The following are axiomatic, right?
- Britain is one of a number of 'broken' societies in which civilised life is being rapidly eroded by steadily rising crime.
- Knife crime is a particularly serious problem and it is fair to talk in terms of an epidemic of these kinds of offences.
- Central government, local government and the police have combined to wage a 'war' on hard-pressed motorists, reaching for ever more draconian financial penalties in order to raise revenue.
The thing is, none of these statements are true. Last summer, the Office for National Statistics noted that by 2010, levels of crime in England and Wales had fallen to their lowest levels for thirty years. It was further noted, however, that two-thirds of people surveyed believed that crime was in fact becoming an ever more serious problem. The biggest gap between reality and public perception was demonstrated in the area of knife crime. The same study revealed that the murder rate is falling and that gun crime has fallen by 36% since it peaked in 2005-06. The report also showed that fixed penalty fines issued for motoring offences had halved since 2005. Overall, in 2009-10, crime levels in England and Wales were at their lowest since the British Crime survey began in 1981.
This is the Broken Britain you've heard so much about.
There may be a number of reasons for this big gap between the real world and how the public perceives it. Some will be attracted to the theory of oppressive governments seeking expanded powers of arrest, detention and surveillance with the spurious justification of keeping us safe from harm. Others may prefer to lay the blame at the door of our newspapers, seeking to sell copies and flog advertising space off the back of sensationally distorting the mundane truth that this is a fundamentally safe, peaceful and well-ordered country. Both may be at least partly true and there may be any number of additional factors at play. What remains clear, though, is that talk of statistical trends should be treated with a healthy dose of scepticism by anyone interested in not being manipulated.
One notable exponent of spinning a trend out of a few incidents (or even just one incident) seems to be Daily Mail firebrand Melanie Phillips.
Writing this week, Phillips reports on the strange and sad tale of a five-year-old child named Sasha Laxton, whose parents decided to avoid classifying him as either a boy or a girl. She quite rightly points out that however well-intended this was meant to be, the effects are unpredictable and may well be harmful.
So how big a problem is this?
"Sasha's parents," writes Phillips "are by no means a one-off aberration. Last year, a Canadian couple insisted they would also raise their baby, Storm, as a gender-neutral child."
So that's two nutty sets of parents, then. How many more at there? Well, although Phillips contends that "in certain circles, this is becoming a fashion," she declines to cite any more examples. True, she finds what sound like reasonably worrying cases of academics or public bodies making strange-sounding pronouncements about the desirability of talking down differences between the genders. But she offers no further examples of actual families raising actual children according to such principles.
Keeping in mind the falling crime figures and the widespread perception that the opposite is true, you may agree that it is wise to remain healthily sceptical about the evidence of worrying trends even when frightening or unwelcome incidents are reported very regularly. Surely that level of scepticism should be even higher when just two isolated cases of potty parenting are put forward to support Melanie Phillips's argument that "far from ushering in a better world", this approach to children and gender "threatens to stamp out the individual right to know what we are, and to rob us of humanity itself."
The tone here is so shrill that it seems hard not to conclude that Phillips was desperately reaching for some hysterical bullshit with which to fill her column on Sunday and that she came up with a particularly outlandish piece on this occasion. The Mail peddles fear of change and difference. That's what it does. But Phillips runs the risk of trying so hard to deliver the goods that she'll up looking like an especially deluded fantasist.
Regardless of the statistics, who is mostly responsible for knife-related crimes, including murder? I don't know what your answer [if any] will be, but I assure you that it is not whites or others who are responsible for knife-related crimes. Whites are not going around stabbing people because of skin color, Hindus are not doing it, Native Americans are not doing it. So who?
ReplyDelete"Regardless of statistics", anonymous? Sounds like the opening line from someone whose opinions, whatever they are, can't be swayed by mere facts. Anyway, Native Americans are a little thin on the ground here in the UK so I'm not sure you're talking about the same country I was referring to.
ReplyDeleteIf you're not basing it on statistics, Anonymous, can you enlighten us as to both the source of your opinions and maybe who you are referring to? From what I can work out, you've narrowed it down to black people, hispanics, koreans, chinese, japanese, muslims, buddhists, aborigines and a few more groups. Tell us more about your weird and wacky musings.
ReplyDeleteUh. Describing Melanie Phillips as "shrill" and "hysterical" is NOT ok. Those are very, very dog-whistle misogynist terms.
ReplyDeleteI am also very wary of your (completely unfounded) claim that raising a child outside the constraints of binary gender is a "strange and sad" thing to do. How dare you brand Sasha's parents as "nutty"? Can't you see that by enforcing gender expectations, you're perpetuating damaging norms? And you're completely ignoring/writing off the experiences of intersex children (who for whatever reason do not fit neatly into category "female" or category "male"). Really, really disappointing.
For what it's worth, I agree with your main point, about the tabloids whipping up fear, and extrapolating bullshit "trends" from isolated data points. But the sexist language you use to dismiss Phillips is unacceptable, and your phobia about non-binary forms of childrearing is weird, and not supported by any kind of evidence, as far as I can tell. (Please, spare me the "but what about the children!!!" crap.) So, yeah. Not great overall.
Hey, Jo. It seems odd that you'd be 'disappointed' in someone (me) that you don't know at all. Surely you can only be disappointed if you come with expectations. Can't figure out how you'd have any kind of expectations about a complete stranger. If we did know each other at all, you'd see that I don't reserve the terms 'shrill' and 'hysterical' for women in particular. I apply them, respectively, to any person, male or female, who uses markedly unrestrained language and who tries to whip up hysteria. So you're seeing 'sexist' terms that are just not there. Take that on trust. Or don't. Up to you. That aside, I daresay we'd never come to agreement re: Sasha's parents and what you call 'damaging norms'. I remain unconvinced that young Sasha or anyone raised similarly will enjoy a pleasantly harmonious time of it at school and when socialising. The kid has one life and no second chance at having a childhood. Seems to me the parents are, doubtless in good faith, taking a hell of a shake of the dice with their child's happiness and wellbeing. It might work out. It might not. But it's such rare practice that there's not much evidence on which to base a confident prediction. Pioneering childrearing seems all well and good. Until/unless it backfires - and the parents won't know either way until it's too late to change course, I'd guess.
ReplyDeleteThe article started off well then rapidly descended into utter shite, hence my disappointment (also it was linked on Twitter, whence I came, by someone I usually trust to RT interesting articles). Afraid your intent when writing doesn't matter. And saying that using "hysterical" to describe men *and* women makes you not sexist... Nuh uh. Doesn't work like that. The word (I trust you know its origin?) has a very long history of being used to damage and oppress women. Using it against a man does not evoke this history of oppression, so is not comparable at all. (I could here make a comparison with slurs used against people of colour, and how using them against white people is nowhere near as hurtful.)
ReplyDeleteAnd... are you a child development specialist? A child psychologist? If you are, please post evidence for your fact-free assertions about the "damage" Sasha's upbringing will cause him. If not, I suggest you stop talking with pretend authority about a subject that you clearly know very little about. Things which seem "common sense" often, very often turn out to be anything but, especially when it comes to challenging stereotypes and norms. It is, until and unless you produce that evidence, utterly inappropriate for you to judge (on no basis whatsoever except *your own prejudices*) the happiness/stability of Sasha's upbringing. Hmm... jumping to conclusions... based on prejudice alone... are you *sure* you don't write a column in the Daily Mail?!
Jo, over time, words shift in terms of the meanings they cover. While you're clearly personally bang up to speed on the etymology of this particular word (hysteria), my sense is that out there in the general population there is no clear feeling that it's a word applied exclusively to women. This is certainly the first time I've ever been upbraided by a woman for daring to use the word. You are genuinely the first person to object to it to me in this way. Anyway, I guess YOU must be a child psychologist, a child development specialist or at the very least a parent who's read and understood a lot of books on these areas. Otherwise you'd not really be in a position to sit in judgement yourself either - if it's your opinion that only those with academic training in a subject may comment on it, that is, and that the layperson has to shut up and defer to the experts. That must narrow the field of your conversations quite severely, I would have thought. Presumably you'd never opine on the economy if you're not employed as an economist or on healthy eating if you're not a qualified nutritionist. For what it's worth, I didn't make any 'assertions' that Sasha's unconventional upbringing will definitely damage him. I was pretty careful about saying that it might and it might not. Which implies risk rather than inevitability of damage. Doubtless your academic background will enable you to point me towards a wealth of research into the large number of kids raised in this way with happy outcomes. Once I've seen that my mind will be at rest. In the meantime, returning to the subject of the meanings of words, you used one that I've never been comfortable with: inappropriate. Seems to suggest a commonly agreed set of rules about what can and can't be discussed and by whom. Who agreed on those rules? Or is it just a matter of common sense...?
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, I did my fair share of eye-rolling with regards to "strange and sad", "shrill" and "hysterical" too.
ReplyDelete'Shrill' and 'hysterical' are used to shut women up and make what they say seem irrelevant all the time, regardless of the point they're making, and it's not just men doing it, it's women too - I got told by a Tory feminist that something I wrote about Tory feminism was 'hysterical', and, as per usual with that criticism, the accuser refused to discuss what I'd actually said (or indeed, what was 'hysterical' and just trotted off doing some kind of victory dance.
You might not see people being called it all the time, but the people who it is used against do see it. I suppose a gender-neutral variation that you might have seen, 'stop being so angry/if you calmed down I'd take what you say seriously', is kind of comparable. Another thing to bear in mind is how you react when people tell you they find words offensive because of their lived experience of having those terms used abusively towards them - if you were a woman would you risk that reaction by telling people you found the word 'shrill' offensive, or just shut up and deal with it? Especially if you'd seen people react the way you did to Jo?
If you're really stuck for words to use to describe Philips' blitherings, the 'bigoted frothings of a zealot who sees conspiracies at every turn' are probably good ones.
As for the comment about "sad and strange", I don't see anything sad or odd about parents who obviously love their child and didn't want him to be told 'you are a boy, therefore you do [X]', rather than 'you are a child, you can do what you want', because that seems like a freer childhood to me. I find it a lot more 'sad and strange' that the only way they could stop other people involved in their child's life from sticking him in rigid gender-stereotypical boxes was to not tell people what was in his nappy.
I did enjoy the rest of the article though. False fear of crime and the media was a topic I studied at university and almost ended up writing my dissertation on, so it's nice to see it addressed as the problem it is.
Sure, Forty Shades... perhaps the brevity of my piece leaves some room for doubt about what I personally find this case "sad and strange". By my maths, the kid will have only just started school. Like it or not, at school he will encounter kids who may round on him for the ways in which he is different to them. It's something of a cliche that 'kids are cruel', but it's a cliche with some truth in it. At least, my own memories of childhood and my observation of my son's peers lead me to think so. In follow up comments to Jo, I've tried to be clear that this unconventional upbringing may indeed have no harmful effects. But who knows? So in my view the parents - doubtless well-meaning and acting in good faith - are taking a punt here. I hope it all works out fine, but if this course of action leads to bullying, ostracism and unhappiness for their kid then ill-effects may only become apparent once it's too late. You know what? I have a son and I have never said "you are a boy, therefore you do X". It's more a case of him going to nursery and then school and him saying ME "I am a boy, therefore I do X". I've actually suggested at times that he could be more open to doing things he perceives of as 'girly', i.e. the things his female classmates do. He resist this when it's made overt and he feels THAT is an unwanted pressure/suggestion.
ReplyDeleteRe: shrill/hysterical - I have LITERALLY never been advised before this week that this is an especially sexist choice of words. I've used it to describe both men and women. I work in an 50-60% female workplace, have had female bosses and have more close female friends than male ones. I take on board this guidance about the choice of words but can only repeat that it's NEVER been raised to me before this week as an issue.