Children Behaving Badly?

Peer Violence Between Children and Young People

Christine Barter, David Berridge, Christine Barter, David Berridge

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781119996064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Children Behaving Badly?

Violence between children is a controversial and frequently misunderstood issue, one that has seen media-fuelled moral panic come to dominate public perceptions and debate. Children Behaving Badly? presents a powerful challenge to commonly held beliefs about peer violence and portrays it as an important child welfare concern.

By gathering together the most updated international research and expert commentary on peer violence issues from across the childhood spectrum, this volume directly addresses the complexity of this troubling issue from a range of multidisciplinary disciplines and perspectives. Contributions throughout the text reveal how childhood is not a homogenous experience but fragmented by gender, ethnicity, sexuality and poverty, which are each addressed within specific chapters. Other issues explored include pre-school children and peer violence, bullying, youth gangs, knife crime, teenage partner violence, sibling abuse, homophobia, international media depictions of violent youth, and implications for professionals working with children and young people.

Throughout the text, new and original research insights are presented with the goal of providing the reader with a greater understanding of the safeguarding of children and young people from this form of violence. Children Behaving Badly? is essential reading for policy makers, researchers, students, and practitioners from a wide range of child welfare disciplines about a highly topical and complex social problem.

1

Introduction

CHRISTINE BARTER AND DAVID BERRIDGE

BACKGROUND

Children behaving badly are a national scandal, a crisis never before seen, where children are out of control and dangerous. The streets are filled with hooded gangs of feral youths, while children routinely intimidate, attack and stab each other. Adults are no longer respected, their authority, values and laws disregarded. The rule of the street, governed by delinquent sub-cultures, has replaced the comfort of family values, with ever younger children being initiated. Or so we are led to believe. This represents, it has been argued, nothing less than a contemporary moral panic (Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001).

It is unclear what facts are submerged in this mist of rhetoric. How great a social problem is violence between children and young people? Has there been an unprecedented escalation in children’s violence, or has such violence always been present but lain unrecognised and hidden, as with child abuse and domestic violence? Who are these child perpetrators and their victims, and what can we do to safeguard all children and young people’s welfare in this area?

This book was conceived as a dispassionate and considered response to these questions, and to challenge some of the erroneous beliefs that surround children’s violence or, as one author describes the problem, ‘toxic childhoods’ (Palmer, 2007). Such ideologies around violent and out-of-control childhoods not only pervade public attitudes and prejudices towards children and young people, but also influence how policy makers and practitioners respond to these problems through, for example, social welfare settings, education and the criminal justice system, including the courts.

Not all forms of peer violence receive equal recognition or concern. Although we acknowledge that professional and public attention, mediated though a moral panic agenda, can be unhelpful and counter-productive, some aspects of peer violence fail to reach public or policy consciousness. Indeed, a common form of violence between young people occurs on the battlefield, where the UK and the US have deployed 18-year-olds in armed conflicts – for example, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps the only form of peer violence to come under sustained public and policy scrutiny, apart from, unsurprisingly, young offenders, has been school-based violence, generally conceptualised as bullying. Why some areas receive unparalleled attention while others remain concealed is open to interpretation.

However, a plausible explanation surrounds wider power inequalities. Children’s violence that directly challenges societal norms or institutions, such as that involving young offenders or some forms of school-based violence, is perceived as necessitating intervention, whereas peer violence that reflects wider power structures, especially inequalities based on gender, sexuality and ‘race’, continue to be tolerated (see Chapters 7, 10 and 13). In reality this has meant that little shared understanding has developed concerning the similarities and differences between different forms of peer violence, including the messages each can bring to best practice. There is an urgent need to inform understanding and professional responses in this complex and contested area of child welfare.

OVERVIEW OF OUR WORK ON PEER VIOLENCE

Both of us have wide experience in the field of child welfare research. Over the past 15 years our joint work, funded by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), a large UK children’s charity, has focused mainly on under-recognised and under-researched areas of peer violence. Initially this interest started with our research on NSPCC investigations into children’s allegations of institutional abuse (Barter, 1998). The analysis revealed that young people’s allegations concerned abuse by peers as well as staff. Yet many of the NSPCC investigators interviewed felt that their recommendations concerning peer abusers were often viewed with less importance by the commissioning authority than those relating to staff.

Our interest in peer violence was further intensified in our subsequent work on young people’s experiences of racism and racial harassment (Barter, 1999). This review showed that peers, rather than adults, were the main instigators of racism. However, from a child protection perspective, the review also found a lack of social work awareness regarding the impact of racial harassment and violence on children and young people, and an absence of practice guidance in the area.

These findings led to our research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under its Violence Research Programme, on peer violence in residential children’s homes (Barter et al., 2004). The research was the first UK study to focus exclusively on peer violence in this context. The level of peer violence we found in children’s homes was a major cause of concern. It is important to acknowledge that settings with very similar resident groups exhibited very different levels of violence, indicating that violence is socially determined and not simply an individual preoccupation. The conceptual framework developed from this research, based on young people’s narratives, is used in this volume by Andrew Kendrick (Chapter 6) to look at peer violence across all out-of-home settings.

While the aim of the research was to explore violence between children’s homes’ residents, it also exposed another form of peer violence: teenage partner violence. Many of the girls interviewed spoke about their boyfriend’s use of violence and control. A subsequent review of this area (Barter, 2006, 2009) showed that, although a body of evidence existed in the US, very little research had been undertaken in the UK. Similarly, policy understanding and professional awareness of this form of intimate violence, as distinct from adult experiences of domestic violence, was also disconcertingly absent. The editors have since undertaken two studies on partner violence in teenage intimate relationships, one of which is reported in Chapter 8 of this volume (Barter et al., 2009; Wood, Barter and Berridge, forthcoming).

We have therefore explained our interests and credentials for embarking on this book. Similar themes were taken up in other related work (e.g. Berridge et al., 2008; Kilpatrick et al., 2008). But undoubtedly a main driving force for undertaking this book was the children and young people who have shared their experiences with us over the past 15 years. Throughout our work on peer violence, the most consistent and powerful findings have been children’s and young people’s own testimonies on how peer relationships, and especially those involving violence, are among the main causes of anxiety and unhappiness in their lives; and that these concerns remain largely unacknowledged by, and unreported to, adults. For example, when we explained our current research on violence in teenage relationships to participants, the response below was common:

Zoe: That’s cool, someone’s fighting our corner.

DEFINITIONS AND MEANINGS

Violence is a disputed concept. In this book we have adopted a wide definition of violence that incorporates physical, sexual, emotional and verbal forms. We use Kelly’s (1988) conceptualisation of a ‘violence continuum’, in which different forms of violence can have a similar impact. Thus we do not impose a pre-determined hierarchy of harm in which, for example, physical violence is given priority above other forms. This reflects children’s and young people’s own evaluations where non-physical forms of violence can be seen as damaging as violence involving physical force, as illustrated below:

Having names called is worse … because it hurts you more … If you have a fight … the pain goes and it heals, but having been called whatever is always at the back of your head.

Fiona, 14, quoted from Barter et al., 2004, p. 29

We have used a definition of childhood that spans birth to 18 years. As much previous writing on peer violence has focused on older children and adolescents, we wanted to ensure that we compensated for this by including work on younger children’s experiences, especially preschool children (see Chapter 2).

The age of 18, in many respects, legally defines the end of childhood in the UK. Some ambiguities to this threshold exist – for example, the state’s responsibility for children ‘looked after’ can extend, at least in theory, into the early 20s. Nevertheless, reaching the age of 18 is generally seen as marking the final transition from childhood to adulthood. Unfortunately, the signifiers of adulthood, in terms of employment, housing and independence, are often severely restricted (Elliot, 1994). Thus, delimitations between childhood dependency and adult autonomy may be more theoretical than practical, especially for disadvantaged groups. While acknowledging this inconsistency, we have attempted to retain the age of 18 as the upper age limit for this book. Violence from young adults, especially men, has attracted considerable attention in research and policy, and we wanted to ensure that our focus remained on children’s experiences.

VIOLENT CHILDHOODS – PROTECTION TO PUNISHMENT

Violence between children is a complex and controversial area and one where media-fuelled trepidation about an epidemic of violent children has come to dominate public perceptions and debate. Often such concern is based on appalling and therefore high-profile, although exceptionally rare, events. Major public concern in the UK can probably be traced back to 1996, when two 10-year-old boys abducted and murdered the two-year-old toddler James Bulger. The coverage of the murder, and the representation of the two 10-year-old boys in the press, by police and the courts as ‘born evil’ and demonic, were a watershed for how childhood deviancy in the UK has come to be perceived (Holland, 2004). The public was especially shocked by the very young age of the murderers. The imagery of a moral collapse prevailed where children, who are supposed to be innocent and protected, turned into killers. This case led to an intense and continuing scrutiny concerning the meaning of childhood, and especially the duality of the innocent/evil child. In this discourse, the innocent and therefore pure, angelic and uncorrupted child, who is in need of our protection, is juxtaposed against the evil, wilful and demonic child, who is in need of constraint for the protection of society (Higonnet, 1998). As Scraton warns:

The conception of ‘evil’ within the aberrant child has long traditions … It resides permanently beneath the surface which presents a veneer of tolerance and understanding in direct contrast to the forces released once a child or young person steps out of line.

Scraton, 1997, p. 167

Children quickly transgress from protection to punishment with little regard for the wider factors that may influence their actions. Once a child transcends one state to another there is little chance of redemption – through their actions they have relinquished the right to their own childhood. Again, this is illustrated in the Bulger case where the children were put on trial as adults, not juveniles. Owing to public outcry against these children, the then Home Secretary attempted to increase the 10-year sentence given by the courts to 15 years (although this was overruled by the Court of Appeal and criticised by the European Court of Human Rights).

Following this, as argued by Brown (2007), a new consensus emerged on the way in which children have come to be viewed by the state, where their own vulnerability and victimisation have been replaced by a more pronounced concern directed at curbing their anti-social and deviant behaviour. This is put succinctly by the following quotation from a young person:

Some kids get left out of being seen as victims. They don’t seem vulnerable, but just because they don’t seem vulnerable doesn’t mean they aren’t. Often the worst behaved are the most vulnerable.

Evans, 2004, p. 15

A comparable media and public outcry occurred more recently in 2009 when two brothers, aged 10 and 11, abducted, tortured and sexually humiliated two boys aged 9 and 11 in South Yorkshire (Doncaster Safeguarding Children Board, 2010). The boys, who were in the care of Doncaster social services at the time of the attack, were convicted in an adult court in January 2010 of causing grievous bodily harm. They were given indeterminate sentences, although they would be eligible for release in five years. Since 2004 the same authority has seen seven children die in suspicious circumstances, leading to a number of serious case reviews (Bennet, 2009), but these deaths failed to receive the same degree of media and public anger and condemnation that was directed at the brothers, who had not killed.

It is important to remember that not all countries view their children in this way. A year after James Bulger was murdered in Liverpool, England, a similar murder occurred in Trondheim, Norway – the Raedergard case. The response could not have been more different. Whereas in the UK the child murderers were represented as evil and in need of punishment, in Norway they were seen as innocent, in need of protection and rehabilitation (Franklin and Larsen, 2000). We should perhaps ask why some countries, including the US (Elliot, 1994), have so readily embraced such malevolent depictions of their young, while others question what their society has done to fail their children so terribly and how this can be amended? In the UK some commentators have argued for a similar approach to be adopted – for example, Johnston (2007) reported Professor Sir Al Aynsley-Green, the then Children’s Commis­...

Table of contents

• Cover
• THE NSPCC/WILEY SERIES in PROTECTING CHILDREN
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Peer Violence in Different Contexts
• Part II: Different Forms of Peer Violence
• Part III: Understanding Peer Violence
• Part IV: Responding to Peer Violence
• Index