Investing in Children

Policy, Law and Practice in Practice

Christine Piper

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134002665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Criminología

This book brings together insights from a range of disciplines, including law, sociology, criminology and history, to identify and explain the complex and inter-related factors which help or hinder the state to 'invest' in children and young people. The first part of the book examines the 'intangibles' - the ideologies, social constructions and moral precepts - which obstruct or encourage the passage and full implementation of legislation, policy and practice which hopes to improve the lives and prospects of children and young people. Notions of family and parental responsibility, assumptions about what children and young people 'are' and the extent to which they should be held accountable, and ideas around state investment against future risks are the key factors considered. The second part of the book focuses on the difficulties in practice of implementing policies aimed at investing in children's lives and futures. It reviews the role of science in the identification of risk factors related to poor outcomes for children and in the selection of target groups or areas for risk-based intervention to provide (early) support and preventative programmes for children and their families. It also assesses whether and how law does or could help to 'deliver' an appropriate investment of time and money in children, with a focus on the existence and effectiveness of a rights-based approach. The final chapters examine the results of research so far undertaken done on selected programmes in the Every Child Matters, social inclusion and Youth Justice Board policy agendas and they indentify promising developments. However, they also draw attention to the alternative agendas around children and young people which are competing for government money and the public's support and warn that there are dangers in a child-focused policy whose justification relies so heavily on future cost savings stemming from the production of healthier, more employable and law-abiding adults.

Part I

Remodelling the components: children, families and risk

Chapter 1

The ‘problem’ of spending on children

There can be no dispute that the UK’s position in the league table of child well-being in the EU is lamentable and that there is a need for more effective investment in services to support children, young people, their families and communities. (Hallam Centre for Community Justice 2006:1)

Our aim is to make this the best place in the world for our children and young people to grow up. (Ed Balls in DCSF 2007: Foreword)

A paradox

A vast amount of legislation affecting the lives of children and young people has been passed in the UK over the course of the last two centuries. At one time or another, Parliament has decided, amongst other things, that children must be educated, their employment forbidden or regulated, their diet supplemented, their health checked, their age of entry into sexual and marital relationships laid down and the sources of their financial support defined. Parliament has also specified the circumstances in which children can be removed from their parents, punished for their wrongdoing and, more recently, not only who should count as their parents when reproduction has been assisted but also how, legitimately, children can be ‘made’.

Further, as a collection of individual parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and friends, we spend millions of pounds on ‘our’ children. The total spend on Christmas presents in the UK is around £15 billion, working out at about £300 per person in 2005, rising to £390 in the run-up to Christmas 2006,¹ with another £500 or so on food, cards and accessories (Deloitte 2005), and much of this is child-driven (Tremblay and Tremblay 1995). In surveys some years ago, 35 per cent of respondents said that the most expensive presents they bought would be for children (PR Newswire 2003), with a fifth of all parents and grandparents saying that they would be spending more than £300 on presents for their children or grandchildren (AITC 2003). For those choosing private education, the current ‘typical’ total cost over 16 years of sending one boy to preparatory and senior schools, followed by university, will be around £300,000.²

The UK also has what appears to be a noble history in relation to child-focused legislation. There are well-known pieces of 19th century legislation, such as those concerning children climbing chimneys, going down mines or working in factories, and in the 20th century important Children Acts were passed in 1908, 1948 and 1989, dealing with issues as diverse as the establishment of local authority Children’s Departments, the legal criteria for care orders, inspection of foster homes and nurseries, juvenile courts, child employment and the death penalty. In addition to this child protection legislation, free compulsory ‘elementary’ education was introduced by legislation passed 1870–91 and free universal secondary education by the 1944 Education Act, whilst the National Health Service Act of 1948 impacted at least as much on children as adults, notably in relation to the previously very poor health and safety of mother and child during childbirth (see, for example, Titmuss 1938). Some of this legislation legitimated expenditure on children by bodies accountable to the taxpayer, such as inspectorates and local authorities, whilst other Acts mandated private individuals and businesses to help protect children – with economic costs for employers or parents. All were the result, at least in part, of attention being drawn to the deprivations endured by children and, as noted at the start of a book entitled A Better World for Children, ‘Little in life arouses moral indignation and demands moral judgements and action more than the suffering of children’ (King 1997: 1).

Negative attitudes to children

Yet, despite all this, the contention of this book is that the British, as a nation, have, historically, been ‘dead mean’ in relation to our children. Perhaps surprisingly, the history of much child-focused legislation is one of tardiness, reluctant acquiescence and incomplete implementation. Governments have, in practice, been reluctant to promote measures which require new or increased expenditure on children; parliaments have sometimes proved similarly reluctant to pass such measures and the courts have often shown timidity when interpreting legislation about children and families. For example, one of the most famous child protection acts, the first ‘Cruelty Act’ (the Prevention of Cruelty to and Better Protection of Children Act), passed in 1889, was preceded by a series of failed bills over several decades, whilst Part III of the Children Act, passed exactly a century later in 1989, did not, it is argued, establish readily available children’s services. According to Munro and Calder, ‘The 1989 Children Act set out a clear agenda on both family support and child protection, but it did not lead to the desired rebalancing of priorities and the use of resources’ (2006: 440).

The apparent reluctance of the state and its agents to intervene in the lives of children and their families or an inability to sanction sufficient expenditure is in contrast to what sometimes appears as a more willing propensity to punish the ‘wrong-doing’ of children. It is easy to find quotes which evidence a derogatory view of children and young people. The following are a sample of headings for news items in July 2007, a month in which Professor Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, the Children’s Commissioner for England, is reported to have told the General Synod of the Church of England that ‘Britain is one of the most unfriendly countries for children in the world’ and one with a ‘creeping criminalisation’ of young people through the use of anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) (Petre 2007).

‘Council uses web to fight yobs’ (Kablenet News 2007; Kable is a public sector IT company and this was a serious news item)

‘Sheds burned as vandals go on rampage’ (Fraser 2007; a news item in the Edinburgh Evening News referring to the work of the youth action team)

‘Yobs turning cities into No Go Areas’ (Sky News 2007; a news item on a report by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee)

One contributory reason could be prevalent public attitudes in the UK to children ‘en masse’. Lister (2005), surveying child-focused policies, has concluded that the UK has ‘a culture unsympathetic to children’; Qvortrup notes that he ‘would not hesitate to use Kaufmann’s notion of “a structural indifference” towards childhood and children on the part of corporate society’ (Qvortrup 2005: 7; Kaufmann 1996) and Vaughan (2000) goes further to argue that public responses to children who offend or behave anti-socially are evidence of an attitude akin to ‘child-hate’. Indeed, there appears to be some truth in the notion that the British have a higher regard for animals than for people and, to quote a newspaper headline, ‘The public worry more about Spanish donkeys than child poverty’ (Toynbee 2007a). A survey conducted in England by the National Children’s Bureau (NCB) found that 33 per cent of adults agreed that ‘the English love their dogs more than their children’ (Madge 2003), and a survey by Petplan in 2005 found that one in five pet owners in the south-west of England ‘love pets as much as their children’ (although respondents in the north of Scotland gave a much lower priority to the needs of their pets).³ Ferguson has highlighted a more alarming manifestation of public ambivalence to children – a ‘systematic distancing from children’ by professionals in child protection work which he considers to be ‘severe and dangerous’ and resistant to change (2004: 216). He sees this as arising, at least in part, from the ‘legacy of poor law attitudes where children are not seen as the deserving poor’ (ibid). One contention of this book will be that historical ‘bequests’ do indeed influence current policy.

Childhood ‘deficits’

Whatever the reasons for the apparently ambivalent status of children in the UK, it is accepted that children and young people in the UK have in the recent past experienced more material disadvantage than children in many other western countries. According to HM Treasury, ‘Child poverty increased dramatically in the last two decades of the twentieth century. By 1998, the UK had the highest child poverty rate in the EU’ (2005: para. 5.5). The increase was fourfold in the 20 years after 1979: the proportion of children living in households with an income lower than 50 per cent of the average increased from 9 per cent to 35 per cent (Freeman 2000: 522) and, in a 1995 UNICEF analysis based on 25 countries, ‘the UK had the third highest poverty rate after Russia and the United States’ (ibid). The number of households accepted under the UK housing legislation as ‘homeless’ increased year on year for Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) from 1980 to 1991, whilst the decreases in the 1990s were not uniform (Quilgars 2001: 105) and the trend is again upwards (Bradshaw and Mayhew 2005). Indeed, the homelessness charity Shelter launched a poster campaign in London in the spring of 2007 in which it publicised the fact that one in seven youngsters in Britain, with 400,000 in London, ‘trapped in squalid conditions’, are ‘desperate to escape homelessness and bad housing’.⁴ Many of the homeless are initially placed in temporary accommodation, and a study in 1987 showed that three-quarters of such homeless ‘units’ contained children and that couples with children spent on average 70 weeks in such accommodation (Quilgars 2001: 112).

In response to emerging evidence of these trends, the Labour Government, in power since 1997, set a target of halving child poverty by 2010 and ending it by 2020. Using a relative measure of child poverty, child poverty rates have been declining since 1999/2000 (Bradshaw and Mayhew 2005) and, so far, 600,000 children have been lifted out of poverty. However, the latest figures show that, whilst the proportion of children living in households with a relatively low income ‘fell between 1998/99 and 2004/05, from 24 per cent to 19 per cent on the before housing costs measure’, there was a small rise in 2005/06 to 20 per cent (DWP 2007a: 13) and, according to the definition used, as many as 3.6 million children remain in poverty (NSPCC et al. 2005: 15). One in four children in England, Wales and Scotland lives in poverty, ‘of which 16 per cent live in persistent poverty’ (ibid), and government policies have, therefore, ‘stalled rather than reversed the increasing levels of child poverty over the last 30 years’ (ibid). More recently, the Save the Children charity, in a report briefing entitled Living Below the Radar, stated that one in 10 children, amounting to 1.4 million, is living in severe poverty, with a couple with one child living on an average of £7,000 per year after housing costs (Save the Children 2007: 1). This has prompted the question as to why a 20-year programme was planned rather than, say, a 10-year programme. If it is an urgent issue, it is argued, the cost should not be spread over 20 years (Bradshaw 2001: 9; Hendrick 2003: 211).

There are other indicators that many children and young people are not experiencing happy periods of childhood and adolescence. A study based on interviews with 7–11-year olds in primary schools showed that children are anxious about global warming and terrorism and are stressed by national tests (Alexander and Hargreaves 2007). Whilst the infant death rate has continued to drop, as has the rate of death and serious injury from child pedestrian traffic accidents, ‘A range of health indicators for children and young people have taken a downward trend’ (Bradshaw and Mayhew 2005). The gap in infant mortality rates between the children with a parent classified as a ‘routine’ or ‘manual’ worker and children in the overall population has ‘narrowed very slightly’ in recent years but there has been a general widening of this gap since 1998 (DWP 2007a: 14). There has also been a much publicised sharp upward trend in the prevalence of obesity among all children aged 2–10 (ibid).

School exclusion rates are also on the increase, more children are now born to drug-using parents, more children are drinking alcohol in harmful quantities, and there is no reduction in the rate of suicides in the under-14 age group (Bradshaw and Mayhew 2005). ONS statistics showed a steady rise in suicides for the 15–24 age group from 9.9 per million of the population in 1977 to 20.4 in 1996 (Higate 2001: 179), an increase driven by the rising rate for young men, whose methods of suicide are more ‘aggressive’ and so more ‘successful’ (ibid: 180). More recent figures from the National Statistician show no clear trend in the UK over the period 1996–2005, with 0–3 children under 13 committing suicide in each year but with 16–39 children under 16 doing so in each year, with a latest figure of 20 for 2005.⁵

Bradshaw and Mayhew conclude that, ‘While overall the UK can claim that life is getting better for children, child well-being continues to be mixed: the list of improving indicators is more or less equal to the list of deteriorating/no change indicators’ (2005: Key trends: 4). Children in poverty, and their parents, suffer a variety of linked disadvantage. In particular, the economic and employment status of the household in which a child lives affects his or her well-being. Further, processes of polarisation and residualisation in social housing in the 1990s in the UK impacted on the schools attended as well on the housing lived in by children (JRF 1999): policies such as the ‘right to buy’ council houses and more choice in selecting schools have led to estates and schools with a much narrower class base. Research by the Institute of Education as part of the Millennium Cohort Study showed, for example, that many children from disadvantaged backgrounds are up to a year behind more privileged youngsters educationally as early as the age of three (Ward, Sullivan and Bradshaw 2007; for the full study see Hansen and Joshi 2007). Multiple disadvantage has become concentrated in particular geographical areas and the inhabitants are more likely to experience social exclusion.

All of the above issues were given a high profile in 2007 when UNICEF published another report on the well-being of children in 21 industrialised nations which put the UK bottom of the table and generated the following headlines in national newspapers on 14 February:

‘Betrayal of a generation’ (Daily Mail)
‘British children: poorer, at greater risk and more insecure’ (The Guardian)
‘Britain’s children: unhappy, neglected and poorly educated’ (The Independent)
‘British youngsters get worst deal, says UN’ (The Daily Telegraph)
‘Britain’s children are unhappiest in the Western world’ (The Times)

In response to the report, the Children’s Commissioner for England, Professor Sir Albert Aynsley-Green, is reported to have said, ‘The findings are disheartening but not surprising as they echo what children tell me on a daily basis’ (Womack 2007).

Barriers to change

The poor life experiences of children, catalogued above, are well documented. These findings are rarely contested and few would disagree that ‘There is no question that the biggest cause of poor outcomes for children is poverty and social exclusion’ (MacLeod 2000: 14). One of those poor outcomes – because crime is rarely a good career choice – is offending by young people. There is ample research evidence that minors imprisoned for serious crimes are very likely to be seriously disadvantaged with abusive backgrounds, and Chapter 5 will review some of this evidence. However, a widespread acceptance of these links ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Remodelling the components: children, families and risk
• Part II: The mechanisms for, and success of, investment policies
• References
• Index