Of all the traditional victims of electioneering, children are among the most heavily abused. Helplessly reined into their prams, they can do little to avoid the leering smiles, the pats and the kisses of vote-hungry candidates. Children as a symbol of purity and innocence are also understood by people in the advertising industry, who don’t go in for elections but for persuading us to kill off our own standards of judgement. What lies behind this propaganda is the warning that while children are attractive they are also hugely vulnerable. They need the Alliance or the Tories, or the Labour Party to protect them or to ensure that their natural protector — the family — is strong enough to do it. The cynicism is obvious but the wretched irony of it is all too often missed: the appeal of children should guarantee them immunity against being used in these ways.
The facts show that the family as it is at present is far from being a reliable protector of children. There is an enormous mountain of child abuse, most of which goes on in the family. The NSPCC estimate that between 150 and 200 children a year are killed through abuse or neglect by their parents or carers. Another estimate is that child battering is the fourth commonest cause of death in the under-fives. There are no official national figures but the NSPCC believe that in England and Wales in 1985 over 9000 children under 15 were physically abused — not counting the other types of maltreatment such as sexual abuse. Stimulated by the publicity given to recent, particularly nasty, cases such as Jasmine Beckford and Tyra Henry, the number of cases reported to the NSPCC has risen sharply— by 42 per cent between 1984 and 1985. When the people responsible for these assaults are prosecuted the media is convulsed by a grisly hysteria of demands for the harshest possible sentence.
Apart from abuse, there is the matter of extreme poverty, from which, of course, the entire family suffers. Last November the Child Poverty Action Group, which was formed on the assumption that campaigning could get rid of the worst excesses of poverty, celebrated its 21st birthday with the news that one third of Britain’s children live in what is officially deemed to be poverty, or at its margins. Apart from those trying to exist on state benefit, the National Children’s Homes state that in 1984 there were 429,000 children in families where the wages were so low that they qualified for the topping up of Family Income Supplement. Overall, it is not a pretty picture, made up as it is of political deceit, social pressures, market morality and ignorance. To understand the problem a bit better, we might consider a few facts about children themselves.
There is a popular concept about childhood which, like most of capitalism's prejudices. is assumed to be too obviously correct to question. Childhood is supposed to be a separate period in our lives when we are too undeveloped to be able to cope with some of the messier aspects of human life — such as sexual activity — and therefore need to be protected and nurtured by grown-ups. In fact, this ’protection" too often amounts to distortion or deceit or concealment, on the assumption that if the child is to develop smoothly into adulthood he or she must be fed on myths and euphemisms. Much of this revolves around prejudices about the fixed roles reserved for each sex and with discouraging children from seeing their parents for what they are — exploited, degraded and repressed objects of class exploitation. But there is nothing fixed or unchanging about this. Childhood is a social concept which varies according to conditions: the present concepts are typical of modern capitalism and are therefore comparatively recent. A new society, with a different basis, will have different — freer, more humane — ideas on the matter.
When children had to work alongside their parents in order that the family survive there was simply no real chance for them to experience this time which is now called childhood. They were regarded as miniature — usually defective — adults who should be punished if they failed to come up to adult standards. With the Industrial Revolution these attitudes were transferred from rural to urban life. Hordes of agricultural workers were sucked from the countryside into the developing towns with their children who were well accustomed to helping out with very demanding work.
Children answered the industrial employers' need for cheap labour and the demands made on them were as fierce as any adult could expect. In pre-industrial England parental attitudes to children had been, by present standards, severe but they did not extend to systematic deliberate sadism and neglect. Child labour took place in the family where the cruelty which was to be commonplace in the mines and factories was unknown. The pace and rhythm of agricultural work had been dictated naturally but in the factories it was the insistent demands of the machinery — which operated whether the sun was up or down and in all seasons — which dragged children from their beds before dawn and kept them at work for twelve hours or more in the most appalling conditions until at the end of the day they collapsed. too exhausted to wash or undress or even to eat. The savagery wreaked on those poor kids, in order to protect the employers' profits, was a horror story of beatings and torture by brutal overseers. Many of those who survived such assaults were brought down by injury or disease caused by the atmosphere in which they laboured.
The parents might have tried to protect their children and very often they did but this called for considerable courage in a family where it was vital that all available children were bringing in a wage. In any case many of the children were orphans or paupers, transported to the new industrial hell-holes. Who cared, or even noticed, whether they suffered and died?
Naturally, if children were treated like adults it followed that they could be punished like them. In 1800 there were no less than 220 offences which could incur the death penalty. Until 1847 the law made no distinction based on age and so children could be — and were — executed for minor thefts or for taking part in public disturbances. For the most trivial matters — throwing stones, knocking on doors, stealing a few turnips from a field — children were imprisoned for years. They might be confined in the rotten, vermin infested hulks and then transported. Reformists tended to prefer a sound flogging for them, on the grounds that this was a humane salvation from the life of unbroken criminality which a prison sentence would assure them.
This situation began to change with legislation making full-time education compulsory. The motives for this were not entirely charitable for as industrial development refined capitalism's class structure it also needed the lower, exploited class to be schooled in new skills through formal, organised education. There was a clash between the demands of the classroom and those of the fields and the factories but in the end the classroom, as it had to, won. One effect of universal education was to raise obedience to the status of a supreme virtue — obedience to god, to the sovereign, to their parents, their betters, all of which amounted to obedience to the class which would eventually accept them into exploitation. The family was important in the business of instilling obedience which became a sort of cement of family relationships. Children were taught to be quiet, meek, well behaved and to grow up into docile wage slaves.
What has happened to children, then, cannot be described as idyllic, under the benevolence of caring adults. Rather, it has been a story of outrageous repression and cruelty, at times in answer to the most extreme demands of an inhumane social system, to be modified only slowly against entrenched opposition based on the narrowest of class interests. Children are still suffering, in this supposedly advanced and civilised age, still easy prey to their elders' frustrations. Child abuse is widely ascribed to the malevolence of a minority of adults, which may be easy and comfortable as an explanation but which misses the essential background to the problem.
There are certain features to be found often enough in child abuse cases for them to be seen as a syndrome so that, in the reverse direction, if some elements of the syndrome are present it is reasonable to fear that a child is being, or will soon be, maltreated. These elements are nothing to do with supposedly evil human beings; they are rooted in social conditions, in the basic inability of capitalism to work to the benefit of the majority of people. Among the symptoms are: where the mother is very young, especially if she is a single parent whose poverty makes her vulnerable to men who come into her life as predators; where two children are born in quick succession to each other, placing an extra physical, emotional and financial strain on the parents; where the child is suffering from a disability or handicap, which again puts more stress on the parents; where one or other of the parents themselves has a history of being abused; where the family income is especially low, so that life is an unremitting battle for access to the barest essentials. The importance of the last element is illuminated by the fact that rich parents can simply buy their way out of at least some of the others. Smug observers of this problem may sometimes assert that it is not a class matter, referring to the infamous brutality practised in public schools and the emotional cruelty suffered by some children in ruling class families. There is some truth in this but it does not refer to the generalised problem, which was pinpointed in the comment of a National Children's Home support worker in Rochdale:
Families live in damp, sub-standard housing that they can't afford to heat properly. They survive on the basics and there is no comfort. Sometimes the pressures overwhelm them. (Children Today - 1986).
The family which operates today — and the modern concept of childhood — is rooted in the unique historical and social character of capitalism in response to its needs as a private property, commodity production system. There is much bleating, especially from the clergy and from Tory politicians, about the family's role in socialising children and whether it does this successfully. In any social system adults have a vital part to play in a child's life, but under capitalism socialisation is not a matter of guidance into the ability to have caring, happy and fruitful relationships with others and into being themselves good parents. It means fashioning — or rather distorting — children's innocent impulses into conformity with the crushing fact that they will one day have to earn their living. They will one day have to sell their working abilities and through their exploitation help further to enrich their employers. Seeing employment as essential to the emotional integrity of a child is not something peculiar to Victorian England; this is how it is described by another NCH worker:
Chronic unemployment arrests the young person's debut into adulthood . . . The growing up process remains uncompleted. They are "limbo" people. (George Keenan — Children Today 1986).
So a child's prospects of maturity are still assessed in terms of his or her ability to pull in a wage. Where does the family fit in? The expectation is that the family will teach the difference between ''right'' and "wrong", which substantially means to respect property rights and to accept the class division of society into the privileged owners and the non-privileged workers. In the 1980s trendy parents may laugh with each other at the haltered Victorian obsession with the obedient child; nowadays, they assure themselves, children are stimulated into thinking and acting for themselves. It is true that modern industrial capitalism has changed the emphases in the way it schools its children. But it has not changed the workers' support — through boom and slump, through war and famine — for capitalism. And how can that be described, if not as mindless, inculcated obedience?
If anything marks out childhood it is because many childish impulses, before adults working on behalf of capitalist society get to work on them, are in conflict with capitalism's morality. Children simply have no grasp of property, or class division; these have to be instilled into them. This shrewdness is what is mis-called childish innocence and it is fair game for politicians and advertising people. When the irony and the cynicism becomes widely enough apparent, we shall have taken a step towards a society which will be the family to us all. The next time you see a child grab hold of something which doesn't belong to it, don't smack it. Think instead.
Ivan
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