Hearing the Voices of Children

Social Policy for a New Century

Christine Hallett, Alan Prout

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134474981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Hearing the Voices of Children provides a fresh perspective on social policy. At the heart of the book is the emergence of 'children's voices' and the implications of this for social policy. The authors argue that children's voices should be heard much more strongly in the process of policy formation at all levels. Although there is growing support for this idea, it is not without opposition, and the authors themselves make many critical points about the current attempts to put it into practice.The book is divided into four main themes: hearing children's voices; discourses of childhood; children and services; and resources for children. Childhood experts from the UK, Scandinavia, Germany and Australia, examine how assumptions and models about childhood and discuss ways in which children's voices might become more influential in shaping policy. There are many obstacles to overcome, but the contributors to this volume show that children's participation is possible, and needed, if services are to be improved.This book is essential reading for students and academics in the field of childhood studies, sociology, social policy and education. It will also be of interest to practitioners in the social, child and youth services.

Part I
Hearing children’s voices

1 Participation, policy and the changing conditions of childhood

Alan Prout

Introduction

During the last two decades many societies have seen an accelerating movement towards ideas about children’s participation and voice. Enshrined in Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, these notions have gathered both general support and efforts at practical implementation. Indeed they have become part of the rhetorical orthodoxy, even among those such as the current English government who have not otherwise been notably enthusiastic proponents of children’s rights. For example, the Children and Young People’s Unit, recently established to develop a ‘joined up policy’ in this area, states that:

We want to hear the voices of young people, influencing and shaping local services; contributing to their local communities; feeling heard; feeling valued; being treated as responsible citizens.

(Children and Young People’s Unit, 2000: 27)

In this chapter I will discuss some of the sociological background to the emergence of these phenomena. My central theme is that general social changes in the last twenty-five years have shifted the conditions and experiences of childhood, destabilising ideas of what it is and what it should be.¹ These shifts are complex, often contradictory, and not necessarily beneficial for children. However, I suggest that these changes, and the destabilisation that they have provoked, provide an essential context for understanding the emergence of children’s voice and participation that is the focus of many chapters in this book.

The century of the child

In a volume first published in 1900 the Swedish social reformer Ellen Key argued that the twentieth century ought to become ‘the century of the child’ (Key, [1900] 1909). In the decades that followed its publication this phrase came to stand for the strategic identification of children as a point of intervention in and investment for the future. Through the activities of both the state and civil society, childhood was turned into a project. In part this was concerned with protection and provision for children – very great resources were expended on all manner of services that have improved children’s lives and well-being. At the same time, however, these actions also rendered children as objects of knowledge brought into the adult gaze, to be surveilled, studied and understood. In consequence, countless books and papers have been written about how children develop and how they can be shaped as future citizens and workers, such that childhood has become, as Nicholas Rose has famously put it:

the most intensively governed sector of personal existence. In different ways, at different times, and by many different routes varying from one section of society to another, the health, welfare, and rearing of children have been linked in thought and practice to the destiny of the nation and the responsibilities of the state.

(Rose 1989: 121)

And yet a century later the optimism about childhood and society that animated reformers such as Key is less pervasive and seems less convincing. On the contrary, the prevailing cultural mood about childhood in European and North American societies seems to be one that is at best puzzled and anxious, and at worst hostile. Why, many seem to ask, after all this effort and expenditure, does childhood seem to escape our purpose and intentions?

In this chapter I will explore one (partial) answer to this question. It concerns the adequacy of the socially available representations of childhood (see also Hendrick, 1997: ch. 4; Holland, 1992). Public discussion, I suggest, seems to struggle with an ambiguity about childhood, caught between two different but equally problematic images of childhood: children in danger and children as dangerous (see also Chapters 5, 6 and 7 of this volume). The first of these, children in danger, pictures childhood through ideas of dependence, vulnerability and idealised innocence. Its positive side is that it draws attention to important social problems like neglect, poverty and safety in public spaces but it often turns into a sentimentalised version of childhood that is saturated with nostalgia for an imagined past. Paradoxically it demands an ever more watchful protection and control over children as activities once routinely open to them, like playing together in the street, are seen as increasingly risky. Fuelled by deeply tragic but thankfully rare events, such as child murder and abduction, media exaggeration of the risks children experience plays an important part in raising levels of concern. As parents become ever more anxious about children’s safety in public space, there is a proliferation of special locations that concentrate groups of children together so that their activities can take place under more or less constant adult surveillance and supervision ( James et al., 1998; McKendrick et al., 2000; Furedi, 1997). From this point of view the space of childhood becomes narrower, more specialised and more under the adult gaze.

The second image, children as dangerous, is concerned with contemporary children as a threat to themselves, to others and to society at large. In it children are identified as personifying the supposed ills of contemporary society, such as crime, moral decay, consumerism and economic failure. Again sensationalist journalism seems ever ready to over-interpret statistically rare events, such as violent crime by children, with a shrillness that sometimes descends into demonisation (see Jenks, 1996: ch. 5; Davis and Bourhill, 1997). This too gives rise to an increasingly instrumental attempt to extend control over children. The persistence, if not the genesis, of social problems is sought in the upbringing of children and, as a result, ‘early intervention’ and ‘prevention’ policies loom large. But prevention, as the political philosopher Richard Freeman argues, is caught in an accelerating recursive cycle (Freeman, 1999). As societies become more complex, prevention becomes more difficult to engineer; but the failure of such interventions summons up merely a renewed commitment to further prevention. The cycle is one in which children, as a primary target of prevention, seem caught in a system that can respond to its own failure only by ratcheting up control.

Throughout the twentieth century, then, social concerns about childhood have been caught between ideas of children as in danger and notions of children as dangerous. Public policy in particular has had a tendency to zigzag back and forth between them, as the exponents of one or other end of the divide gain a temporary upper hand. I contend, however, that neither of these representations of childhood is adequate to understanding the position of children in contemporary society. What is required is a more adequate way of representing childhood. The seed of this, I suggest, is found in the idea of children as social persons, a notion that has also gained increasing currency, especially towards the end of the twentieth century. It is expressed, for example, through Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In many countries it is being turned into a practical reality through local and national projects that have begun to devise effective means for consulting children and involving them in decision-making (see for example, Davie et al., 1996; Flekkoy and Kaufman, 1997; Franklin, 1995; Freeman et al., 1999; John, 1996; Lansdown, 1995; Hart, 1992).

At the core of this movement is a gradual rethinking of ways of representing children, where ‘representation’ can be understood in a double sense. In its cultural sense representation refers to the socially available images and concepts through which children are thought about (and think of themselves). However, representation also points to the role of children in governance, suggesting that children might be involved in processes of decision-making and policy formation. I will suggest below that, by linking the cultural and the governance notions of childhood representation, a way out of the slot-rattling impasse between the image of children as in danger and children as dangerous might be found.

The changing conditions of childhood

Before doing that, however, I want to consider how, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, the conditions of childhood and the experience of children in Europe and North America have changed in significant ways. There is, of course, considerable variation between countries. They have, for example, different welfare state regimes, with quite distinct forms for the relationship between families, markets and the state, different conceptions of childhood and different patterns of intra-familial relations (Dahlberg et al., 1999; Pringle, 1998). Whilst not ignoring these differences, five important general trends that can be seen more or less across Europe and North America can be identified.

First, there has been a general decline in the birth rate, an increase in life expectancy and an ageing population. For example, the countries of the European Union now have fertility rates below the threshold of generational replacement. As a result it has been projected that in Europe by 2025 the numbers in the 0–19 age group will fall by over 10 per cent (European Commission, 1996). It is as yet unclear what the implications of this are for children. However, some social policy analysts have argued that we have seen, and will see a further, redistribution of social resources away from children towards older people. This raises important issues about how justice in the distribution of resources between the generations can be achieved and maintained (Thompson, 1989; Sgritta, 1994: 361). These are linked to questions about how children’s voice will be heard in decisions and debates about resource distribution.

Second, there is evidence of an increased differentiation of the life circumstances of children. One well-known source of this is family change. Most industrialised countries have seen a steady demographic decline in the nuclear family. This itself is the product of a number of linked trends in population and household formation. These are: a decline in the number of marriages and a rise in the number of divorces; an increase in cohabitation, especially in the northern European countries; and a diversification in family types, including the growth in stepfamilies and lone parent families (Ruxton, 1996).

There are differences between countries but the overall trend and general direction is the same. In the UK, for example, the number of nuclear families has fallen from 38 per cent of all households at the start of the 1960s to 25 per cent by the mid-1990s. Although children living in two-parent households are still the majority, the proportion living in single-parent households has doubled, to about 20 per cent, over the last thirty years (Clarke, 1996; Office for National Statistics, 1999).

Although all this has taken place against a background of generally rising living standards, there is evidence for an increasing differentiation between the children who share most in growing affluence and those who have benefited least. A recent study based on OECD data asked whether income distribution between children is becoming more unequal. It appears that it is. Of the seventeen countries studied twelve showed growing income inequality between children (Oxley et al., 2001: 378). International comparison of trends in child poverty presents a complex picture and is subject to many methodological difficulties. Nevertheless, a recent analysis of Luxemburg Income Study data suggests that during the last quarter of a century the proportion of children in families with less than 50 per cent of median income rose in eleven of the twenty countries studied. These included Australia, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK and the USA (Bradshaw, 2000: 240).

This leads me to a third trend. For, although national comparisons remain useful and revealing, they also remind us that the twentiethcentury notion of society as a distinct, geographically bounded entity is in decline. The nation-state as a unit has decreasing purchase on the emergent realities of the new century. ‘Societies’ thought of as ‘national’ units are less and less able to secure their increasingly porous boundaries and more and more adopt a lower-level defensiveness that seeks to regulate and moderate the powerful new global flows of the people, information and products that penetrate and traverse them (Urry, 2000). These processes have implications for childhood. One aspect of this is well illustrated by the research on ‘transnational childhoods’ carried out by Thorne and her colleagues in California, raising questions about the variety and complexity of childhood in a rapidly changing and more mobile world (Orellana et al., [1998] 2001). This research shows that children are moving backwards and forwards over national boundaries, forming and reforming, joining and separating from households. They have families (or are members of households) both in the USA and in another country (for example, Taiwan or the Philippines). Such flows create childhoods that are different from those often assumed by schools and other public services. These children are usually not those of the wealthy but of poor families using both kin and non-kin links within the USA as a route of social mobility. This is not a new phenomenon but it is one that seems to be increasing in scale, adding to the diversity of childhood in a given society.

However, there is another aspect of this situation that is sometimes overlooked. In addition to people, transnational mobilities also involve flows of products, information, values and images that most children routinely engage with in one way or another (see, for example, Buckingham, 2000). This flow of products, information, values and images has profound implications for socialisation. Contemporary social science has for some time recognised the increasing complexity of socialisation processes that occur when young children begin to spend a large part of their daily life away from the family – at school, in after-school clubs or in day care institutions. This gave rise to the idea of ‘double socialisation’. The German educationalist Giesecke (1985), however, has suggested that we now also have to acknowledge that children, like adults, live in a pluralistic society. They are confronted by a range of competing, complementary and divergent values and perspectives from parents, school, the media, the consumer society and their peer relations. He suggests parents, teachers and other people with responsibility for the care of children have less power to control and steer these different factors as a whole. It becomes, therefore, important to understand children as individually and collectively trying to make coherence and sense of the world in which they live (Christensen and Prout, 2002).

The fourth trend concerns the ways in which the twentieth century has witnessed increased levels of institutional control over children. The introduction of compulsory schooling in many but not all countries and children’s formal exclusion from paid work signalled a historical tendency towards children’s increasing compartmentalisation in specifically designated, separate settings, supervised by professionals and structured according to age and ability. Nasman (1994) has called this process the institutionalisation of childhood. Throughout the twentieth century schooling has gradually been extended both ‘upwards’ (for example in incremental steps towards an older leaving age for compulsory schooling) and ‘downwards’ in the growing emphasis on pre-school education and nursery provision (Moss et al., 2000). Even leisure time is often framed in this way for many children because activities such as sport or music increasingly take place within some kind of institutional setting. It can be seen in the provision of after-school and holiday clubs that organise and regulate children’s activities under an adult gaze, channelling them into forms considered developmentally healthy and productive. Such phenomena have been noted across European societies. German sociologists, for example, have used the term ‘domestication’ to describe the progressive removal of children from the streets and other public spaces and their relocation in special, protected spaces. They use the term ‘insularisation’ to describe the decreased levels of children’s autonomous mobility around cities and the creation of special ‘islands’ of childhood to and from which they are transported (Zeiher, 2001, 2002).

Within these institutions, but with significant variations according to national policy, it is possible to discern a tightening of the effort to regulate children and to shape more firmly...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Hearing children’s voices
• Part II: Discourses of childhood
• Part III: Children and services
• Part IV: Resources for children