UNDER THATCHER of course, 'There was no society - only families'! The apparent collapse of society now is presented as anything but the result of gorernment policies.
The breakdown in schools is the 'teachers' fault', or a result children. of 'lack of parental control'. The fact that the Halifax school competes with lour grant maintained schools leaving the most deprived children to sink, is left unmentioned.The fact that resources have been cut while pupils with special needs have Tamiles. been integrated into mainstream schools, that a national curriculum has been imposed giving teachers little leeway to teach material with any relevance to children. that league tables make the school's need to succeed paramount over the child's need to learn - all this goes unsaid.
Similarly the perpetrators of child abuse are typecast as solitary, evil, and untreat able mistits. But the tact is, Ike te kut Neeve case in Cambridge, most chine physical, verbal or emotional, is carried out in the family - where Tory 'family values' are presumably to be found. Even in the West case, while not all those abused were blood relatives of the perpetrators, there was abuse within the actuallv family and in some ways the other young women were treated almost as 'adopted' The closest most reports get to recognition or this is to describe such families as "dysfunctional' , part of a cycle of ral punishment. abuse. not exactly genetic. but very dificult to break, and nothing to do with 'normal' So the publication of the NSPCC report on child abuse ( National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children: Childhood Matters ) whose cetinition incudes sexuai physical, verbal and emotional abuse and which claims a million children a year abused in has not been welcomed. If lack of discipline at nome ane in schoo is me exo a- ing. nation for the apparent social breakdown, the Tory remedy is for greater discipline, including the right of parents and teachers to smack and cane their Pals. While it is well known that abuse in families is no respecter of class or wealth, nonetheless une suress or lving in poverty nas clearly exacerdalea tne problem for many. But for a government which denies me very concept or poverty, (at the same time as one in three British people see themselves living below the poverty line: Bristol University Statistical Monitoring Unit) the idea that their policies could have produced a society which 1ll treats its children in such large numbers is unpalatable indeed As for the solution, how much essier o excude more charges. The Tories who call children from school, build for the return of the birch and more prisons (especially pricapital punishment can be side- vate ones so that the Tories lined as 'nutty extremists', by business friends can profit) and their own side, but Tory social make life sentences mandatory policy in general, and on educa- for second-time serious sex and tion in particular leads inevita- violent offenders. For the proper funding of special bly to pressure to reintroduce abusive measures to maintain needs, the introduction of councontrol. Even the Secretary of selling and treatment for people State for Education, Gillian who can't cope, is a much more Shepherd, a teacher herself, is long-term, expensive affair: in favour of the return of corpo- and no way to make money!
Switching funding from invesThe contradictions between tigation to prevention, as the Report proposes, will not enTory policies and their rhetoric on education and the family are sure all these new prisons are glaring. Surely Tories ask, profitably full to capacity. some form of physical punish- For socialists and for femiment - a quick slap, a sharp nists, the Report's findings on smack - does no harm? The the scale of child abuse are not attack on such disciplinary ne- such a shock. Feminists in the cessities in a report on child 1970s, analysing the role of the abuse - surely this is taking the family in capitalist society, loliberalism of the 1960s too far? cated it as the place of oppresThe Report is wrong to equate sion and of the abuse of power, sensible discipline with child usually by men against women abuse, junior health minister ana chiidren. More recent Simon Burns is quoted as say- prominent cases - the West case in particular - have also The Report claims that exposeu me lact wal women much abuse is committed by too are capable of the abuse of ordinary people under extraor- power against those who are dinary pressures. Not solitary vinerole For a feminism that sees misfits, but ordinary individuwomen as a class and men, whatever their class, as the oppressor, the idea that women can abuse children (as well as other women), has been impossible to understand. But for socialist feminists, whose analysis combines class with sex oppression, and who characterise capitalist society as a society based on power and privilege, whose overriding concern is with pront rainer than need, defended if necessary by force, it comes as less surprise that sex and power are intimately linked, that in certain circumstances peopie are capable of violence, including extreme and sexual violence, agalnst ouels.
With the Labour Party spokespeople vying with the Tories for greater punishments for offenders, any analysis that places crime in the context of the society in which it is perpetrated; that uses statistics to show the correlation between criminality and unemployment, with all its acompanying attacks on human dignity -homelessness, poverty, lack of self-worth and high levels of suicide - such analysis is unheard. Instead we are left with the judiciary opposing the draconian proposals for mandatory sentences introducea by Michael Howard for the new session of Parliament!
Far from reversing the abuse children suffer, or solving other social ills of Britain today, this bipartisan approach on morality and punishment is entirely reactionary. It will put Britain's prisons on a par with Singapore and Thailand.
And as California has found, simply putting more and more poor people in prison does not make the city streets any safer.
paedophilia, unruly school children - is all part of a 'moral Punishment not prevention is the cure. The people concerned are 'evil", 'infecting' our schools, 'polluting' our This is used in the pre-election bandwagon where it is increasingly difficult to tell the two main parties apart, and where the Liberal Democrats have a more radical social