: 9 he moral panic this summer over naming paedophiles, initiated by the News of the World, has calmed down, and a somewhat more reasoned debate is taking place. But still the real issues underlying abuse and neglect - the relations of power within the nuclear family, the hierarchy between children and parents, girls and boys, women and men - are ignored.
The ruling class simply can not accept that the family, the basic unit of capitalist society, is a place of oppression, violence and abuse.
While around 40 investigations are ongoing into sexual abuse in children's home, going back to the 1960s and 1970s, the idea that such abuse is also part of family life for many children, is unthinkable.
Ever since the Cleveland affair, when large numbers of children were identified as suffering from sexual abuse within the family, the powers that be have tried to refute the information, ridiculing medical and social work professionals who have uncovered it, denying its existence. In November this year the NSPCC published their report Child Maltreatment in the United Kingdom: A study of the prevalence of child abuse and neglect. It was widely reported in the broadsheet press and media.
At the come Time Newsnight on November investigated the long term, systematic abuse within and around one family, while Panorama on 26 November looked at the probably wrongful conviction of a care worker for sexual abuse of boys in a children's home.
The complexity and difficulty of these issues is at last being aired - albeit mainly within sections of the 'quality' media. The Panorama programme exposed the fatal flaws of a police investigation which, after allegations of sexual abuse in a children's home in the late 1970s to the early 1980s, trawled for further evidence by interviewing large numbers of ex-residents of the home. working alongside solicitors who made clear the likely compensation available for victims resulting from a conviction.
While making it clear that sexual abusers should be prosecuted and victims compensated, the programme argued that the two should not be mixed together. Although two care workers had admitted sexual abuse and were imprisoned, the third man, still in prison for crimes which he refutes, seems to be the victim himself of unscrupulous allegations by men seeking compensation.
Perhaps more shocking was the Newsnight investigation. Focussing on one family, it followed up allegations by a young woman about sexual abuse perpetrated by her stepfather on herself and her two sisters. All three were abused by him from a young age. Worse, they were also subjected to sexual and physical abuse by other men for money.
When one of the sisters inevitably became disturbed, running away from home, attacking one of her sister's abusers, she was put into a children's home, where further abuse took place. Despite complaints to the police at the time and since, little was ever done. Even now, police seem reluctant to investigate the stepfather, who admitted the sexual abuse - though that is not what he called it. This case also focussed on the complexity of abusive sexual relations within the family. One of the sisters had taken over her dead mothers' place, including in her stepfather's bed, and seemed genuinely sympathetic towards him, even as she argued she was doing it, 'to save him abusing others', including his grandchildren. Although the programme was somewhat unscrupulous, using hidden cameras to film the stepfather describing his behaviour, recording his sexualised and misogynist ref erences to young girls, it brought home in a Crisis in the home graphic and emotive way the terrible effects of such an upbringing, whose experiences can never be forgotten.
The issue of how children can be equipped to reject such sexual behaviour, or to report it if forced to participate, has also been raised. The importance of children being comfortable with their bodies, of recognising sexual abuse, and being able reject it or tell others about it has been emphasised, as well as the need for sex education so that children can tell the difference between harmless play among peers and non-consenting sexual activities between older people and children.
The NSPCC Report however, points out that it is not always easy to differentiate between these two types of behaviour, especially between siblings. 'Sexual relations with and between children and young people are hard to define in relation to abuse? (Quoted in The Observer, 19 Nov)
While the BBC programmes focussed on singular examples, the NSPCC Report was based on interviews with nearly 3,000 people between the ages of 18 and 24, asking them if they had experienced either sexual abuse or physical neglect when they were under 16 years old.
In fact the resulting figures for sexual abuse within the family are not as high as might have been expected. But the reporting, even in the 'quality' press, concentrated on the 4 per cent who reported sexual abuse, of whom "43 per cent said it had been committed by a brother or stepbrother, compared with 19 per cent who named their stepfather, and 14 per cent who named their father."
This apparently unexpected result - that stepbrothers and brothers represented by far and away the highest number of abusers -has "turned on its head the widespread belief that adult males are the most likely abusers." (The Observer 19 Nov)
The other part of the NSPCC Report was given hardly any press coverage. This is hardly surprising, as the figure of 6 per cent of young adults reporting serious neglect during childhood is in sonne wavs nore startling, and especially as the neglect was blamed almost exclusively on mothers.
Furthermore as the synopsis published by the NSPCC on its website argues: "The study underlines the link between child neglect and disadvantage. Respondents in semi or unskilled employment were ten times more likev to have experienced serious absence of care in childhood than were respondents who were in professional jobs and almost twice as likely as those in higher education."
While sexual abuse and violence against women within the family do not respect class differences, neglect is much more often the result of dire poverty and deprivation.
The tragic and apparently motiveless murder veat old Damilola Taylor in Peckham at the end of November, reveals the end result of neglected and desensitised children and teenagers, brought up on run down estates, excluded from school, with no state resources dedicated to their upbringing other than policing. Local social services are unable to support any children but those in immediate danger of sexual and physical abuse; there are no youth clubs in the area; many young people are banned from using the local leisure centre; and the culture of drugs provides not only a way of blurring the harsh realities of life but also a way of making money. Discussion of the NSPCC Report has made much of the high incidence of sibling abuse, but we should not be surprised by this. Nor does it shift the debate away from the family. Rather, it underlines the fact that every member of a nuclear family is touched by its oppressive and hierarchical nature. In the 1970s socialist feminists identified the family as the key site of women's oppression. They also recognised that children too are oppressed by the relations within the family. Developing ideas from Friederich Engels' Outlook The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, first published in 1884, socialist feminists analysed the bourgeois 'nuclear family' as the primary social unit most appropriate for the development of capitalism. It was able to fulfil a number of functions simultaneously. It enabled the cheap reproduction of a future labour force, the servicing of the present labour force, again on the cheap, and the place where ideology could be reproduced, including the enforcing of a heterosexual norm. All of these tunctions of course relied on the cheap or free labour of The introduction of the 'family wage', supported equally by the ruling class and the male-dominated trade union leadership in the late 19th century, encouraged the adoption of the nuclear family by the working class, to avoid the social breakdown predicted by Engels.
it led to women's paid work outside the home being subordinated to that of the adult male members of the family. But this too suited the ruling class. It • meant mal women along with young adults, could be part of the reserve army of labour, brought into and expelled from the workforce according to the 'demands' of the economy, at the same time threatening wages by being used as a cheap source of labour.
More generally the family was analysed as a microcosm of capitalist society as a whole. Not only reproducing the heterosexual norm, but also competitive individualism, hierarchy and unequal relations of power.
Giving male adults a power denied them in society at large, power over women and children, the nuclear family reproduces in its most intimate relations the worst aspects of social relations under capitalism.
While women and children are subject to often violent and damaging sexual abuse and neglect, within this system of oppression women also become capable of violence abuse and neglect of children. The myth of the 'dysfunctional' family is just that, a myth. The bourgeois nuclear family is in itself dysfunctional.
Much of this socialist feminist analysis has been on the back burner of feminist understanding over the fast decade or so, having been overtaken by the seductive relativism of postmodern misunderstandings. But it is essential that we grapple with these ideas again if we are to understand what is happening to and within the family, as well as to society more generally.
While such an analysis suggests little can be fundamentally altered without larger changes in society as a whole, this should not stop us from putting demands today for the amelioration of conditions within and between families.
We should be demanding a huge increase in money for social services and other local government undertakings such as youth clubs; money should be made available for community projects dedicated to children and teenagers.
One such project locally, Kids Company, successfully run by a psychotherapist, is threatened with closure, and the coordinator has been forced to raise money from charity, despite helping 200 or so local children.
We should defend sex education in schools against those who would leave our children in ignorance; we should support women's organisations which have fought for rape in marriage to be made a crime, and for those who have defended women who have killed abusive partners. Harriet Harman, Blairite Labour MP for Camberwell and Peckham, suggested she didn't know what to do to change the situation in the area. If that's the case she should resign, and we can elect the Socialist Alliance candidate, John Mulrenan, a UNISON activist, who knows very well how to respond to the demands of the local people for local and national government money for the area.