As usual Bystander you have hit a very prevalent and intractable social problem smack on the head.
We need to see the White Paper to comment properly. It looks like the government plans to widen the legal powers to make parenting orders - for which, see:
http://www.yjb.gov.uk/en-gb/yjs/...ParentingOrder/
That is not necessarily a bad thing if it avoids (at least sometimes) the kind of criminal court appearance to which Bystander has referred. However, parenting orders are not going to be some "silver bullet" solution to truancy and the anti-social behaviour and youth crime to which it leads.
I would be interested to hear Somerset's considered views on this one. Perhaps he has some straightforward solution. If he has, society has not noticed it yet.
The issue of sentencing for the purported impoverished is raised again. It's a hot topic.
I find Bystander's take on this so deeply saddening because I believe it is consistent with that of the majority of others in authority who seek to exclude and marginalise their lessers.
Free education is a great privilege - and hard fought for - and parents who deny that to their children are not the victims. Their cruelty and vindictiveness against their children must not be exused because of their fecklessness and their refusal to work.
In paragraph 4, BS is (as I am) clearly dissatisfied with the guidelines.
I suggest the fine should be automatically maximised for those on benefits (barring the legitimately incapacitated) and then contractually waived in accordance the perp's future performance.
So, in the case of Miss S, 1,000 fine payable at 5 per week and waived in the sum of (say) 100 per month for every month that she remains off benefits.
One year of work, and all is forgiven.
Not much to ask.
Of course, the "relevant authorities" (oxymoron?) could get together, decide that little Wayne is 'at risk' - from something or other - and have him taken into care.
Then mum doesn't have to go to Court or be fined out of her already mimimal and State-provided funds.
And, next time Wayne does a runner from school (or someone notices he hasn't turned up for a few weeks) - "The Social" can explain he is totally beyond control and that THEY are not responsible.
"The issue of sentencing for the purported impoverished is raised again".
The law requires me to have regard to means in sentencing. So that's what I do.
Poverty isn't always the issue here. Inadequacy and alienation often is.
Sneering at poverty as 'purported' is simply insulting to the many poor but decent people who do the best they can.
I repeat that this is not a criminal justice problem, but a social one. Your suggestion of fining a hand-to-mouth single mother a thousand quid is simply ludicrous.
As well as illegal of course.
If this law had been in place ten years ago I would likely have been fined and/or imprisoned.
The result would have been that:
(a) I would have a criminal record, not good for employment
(b) My daughter, who had as it turned out some chemical imbalance in her brain for which drugs were available but could not because of some other law be prescribed for children, would have suffered guilt as well as severe depression from which she might never have recovered.
This is supposed to be good for who precisely? As it was, I was torn between doing the best I could for my daughter and doing what the law said. There is no way that these two things should have been in conflict. The only response of the authorities was to subject both of us to interminable, useless and oppressive meetings, counselling, letters and threats.
Luckily, I was sufficiently resilient to fend them all off. Many people aren't. Doesn't make them criminals.
(Incidentally, it all turned out well in the end as we educated her at home and despite having no qualifications at all she is happy, sparkly, bright and gainfully employed - I bet that would not have happened either)
'Free education is a great privilege - and hard fought for - and parents who deny that to their children are not the victims. Their cruelty and vindictiveness against their children must not be exused because of their fecklessness and their refusal to work.'
MichaelO 10.34am
Michael, the value and privilege of getting an education matters not to the average teenage truant, who would much rather be hanging around outside school than in it. It is a very unusual parent indeed who has the power to compel such a person to attend school.
I don't think you understand what Bystander was writing about at all, but consider this scenrio which is far from unusual:
The lady described by B has has a series of relationships with men during her son's lifetime, some of whom beat her. An all too common occurrence. The son will have picked up on this behaviour and may repeat it, so sustained pressure from Mum to attend school, stay in after 11 pm, not take drugs, not shoplift Stella, not hang around on street corners etc will result in her getting a wallop. She will be a victim again.
I agree with B - a different remedy is need to deal with truants, which involves positive action with the child, not punishing parents that have little or no say in the matter.
"The truancy problem is important and complex. It needs painstaking, down-and-dirty work at the school, on the estate and in the home. It will be expensive and unglamorous. It may well fail anyway. But it's more use than dragging an inadequate mother into the dock of a criminal court."
Exactly Bystander and you should add that these measures would not help to get them re-elected as any results would not be apparent for at least a generation or two and by then they would have had their noses in some other trough long ago.
Bystander, you say:
"It needs painstaking, down-and-dirty work at the school, on the estate and in the home. It will be expensive and unglamorous. It may well fail anyway."
I think that it just needs a new government, one that has the courage to properly set and enforce customary societal and family values and one that leads by uncorrupt and perfect example...
(...like wishing for pie in the sky).
Bring back flogging is the simple answer to many of British society's current woes.
Being judicially flogged removes any feeling of superiority one may have, and really encourages one to conform to society's norms, lest the punishment be repeated.
"Prison works"? No...
...corporal punishment works.
Anyone have another option, one that actually works?
@Michael:
I could not disagree more with your proposal.
Even if flogging once worked (which I suspect we shall have to disagree on), it seems to me unlikely that bringing it back would work now. Times have changed, they really have. I was caned once, unjustly, and 40 years on I still remember and resent it. Breeding resentment is not the answer.
Nor is 'just' a new government the answer, particular if it is one that believes it has the power or ability to enforce societal change through the criminal justice system. If you hadn't noticed, that is the government that we have now.
Schooling won't work if people don't want to go, it doesn't get better for anyone else or for the individuals concerned if people are forced to go there, and the whole thing is a horrible mess that will take painstaking slog to sort out.
I suspect - though part of me doesn't want to say this - that the only relatively short-term answer that will work is to resegregate schools. Not on the basis of ability but on the basis of those who want to learn versus those who don't. They need different treatment. I doubt, though, that any government would have the courage to do that, so we are probably left with painstaking social-work slog with patchy results.
Are you a troll, MichaelO? I cannot believe that anyone intelligent enough to spend more than a couple of minutes reading Bystander's blog could so utterly fail to miss the point of his thread.
Imprisoning parents for their child/children not attending school has been going on for some time now. I heard a programme on Radio 4 in which some of the parents and children affected by the law discussed their experiences.
The general conclusion was that it didn't have any affect on truancy rates.
Another bit of headline grabbing fluff legislation that doesn't deal with the real causes of truancy.
Nail on the head indeed, BS.
I'm not entirely sure it is fair to tar 'Miss S' with the tag of being an 'inadequate mother', but certainly if anyone is to be fined I wouldn't mind pursuing the inadequate father.
Truancy and the justice system should never be bedmates.
@Biker
I think it is fair (if not "nice") to call Miss S an inadequate mother. But I think the penalty should be against the "child" (a hulking 15-year old - more sensibly called a "youth" in my view). But the idea of dealing with the father is a better one.
'But the idea of dealing with the father is a better one'.
I agree. But you have to find him first........
It's a rarity, but I agree with you here Bystander; hopeless parenting of this kind is not a matter for the CJS.
@Bystander
In this case, the mother knows who it is, and one assumes he is also on the birth certificate. Or are you saying the police would be unable to find him? Making a punitive, deterrent example of a useless absent father would surely also have a deterrent effect (however small) on teenage pregnancy, which at the moment has no effect at all on the father.
Sorry Ed, in my experience the underclass doesn't work that way. Even with the mother's cooperation how do you find the bloke who had a one night stand a decade and a half ago?
http://tinyurl.com/lexv4g
Absolutely pointless in trying to bring these supposed fathers to book.
It is absolutely beyond my comprehension that a man can walk away from his child no matter the circumstances. No matter the relationship with the mother. No matter how hard how tough, it is a truly selfish and pitiful individual that does not place his kids at the very centre of his being.
It is almost a genetic instinct a primeval force call it what you will.
So if a man can walk away from that do really think he will have any recognition of the state telling him otherwise.
if they dont feel it they dont feel it. Very sad but very simple, just move on.
@Bystander
You're right - I was thinking of "Lee" and "Donna" - Lee's father left only after he was born, so she knew who he was. In general, of course you're right.
Imagine the long-term effect of a government DNA database - it would be possible to know who everyone's parents were. That might even cause ructions for philandering wives (or husbands).
Quote - "In this case, the mother knows who it is, and one assumes he is also on the birth certificate."
That is one big assumption. Many fathers are not named on birth certificates. That is so whether the mother knows who the father is or, as is sadly often the case, does not know. As Bystander so elegantly put it - "a one night stand a decade and a half ago?"
Punishing the parent(s) will not equip them or motivate them to control their children. From what I see in Court, most parents with errant kids have no idea how to parent them properly and by the time we see them the time for effective parental discipline is many years past.
I do think parenting orders are a good idea, though one rarely sees them ordered these days as the Youth Offending Teams appear to have an aversion to them. Many parents would appreciate the support.
Forcing children back into schools where they have been disruptive or will be, simply transfers the problem onto ill-equipped teaching staff and will have a detrimental affect on those young people who attend school and gain benefit from it.
It seems to me that the responsibility for parenting and discipline rests first and foremost at home and immediate family. Where this isn't working intervention should be effected, where that fails removal of the child from the environment either full or part time should be a possibility.
The difficulty is in doing this early enough. Once they are into their mid-teens and have established a pattern of misbehaviour, turning them round requires almost a vocation.
As usual, neither government nor commenters turn to what many educators and sensible parents have known and said for decades: halve the class sizes, especially in the early years, and recruit and train really good candidates for the crucial years between age 3 and 8, when numeracy, literacy, and social skills get imbedded in the synapses.
Even children with apparently-adequate parents can get wrong-footed and ignored by tecahers fire-fighting in a class of thirty children. Very few children are actually unteachable at three or four *when they're taught by well-trained and experienced teachers* with a reasonable adult-to-child ratio.
As a society, we don't seem to understand or accept that the sheer cost of dealing with a self-created underclass is vastly greater than that of investing in our primary schools, which is where a child's native abilities can be honed or destroyed. With boys, in particular, class size and mindful management from a very young age is absolutely crucial, because so few of them have decent role models to follow.
The glaring stupidity of this truancy legislation is that it addresses the problem far, far too late. A boy out on the streets at 15 can't be reached by this method; and all it will do is reinforce the view that once again, Eve has failed Adam.
No matter how willing a mother is to try and do her best for a child, she cannot overcome the effect of an under-funded, under-staffed school which factory-processes 30 kids per class at a time. I have two higher degrees, a supportive husband, and a good kid, and we couldn't do it; but it's a damned shame that with a lot of family help we could get our kid into a fee-paying school with smaller class sizes, when we knew that every child should have the same basic advantage.
If I were a 15 year old who could barely read and write and had internalised failure I'd reckon that my mum going to court and getting hit with a fine was just another example of what made me and her a loser. If I went to school I'd just be sitting at the back of the class continuing to not learn while the teacher addressed with brighter ones or the willing ones or the ones who could be marked as "best value added". Meantime, my homies would be out earning social status and money doing crime.
We don't invest in the little ones, the big ones come out the other end as poor material, and so it goes.
But no doubt somebody will say this is sentimental or simplistic or both; but it isn't. It's just not aggressive; and it's not rocket science, either.
Call it "Aversion Therapy", not "flogging". Not to bad then is it ?
It's posts like this one which give me great faith in the judiciary. While you're dragging the BBC bigwigs into your court to see some cases, could you drag the government in too so you can open their eyes too. I think they need it even more.
I forget who said it but it reminds of the quote "to every complex problem there is a simple solution... and it's wrong".
Your overtly political views really are not compatible with your office.
[One of my colleagues is a Councillor, and another is a member of the House of Lords who takes a party whip (on the opposite side to the councillor). I think that means they have party views, but they are both good impartial JPs - ed]
Edited By Siteowner
Re Katherine @12.05
Spot on and you could add that at those early ages the children are normally very willing to go to school and even the inadequate parents are more than happy to leave them in the care of someone else.
Its the only way that the vicious circle of bad parents begetting anti-social children who become bad parents will be broken but that is long term and the average politician is far more concerned with short term personal matters.
I agree with judicial flogging, but only for boys/young men. You can't expect a six-foot and gormless son to respect his mother if you've just flogged her - more likely he'd take it as an example! Flogging should only be up to the age of 21, from 12 say, and never for girls.
However Bystander often reports young male defendants with either no interest in court proceedings or complete defiance. The prospect of birching on conviction might concentrate their minds. I expect it would work as well in modern times as it ever did. We would have to trust Bystander and his colleagues to judge correctly when corporal punishment would prove corrective and when it would be pointless or unjust. (People reporting that they still rankle at an unjust beating years afterwards show the power of this punishment to affect the mind. The punishment is as much the indignity as the pain.)
Turning to the main point of the post though - the root cause of so much crime and educational failure seems to be single motherhood. Most young criminals seem to be bastards in the literal sense.
We should address the born-out-of-wedlock problem. At the moment it's subsidised rather than condemned. Really it's a cancer eating away at our society, and it appears to be hereditary. What's more, the tax and benefit rules make marriage breakdowns actually beneficial. That's mad. Someone in a high place seems actively to want the country to collapse under the load of its underclass.
The solution is tough love - children born out of wedlock should be taken into care on birth unless the single mother can show independent financial means. The children should be fostered/adopted by married couples who will give them a good upbringing on the straight and narrow. (In essence this means: take babies from lower class mothers and give them to middle class families and hope blood isn't thicker than water.)
Of course as soon as this becomes the rule very few babies will be born out of wedlock since there would be no gain to the mother - no flat, no benefits, no status. Just changing the rules should, largely, fix the problem. Not many babies would have to be taken away from their mothers.
"Your overtly political views really are not compatible with your office."
P Johnson
Remind me again what Bystander's political views are, would you, Mr Johnson? Would being concerned about truancy mark him out as a member of the CommonSense party, perchance? ( http://www.commonsenseparty.org.uk/ )
If not, here is a list of some 300 parties registered with the Electoral Commission - perhaps you could indicate your choice? http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/...area/uk/
bpp.htm
Myself, I support the Protest Vote party. "Whatever it is, I'm against it...!"
@ Nationalist.
Imm curious as to why you draw a distinction with Women/Girls and would not flog them.
If you have the time or inclination it would be good to hear your reasons.
Cheers
Sorry, I'm calling a halt on the corporal punishment stuff too. Two reasons - it will never come back into use anywhere in the civilised world - and it's a magnet for nutters. Any further flogging stuff will be redirected to the dodgier shores of the Web and deleted from here.
Yeah - nail some sense into them LOL good grief.
@smuggler (and Bystander)
In view of Bystander’s moratorium on the discussion of corporal punishment I can’t answer your question.
To Bystander I would urge a more liberal attitude to what can be discussed. Don’t forget you have been immersed in the touchy-feely world of social work and probation for decades and this may have skewed your perceptions to the point that people you consider “nutters” could actually be talking sense.
I suspect that many of your commenters, myself included, have never had any contact with the criminal justice system in any capacity, never knowingly met a social worker or a member of the underclass, other than fleetingly. We are untarnished by the system, and since we are the majority we are also by definition, normal.
@Nationalist
I suspect that many of your commenters, myself included, have never had any contact with the criminal justice system in any capacity, never knowingly met a social worker or a member of the underclass, other than fleetingly. We are untarnished by the system, and since we are the majority we are also by definition, normal.
"Untarnished" by any actual knowledge of the subject. But still bravely holding an opinion. To quote Scott Adams, author of "Dilbert": "When Did Ignorance Become A Point Of View?"
@Nationalist
Your self confessed ignorance of the people you refer to is entirely self evident, you really need not spell it out.
Try typing 'corporal punishment' into Google or usenet and you will see what I mean about nutters.
That is search engine traffic I can do without, thanks.
As in,I would imagine,virtually everything in this universe its where you draw a line between two absolutes.Capital and state sanctioned corporal punishment are,as Bystander says are retrograde and unacceptable in a would be civilised world but I do get a little tired of the approbation heaped on very many good and responsible parents by idealistic people who cannot tell the difference between a savage beating of a child and the short sharp shock of a slap on the bum.
I can assure you I speak from much experience as a father of four and innumerable grandchildren.
Comment deleted due to stupid schoolboy attempt at profanity. One more like that and you are out of here - ed
Edited By Siteowner
The major problem with this as I see it revolves an unenforceable piece of paper called a hone-school contract. This supposedly lays out the duties of the school, the parent and the child in obtain their state education.
Currently, it is a waste of time and effort by all parties as it is not as contract in any sense of the law (more a 'compact, I guess). This White Paper suggests maiki8ng it enforceable on only one of the the parties - so no equality of arms. No sanction of the school fails to deliver as per the 'contract'.
Also, many years have been spent trying to ensure equal access to all state schools via the admissions system and a statutory code of practice; this suggested legislation will undo that at a stroke, because those schools that only want good, well-attending pupils will simply write very stringent contracts.
My final point is that this particular government are very good at 'government by tabloid'. Put a proposal out and see how strong the condemnation is. If too high, quietly drop the proposal.
"It needs painstaking, down-and-dirty work at the school, on the estate and in the home. It will be expensive and unglamorous. It may well fail anyway."
It will fail anyway *. The only possible way of preventing more Miss Smiths is not paying them to have babies and not giving them houses. But we won't do that, because it would be cruel to the child. As the only option for Miss Smith would then be to find an earning male willing to take on her and her child, it would also incur the feminist wrath of our rulers. It won't happen until some political cataclysm occurs.
Getting pregnant is a pretty rational option for an uneducated teenage girl. Money (not much) and house (of a sort, but enough) follow. An 'independent' life, without any of the tricky stuff that a young, working childless person would have to deal with - like not being able to afford a house.
* for evidence of it not working, Charles Murray.
"Our grandparents thought you couldn’t “do” with a youngster who wasn’t brought up right. Today’s translation: social programmes for intervening with children at risk have consistently meagre results. This finding has even longer shelves of analysis than the literature on the children of single parents.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Americans tried everything: pre-school socialisation programmes, enrichment programmes in elementary schools, programmes that provided guaranteed jobs for young people without skills, ones that provided on-the-job training, programmes that sent young people without skills to residential centres for extended skills training and psychological preparation for the world of work, programmes to prevent school dropout, and so on. These are just the efforts aimed at individuals. I won’t even try to list the varieties of programmes that went under the heading of “community development”. They were also the most notorious failures.
We know the programmes didn’t work because all of them were accompanied by evaluations. I was a programme evaluator from 1968 to 1981. The most eminent of America’s experts on programme evaluation — a liberal sociologist named Peter Rossi — distilled this vast experience into what he called the Iron Law of Evaluation: “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social programme is zero.” The Iron Law has not been overturned by subsequent experience."
@Laban
That is politically unacceptable, therefore it is not true. Shame on you.
When we were sentencing for "Failure to ensure" etc, we commented afterwards to the local authority prosecutor on the rarity of the event. We asked them to expand on why the prosecutions had been brought.
They explained that they prosecuted the parent (Bystander is regrettably correct: it is usually "parent" not "parents", and it's usually the mother) only when the Local Authority felt that it was the parent was part of the problem. If the parent shoved the kid through the school gates, and the kid vaulted the fence, then the school would deal with the child and the Local Authority would try to help the parent. No blame as such would be attached to the parent.
However, they prosecuted the parents because they didn't turn up to discuss the home-school contract/ compact, parents' evenings, didn't reply to letters/ phone calls, etc. They prosecuted because the Local Authority didn't feel that the parents took kids' schooling seriously.
Truancy is a difficult problem: we can only fix it if schools, society and parents work together against the children. If parents aren't doing their part, they undermine the wider effort, and they should be prosecuted for it.
That's what I think, but I appreciate I'm neither a parent, nor a teacher, nor a member of a Local Authority. Neither do I know anyone under the age of 21. I know I must have driven my own parents demented at times, so all parents (even those that get prosecuted) have my respect.
@Laban, every time I find commenters complaining about young women getting pregnant, I reckon they're male. It is true that for a young woman of the lower classes, pregnancy makes some sense; not necessarily because of benefits but because of the place it gives her in her soical milieu: she's somebody, she's a mother; she has somewhere to fit and has a position which society professes - untruthfully, by the way - to respect.
Motherhood gets a lot of lipservice but is the most hated position in the world to occupy. "Oh, she's/I'm just a mum" is a phrase you'll hear everywhere, in terms of disparagement.
I suggest you get off your high horse and go do something useful instead of serving up this nonsense about how young women get pregnant for benefits; it may be true in some cases, but they are truly a minority. Life is more complex.
Yes Katherine,it does go deeper than that, in most cases its basically a way of getting a respected identity, if you are uneducated,or badly educated,have very little ambition,virtually nil job prospects,bombarded by garbage from the media, do not have to worry about a place to live or how to feed yourself or you child and then gradually you sink to a level which becomes permanent and then you are virtually beyond help.
Early education is the key with plenty of carrot and just a little stick in the form of personal responsibility gradually changing to less carrot and a lot more encourage ment to control and fund your own life and find a decent place in society.
In this world you are what you do.
AnotherJP, the education authorities take the same view and practice here. I was squeamish about sentencing in that court before this was explained in some detail. Not afterwards, though it is always sad I think.
@jerym, thanks. I've seen it all, read the studies, have friends whose children are in that position, watched well-meaning mothers with terrible family backgrounds themselves try hard and *still* end up with kids who are at best just barely managing, who became overly-young parents themselves, and for whom staying away from crime or getting an NVQ Level 1 in some sort of beautician's course are *huge* achievements. They have neighbours across the street whose children take pride in getting sent to the young offender's institution, whose father eggs them on to get there; and when his wife objects, he hits her.
These new laws won't do anything about that lot and they wouldn't have helped my friend, either. The one thing that helped her keep her children away from crime was having a roof over her head; as long as she had that she felt she could teach them to stay honest, if not to practice birth control. I hate to think howthings would have been for her and her family if she hadn't had a basic level of benefit.
Is there a problem with being male, Katherine ?
""Oh, she's/I'm just a mum" is a phrase you'll hear everywhere, in terms of disparagement."
Very true. One of the reasons (only one of many, mind) why fertility has collapsed among the baby-boomers.
I think, Katherine, you should listen to the wise words of the late Sayyid Qutb, executed theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood. While I don't agree with everything he says, he makes some good points :
" ... [the] family provides the environment under which human values and morals develop and grow in the new generation; these values and morals cannot exist apart from the family unit. If, on the other hand, free sexual relationships and illegitimate children become the basis of a society, and if the relationship between man and woman is based on lust, passion and impulse, and the division of work is not based on family responsibility and natural gifts; if woman’s role is merely to be attractive, sexy and flirtatious, and if woman is freed from her basic responsibility of bringing up children; and if, on her own or under social demand, she prefers to become a hostess or a stewardess in a hotel or ship or air company, thus using her ability for material productivity rather than the training of human beings, because material production is considered to be more important, more valuable and more honourable than the development of human character, then such a civilisation is ‘backward’ from the human point of view ..."
@MichaelO
I saw your deleted comment in my RSS feed (reminder, I am not the editor). You seem to think of yourself as some sort of hero. Only you think that.
@Laban:
You quote a male writer from a notoriously misogynist and essentialist tradition and then ask me if there's a problem with being male? Let's start with the problem for men of how to get over themselves and their male privilege, which includes defining what a woman's "basic responsibility" is, thus: " if woman is freed from her basic responsibility of bringing up children ...".
Women, like men, are human beings, first and foremost, and the responsibility for raising children is the responsibility of both parents and is not exclusively the remit of the female. And don't go all biological essentialist on me on this one, you'll lose.
"Free sexual relationships" and relationships based on lust are male issues when they are linked - as they are - to physical and financial power. It isn't a woman's version of Paradise to be issued with 70-mumble virgins. Of course Sayyid Qutb didn't want women in the workplace: it means that women gain the economic and social power to stop being domestic sex workers.
When serial fathers are made to step up to the plate and take long-term responsibility for the effects of their one-night stands, or their broken relationships, when men start accepting that their definitions of women and women's place are not the sole valid definitions, we'll have some common ground in society. Until then, yes, there is a problem, for men, with how they define and act upon their masculinity. And truancy, and sentencing, are part and parcel of men legislating for male convenience, because after all it's women who are "responsible" for raising the kids, nothing to do with me, mate, if the kid skives off school.
T'chah. Male privilege doesn't even actually benefit men; if it did we'd not have such a preponderance of males up in court. [shakes head and gets coat HERE]
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