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Frank FurediProfessor of Sociology at University of Kent, and author of Politics of Fear, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, Therapy Culture, Paranoid Parenting and Culture of Fear. |
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The phrase Old Masters is sexist, authors and students are told Publishers and universities are outlawing dozens of seemingly innocuous words in case they cause offence. Banned phrases on the list, which was originally drawn up by sociologists, include Old Masters, which has been used for centuries to refer to great painters - almost all of whom were in fact male. It is claimed that the term discriminates against women and should be replaced by “classic artists”. The list of banned words was written by the British Sociological Association, whose members include dozens of professors, lecturers and researchers. The list of allegedly racist words includes immigrants, developing nations and black, while so-called “disablist” terms include patient, the elderly and special needs. It comes after one council outlawed the allegedly sexist phrase “man on the street”, and another banned staff from saying “brainstorm” in case it offended people with epilepsy. However the list of “sensitive” language is said by critics to amount to unwarranted censorship and wrongly assume that people are offended by words that have been in use for years. Prof Frank Furedi, a sociologist at the University of Kent, said he was shocked when he saw the extent of the list and how readily academics had accepted it. “I was genuinely taken aback when I discovered that the term ‘Chinese Whisper’ was offensive because of its apparently racist connotations. I was moved to despair when I found out that one of my favourite words, ‘civilised’, ought not be used by a culturally sensitive author because of its alleged racist implications.” Prof Furedi said that censorship is about the “policing of moral behaviour” by an army of campaign groups, teachers and media organisations who are on a “crusade” to ban certain words and promote their own politically correct alternatives. He said people should see the efforts to ban certain words as the “coercive regulation” of everyday language and the “closing down of discussions” rather than positive attempts to protect vulnerable groups from offence. The list of banned words is now sent out to prospective authors by Policy Press, a publisher of social science books and journals based at the University of Bristol, but is also used in many academic institutions. The University of Bristol’s School for Policy Studies recommends the guidelines to help students “challenge heterosexist assumptions”, and they are included in a “toolkit” to combat institutional racism included on the University of Leeds’ website. King’s College London says they “may provide a good starting point” and Liverpool John Moores University provides a link to them in its students’ guide. The Open University said they are an “appropriate source of reference and advice” for students. Napier University in Edinburgh says the list is “well worth looking at” while the University of East London advises its students they should “attempt to incorporate” it. Even a secondary school in Norwich includes a link to the list on its website, with the statement: “Students may care to consider how far we inadvertently reproduce inaccurate sexist assumptions in the language we use, both written and spoken.” The list of racist terms features black, which “can be used in a racist sense” and should be changed to “black peoples” or “black communities”. Immigrants is said to have “racist overtones” because of its association with “immigration legislation”, while developing nations - intended as a more sensitive replacement for Third World - is “prejudical” because it implies a comparison with developed countries. Although not included on the Policy Press list, the BSA warns authors against using civilisation because of its “racist overtones that derive from a colonialist perception of the world”. Among the “sexist” terms to be avoided are “seminal” and “disseminate” because they are derived from the word semen and supposedly imply a male-dominated view of the world. Authors are also told to “avoid using medical labels” when writing about disabled people as this “may promote a view of them as patients”. In addition, the list says “special needs” should be changed to “additional needs”, “patient” to “person” and “the elderly” to “older people”.
“Able-bodied person” should be replaced with “non-disabled person”, it is claimed.
First published by Daily Telegraph, 20 September 2008 |
Podcast: Saving the Enlightenment We are children of the Enlightenment, that fruitful period of the 17th and 18th centuries that gave birth to our modern ways. Surely now we have come this far there is no turning back? Not according to the five distinguished speakers on this forum. The ideas of the Enlightenment need to be protected, they say, lest they be dismantled bit-by-bit in a new climate of fear. Speakers
Frank Furedi
James Spigelman
Dr Arthur Herman
Dr Jonathan Le Cocq
Ayaan Hirshi Ali
First published by Canterbury Heritage, 11 September 2008 |
Redefining feminism Thirty years after second-wave feminism, some of its relics are pursuing a witch-hunt against Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin that would do the “male chauvinist pigs” of yesteryear proud. As Frank Furedi writes in The Australian today, Ms Palin is copping flak for everything from being a working mother of a child with special needs to “living the life of a caricature of the feminist who ‘wants it all’.” Such is the hypocrisy that some of them will soon be telling her to go home and darn her husband’s socks. Far from celebrating a significant milestone for women, the sisterhood appears incandescent with rage that it is a conservative woman and not one of them who has reached such a position. As Furedi, who is pro-choice himself, points out, many of the feminists who advocate choice on abortion are dismissive of the choices other women make about the issue. In the case of Ms Palin, their reactions have been nothing short of undisguised hatred. Yet she is, as Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan says, a feminist “not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way.” Most contemptible of all are the personal internet attacks on Ms Palin’s daughter Bristol, who is 17, unmarried and who has chosen to have her baby, and the false claim that Ms Palin faked her last pregnancy. Yesterday’s speech to the Republican convention defused the issue well, admitting “Our family has the same ups and downs as any other.” Miranda Devine’s analysis in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday was correct. The attacks “expose the elitism, condescension and moral rootlessness of the feminist establishment. It will serve to shore up support for Palin among those who are not so intolerant.” It is early days in her campaign, but Ms Palin’s speech was highly effective. Time will tell whether she, like Democrat candidate Barack Obama, who also remains a largely unknown quantity, has the policy gravitas and political nous to be elected. Like senators John McCain, Obama and Joseph Biden, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate deserves to be assessed on her suitability for office, not her family life. Unlike the professional feminists who love to wallow in victimhood in their purple ghettos, Ms Palin exuded strength in her first major speech of the campaign. Like Margaret Thatcher a generation earlier, she showed an admirable immunity to liberal-left ridicule: “Here’s a little news flash ... I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion - I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country.” While many sophisticated, big-city commentators sneered, Ms Palin presented a set of values and attitudes to the convention that will appeal to “small-town America” - lower taxes, smaller government and service to the country and American ideals. She was unflinching and unapologetic, and her call for greater US energy independence should also strike a chord with the electorate: “Take it from a gal who knows the North Slope of Alaska: We’ve got lots of both (oil and gas),” she said as the audience rose, shouting “drill, baby, drill”. The value of her candidacy could be that she motivates working-class, predominantly white “Reagan Democrats” who do not support Barack Obama to come out and vote Republican, even if they are not keen on John McCain. This is why the American Left has recognised that she is a real danger. First published by The Australian, 5 September 2008 |
Pushy parents can act as agents Pushy parents can act as agents
In the past, the admissions service had to deal directly with applicants. Parents have also been expecting to sit in on their children’s university interviews, says academic Frank Furedi. Universities are facing the growing phenomenon of “helicopter parents” - the over-involved parents who want to continue interfering in the lives of their children at university. ‘Infantilism’ The university admissions service, Ucas, says that in response to the number of calls from parents that it has decided to allow parents to act as their children’s representatives in handling applications. As such, young people making applications this year have been allowed to nominate a proxy to speak for them and make decisions. “This is usually because the parent feels they haven’t got all the information they need from their son or daughter and so phone back to double check and clarify points,” says a Ucas spokesman. About one in 10 students this year are estimated to have used this option of nominating their parents to make calls on their behalf. Frank Furedi, social commentator and professor of sociology at the University of Kent, says that controlling parents are “destroying the distinction between school and higher education”. “All universities now have to take the parent factor into account. On university open days you can see more parents attending than children,” says Professor Furedi. He says there have been cases of parents who arrive expecting to attend their children’s university interviews. Professor Furedi says that he tells parents that they have to leave, but there are other academics who “accept that this will be a family discussion”. “There is a powerful sense of infantilism, where parents can’t let go.” Consumerism This extends to universities having to handle complaints from parents over grades awarded to students, he says, and a constant over-involvement during term time. “We have to remind parents that there is a professional relationship between academics and students,” he says. Professor Furedi expects this parental pressure to grow - with the risk of turning universities into “schools for biologically mature children”. He warns that it will follow the trend in the United States for universities to pitch their marketing at parents rather than students. Rob Evans, head of admissions at Sussex University, says that universities are seeing an increasing amount of involvement from parents when students are making applications. He links it to the increased cost of university and also to a more over-protective form of parenting. Safety fears mean that children can grow up with less independence, such as not being allowed to walk to school, and this attitude filters through to when young people apply to university. The high-pressure parent is a reflection of consumerist values hitting higher education, says Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Lancaster University Management School. “These parents are paying more, so they think they can demand more,” says Professor Cooper. Parents want to retain control of their “psychological and financial investment in their children”. Parents are also using their children as surrogates for their own ambitions, he says, getting them to chase the success that they might feel eluded them in their own careers.
“Parents derive status from their children’s success,” says Professor Cooper.
First published by BBC News Online, 19 August 2008 |
Enlightened spirit of inquiry SITTING on a stage at the Sydney Opera House on Monday evening, her hair swept up, a cream scarf wrapped around her shoulders, a beautiful young black woman tells the audience she is often accused of being a puppet of white middle-aged men. With a twinkle in her eye, Somalian-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali flashes a wry smile as she looks down the table at the four older white men who have been brought together by the Centre for Independent Studies to discuss why the ideas of the Enlightenment need a 21st-century revival. Puppet? Not a chance. Anyone who knows Hirsi Ali’s story knows she is no one’s pawn. As a girl she suffered genital mutilation; then, as a young woman, escaped an arranged marriage, incurring the wrath of Islam by rejecting her faith. Last time she was in Sydney, huge crowds listened to her journey, where she crossed back and forth between the superstitions, tribal taboos and conspiracy theories of her people to the world of inquiry and measured, rational discourse in the West. It was evident to her that one system was better than the other. People are equal but ideas and values are not. The crowds have come again on another wintry Sydney night. But this time Hirsi Ali is more interested in our story. She says we in the West, who have inherited the values of the Enlightenment, have developed contempt for values that drive progress and freedom. There is no doubt the West is suffering from a dangerous moral disorientation. It is not clear that we value the very idea of the West any more. Enlightenment values such as genuine inquiry and reason, which ought to flow like blood delivering a vibrant pulse to the Western project, have been dislodged by the noxious intruders of unreason and fear. If talk about the Enlightenment sounds like some quaint historical curiosity debated by poseurs in the ethereal world of academe, think again. The determination to quash inquiry and reason infiltrates just about every aspect of our lives. Hirsi Ali knows something about this. Shadowed by a security detail, she lives with death threats because she has chosen to debate Islam. Sweet-sounding words such as multiculturalism and tolerance are used to repress open debate. She has no problem with people who worship the prophet Mohammed. “But I want to be able to say that Mohammed had some reprehensible qualities without being thrown in jail, without being demonised,” she says. This must be allowed in a society committed to Enlightenment values of inquiry and reason because people progress by using reason to challenge ideas. Panel member Frank Furedi also knows something about our pusillanimous surrender of Enlightenment values. Debate is closed down by claiming that words, ideas and arguments cause offence to people, sometimes censored by the strong arm of the state or, more often, regulated by informal gatekeepers and our own timidity. Furedi, a professor of sociology from Britain and a prolific author of books about modern culture, was advised by a publisher recently that the term mentally ill was inappropriate. Instead, he should say “mental health service user”. He was warned against the word civilisation because it presupposes that there are uncivilised people. His young son was told recently not to use the word retard because it had offensive connotations. His son knew that, which is why he used the term. “But words are now viewed as psychological weapons,” Furedi said. And it is the modern world’s notion of human beings that explains why we have become so fearful of words. The conception of freedom that fuelled the Enlightenment was based on a radical view of humans as autonomous, resilient beings with the capacity to exercise their power in a rational, reasoned manner. Rational, reasoned human beings deserved the widest freedoms. This very positive rendition of human beings has been replaced in the 21st century with a notion that people are weak (the buzzword is vulnerable) or destructive. Hence, freedoms that underpinned the Enlightenment period have been curtailed. Furedi notes that the phrase “human impact” would have been celebrated during the Enlightenment. Today, it is a negative term because humans are viewed as destructive; so destructive, we obsess about our carbon footprint to the point where, he says, “the best thing people can do is stay at home and never get out of bed”. A modern world has lost confidence in what it means to be human and therefore lost confidence in basic values of freedom, such as free speech. Nowhere is this more evident than in the embrace of global warming, where anyone who questions the orthodoxy is labelled a denier, a heretic who should not be heard. Genuine inquiry is not encouraged; it is jettisoned. Arthur Herman, another panel member, predicts that in five years there will be a spate of books and articles wondering how politicians, the media and the people were all so comprehensively conned by global warming alarmism. But Herman, a historian, is not surprised. History tells us there will always be fanatics who peddle invisible fears and doomsday scenarios and, equally, there will always be people drawn to a priestly class - think Al Gore - who claim to know the answers. And so springs up a modern-day theology given over to supplications and modern sacrifices such as banning the innocuous plastic bag. The debate over global warming stopped being a scientific debate long ago, Herman says. Scientific consensus, not dispassionate inquiry, is the name of the game. And governments and politicians have long since stopped bothering with the evolving science. Here again, Herman says, we need to revive the Enlightenment values of scepticism, inquiry and reason. He quotes pre-eminent English scientist and experimentalist Michael Faraday, who said that one should hold theories in one’s fingertips so that the least breeze of fact might blow them away. Yet, in so many areas, inquiry and reason have been abandoned, drowned out by group-think orthodoxies. I see the lack of inquiry in a Year 8 geography curriculum that tells students that globalisation is a bogyman to be feared. It is in the mindset of many indigenous leaders still wedded to policies that produced 30 years of dysfunction. As Hirsi Ali told the audience on Monday evening, we ought to be confident enough about the values of the Enlightenment to defend them and use them. After all, we sharpen our minds and bring clarity to ideas through open, reasoned debate. A man in the audience asks her how she responds to accusations by some of her critics that she is an Enlightenment fundamentalist. “I think it’s cute,” she says with a laugh. “It’s just so absurd to put the two words together. The Enlightenment is all about asking questions.” Her departing advice is that we confront, through robust debate, those who would threaten our most cherished values, whether the threat comes from our own complacency, or the malevolent anti-Westernism of moral relativists or the Islamic fanatics.
First published by The Australian, 6 August 2008 |
Neglect the kids … it will stop them getting bored Just days into the long holiday and the summer soundtrack isn’t so much the sleepy drone of busy bees as the whine of listless children. The thrills of liberty and long lie-ins have worn thin, everyone else seems to have fled the country to enjoy holidays abroad and the “I’m bored...” mantra is driving parents to breaking point. The reaction of many well-meaning adults is to swiftly organise weeks of activity aimed at keeping every minute of every hour so crammed with events that their offspring’s ennui will be eased before it gets a chance to set in. But should we bother? Isn’t it time we recognised the benefits of boredom and gave children the chance to use their own initiative and learn how to entertain themselves? Guilt simply comes with the territory for most parents, especially as so many people now work full-time and perform amazing juggling acts to ferry their children around, with timetables crammed not just with education but also with huge amounts of extracurricular activities. Holidays too are now packed with sports/art/drama camps, every minute timetabled. Paddy O’Donnell, professor of social psychology at the University of Glasgow, has been studying the long-term effects of structured play and the way it has impacted at university level over the past ten to 15 years. “Children have a natural inclination to play and explore and until they reach around the age of 3 this is directed by the parents, hopefully helping them to deepen their curiosity and learn to use language to explore the world. “Once they reach 3 they are interested in social play, which becomes a major feature of their activities. Boredom shouldn’t last long if children are in the right environment where they’re dragged off either by curiosity or the desire to socialise. It continues only if there’s no one to play with or the environment’s too restrictive.” The age of 5 or 6 has always been a crucial stage at which youngsters naturally tend to stop spending so much time with their parents and seek the company of their peers. Children like playing with their own age group and find siblings less interesting, though they’ll make do with them when there’s no alternative, such as during family holidays. Adults who feel morally obliged to spend every waking hour entertaining their children and doing everything “as a family” might want to take stock at this point, especially as O’Donnell also points out that “parents should not be pals. Their role is as a parent, not as a friend, and children need to make their own friends.” According to O’Donnell, the shift in play over the past couple of decades is reflected in the attitudes of today’s students. “Schools, clubs and other activities are now very much leader-related,” he says. “Unstructured play is becoming rarer with no moving as a pack or just getting on with activities - children always expect and want to relate individually to whomever is in charge and we now have 18, 19, 20-year-olds who can only function effectively like that. Students are far less confident than they were 15 years ago, far less likely to make a decision by themselves and with little aspiration to get things moving without someone else being in charge and directing them.” What are parents so scared of when it comes to leaving their children to get on with it? Desiring nothing more than freedom to do nothing is incomprehensible to modern parents, who steadfastly believe that structuring supervised activities is the best they can do for their ofspring. Escape and creativity are vital for development, but supervision now tempers a vast amount of activity. Dr Richard Ralley, a senior psychology lecturer at Edge Hill College in Lancashire, is now quantifying a research project he carried out with 300 participants to assess the wider implications and benefits of boredom: “People often report that when they are bored they do nothing. Seen this way, boredom is useful - we conserve energy, but do not find this pleasant, so are ready to engage with the next useful activity that comes along. “The brain sucks up a fifth of our energy and our children are the most heavily assessed in Europe. Some genuine downtime seems due.” One of the hardest parts of parenting is letting children develop independence to learn to think for themselves, but if sent off cheerfully to try something different few children will demur. However, add a nervous or weepy parent, over-the-top exhortations to take care and a terrifying list of what can go wrong - and failure seems the most likely outcome. We would all like our children to grow into well-rounded and capable human beings in the safety of our own living rooms, but it doesn’t work like that. Ralley says that parents should leave their children to feel fed-up, rather than keeping them constantly occupied, as boredom could also allow children to get sufficient rest. “One of the features that has arisen in people’s reports so far is a loneliness that comes with boredom, as well as the inadequacy of grasping on to any kind of activity to relieve it. I’m starting to believe that being bored is a signal to stop doing other things and to re-engage socially. I’ve always suggested that social activity is best: a family beach trip, playing football, having a picnic.” Once you’ve embraced the idea of benign neglect having a valid position in parenting, you’re still left with the problem of actually finding the places where children can entertain themselves safely. Aim for physical activity, especially as that will ensure real sleep at the end of the day and remove the time constraints, irrespective of whether you’re at a beach, country park or in a forest. Give children basic safety instructions, make sure they know where to find you and then tell them that you’ll see them when they’re hungry or bored with messing around. The real test then will actually be for the parents, as very few of us can sit peacefully for two or three hours and not leap fretfully towards every sound, or lack of sound. Build up the time if you lack confidence in yourself or your children, watch over them unseen if you really cannot bear to let them out of your sight and then let them get on with it - the Lord of the Flies-style confrontations excepted. Letting kids run screaming into the wind on an empty beach, leaving them to get filthy building a den in the woods, or just spending a whole day slouching in their pyjamas without one parental exhortation to get dressed, might be hard for parents who are used to driving their children everywhere - in every sense. But when it comes to journeying into their own imagination, children are best left to travel solo. Child’s play Let your children go to the park - country parks in particular, where they have access to woods, streams and nature. Seek out beaches with rockpools. Camping in the back garden: leave them to get on with it. Sleepovers that they organise themselves: let them take over the living room and kitchen and do everything themselves, including clearing. On holiday, let them stay in pyjamas all day, eat at odd times, go out and look at the stars. If you can’t bear it all the time, then agree that half the holiday is for loafing around. Try an adventure centre where you know that the activities are relevant to age and let them get on with it, returning only when they’ve had enough. Wherever you are, don’t organise them! Read on: Are you an over-protective parent?
Are you constantly fretting about your kids? Controversial sociologist Frank Furedi asks parents to stop worrying so much
First published by The Times (London), 5 August 2008 |
Parents warned on gymnastic photos Controversial new advice from governing body Scottish Gymnastics says photographs of youngsters should only be taken if they are wearing tracksuits. The child protection guidelines – drawn up to prevent “unsuitable images” appearing on the internet – also suggest parents should destroy existing photographs showing children in a “potentially provocative” pose. The organisation, which has 8,500 members in Scotland, says the move is a commonsense alternative to having an outright ban on filming or photography at competitions. But others claim it is a needless overreaction that will do little more than help spread fear. The new policy, for five to 16-year-olds at Scottish Gymnastics clubs, states: “Sport websites and publications provide excellent opportunities to broadcast achievements of individuals to the world and to provide a showcase for the activities of gymnasts. In some cases, however, displaying certain information or pictures of children could put them at risk. We must all take the time to ensure these photographs are actually suitable for publication.” The guidelines, which are being handed out in leaflets to parents before they attend children’s gymnastic events state: “The content of photographs or videos must not depict a child or vulnerable adult in a provocative pose or in a state of partial undress other than when depicting a sporting activity. “Where relevant, a tracksuit may be more appropriate attire. Children must never be portrayed in a demeaning or tasteless manner. Common sense should be used when deciding which photographs to print. Do not use images that can appear staged and potentially provocative. Do not use images that appear to focus on the groin or in movements when the legs are in a split position.” Lorna Whyte, the body’s ethics and welfare manager, said the guidelines had been drawn up in consultation with parents, coaches and clubs. She said: “We are certainly not stopping people from taking pictures of their children. “We are saying: ‘Yes, you can, but you have got to beware about the type of photograph you are taking’. “Everybody loves to see an action shot of gymnastics. It is not a problem, just as long as the action shot is appropriate.” Whyte confirmed the guidelines were pro-active and that Scottish Gymnastics has never encountered any problems with photographs or films being misused in any way. Previously parents were requested to fill in a form if they wanted to take photos, but this has now been replaced by handing out specific guidance to all mothers and fathers. Maire McCormack, head of policy for Scotland’s Commissioner for Children & Young People, backed the policy. She said: “It’s essential that parents are given clear guidance on the making and use of video and photographic material of all children taking part in activities such as gymnastics. These commonsense guidelines should help protect children and provide reassurance to all relevant adults.” Anne Houston, chief executive of Children 1st, which helps to run the national child protection in sport service, agreed it was a delicate issue. “The internet had added another dimension to fears about inappropriate images appearing of children, but it is important that common sense prevails and that parents, relatives and children are not robbed of the photographic reminders of special moments in their lives.” But Professor Frank Furedi, a sociologist with the University of Kent, believes the growing trend of restricting photographs of children at public events is unnecessary and counter-productive. The author of Paranoid Parenting said: “The assumption that pictures represent a significant threat to children has acquired a fantasy-like grotesque character. We rarely dare ask the question: what possible harm can come from taking pictures of children? Dark hints about the threat of evil networks of paedophiles are sufficient to corrode common sense. “Tragically, what the dramatisation and criminalisation of the act of photographing children reveals is a culture that regards virtually every childhood experience from the standpoint of a paedophile. The default position is to always expect the worst.” In New Zealand all spectators at the national athletics championships must have cameras and mobile phones registered and labelled on entry because of fears that “unsavoury” images could emerge. In 2002, Edinburgh City Council was forced to retract a ban on parents taking photographs at their children’s Nativity plays after parents threatened to take legal action. First published by Scotland on Sunday, 3 August 2008 |
Are you an over-protective parent? The summer holidays stretch before many parents like a problem to be solved. How much freedom should we give the children? Will they be safe? Will they be able to cope on their own? The small, gap-toothed and quietly spoken man in front of me has been yelling at you not to worry for years. Frank Furedi, 61, the most quoted sociologist in the media (there’s a research study to prove it), thinks we live in a society in which we’re all encouraged to worry too much. And whether it be for the sake or our own health or the safety of our children, very little of it is productive. Last month, in a well-publicised report for the think-tank Civitas, Furedi was decrying the rise in police checks for adults working with children because they have “succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations”. Later this year an updated edition of his best-known book, Paranoid Parenting (Allen Lane), will be published. It’s a demolition of daily campaigns that convince us that children are in danger from disease, obesity, paedophiles and lurking safety hazards. Furedi is sitting in his double-fronted Victorian house in Faversham, Kent, sipping a Pepsi Max in obvious defiance of all those alarmist fizzy-drink warnings. Yet he is not altogether in tune with his teachings. He’s clock-watching so that he’s not late to pick up his son Jacob, 12, from cricket. He’s telling me how he goes to see the doctor too often; that he has been worried about his prostate since listening to a recent radio programme. And though he and his wife (Ann Furedi, the chief executive of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service) have tried to be as paranoia-free as possible - Jacob was allowed to go to the park and shops by himself from the age of 7 - he confides that he’s not immune to worry. “Occasionally my wife tells me to practise what I preach when I react like a typical paranoid father,” he says. “Our lives and emotions are so heavily invested in our children, we all find it difficult to be practical.” The State makes parents feel vulnerable Such self-confessed fallibility is endearing, and surprising too, given Furedi’s reputation as an academic rottweiler. A Hungarian émigré and founder of the British Revolutionary Communist Party in the 1970s (disbanded in 1998), he has been accused by environmentalist George Monbiot of heading a group of neo-conservative ex-Trotskyites systematically infiltrating parts of the British Establishment with free-market libertarianism, a claim that Furedi denies. His politics now seem a long way from communism as we know it. He says he’s always been deeply suspicious of the State and resents the way it makes everyone, particularly parents, feel more vulnerable than they should. “Back in my childhood, the expression over-protective parent was used as a criticism, but today it’s seen as a responsibility,” says Furedi, Professor of Sociology at Kent University since 1975. He wrote Paranoid Parenting in 2001, prompted by the countless warnings of risk he received from health and local authorities as soon as Jacob, his only child, was born. But the risk of abduction or harm is tiny, he says,certainly less than that of taking a child on a car trip. He says he has updated Paranoid Parenting because, since he first wrote the book, the “idiotic” (one of his favourite words) has become the norm: safety measures preventing parents from taking photographs of their children at school, or stopping them playing conkers, or from going anywhere near a public bonfire on November 5, are common. “All these things that are important aspects of kids’ lives are being gradually undermined. There’s also an increasing mistrust of adults, where they are no longer allies but potential enemies.” Furedi points to our automatic assumption that adult interest in children is suspicious or sexually motivated, something that research has indicated does not exist to the same extent in other countries. It’s so pervasive that sometimes he can’t help feeling it too. Furedi says we need a cultural change “I remember going to the gym with my son when he was 6 or 7 and there was this guy taking a lot of interest in him. I remember saying to myself ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ But then I had a reality check and realised that he was behaving normally, and if I’d been my father, in his time, he’d have just viewed it as a friendly gesture and welcomed the interest that was being shown.” What we need, he says, is a cultural change where we regard childhood differently, where adults are allowed to hug children, but also to have responsibility for them; looking after them if they look in trouble, telling them off if they’re behaving antisocially. That way children would be less fearful and become more engaged in adult ideas of social responsibility, and adults would tune their emotional radar to real sources of concern, rather than having to rely on criminal record checks. Furedi denies that he wants to go back in time, but what he says constantly harks to a better past: old-fashioned, let-’em-take-care-of-themselves parenting. His theories seem to have their roots as much in his own extraordinary background, as in the hours of contemplation and self-inquisition that he tells me also lie behind them. Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, his mother was a concentration camp survivor and his watchmaker father spent the war on the run from the Nazis, first pretending to be a regimental doctor and then spending the last six months of the war in the same hotel as German high command. It would be the last place they would look, he correctly reasoned. His mother let him take care of himself Through most of Furedi’s childhood, his father was in jail at the hands of the Stalinist regime (“he was a loudmouth, very right-wing and not too diplomatic”) and his overstretched mother let him and his sister more or less take care of themselves. He recalls often catching a train to Budapest and back on his own from the age of 7. The family fled to Canada, after the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when Furedi was 9. He left home at 16, joined the Army, went to McGill University, got involved in “extreme” politics, of unformed political hue he says. It involved occupying university buildings to try and radicalise political teaching and he found himself blacklisted when he applied for PhD courses. He decided to study in London instead. His emerging - and to many puzzling - brand of Marxism brought him notoriety among leftwingers when he opposed Arthur Scargill during the 1980s miners’ strike because of his refusal to hold a ballot, and he criticised the Anti Nazi League for preventing freedom of speech. Some have called it extreme right-wing libertarianism. Furedi calls it upholding free speech and the rights of individuals above institutions. He prefers to be called a humanist rather than a libertarian. He vehemently opposes what he calls the “medicalisation” of society, the process by which existential problems, such as shyness, active behaviour, poor schoolwork, are recast as medical problems such as social phobia, ADHD and learning difficulties. This is the result, he says, of “cultural drivers” (by which I think he means short-termist, vote-grabbing politicians). “There’s a fear market, which the pharmaceutical and other industries benefit from,” he says. “I wouldn’t trust them any more than the Department of Health’s idiotic campaign on child obesity. The idea of what it means to be human is constantly downsized, making us imagine that we are more mentally ill, have more invisible diseases, and are less able to cope with chronic diseases than we imagined. It encourages people to feel less in control of their lives. “I see the impact of this in quite a devastating way. You go to a nursery and you find every year the number of dyslexic children grows, and you know that it’s both real but also principally the result of culture, and not biological causes.” Furedi claims that, in private, many journalists and academics see the sense in what he says. He seems faintly bemused by why he has attracted such spleen from people like Monbiot. What he says is outspoken but nuanced, he says. Others would say the consistent anti-state agenda behind his academic efforts, and his involvement with the magazine Living Marxism, which regularly caused outrage by appearing to defend the indefensible, certainly haven’t helped. Perhaps it’s also down to a natural, intellectual pugnaciousness inherited from his father. There’s the curious spring of the fighter in his walk, and a slight, tense withdrawal when he feels challenged. He tells me a revealing story. Since infancy, his father scolded him when he didn’t stand up for himself and encouraged him to fight back if he was pushed around. So that’s what he did. When he was 17 and living in Montreal, he went on a bus to see his girlfriend. Between getting off the bus and getting to her house, Furedi claims to have got into three fights. “It was a very anti-Semitic area and I got a lot of abuse. But I relished the opportunity to make something of it.” Shortly after that, he vowed never again to confront problems in that way, or to embarrass his own children into action. “If I don’t exercise I become a bad person” Now he has other physical outlets. He goes to the gym three times a week, but not to keep fit. “I take physical exercise seriously. If I don’t do it, I become very uptight and a bad person. I find it phenomenally relaxing.” He and his wife love climbing and skiing, which, he says, absorb most of their disposable income. But he’s definitely not faddy about his food, with lots of fatty meat (”the Hungarian diet”) on the family menu, not much junk because he wants Jacob to understand quality in food, but not too much emphasis on fruit and veg either “because we want to encourage him to eat whatever he wants”. But it’s clearly not easy running against a tide of human anxiety. “I’ve been to my doctor several times with worries. I would like to be less concerned than I am, but that’s me.” And when he tells me about the planning he and his wife do to allow their son as much freedom as possible without isolating him from friends and safety-concerned parents, and about worried parents of schoolmates turning up on the Furedi doorstep to report that they’ve found Jacob out on his own...well, it all sounds quite pressurised. Furedi doesn’t blame any parent for leading an anxiety-filled, health-conscious life. “It’s very difficult for any individual to adopt a parenting style that is fundamentally different from anyone else’s. We interact with each other, we are influenced by similar fashions, and I don’t suggest that anyone should adopt a childcare strategy that isolates you from the rest of the world. But I can see the day when we are more mature in making choices and don’t have to pee in our pants about every new experience.” We await the revolution. Child safety in numbers 11.7m under 16s in England and Wales 68 children were abducted by strangers in 2002-03 166 children are killed on the road every year 96 children drowned in 2002 917,498 children were injured in falls in 2002
Source: Times database
First published by The Times (London), 26 July 2008 |
Our little emperors: does worrying do more harm than good? As the mother of two young daughters, Ruth Appleton is used to doling out praise for almost everything they do. Even she was taken aback, however, when her younger daughter, Rachel, now 5, arrived home from nursery clutching a certificate for “sitting nicely on the carpet”. “It made me wonder what she was doing the rest of the time,” said Appleton, from Porthcawl, Wales. “I thought it was a bit over the top rewarding her for something so routine. But it’s part of a whole culture of stickers and smiley faces and ‘celebration assemblies’.” Anyone with children at primary school will instantly get the picture: no child’s existence is complete without “circle time”, or “show and tell” sessions at which they are encouraged to parade their achievements and examine their feelings. The received wisdom on child-rearing says nothing should be allowed to damage a child’s sense of self-worth: just last week the Football Association (FA) decided to ban teams including children under eight from publishing their results, for fear of putting the kids under too much pressure if they lost a match. As parents, we are encouraged to nurture our children’s sense of “self”, but are we unwittingly doing them more harm than good? Our child-centred society means we fret over what our kids eat, what they wear, their friends, their exam grades and their safety. A US academic has coined the term kindergarchy – a new (affluent) world order in which children rule. “Children have gone from background to foreground in domestic life with more attention centred on them, their upbringing [and] their small accomplishments,” wrote Joseph Epstein, a recently retired lecturer at Northwestern University, in The Weekly Standard, a US magazine. “On visits to the homes of friends with small children, one finds their toys strewn everywhere, their drawings on the refrigerator, television sets turned on to their shows. Parents seem little more than indentured servants.” Epstein’s recollections of his own childhood evoke an utterly different world. Parents didn’t feel the need to micro-manage their children’s lives. He doesn’t remember his parents reading to him, or turning up to watch him compete at athletics. They left it to him to decide which foreign language to study at secondary school and weren’t much bothered that he was a mediocre student. Now, he says, it’s a wonder more teachers aren’t driven out of the profession by parents bombarding them with e-mails, phone calls and requests for meetings. “Students told me what they ‘felt’ about a novel,” he recalled. “I tried, ever so gently, to tell them no one cared what they felt. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to – but did not – write, ‘Too much love in the home’.” In Britain, too, there has been a seismic shift in parenting. “At the weekends, the kids are saying to us, ‘What are we doing today?’ – in other words, ‘You are going to entertain us, aren’t you?’ ” said Appleton, who works part-time for Netmums, an online network for mothers. It is becoming a worldwide trend. A recent production of Snow White at a primary school in Japan featured 25 Snow Whites, no dwarfs and no wicked witch, as parents objected to one child being picked out for the title role. In Sweden a boy was prevented from handing out invitations to his birthday party at school because he was “discriminating” against the two classmates he did not invite. A straw poll in Netmums’ virtual coffee house produced distinctly mixed feelings about the phenomenon. “The cushioning effect of awarding stickers and praise for inconsequential trivia masks what children really need and are looking for – guidance, consistency, self-reliance and love,” said one mother, Liz. Another, Jeanette, was concerned that her daughter’s teachers would not correct spelling mistakes, “because she was spelling the words how you said them”, nor correct her writing when she drew letters back to front. “The reality is, she does need to be corrected,” said Jeanette. “Children have to learn. I’m not saying it has to be negative, but there has to be a balance. When our kids go into the workplace, they are in for a shock.” That would appear to be true. Earlier this year the Association of Graduate Recruiters said the generation born since 1982 – the so-called generation Y – were “unrealistic, self-centred, fickle and greedy”. They used the example of a new recruit to a transport company who rang his mother to complain: “I have got to go to London tomorrow and they haven’t even given me a map.” The employer threw up her hands in anger, according to Carl Gilleard, AGR’s chief executive: “Here was someone working for a transport company, who had spent three years at university, who was aggrieved because he hadn’t been given a detailed map.” On a more sinister level, the child-centred approach also seems to have contributed to a decline in standards of behaviour in schools, with children ever more conscious of their “rights” and teachers afraid to chastise unruly children for fear of being attacked or accused of assault. Last week Boris Johnson, the London mayor, highlighted the problem of indiscipline in schools as a factor in street violence. “Too many kids in London are growing up without boundaries, without discipline and without the family structures they need,” he said. “We should bring back discipline and the idea of punishment.” In Merseyside an academic is bucking the trend of navel-gazing in schools. Peter Clough, head of psychology at the University of Hull, is working with children at All Saints Catholic high school in Knowsley, attempting to teach them to be “mentally tough”. “Positive psychology says, ‘Count your blessings.’ My kind of psychology says, ‘Life can be hard and you have to learn to deal with it’,” he explained. According to Clough, mentally tough pupils do better in exams and are less likely to see themselves as victims of bullying. If they fail at something, they try again. Using a diagnostic test devised by AQR, a business consultancy, Clough has been assessing his group’s attitudes to challenges, looking at such factors as whether they consider themselves optimists or pessimists and whether they think they can stay cool in stressful situations. Those with the lowest scores are learning visualisation, relaxation and anxiety-control techniques to help them toughen up. “I’m encouraging kids not to run away from stress but face up to it,” said Clough. “If you’ve got a maths exam, just do it.” We have to decide what we want our children to be – tough go-getters or touchy-feely carers. Or is it even about them? Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, believes our child-centredness is really adult-centredness. “It’s a way of reassuring ourselves that our children are going to be insulated from pain and adversity,” he said. “We tell children they are wonderful now for tying their shoelaces or getting 50% in an exam. But really it’s our way of flattering ourselves that we’re far more sensitive to children than people were in the past.” The trouble is, Furedi says, that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. “You’re subtly giving kids the message that they can’t cope with life,” he said. “I have a son of 12 and when he and his friends were just nineI remember being shocked at them using therapeutic language, talking about being stressed out and depressed.” While researching The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, its co-author Dennis Hayes, visiting professor of education at Oxford Brookes University, discovered a leaflet telling students that if they studied sociology they might come across poor people and get depressed and if they studied nursing they might come across sick people and get distressed – so the university offered counselling.
“It was telling students they could not cope before they started,” he said. “The focus on feelings has become ridiculous. One friend told me his daughter was crying at home one night and when he asked why she said, ‘It’s my turn to put my worries in the worry box tomorrow and I haven’t got any!’ ” Perhaps we underestimate the resilience of children. One coach of an undereights football team was in favour of publishing results, saying they just enjoyed playing, whatever the score. “They didn’t care that they lost,” he said of one game. It was only 21-0, after all.
First published by Sunday Times, 29 June 2008 |
Licensed to Hug The following appeared on 26 June 2008. A quarter of adults to face ‘anti-paedophile’ tests. Daily Telegraph - front page Time for sanity in the vetting of volunteers. Daily Telegraph - leader Government will crack down on unnecessary CRB checks, Phil Hope says. Daily Telegraph Are we overprotective of our children? Daily Telegraph - discussion Has vetting damaged trust? Today, BBC Radio Four Adults ‘scared to go near kids’. BBC News Online Is our response to child sex abuse in proportion? BBC News Online - Analysis by Mark Easton Child safety laws mean adults ‘scared to approach children’. Guardian Child protection laws are ‘poisoning the relationships between adults and children’. Daily Mail Quarter of adults must be CRB checked under new rules. The Times (London) Paedophile label scares off adults. London Metro Child protection measures ‘increase risk to children’. Inthenews.co.uk
Adults Scared Of Children. Raising Kids
Escalation in child protection measures make adults ‘afraid to interact with children’. 24dash.com The following appeared on 27 June 2008. An obnoxious brat in the street, a chilling leaflet… and my 14-year-old son who chants ‘Childline’ when I try to hug him. By Tom Utley. Daily Mail This child protection hysteria deflects attention from a real, and growing, danger. By Dominic Lawson. The Independent Protecting kids is far from child’s play, by Tim Gill. Guardian - Comment is Free Acting on instinct, by David Wilson. Guardian - Comment is Free Are we overprotective of our kids? Guardian - news blog Parents banned from ferrying children to sports matches. Daily Telegraph Baby photos that fall foul of the PC police, by Lesley Thomas. Daily Telegraph ‘I was treated like a paedophile’, by Julian Joyce. BBC News Online. Londres multiplie les contrôles antipédophiles. Le Figaro (France) Esther Rantzen’s fury over kid check. The Mirror Welcome for record check on volunteers. Dorset Echo / Daily Echo Letters to the Telegraph, including from Meg Hillier MP, Home Office Minister The following appeared on 28 June 2008. John Pinnington sacked after CRB check reveals unsubstantiated abuse allegations. Telegraph New Report Explores The Damaging Effects Of Child Protection Policies. Medical News Today The following appeared on 29 June 2008. If we can’t learn to trust each other, we will lose ourselves and our children. By Tim Lott. Independent Parents are kidding themselves over child protection. By Rod Liddle. Sunday Times There is no law against photographing children. By Jemima Lewis. Telegraph The following appeared on 30 June 2008. We’re all victims in Meg Hillier’s mad world. By Philip Johnston. Telegraph The following appeared on 7 July 2008. How magic might finally fix your computer. The Red Tape Chronicles, MSNBC The following appeared on 9 July 2008. I launched Childline to protect the most vulnerable - but unleashed a politically correct monster. By Esther Rantzen. Daily Mail Bureaucrats killing future British tennis stars. By Jim White. Daily Telegraph The following appeared on 13 July 2008. Paranoia has taken over child protection, by India Knight. The Sunday Times The following appeared on 1 August 2008. The Damaging Effects of Child Protection Policies. Children Webmag Also see: Thou shalt not hug, by Frank Furedi. New Statesman, 26 June 2008 Now you need a licence to interact with children, by Frank Furedi. spiked, 26 June 2008 Childcare: child’s play is now a minefield, by Frank Furedi. Daily Telegraph, 26 June 2008 Licensed to Hug. Civitas blog, 26 June 2008
First published by All media, 26 June 2008 |
Emphasis on emotions is creating ‘can’t do’ students Schools and universities are producing a generation of “can’t do” students, who are encouraged to talk about their emotions at the expense of exploring ideas or acquiring knowledge, academics claimed yesterday. The strong focus on emotional expression and building up self-esteem in schools and colleges was “infantilising” students, leaving them unable to cope with life on their own, according to the authors of a new book, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. Dennis Hayes and Kathryn Ecclestone, of Oxford Brookes University, argue that this “therapeutic” approach to education is at odds with the acquisition of knowledge because it views the emotional skills associated with learning as more important than subject content or criticism. “Turning teaching into therapy is destroying the minds of children, young people and adults,” Dr Hayes told Times Higher Education. “Therapeutic education promotes the idea that we are emotional, vulnerable and hapless individuals. It is an attack on human potential.” They pointed to the increased presence of parents on campus, and substitute parents, such as counsellors and support officers. “Everyone looks for a difficulty to declare, like the hundreds of students who register themselves as dyslexic. Being dyslexic used to be something that people hid. Now students wear their difficulties as a badge of honour,” Dr Hayes said. Therapeutic education pervaded all levels of education. Dr Hayes cited the case of a primary school boy who was asked by an emotional learning assistant why he was so happy. When he said he was looking forward to a treat at McDonald’s, she asked: “Are you sure there is nothing worrying you?” The book follows the recent introduction into state schools of lessons in happiness and wellbeing under a programme known as Seal (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning). Ministers are convinced that teaching children to express their emotions boosts concentration and motivation. But there is growing disquiet that this attitude could undermine teaching and learning. Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, said: “It inflates the importance of feelings to the point where they eclipse what is supposed to be going on in the classroom.” It also made teachers and lecturers overcautious. “They will give a piece of work 55 per cent and then write on it ‘this essay is superb’ because they daren’t say it’s crap.” John Foreman, dean of students at University College London, agreed that students were not as “self-sustaining and robust” as they once were. He partly blamed overprotective parents. “If young people don’t start learning to solve their own problems, when will they ever?” he said. Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College in Berkshire, a pioneer of wellbeing classes, defended the approach. “Since we started wellbeing lessons [in 2005] our A-level results have gone up from 64 to 86 per cent of students getting As and Bs.” The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education is published on July 14. First published by The Times (London), 12 June 2008 |
Times Online marriage and sex survey Do people’s sex lives start to fizzle out after they have children? Does their arrival mark the end of romance and the start of fantasising about other sexual partners - or even a night of uninterrupted sleep? Shining a light on this deeply private area of couple’s lives is not always easy. So when we posted a questionnaire on Times Online, we were not entirely sure what to expect. So far nearly 1,700 men and women have answered questions that range from how often they have sex and how long it lasts, to how many children they have and whether the children have affected the quality of their sex lives. Many also wrote at length about their own experiences. David Thompson - the only one of those we contacted who agreed to give his real name - spoke with lyrical nostalgia about a long walk in the woods with his girlfriend. The weather was perfect, no one else was around and they had nothing on their minds but each other; so they made love beneath the trees. Now aged 37, Thompson is married to his girlfriend and a father of three. “Making love spontaneously outdoors is something we would never do now,” he said. “We’re too busy running after the kids, making sure they don’t beat each other with sticks.” His experience seemed typical: most of the respondents to our survey agreed that having children meant having less time for love-making. Yet despite recent reports about the rise in sexless marriages, the overwhelming majority still had a sex life – and few complaints about its quality. “Frequency has gone down because we are both constantly tired and frazzled with the demands of our jobs and looking after the family,” wrote a married mother of two, who said she had sex two to three times a month. “But quality has gone up, as we have got closer after the birth of our child . . . We trust each other more and so are more open with each other.” In all, 1,675 respondents - 54% of them male - filled in the survey on the Times Online’s Alpha Mummy blog. While not strictly scientific - because the respondents were self-selected - it painted a reassuring picture of what happens to romance after having children. The majority of parents said they had sex more than once a month; and 63% said the frequency of their love-making ranged from several times a week to two to three times a month. For 46%, love-making sessions lasted 20-45 minutes, while 34% made love for up to 20 minutes and 3% for more than an hour. Tiredness was the chief reason given for having less sex now than before having a family; causes of this included the sheer physical energy needed to look after children, disturbed nights, early starts, pressures at work and general stress. One pregnant mother, who has one child, said the reason why she was having sex only two or three times a month was, in fact, nothing to do with having a baby. “Running our own business does more damage,” she wrote. Other reasons for less frequent sex included sharing a bed with children or sleeping in separate beds - in some cases so that fathers were not woken up when a baby needed to be breast-fed. One mother of three complained that it was hard ever to escape from children - “I’m worried about little hands opening bedroom doors,” she wrote. Sex with his wife was described by one father as “quick, covert, much like a military strike . . . My daughter seems to have been born with a built-in radar which informs her any time my wife and I try to get close . . . even if she’s in the other room . . . at two in the morning”. Some parents said they stole private moments while the children were playing in the garden or when the nanny was on duty. “We have to make the most of the opportunities, but the quality seems to get better with age and experience,” wrote a father of three, who described sex with his girlfriend as “better than ever” after 13 years together. It was striking just how many parents had a positive view of their sex lives - whatever the frequency. “The sex we have is really great. It is maybe not as saucy as it was when we first got together, but it is more effective in that we both know what the other likes and what works for us both,” said a mother of one, who has been with her husband for eight years. They still have sex several times a week: “Although sometimes I am tired and think I can’t be bothered, afterwards I always think how much fun it was and am so pleased that I made the effort.” Another mother, who has three children, said: “Being constantly tired and busy with activities after school made it hard to feel ‘in the mood’. Once the kids were older and more independent, we could return to more intimacy, and now that the kids have left home it is great.” Some in long-term relationships admitted that the ebb and flow of their sex lives did not necessarily have anything to do with having children. “We thought children affected our sex life when they were very little; but looking back, it was better then than now,” wrote a mother of two, whose relationship has so far lasted 11 years. “It may be our age, or we may have just got lazy.” According to Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University and author of Paranoid Parenting, mothers in particular can find parenting a desexualising experience. After a baby is born, he said, “there’s a sense that the baby becomes the priority; the body is given over to the child. And that is sometimes slightly contradictory to the woman as a sexual being”. Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, says that there can be a tension between “the erotic and the domestic. Family life thrives in an atmosphere of consistency and stability. The erotic crumbles under routine”. Several respondents recognised these strains in their relationships. “I believe that my partner saw me as a mother/housewife rather than as being a sexually attractive, interesting woman,” said a mother of one. And a father wrote: “Being in the birthing room was very traumatic for me. Taking second place to our child hurt our sex life . . . I think we both withdrew from the sex part of the relationship.” One father of two, who had been in a relationship for five years, said: “After the second child, desire just disappeared and never really came back to full strength - and it’s been three years.” The couple’s love-making - two to three times a month - was, however, “great when you get it”. Another father said that his love life had dwindled to having formulaic sex several times a year: “It was never the right moment so I gave up trying . . .” On the other hand, many felt that pregnancy and parenthood had put renewed energy into their relationships. “It’s great now because she’s pregnant and has a sex craving,” said a father who has sex about once a week. Perel said this was not uncommon. “There are lots of women who actually discover through pregnancy, through birth, nursing and bonding with a child, a whole new sense of themselves as women - physically, sexually and sensually.” The iron bonds of parenthood can often reinforce a relationship, according to Furedi. “Having kids and having some very positive shared experiences bring people together,” he said. “A good sex life for a couple depends on there being a kind of bond, a friendship - it’s what gives you confidence to relax.” What can be done if the sexual spark between a couple has simply fizzled out? Scheduling time to be alone together is vital, advises Suzi Godson, author of The Sex Book. Perel advises going out for a meal, dancing - anything that the couple will both enjoy. “Just don’t talk about the kids,” she says.
However, one desperate parent asked: but what else is there to talk about by that stage in a relationship?
First published by Sunday Times, 25 May 2008 |
Government to quiz households on sex lives and salaries More than 500,000 people a year are to be questioned about their sex lives and salaries by Government inspectors, it has emerged. Officials will ask for information about former sexual partners, contraception and how long couples have lived together before getting married. The 2,000-question survey, which will be carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), has prompted fears of further data security breaches as both names and addresses will be logged by inspectors. Critics also say the £3.5 million-a-year cost will be a waste of money as people tend to lie about their private lives and begrudge intrusion into personal matters. Eric Pickles, the shadow communities secretary, said: “Day by day, the liberty and privacy of the British public is being undermined by Labour’s surveillance state. People will be shocked that taxpayers’ money is being spent on intrusive surveys. Now state spies want to log and record who sleeps with whom and how often. Not even the Stasi went this far.” Inspectors will ask the questions as part of the new Integrated Household Survey. They will visit 200,000 homes at random each year and question each occupant, meaning that about 500,000 individuals will take part. One of the questions asks: “Have you ever had a baby - even one who only lived for a short time?” Interviewers are warned: “Exclude: Any stillborn; Include: Any who only lived for a short time.” The survey features intimate questions on exact dates when relationships ended, and the precise amount of money people take home. There will also be 35 questions on contraception, such as whether men have had vasectomies, the brands of Pill women use, and whether they have ever taken the morning-after Pill. Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at Kent University, said: “When researchers ask about sexual habits there is a very strong tendency for people to clam up, or to say what they think they want to hear. “I would resent being asked these questions and I don’t think the Government should be doing it.” A spokesman for the ONS said the survey was the most efficient way of meeting the Government’s “information needs”.
He said that all names and addresses would be deleted from the files once they arrived in the main office.
First published by Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2008 |
State busybodies want to pry into your bedroom secrets Government inspectors are to ask us intimate questions about our sex lives, it was revealed. More than half a million people every year will be asked about their past and present sexual partners, contraception and how long couples have lived together before marriage. The 2,000 questions are part of the Integrated Household Survey, and the responses will be logged with respondents’ names and addresses. Civil servants insist that the sensitive personal information will be made anonymous once the files arrive at the Office of National Statistics, where they will then be held on a secure server. But campaigners last night branded the survey “intrusive” and another example of Labour’s “surveillance state”. The survey will cost £3.5 million to carry out each year and will see inspectors randomly visit up to 200,000 homes to question each occupant. They will ask 35 questions on contraception alone, covering vasectomies, the pill and if respondents have ever used the “morning after” pill. Other intimate questions include the exact dates when previous relationships ended, precise monthly earnings and details of any second jobs or bonuses. Investigators will also ask about the health of any children in the household. One insensitive question asks: “Have you ever had a baby - even one who lived for a short time?” Interviewers are then told: “Exclude: Any stillborn; include: Any who lived for a short time.” Even though the survey is voluntary it has been claimed that inspectors will press respondents into revealing personal details with follow-up questions designed to draw out more information. The ONS said it needed to carry out the annual poll to keep abreast of constantly changing social trends and so help Whitehall formulate policy. But some experts cast doubt on the survey’s accuracy, suggesting that some respondents may hold back information, especially of a sexual nature, or say what they think the interviewer wants to hear. Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at Kent University, said: “If they want to find out about intimate details they should do it in a much more sensitive way.” Tory Communities spokesman Eric Pickles said: “Day by day, the liberty and privacy of the British public is being undermined by Labour’s surveillance state. People will be shocked that taxpayers’ money is being spent on intrusive surveys. “Now state spies want to log and record who sleeps with whom and how often. Not even the Stasi went this far.”
Last night, a spokesman for the ONS defended the survey and said it was “a high quality, adaptable and efficient” way of “meeting the Government’s future information needs”.
First published by Daily Mail, 21 April 2008 |
Irrational fears fuel stifling regulations The image of the deputy Labour leader walking through her constituency in a stab-proof vest generated plenty of debate last week. Harriet Harman likened it to wearing a team kit, but the picture provided easy pickings for the Conservatives. William Hague, shadow foreign secretary, asked if she wore a clown’s outfit to cabinet meetings. Harman responded that she would not take fashion tips from a man previously photographed wearing a baseball cap.
Furedi won over the summit delegates. But fear of the unknown is more visible than ever in the markets. Retail investors continue to move into cautious managed and protected products, despite the long-term arguments for holding equities. A desire to mitigate risk is also apparent at a higher level, with calls in Britain and America for tighter regulation of financial services, following the failures of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns. In particular, the influence of foreigners, from “non-dom” individuals to sovereign wealth funds is under scrutiny. While some investors have welcomed the arrival of the funds, and the estimated $3 trillion (£1.5 trillion) of funding they offer, others are cautious. In a bid to soothe concerns and pre-empt the introduction of tougher rules, two of the funds are set to adopt a code of conduct created by the British Venture Capital Association.
The financial services industry has seen such clamp-downs before. Most notably, the imposition of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act 2002 in America came in the aftermath of accounting scandals at WorldCom and Enron. The act satisfied the public outcry for action, but consigned American companies to extra regulatory burden and led to the rise of London as a financial centre. The British government will face similar pressures in the months ahead. While extra protection may be required, it should remember that over-regulation can be stifling.
First published by Fund Strategy, 7 April 2008 |
The Suspect Society The Surveillance Society. The New Authoritarianism. The Age of Paranoid Politics. These are just a few of the ways writers and thinkers describe the age we’re now living in. The signs of anxiety and fear in this post 9-11 era are all around us. School lock-downs are called the new fire-drill. Recently, many schools boards in Canada made rehearsing the lock-down mandatory. The number of security staff in schools is increasing every year. By 2010 for example, there will be more security guards than teachers in American schools. But, the uniforms aren’t just being worn by security staff. More and more American public schools have adopted uniforms for students. Meanwhile the U.S. army is embedding itself in schools - targeting younger and younger students for recruitment. In Canada recruitment comes through video games that inform, entertain and seduce “action-focused males starting at 17 years old”. Military symbols and myths are gaining prominence in western societies. In Britain, a recent report recommended that military personnel continue to wear a uniform in their daily life as citizens to boost support for themselves. One of Canada’s military boosters is Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In April, 2007, he told us that the Battle of Vimy Ridge is Canada’s creation story. Military Heroics. Bunker politics. Us against Them. The world, indeed seems more dangerous than ever, in the most intimate of environments. In daycares within Canada, the US, Britain and Australia, there is now video surveillance of very young children, easing we’re told, parental anxieties. Never mind cameras at intersections, in elevators. Cameras everywhere. In Baltimore, they’ve gone further. Based on an idea from Glasgow, Scotland, blue flashing lights have been installed around Baltimore - to signal: this is a high-crime neighbourhood. A grant worth millions of dollars from the United States Department of Homeland Security has helped pay for Baltimore’s video fortress. That video is streamed into the Baltimore Police Depatments “Watch Centre”. In New York City and London, England similar surveillance is called, “The Ring of Steel”. Britain has 4 million cameras trained on it’s citizens. The country’s information commissioner has publicly stated the British are sleepwalking into a surveillance society. One study revealed a single person in London, going about their business would be filmed about 300 times in one day. But what are we to make of all of this? We know that video cameras can, in specific situations, help solve crimes but must everybody be watched all the time? And what’s at stake? IDEAS producer Mary O’Connell takes us inside the new authoritarianism – which, if we’re paying attention, seems to be all around us.
In Episode 2, Mary O’Connell explores violations of academic freedom and expression. Dr. Steven Kurtz is an arts professor at Suny - State University of New York at Buffalo. Dr. Kurtz has been the subject of an FBI investigation and his trial will begin in summer 2008. The second case involves the story of Religion and Philosophy professor Douglas Giles who was dismissed from his
Follow this link to listen to The Suspect Society, Part 1 (13 March) and Part 2 (20 March). RESOURCES Books Against the New Authoritarianism, by Henry A. Giroux. The University in Chains, by Henry A. Giroux. Paranoid Parenting, by Frank Furedi. Witch Hunts from Salem to Guantanamo Bay, by Robert Rapley. The Age of McCarthyism, by Ellen Schrecker. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, by Ellen Schrecker. Suspect, Alphabet City, editor John Knechtel. Websites The American Civil Liberties Union - Is the US Turning Into A Surveillance Society Canadian Civil Liberties Association - CCLA In The Schools: The Right To Personal Privacy Media Matters for America - Savage Nation Alligator Online - Capital Bill Aims to Control Leftist CBN.NEWS.com - The 101 Most Dangerous Professors in America American Historical Association - Scholars Become Targets of Patriot Act First published by CBC Radio, 13 March 2008 |
Think positive On Monday night, before a capacity audience at the Guardian newsroom, Anthony Seldon, head of Wellington college, and the sociologist Frank Furedi debated whether happiness should be taught in schools. The event was the first in a series of public programmes co-sponsored by the Guardian and the education think tank Agora. Seldon is the first headteacher in the country to timetable happiness lessons. Wellington students are now taught ‘how to be happy’ according to the tenets of positive psychology. Seldon defended the movement by stressing that it defined happiness not as maximising pleasure but as cultivating meaningful relationships. The controversial academic Furedi agreed with Seldon that education should enable people to flourish. But he denounced happiness lessons as the intrusion of “psychobabble” into the classroom. The entire project, he argued, was misconceived because happiness cannot be taught; it can only be experienced in the daily challenges of life. Yet Furedi’s gravest concern about teaching happiness through positive psychology was that it threatened, rather than fostered, individual autonomy by imposing a formulaic and doctrinaire approach to life. In a post-debate show of hands, the audience was evenly divided on the merits or demerits-of teaching happiness. I can see why. Seldon rightly insists that education must prepare young people for something more than high-earning jobs; it must help them to become loving parents, loyal friends, and responsible stewards of the planet. Families, communities and faith groups must do the same. But how? Seldon’s answer is to teach positive psychology. But that hardly inspires confidence. Though the happiness scientists wisely promote “meaning and engagement” as the pinnacle of the good life, they consistently fall back upon a much weaker version of happiness - positive feelings, good moods - because that’s the only kind they can measure. (How do you measure meaning?) And positive psychology is all about measuring happiness. Though quick to ridicule the notion of happiness lessons, Furedi failed to offer much of an alternative. His derision is so sweepingly negative that it excludes any curricular focus on happiness. Yet such an extreme response hinders the educational mission that Furedi himself promotes: developing moral character, judicious intellect and good citizenship. A person who possesses those attributes is likely to be the person whom we call happy. What happened on Monday night, and what happens so often in such debates, is that happiness itself gets sidelined and the discussion becomes a verdict upon positive psychology - you love it, you hate it. At the end nobody is much clearer about what happiness is or how to achieve it. Missing from the debate is the recognition that happiness has a history. People have been talking, thinking, and writing about the good life for thousands of years, beginning with Aristotle in ancient Athens and the Hindu sages who composed the Upanishads. Though it sounds incredible, some people in the past have actually been happy. To assume that nobody knew anything about happiness until positive psychology emerged a decade ago is intellectual arrogance. And it’s a mystery why critics of positive psychology are so often blind to the well-established traditions of happiness that have developed over humanity’s long history. The truth is that for the past 2,500 years, happiness has been understood - and experienced - mostly in the context of philosophical and religious beliefs. Only in the past few centuries, and mostly in the west, has happiness become divorced from broad visions of the good life. From Epicureanism to Stoicism, and from Buddhism to Christianity, the question “what makes a life happy?” has never stopped being asked. That the question is perennial shows not only its importance, but also the difficulty of finding the right answer. Just as “one swallow does not make a springtime”, Aristotle reasoned, one pleasant day does not make a whole life happy. Which is another way of saying that we could all use some help in our search for happiness. So, yes, there is a place for happiness in the classroom, just as there is a place for it in the home, in youth groups, in churches, in mosques, and in synagogues. Call it happiness, call it morality, call it “life skills”, the label scarcely matters. What matters is that the ideal happiness curriculum already exists, and had existed for centuries. The problem is that it has been overlooked, sometimes in the faddish pursuit of the latest scientific discovery and sometimes out of historical amnesia. Still, humanity’s accumulated wisdom about the pursuit and achievement of happiness is there for anyone who wants to learn from it. If Wellington college really wants to teach its students how to be happy, it could do far worse than directing them to the library, where they might discover some books, perhaps dusty from long neglect, that will inspire them to excel in the art of living, the art whose other name is happiness. Richard Schoch is professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London and author of The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life. He also sits on the advisory board of Agora. First published by Guardian, 28 February 2008 |
Council bans social network site Workers at Kent County Council (KCC) have been banned from using the social networking website Facebook.
It said the move was an effort to reduce time-wasting, but some workers have objected and want Facebook back. “Like any other organisation, we have a responsibility to keep our IT systems secure,” the council said. The authority employs 32,000 people.
It can be difficult to know when to stop
One Facebook user, John Woodley, said: “You have your network of friends and there is always that element of trying to develop other relationships and meet other people on there. “We are social animals - it can be difficult to know when to stop.” Professor Frank Furedi, from the University of Kent, said the site could be “a very valuable asset for creating communities between employees”. He said: “It’s a way that employees can share experiences, and it’s a way that employers can learn about problems that exist in the workplace.” But employment lawyer Jonathan Gauton said: “Employers are facing employees who are wasting a lot of time, who are ill-focused on their correct responsibilities. “Ultimately, they can be sanctioned. They can be disciplined for it, and we have seen employees ultimately dismissed.” First published by BBC News, 28 August 2007 |
A world view built on worst-case scenarios HABITUES of second-hand bookshops tend to develop a more sceptical sense of intellectual fashion than those who prefer their ideas shiny and new, straight from the everlasting present of Borders or Amazon. Amid dusty shelves and wobbling stacks one finds whole runs of ideas and obsessions now discarded, such as lost civilisations or those long polar ice-core samples that have become part of our mental furniture. Nowhere is this more telling than in the area of the social sciences, where dominant ideas and research programs rise and fall and rise again over decades, leaving rich lodes of once popular works obsolete with a turn of the calendar. When I started to haunt such shops in the early 1980s, the ideas that had excited and informed the ‘60s and ‘70s were at their nadir and books that had been eagerly read classics were available in fire-hazard volume. As the Reagan-Thatcher-yuppie-greed-isgood years took off, it was above all works of grand cultural criticism that were dumped. Works that had inspired a revolution in thinking, such as Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report, Ivan Illich’s Celebration of Awareness and Paul Goodman’s Growing up Absurd had come to appear, as we all got stoned and it blew away, irrelevant, if not a little embarrassing. They had warned of a world tearing up its finite resources at a furious rate, in which the variety and quality of life had been suborned to a commodified, inhibited one-dimensional society. By the time we got to the ‘80s many of their answers turned out to have a few problems of their own, and here we were in a world of bright lights and big cities and, well, it didn’t look so bad. The classic ‘60s works were part of a longer tradition of cultural criticism stretching right back all the way, if one wanted to go there, via authors such as John Ruskin and William Morris, Emile Durkheim and Geoffrey Bateson, to the traditions of Theocritus and the other pastoral poets of the Greek city-states, who wrote endless odes about happy shepherds frolicking in a simple, uncorrupted world. To many, the glorious dawn of cultural criticism in the ‘60s was, in its twilight, more readily identifiable as traditional, rather than revolutionary, cyclic rather than unprecedented. Two decades further on, such concerns have once again come to the fore, prompted by a variety of great and small events. Yet such was the wrenching power of the fire last time, such were its promises and disappointments, that current contributions are haunted by a memory of embarrassing naivete, of the ease by which the smiley face became a logo. Even those predisposed to offering a more prophetic account of contemporary life feel a need to hedge their bets. Such caution, and what haunts it, is exemplified in Robyn Davidson’s Quarterly Essay on nomadism. Davidson, a life-long travelling writer, best known for her book Tracks, has written a highly readable and sometimes moving account of encounters with various nomadic peoples, with an explicit attempt to offer some reflections on our way of life - and a concerted attempt to disown any sense that what she is offering is a program for another way to live. Yet whether one agrees with or is exasperated by her argument that we must look to other cultures for solutions to an unsustainable way of life, many will be irritated by her idealised view of those other cultures. Beginning with a fairly outdated historical account identifying the coming of agriculture with the “fall”, Davidson moves through a consideration of the Aborigines she grew up near, but did not know, in rural Queensland, a journey to a horse fair in Tibet and, most substantially, a period travelling with the Rabari people of Rajasthan in India. Having early on sketched out a more limited purview-"I do not mean to say that we should (or could) return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean . . . that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate (them)"-the essay itself is a process of falling into a deep romance with her subjects. “I never once saw one of them show discourtesy to another human being, no matter how lowly, nor cruelty to another form of life,” she writes of the Rabari. “Although they were proud of themselves as a caste, they seemed to exist somewhere outside the more rigid hierarchies of settled people. They were aware of the air of freedom and liberality surrounding them.” Not only that, but they retained a pre-Edenic innocence that other cultures have lost: “Their success depended upon formal generosity, tolerance and honesty among migrating individuals, families, dangs (small groups), castes and religions.” At times, Davidson slips into a near Rudolph Valentino mode in which the nomads are a glamorous aristocratic other: “It was something they identified as their own, which made them different from (and I’m sure they would tacitly agree, superior to) the peasantry.” At other times they are “comfortable with uncertainty and contradiction. They are cosmopolitan in outlook, because they have to deal with difference, negotiate difference. They do not focus on long-term goals so much as continually accommodate themselves to change. They are less concerned with the accumulation of wealth and more concerned with the accumulation of knowledge . . . Adaptability, flexibility, mental agility, the ability to cope with flux. These traits shy away from absolutes, and strive for an equilibrium that blurs rigid boundaries.” You can almost see them walking down Glebe Point Road, Brunswick Street or any groovy inner-city locale. By now you can see the denouement coming. It is we, the knowledge and culture workers who are the true heirs of these insouciant nobles: “And increasingly, there are people like me, who live in several countries, have complex identities and feel allied to more than one culture. We live in what Edward Said called ‘a generalised condition of homelessness’. These new forms of nomadism will shape the culture of the new century in unpredictable ways.” For all the genuine passion and knowledge in Davidson’s account of her time with the Rabari, the account of nomadism as a whole is a farrago. Though such cultures have many qualities to be envious of, you don’t have to know much about non-agricultural peoples (and my knowledge is confined to second-hand acquaintance with Inuit culture) to know they have a harshness we would find intolerable. The abandonment of the weak or ill, infanticide, shunning, scapegoating, exile, summary judgment, violence, xenophobia, feuds, splits, slighted honour and retribution - all are essential to their survival as coherent and mobile peoples. And they issue from the same place as the qualities more attractive to a contemporary audience. Nor does the equation of nomadism with contemporary atomised hyperindividualism ring true. The most important point, surely, about nomads is not that they move, but that they move together, and that the identity of each person in the group is bound up in those of the others to a greater degree than we would find possible or desirable. Both short and long-distance nomadic groups travel within a known world, a world in which part and whole - landscape, flora, fauna, weather - are knitted together, organised and made vivid by myth, totem systems, taboo, kinship rules and complex language systems. Though early anthropology was wont to see these systems as more stable than they now appear, and although contact with modernity has created hybrid systems, the fact is that nomads have more in common with non-mobile, substantially non-agricultural people - Pacific Islanders, for example - than with mobile moderns. In all traditional cultures, stories of solitary wandering are either cautionary tales of exile - the worst punishment imaginable - or of the wanderer’s triumphant return home. What the contemporary traveller seeks is repeated strangeness, the exciting, frightening, delicious process whereby the utterly alien starts to become known, without losing its alien quality. The encounter between the traveller and the nomad is not an encou |
