservative writers anxious for an ordered society (Hendrick 1990). Among them Maria Edworth argued ‘Is it not a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may, perhaps, want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify?’ (Robertson 1976: 421).

However, gradually there was a fragmented emergence of the dominant notion of childhood innocence and the innate goodness of the child, violated by an evil society (Takanishi 1978). This view, that children began as ‘noble, unselfish and joyous creatures until society crushed or corrupted their spirit’ (Takanishi 1978: 11) was also adopted by Victorians. It was, however, a very elite notion that co-existed in the nineteenth century with a period of industrial capitalism characterised by the brutal exploitation of child labour in factories.

This led to growing concern amongst some middle class reformers who wanted to regulate certain forms of child labour. Part of this concern was based on a conceptualisation of children as a natural resource that needed to be nurtured and conserved but more pragmatically it also derived from a fear that ‘the brutalisation of [“working class”] children was contributing to the dehumanisation of social class’ (Hendrick 1990: 41) and that this would lead to moral and social instability. Education was perceived to be one way to instil discipline, respect for order and punctuality in working class children. According to May (1973: 12) ‘Schools were to act as “moral hospitals” and provide corrective training’. In this way education not only imposed middle class values on the general population, but also had the added advantage for the middle-classes of helping them to control their own children (Schnell 1979: 17). Education became a fundamental process through which adulthood was achieved, a marker of the transition to adulthood (Postman 1982, Archard 1993). Paradoxically at the same time education also signalled a move to a recognition of childhood as a special period of time separated off from the responsibilities of adulthood.

Ideologically related to the emergence of universal education was the construction of a notion of juvenile delinquency. In the early nineteenth century there was no separate legal system for the young and prisons increasingly became full of children. It was argued that these institutions were corrupting young people – and to coin a wonderful phrase of this period – ‘vomiting them back into society’, provoking growing concerns about delinquency. Takanishi (1978: 13) describes how ‘[r]agged unsupervised children roved the streets in small bands, sometimes stealing and breaking store windows’. This then was a period when the middle class saw working class children as a moral and physical pestilence, likening them to packs of ‘ownerless dogs’ (May 1973: 7). Above all it was feared that these children without a childhood were a threat to those that had one (Schnell 1979: 23).

Gradually judicial self-interest, the need to reduce prison costs and a growing awareness of children’s rights led to the first statutory distinction between adults and children in the form of legislation recognising juvenile delinquency. This legislation identified children as not necessarily responsible for their own actions and as requiring care and protection. When parents failed to provide this physical and moral care the State, the legislation decreed, had the right to act in loco parentis (May 1973: 12).

Reformatory schools were introduced as a way of remoralizing delinquent young people. These were, according to Ploszajska (1994: 413) ‘the very embodiment of contemporary belief in the latent power of the social and physical environment to influence behaviour’. Boys’ reformatories were established in rural sites, the antithesis of the corrupting environment of the city; while institutions for girls were located in suburban areas reflecting the domesticity that girls were expected to aspire to (Ploszaj ska 1994). Likewise, the development of the playground movement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, at the beginning of the twentieth century also reflected a desire on behalf of the middle classes to gain control over children and stop them running wild. In particular, middle class Americans at this time were concerned about the need for growing numbers of immigrant children to be assimilated into the national way of life (Gagen 1998, 2000). Playground regimes were established with the intention of creating appropriately gendered US citizens and correcting anti-social behaviour. Notably, they attempted to refocus the ‘natural instinct’ of boys to form street gangs into team sports in the playground.

Through legislation (in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and more critically the introduction of mass schooling (and later the National Health Service), Hendrick argues that the mythical condition of childhood was popularised and gradually a universal notion of childhood emerged. Steedman describes the changes which took place between 1870 and 1930 as a ‘profound transformation in the economic and sentimental value of children’ (Steedman 1990: 63). The economic value of children went down as there was a shift away from the child as labourer, towards a conceptualisation of the child as dependant. This was accompanied by a parallel change in family life and by new (literary, artistic and photographic) representations of childhood (Steedman 1990).

The development of welfarist protectionism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, variously improving children’s educational, legal, environmental, physical conditions and life-opportunities and the greater resources invested in children by parents (e.g. child oriented toys, fashions, foods, entertainments) have further fostered representations of childhood as a time of innocence and vulnerability when children are in need of protection from the adult world (Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers 1992).

During the twentieth century the length of time young people are legally defined as dependent on their parent(s) has been extended by a post-war increase in the school leaving age from 14 to 16 and more recently by changes in welfare provision which, for example, have driven up the age at which teenagers can first claim welfare benefits in the UK from 16 to 18. (Although paradoxically others, such as Neil Postman, argue that the length of childhood is contracting, with the media, fashion industry and technology all accused of blurring the boundaries between adults and children.)

In the twentieth century, ‘the family’, particularly the mother has been conceived as crucial to the development and well-being of children. It is primarily mothers who are held responsible for their children turning out ‘right’ (Hardyment 1990, Phoenix and Woollett 1991), as law abiding, ‘mature’ citizens (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989). As Phoenix and Woollett (1991: 18), argue ‘mothers in the UK are expected to be guardians of the liberal democracy by bringing their children up to be self regulating’ (Phoenix and Woollett 1991: 18). These idealised constructions of what it means to be a ‘good’ mother – which are primarily white and middle class – are particularly apparent in childcare and parenting manuals as well as everyday discourses (Marshall 1991). Working class mothers, single parents and mothers from minority ethnic groups who are perceived or assumed to deviate from these white, middle class ‘norms’ (Phoenix and Woollett 1991) are frequently accused by populist politicians and media of producing unruly or ‘dangerous children’. Yet numerous studies have demonstrated that such accusations have no foundation (Walkerdine and Lucey 1989).

The innate innocence and vulnerability of the child has also been reinforced in the late twentieth century through public discourses about stranger-dangers and child abuse (Cream 1993). As Kitizinger (1990: 158) points out ‘the victim is the child – and ultimately, childhood itself is at issue ... The concern is therefore, not just about the assault on an individual child but with the attack upon, and defence of, childhood itself (that institution and ideal which exists independently from, and sometimes in spite of, actual flesh and blood children)’. And she goes on to argue that ‘[i]ndeed, the sexual abuse of a child is often referred to as the “theft” or “violation” of childhood’.

The twentieth century has therefore witnessed the emergence of a conception of a coherent ‘universal’ childhood. Namely, that a child is temporally set apart from the adult world (although there are multiple and conflicting definitions of the age at which this division occurs); that children are innocent, incompetent and vulnerably dependent (on both parent(s) and the State); and that childhood is a happy and free time, lacking responsibilities. This is, however, the dominant imagining of childhood rather than reality experienced by most children. The experience of childhood has never been universal, rather what it means to be a particular age intersects with other identities so that experiences of poverty, disability, ill health, homelessness, being taken into care, or having to look after a sick parent have all denied many children this idealised time of innocence and dependence (James and Jenks 1996). Likewise ‘growing up’ has been based on the false assumption that social development follows on from physical growth and that it marks a transition from simplicity to complexity and from irrationality to rationality. The reality once again is that many children have to demonstrate maturity and responsibility at an early age (for exa...