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From safeguarding to solipsism
Why we need to get to grips with the real threats to children's welfare
As I’ve said before, sometimes in the world of children’s safeguarding you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s as much as about safeguarding adults as it is about protecting children. This came to mind when I was reading Sharing nudes and semi-nudes: advice for education settings working with children and young people. Granted, this is not what most of you will have been reading on the beach these past summer weeks. But it is a fascinating example of the ‘who’s safeguarding who?’ conundrum. It’s actually rather good as guidance goes.
It gives clear advice on what a school should do if indecent images are being shared around. But it also says much about the tangle the law has got schools into. It goes to great lengths to ensure that should it be really necessary for a member of staff to view said image, they take precautions to ensure they are safeguarded from any allegations or lawbreaking themselves. Is there somebody in the room with you? Whatever you do, don’t save the pic or you could be accused of sharing it yourself. If you do, unplug everything. And tell the police! If they have to take the phone as evidence, they are unlikely to return it as they too may be accused of sexting a minor. Really.
And yet, as we get caught up in ‘safeguarding traps of our own making, those in genuine need are more likely to find themselves put at risk or treated with suspicion. Autistic people, for instance, make up about half of those referred to the government’s anti-terrorism initiative Prevent. Autistic children accounted for more than a third of those referred to the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), at the infamous (and thankfully now defunct) Tavistock gender-identity clinic. Despite constituting less than 2% of the population. And they continue to be put at risk as those who should be advocating for them, including the government, fail to recognise the serious threat to their wellbeing posed by gender ideology.
This confusion about biological reality has resonated with a withdrawal into the disembodied online world. And yet here too, a refuge of sorts, the dangers (both real and imagined) proliferate. There is safeguarding guidance aplenty from Teaching online safety in schools to the support provided by the likes of the NSPCC - an organisation that seems to spend at least as much time inflating the more speculative risks to young people, as it does to protecting them from the actual risks they face - with its Keeping children safe online resources. This is not to say young people’s welfare isn’t being compromised by their electronic and virtual fixations, anymore than it is by the fashionable fixations of the professional classes.
While, like most parents, I’m anxious about my children’s attachment to their devices, the mental health concerns raised about smartphones, and worry about the nature of their virtual encounters - we adults can be led astray too. Not least by unscrupulous technocrats bent on manipulating fear for their own selfish ends. After all, when you’re encouraged to fret about everything, it’s hard to know where the real risks lie. It’s all to easy dispense with our own freedoms if we’re convinced the dangers, especially to our children, demand it.
Which is why the introduction of the Online Safety Act used children’s safeguarding as a battering ram against what little opposition it faced. It would, so the last government boasted, ‘make the UK the safest place in the world to be online’. And now, a new government is using the stifling post-riots climate not only to lock people up for social media posts, but also to prepare the way for further restrictions on what we - adults - can access online. Do we worry too much too much about the influence of technology on children’s lives? While the rise in some of the problems children are facing have coincided with the explosion of social media, and there is surely a relationship there, I suspect this has been a fine tuning of a pre-existing cultural turn.
For instance, we have been telling young people that they (like us) are rather frail for decades now. Long before any of us knew what an online encounter was. Is it really such a great idea, as official guidance has it, to be promoting and supporting mental health and wellbeing in schools and colleges? Of course, those with diagnosed mental health problems should get all the support they need. And, let’s be clear, they’re not getting it. But what are the unintended consequences of ‘promoting’ the idea that children in general are liable to mental health problems? I suspect we’re already seeing the consequences as more young people experiencing genuine difficulties of some description, are encouraged to understand them through this particular prism. Could it be that this generates it’s own demand, as it were?
As Mary Wakefield writes in The Spectator, ‘the therapeutic approach to child-rearing seems to actively create the problems it’s seeking to alleviate’. In a culture already receptive to the idea that we are all vulnerable, psychologically unsafe or at risk of emotional damage - the need for this kind of ‘support’ will surely never be satisfied? Likewise, the special educational needs crisis in the education system - about which I have written extensively on here - is only getting worse the more these needs become rather less ‘special’. As Tim Oliver, chair of the County Councils Network, argues - not only are parents and schools struggling but ‘councils have seen a doubling in needs over the last 10 years and have amassed deficits that threaten their financial solvency.’ In other words, far from safeguarding these children, the system is failing them and their families, and seemingly at risk of collapse as it nevertheless continues to grow and grow.
When it comes to the new government’s approach to behaviour in schools, I confess to being in two minds. The last administration, while it said all the right things about schools not tolerating poor behaviour, lacked curiosity about the causes of that misbehaviour as well as nuance in how it should be dealt with. As I have also written about before, whether it’s problems at home or behaviours associated with diagnosed conditions, it’s not enough to simply encourage schools to clamp down. If the behaviour problem is to be addressed, it’s root causes - as the new government seems to recognise - need to be understood in all their complexity. And yet, as Nat Nabarro, headteacher at Bristol’s Blaise High School, rightly posted on X: “Hint, these are 99 per cent external to schools.”
Schools can’t continue to isolate, suspend and exclude children, in record numbers. The damage to those children of being constantly thrown out is not to be underestimated; nor the contribution of school closures during the pandemic to this and the other issues I’ve discussed above. And yet, schools don’t have all the answers. They certainly don’t have the capacity both to address the troubling behaviour and to educate children to the standard we rightly expect. Nor is sending in an army of ‘experts’ necessarily the answer. Alternative provision needs to be put in place. Quite urgently for some of these children. But the problems a lot of young people face are deeply socially and culturally embedded.
While the traditionalists fail to acknowledge the impact of the current regime on the poorest and most needy children who find themselves excluded, they are surely right to worry that schools could become more chaotic if pressure is put on schools to solve the problem in-house. And again, it would be already disadvantaged pupils who would suffer the most as their classrooms deal with the greater disruption associated with a more ‘inclusive’ approach. There are no easy solutions to any of these problems - whether its the dangers of devices, the seemingly relentless expansion in mental health problems and special educational needs, or the increasingly difficult behaviour experienced in the nation’s classrooms.
But if we can at least be - and I don’t usually like this hackneyed phrase - more child-centred, that would be helpful. Whether its censorious officials trying to tame the internet, adults projecting their anxieties onto children, or ‘the blob’ holding on to institutional arrangements that simply aren’t working - we need to have an honest debate about how to improve their (here comes another word that has lost all meaning) wellbeing.
Image: Victor Bezrukov