Risk Aversion in Childhood: Notes

Antisocial Behavior

  • Halesowen Incident (2006):
    • Police arrested and DNA tested three 12-year-olds for climbing a cherry tree on public land.
    • Police defended their actions, stating they aim to prevent escalation of low-level crime.
  • Willow Park Housing Trust (Manchester):
    • A three-year-old Ben Mann was accused of antisocial behavior for playing football and causing a disturbance.
  • Impact of Antisocial Behavior:
    • Causes genuine anguish in communities.
    • Leads to restrictions on children due to parental fear.
  • Overreaction to Minor Problems:
    • Adult hostility to minor misbehavior is not new.
    • Trend for police and public services to impose formal sanctions for petty offenses is new.
  • Rod Morgan's Concern:
    • Too many children are being criminalized for behavior that could be dealt with informally.
  • Police Perspective:
    • West Midlands Police receive about three million non-emergency calls a year, mostly about antisocial behavior.
    • Concerns are often about young people just being present in public spaces.

Play Fighting

  • Changing Attitudes:
    • Play fighting is natural behavior for young mammals.
    • Once overlooked, now banned in many nurseries and schools causing anxiety for parents.
  • Penny Holland's Argument:
    • Play fighting is a sophisticated, unconscious learning process, not animal aggression.
  • Psychological Benefits:
    • Helps children perfect social skills, read facial expressions and body language, and understand their position in peer groups.
    • Children are skilled at distinguishing play from real fighting, unlike adults.
  • Adult Anxieties:
    • Fear of blame if children are hurt or upset.
    • Belief that allowing such play is bad practice.
  • Ironic Outcome:
    • Deprivation of experiences that help children navigate social situations and stay safe.
    • Labeling boys who engage in play fighting as troublemakers, leading to self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • Distinguishing Play from Antisocial Acts:
    • Important to differentiate between play fighting and deliberate antisocial acts.
    • Play fighting is a formative experience, not a predictor of a life of crime.
  • Everyday Morality:
    • System of rules learned through social interactions, guiding decisions on helping others, responding to jokes, standing up for oneself, dealing with abuse of power, and trusting others.
  • Learning Social Behavior:
    • Learned through parental guidance, witnessing adult behavior, and peer interactions.
  • Balanced Public Policy Response:
    • Encourage proportionate measures that acknowledge the importance of self-directed experience.
    • Support communities in resolving differences before involving official bodies.
    • Depends on trust and mutual respect between people of all ages.
  • IPPR Research:
    • Adults in the UK are less willing to address low-level public misbehavior by teenagers compared to other European countries.
    • Disproportionate responses deprive children of experiences needed to learn social interaction.

Bullying

  • Daughter's Use of the Term 'Bullying':
    • A personal anecdote about the author's daughter using the word "bullying" to describe teasing during a treasure hunt.
  • Bullying as a Serious Problem:
    • A 2007 report indicated that around a third of young adults experienced bullying in childhood.
    • Mobile phones and social networking sites provide new contexts for bullying.
    • Bullying can have devastating effects on victims' lives.
  • Excessive Risk Aversion in Anti-Bullying Initiatives:
    • Definitions of bullying are broadening, showing signs of excessive risk aversion.
  • Traditional Definition of Bullying:
    • Sustained, repeated maltreatment based on a power imbalance.
    • Distinguished from less serious conflicts and disagreements.
  • Valerie Besag's Perspective (2002):
    • Teasing, challenging, and critical comments have a place in normal childhood interactions.
    • Over-protectiveness can thwart decision-making skills, imaginative play, and creativity.
    • Adults should be vigilant but intervene only when necessary.
  • Michele Elliott's Definition (2006):
    • Bullying is any behavior that causes pain, even teasing.
  • Recent Research Definition:
    • Bullying is any form of victimization or harassment perpetrated by another child or young person.
  • Problems with Broad Definitions:
    • Redefining all unpleasant behavior as bullying doesn't solve the problem.
    • Adults may overreact and suppress behavior that helps children learn to deal with difficult social situations.
  • Tackling Bullying as a Risk Management Problem:
    • A balanced approach is needed.
    • Blurring the distinction between bullying and less serious conflicts hinders effective management.
  • Importance of School Playgrounds:
    • Playgrounds offer opportunities for socialization and face-to-face interaction in a relatively adult-free space.
    • Distinguishing between bullying and everyday unpleasantness is crucial.

Child Protection, Vetting, and Contact Between Children and Adults

  • Central Herts YMCA Example:
    • A plan to have teenagers volunteer to help older people with computer courses was scrapped due to child protection procedures requiring Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks for the "silver surfers."
  • Growth of Child Protection Initiatives:
    • Significant changes in the UK's public policy landscape.
    • Shift from family interventions to broader measures like the Sex Offenders' Register (1997) and the Criminal Records Bureau (2002).
  • Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006:
    • Creates a new bureaucracy to regulate contact between children and vulnerable groups and adult workers/volunteers.
    • Driven by the Bichard inquiry into the 2002 Soham murders.
  • Definition of Regulated Activities:
    • Activities carried out frequently (once a week or more), on three or more days in a 30-day period, or overnight, involving contact with children or taking place on specified premises.
  • Scope of the Act:
    • Extends mandatory vetting to over two million volunteers and workers in sports and leisure and over 200,000 school governors.
    • Technically places around nine million adults under suspicion of abuse, a third of the adult working population.
  • Costs of the System:
    • Annual running costs were already £83 million in 2005/6 and are expected to rise.
    • Costs are largely paid by volunteer groups and schools, deterring volunteerism.
  • Effectiveness of the Measures:
    • The government admits that the scheme will not completely prevent all abuse in the workplace.
    • Likely to prevent a tiny number of cases compared to abuse in domestic settings.
  • NSPCC Survey (2000):
    • Sexual abuse by people covered by the Act hardly registered in a survey of 18 to 24-year-olds.
    • Around 79 children a year are killed by parents or family members, a rate that remains high.
  • Reliance on Procedures:
    • CRB checks are seen as the "gold standard" for public confidence.
    • Parents have started using CRB checks to vet shop staff their children might contact.
  • Limitations of CRB Checks:
    • A clear CRB check does not guarantee a person is not a threat.
    • Much child abuse goes unreported and undetected.
    • CRB checks provide less protection than many people think, even with universal vetting.
  • Dangers of Bureaucratic Procedures:
    • Focus on carrying out checks at the expense of more effective measures like training and awareness-raising.
    • Little room for judgment and common sense when compliance becomes procedural.
  • Michael Power's Argument:
    • Secondary risk management can lead to a "catastrophic downward spiral" where expert judgment shrinks to defensible compliance.
  • Unintended Consequences:
    • Mistakes are inevitable in a large bureaucracy, affecting many people.
    • Home Office figures from 2006 showed that the CRB wrongly labeled 2,700 people as criminals.
  • Impact on Volunteering:
    • Potential employees or volunteers with irrelevant convictions may worry about their details becoming public.
    • Resentment with the extensive vetting process may undermine trust in communities.
  • Celia Brackenridge's Concerns:
    • Expresses concerns that child protection policies have "got out of hand" and are deterring people from running junior clubs or driving buses.
  • Focus on Abusers:
    • The pursuit of abusers should not come at any cost or consequence.
    • Overemphasis on insulating children from all adults who might harm them.
    • Neglect of other ways to help children keep themselves safe or cope with abuse.

Fear of Strangers

  • Irrational Fear:
    • Fear of strangers is disproportionate to the actual risk.
    • People do not take an actuarial position on risk.
    • Murder is less tolerated than car crashes, despite being statistically less likely.
  • Statistical Perspective:
    • Around five to seven children a year are killed by strangers.
    • Two primary schoolchildren are killed by strangers each year.
    • In 1995, not a single child between 5 and 11 was killed by a stranger.
    • Figures have been at around their current level for decades with no increasing trend since 1975.
  • Media Influence:
    • Dominant media message portrays dangerous strangers as a significant threat, which is refuted by statistics.
  • Public Perception:
    • Public surveys reinforce the belief that the threat from strangers is growing.
    • BBC research in Scotland showed that 76 percent of respondents thought there had been an increase in child murder by strangers, despite no change in 20 years.
  • Risk from Known Individuals:
    • Far more children are killed by parents or other adults they know, with a ratio of 14 to 1 compared to strangers.
  • Silverman and Wilson's Argument:
    • Urgent need to correct a "corrosive imbalance in society's thinking."
    • Children are at no greater risk of abduction and murder by a stranger in 2002 than in 1972.
    • Children remain unacceptably vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation by people they should trust.
  • Lesser Forms of Abuse:
    • Children also suffer abuse, victimization, and harassment from strangers.
  • Gallagher Study:
    • 9 percent of children aged 9 to 16 experienced a "stranger-perpetrated sexual incident."
    • Indecent exposure was the most common type of incident.
    • A small minority of children experienced such incidents, and many incidents involved "less serious" acts.
  • Children's Capacity for Self-Protection:
    • Children are capable of protecting themselves from sexual victimization.
    • Ten times as many perpetrators tried to get children to go with them as achieved this.
  • Nature of Unwelcome Behavior:
    • The bulk of unwelcome or hostile behavior that children face stems from other children.
    • A small proportion involves any level of sexual threat from strangers, and the great majority of these are failed attempts.
  • Psychological Impact:
    • Sexual attacks and harassment by strangers are unpleasant experiences for children.
    • Abduction is extremely traumatic for the child and their family and friends.
    • Psychological consequences of child sexual abuse can include post-traumatic stress disorder and long-term behavioral, emotional, and relationship problems.
    • The prospects for recovery are usually better with stranger abuse than when the perpetrator is known to the child.
    • Abuse by someone known to the child can destroy the child's sense of trust.
  • Pyramid Shape of Risk:
    • Deaths at the hands of violent, predatory paedophiles are at the apex.
    • Larger number of abductions and serious sexual assaults in the next tier.
    • A larger group of episodes of less serious sexual maltreatment and harassment at the base.
  • Common Threat Manifestation:
    • The "neighborhood flasher" is a common manifestation of the threat to children from strangers.
    • The bulk of crimes they commit, while distressing, are of a type that children can recover from well.
    • Only a minority of such people progress to more serious crimes.
  • Scaremongering:
    • Claiming that anyone who flashes at a child might turn out to be a child murderer is scaremongering.
  • Unhealthy Consequences of Fear of Strangers:
    • Leaves many parents and children unnecessarily anxious.
    • Reinforces a norm of parenting that equates being a good parent with being a controlling parent.
    • Sees the granting of independence as a sign of indifference.
    • Denies children the chance to build their confidence and competences through everyday interactions with the wider world.
    • Adversely affects children’s mental health.
  • Erosion of Community Ties:
    • Excessive fear of strangers can corrode the ties that help communities to be safe for both adults and children.
  • Jane Jacobs' Argument:
    • The first fundamental of successful city life is that people must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other.
    • This is learned from the experience of having other people take a modicum of responsibility for you.
  • Strangers as a Source of Help:
    • Strangers are a largely dependable source of help if things go wrong.
    • Safety messages that warn children never to speak to strangers reinforce the view that it is wrong for adults to initiate social contact with children they don't know.
  • Abigail Rae Tragedy:
    • A two-year-old girl drowned after escaping from her nursery.
    • A man who saw her wandering the streets did nothing because he feared being perceived as attempting to abduct her.
  • Critique of Child Safety Initiatives:
    • Some initiatives continue to dwell on the threat from strangers.
    • Reinforce the message that strangers are not to be trusted.
  • Protective Behaviours Approach:
    • Taken up by Barnardo's and aims to help children develop their ability to take effective action when they feel they are not safe.
    • Emerged in the USA in the 1970s and spread to the UK in the 1990s.
    • Addresses the fact that most child abuse takes place in the family, while education programs focus on the threat from strangers.
    • Reframes language into an empowering, non-victimizing, and non-violent format.
    • Encourages self-empowerment and brings with it the skills to avoid being victimized.
    • Helps people recognize and trust their intuitive feelings (early warning signs) and develop strategies for self-protection.
    • Encourages an adventurous approach to life which satisfies the need for fun and excitement without violence and fear.
    • Emphasizes the difference between feeling safe, adventurousness, risking on purpose, and feeling unsafe.
    • Encourages everyone to develop their personal networks of support, and to explore letting people know we need to talk to them.

Online Risks

  • Technological Transformation:
    • Rapid technological advances are transforming children's lives, causing anxiety for adults.
    • Adults struggle to master new technologies compared to children.
  • Sonia Livingstone's View:
    • The internet has rapidly become central in children's lives.
    • Represents a significant addition to existing means of communication.
  • Internet Access:
    • The internet is not universally accessible to all children.
    • In 2006, 3939 percent of households had no internet access, and only 4545 percent had broadband.
  • Centrality of the Internet:
    • The internet is becoming central to children's social lives, information gathering, informal learning, creative content generation, and leisure activities.
  • Digital Pioneers:
    • Young people are at the forefront of developing new ways of creating, sharing, and using content.
  • Economic Importance:
    • Mastery of online technology is crucial for children's future economic prospects.
  • Isolating Children:
    • Isolating children from the online world would have damaging consequences for them and society.
  • Online Threats:
    • Online child sexual abuse.
    • Violent and/or sexual images, video, and other content.
    • Cyberbullying.
  • Prevalence of Harm:
    • The vast majority of children enjoy rich, active online lives without suffering serious harm.
  • Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP):
    • Online sex offending is the greatest adult anxiety.
    • CEOP admits that the level of threat is "incredibly difficult to define."
    • The biggest risk to children is self-generated, caused by providing too much personal information or behavior that presents an opportunity for victimization.
  • Conflicting Advice:
    • There is a tension between advice not to share personal information or meet new online contacts and the reality of children's online social lives.
  • Meetings with Online Contacts:
    • Government-funded research shows that 2525 percent of children and young people had arranged meetings with people they initially encountered online.
    • About three-quarters of those took someone else with them, indicating risk awareness.
    • 8585 percent chose to take a friend rather than a trusted adult, parent or family member, which CEOP argued showed children are taking unnecessary risks.
  • Unrealistic Expectations:
    • It is unrealistic to suggest that parents should always accompany children on significant social activities.
  • Potential Harm of Advice:
    • Advice may undermine children's safety, since parents who try to enforce the rule may push their children into making secret arrangements.
  • Debate on Online Content:
    • The debate parallels historical debates about the influence of mass media on children, from penny dreadfuls to cinema and television.
  • Gordon Brown's Consultation:
    • In September 2007, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a consultation on the effects of the media on children.
  • Harm vs. Offence:
    • Sonia Livingstone and Andrea Millwood Hargrave emphasize the distinction between harm (objective, long-term, observable) and offence (subjective, immediate).
  • Methodological Difficulties:
    • Methodological difficulties exist in showing cause and effect, applying laboratory findings to the real world, and applying results from one audience group or medium to others.
  • Research Findings:
    • The research literature points to modest effects, including effects on attitudes and beliefs, effects on emotions, and, more controversially, effects on behavior.
  • Vulnerable Audiences:
    • Research findings suggest that vulnerable audiences/users may include children and young people, especially boys.
  • Unique Aspects of the Internet:
    • The widespread accessibility, affordability, anonymity, and convenience of the internet mark an important difference from other media.
  • Need for Sophisticated Analysis:
    • Debates need to move beyond simplistic arguments about cause and effect.
    • Call for a more sophisticated analysis that brings together content, audience, medium, viewing situation, and social context.
  • Opportunity Costs:
    • Heavy consumers of new media can miss out on other experiences.
  • Social Aspects of Game-Playing:
    • Game-playing is often highly social, with tactics and strategy being the subject of lively debate amongst friends and peers.
  • Overall Impact:
    • The consequences of spending a lot of time online may be no more or less concerning than the impact of pursuing many other sedentary, indoor activities to excess.
  • Cyberbullying:
    • Cyberbullying is an old form of victimization in a new context.
    • Perpetrators can remain anonymous, and online bullying can be a more public form of humiliation and potentially create a permanent record.
    • Children are operating in a context in which some of the rules and conventions are unclear, making it difficult to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
  • Parental Monitoring:
    • Some experts question the value of parental monitoring and technical fixes.
    • Filters are vulnerable to advances in technology and digitally savvy children.
    • Children are often aware of potential dangers and adept at self-regulating.
  • Children's Evasion:
    • Simply pressing for more parental monitoring, restriction, and control could encourage children's evasion rather than their cooperation with attempts at internet regulation in the home.
  • Balancing Risks and Benefits:
    • The virtual world demands the same thoughtful approach to balancing risks and benefits as any of the real-world contexts already discussed.
  • No Risk Elimination:
    • Risk elimination is no more possible here than anywhere else in childhood.
  • Focus on Children's Vulnerability:
    • It is especially futile to base responses on the premise that children are somehow globally vulnerable.
  • Children's Online Success:
    • In their online lives, children are successfully learning and sharing ways to pursue their interests while keeping themselves safe.

Conclusions

  • Policy and Practice Focus:
    • Policy and practice are often focused on reducing adverse outcomes, with a manifest need to take into account the benefits of allowing children more freedom.
  • Tragic Outcomes:
    • Rare, tragic adverse outcomes have a disproportionate influence, with scant regard to evidence and little or no debate about how to draw the line between these and more common, less serious experiences.
  • Quick Fixes:
    • Safety initiatives tend to take the form of quick fixes, technical or bureaucratic procedures that work against the exercise of judgment.
  • Lack of Consideration:
    • Little or no consideration is given to the possible side-effects of measures that will lead to further restrictions and limitations on children's lives.
  • Underlying Assumptions:
    • Underpinning and connecting these topics is an assumption of children's vulnerability (or in the case of antisocial behavior, their villainy) combined with a lack of interest in how to foster their resilience and sense of responsibility.