Children of the void

Over 20,000 children and adolescents play truants from school everyday rather than suffer the trauma of oppression by their bullying schoolmates. Disabled children and members of ethnic minorities – especially those of Islamic faith after the terror attacks of 7 July 2005 – are the preferred targets of the bullies that are ever more numerous in British schools. This increase in bullying incidents is shown by the latest figures on bullying in Great Britain, a phenomenon that is also registering ever more cases in various European countries. Also worrying is the increase in acts of sexual abuse committed against teachers. The National Teachers Association, during a recent audition in Parliament, denounced the fact that “the practice of touching and sexually molesting young women teachers is continuously growing, by something like 69% per year on a national scale. The problem is that denunciations for sexual abuse are in the majority of cases either ignored or even judged unfounded”. AN ALARMING SITUATION. This alarming situation has convinced the government led by Tony Blair to allocate an extra budget of 480,000 pounds, almost 700,000 euros, to intervene in schools through a programme of so-called mentoring, i.e. the introduction of mentors with a particularly strong charisma and moral authority among the older pupils from whom the victims of acts of bullying can seek advice and to whom they can denounce the abuse they have suffered. In the schools in which the ‘pupil mentoring scheme’ is active (one in ten in the whole of England), incidents of aggressive behaviour have slumped by almost 85% over two years. It is a solution, however, that, like the proposal of the Minister of Education Alan Johnson to fine up to a thousand pounds, over 1400 euros, the parents of children culpable of anti-social behaviour, can only be considered as a stopgap. COMMERCIALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD. Children of kindergarten age are not in a much better situation. According to a report called “The commercialisation of childhood”, sponsored by the Anglican Primate Rowan Williams, even young children are now the target of marketing campaigns that often make use of images of sex and are aimed at telling children how they should dress and what they should buy. Seven children out of ten at the age of three already know the logo of McDonald’s, but only half of them know their own surname. CLIMATE OF FEAR. Helen Bardy, National Director of the Catholic Youth Service within the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, identifies the causes of this “worrying” situation “in the type of society in which we live. A climate of fear often exists in which people fear defending the weakest and the most vulnerable; so, when someone is attacked or beaten up on the street, no one intervenes. The crisis of the enlarged family has contributed to this situation. Parents work for most of the day and children are entrusted from a very early age to kindergartens or abandoned in front of the television”. “Respect for authority – explains Bardy – is communicated through a human relationship like that between parent and child, grandparent and grandchild, or between the young and the old. With the end of the extended family this relationship no longer exists and children are no longer educated in respect for others, whether they be the weaker or the more elderly. This becomes especially clear when children go to school; teachers are asked to fill the educational void left by the family and it’s a very difficult task”. Among the changes that have had a “negative effect on society” Bardy also lists “the loss of the sense of community. In the past people knew their own neighbours, they felt part of a larger identity; but today father and mother often work far from home; they spend much of their time travelling”. About the measures introduced by the Blair government to try to curb youth violence, such as fines on parents and mentoring schemes, the national director of the Catholic Youth Service in England and Wales has no doubts: “the punishments? I don’t think they will work. I think violent or aggressive behaviour in children can only be corrected within a relationship, within a relationship of love and affection, but this is becoming ever more difficult”.