The Story of Childhood (11 page)

Donald Findlater of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation has argued that the sexual abuse of children should be treated like any other public health issue, and that a massive public education campaign is needed to inform all adults of the realities of sexual abuse. Approaches based on prevention and non-custodial as well as custodial treatment are gaining governmental support, but require a corresponding shift in public opinion to be ultimately successful.

Findlater is the former manager of the Wolvercote Clinic, Britain's only non-custodial residential treatment centre for paedophiles, who were referred there by social services and the civil as well as criminal courts. Despite being hailed as the most effective treatment programme in the country, the clinic was closed down in 2002 after protests in the area it was moving to by local residents concerned about their children's safety.

Professionals in the field believe that in many cases treatment does work. Research indicates that between a third and half of abusers can be taught to manage their sexual arousal to children. But at present, this is only available via the Sex Offenders' Treatment Programme (SOTP) in prison and the community sex-offender treatment programmes operated by the probation service. Thus only a minority are helped, nor do they receive the ongoing intervention necessary to reinforce their treatment.

The government has funded a handful of projects supporting the integration of abusers back into the community on release from prison. Modelled on a Canadian scheme called Circles of Support and Accountability, each abuser becomes the core member of a group of six befrienders, who offer daily telephone contact and regular meetings, as long as he or she maintains a covenant not to reoffend. Less than half of the abusers in the Canadian Circles scheme had reoffended two years on from release.

The Lucy Faithfull Foundation has also been involved in another Home Office-supported initiative, Stop It Now! UK and Ireland. As well as providing information about the reality of child sexual abuse to all adults, Stop It Now! operates a freephone helpline for abusers and potential abusers, and their friends and family. Those experiencing inappropriate sexual feelings can speak confidentially to trained counsellors who offer risk management strategies.

Paedophiles are not a homogeneous group. They are more likely to be supporting a family than organising an international porn ring. Shifting the emphasis from getting caught to getting help takes into account the different patterns of abuse that occur and the impact on the child of their abuser being exposed. But normalising discussion of sexual abuse is not the same as normalising the abuse itself.

It is impossible to know whether more or less sexual abuse of children takes place today than in previous ages, but we are certainly more aware of it. According to one apocryphal tale of mass hysteria, this awareness caused a mob to attack a paediatrician's home because they mistook her job title for an admission of guilt. But it does not encourage parents to picket the high-street fashion chains that sell padded bras and ‘Pop My Cherry' T-shirts to ten-year-olds.

Perhaps this is not a helpful parallel to draw. Do the legions of ten-year-olds dressing like Britney Spears really encourage potential paedophiles to act upon their fantasies? Would a return to high-necked smocks eradicate child abuse? It's a dangerous path to tread, akin to that old rape myth that it was women's responsibility to consider the way they dressed and acted in order not to excite the unpredictable male libido. In fact, research suggests that the majority of paedophiles prefer young-looking, vulnerable-seeming children.

What is more relevant is the question of whether tight tops and miniskirts encourage children to see themselves as sexual beings from an inappropriately early age. Children are eager mimics, but clothes that reveal rump or cleavage speak to highly subjective adult definitions of what is sexually appealing. Of graver concern is whether dressing like this enables those who would exploit children to blur boundaries more easily – in the same way that some paedophiles show pornography to children as part of the ‘grooming' process. And, on a purely practical level, it's much harder to climb trees in a tight skirt.

Of course, concern about the sexualisation of childhood is premised on the assumption that children do not have a sexuality of their own, however distinct that might be from the adult version. But children are extraordinarily sensual beings, who flirt and seduce and explore their own and others' bodies.
To acknowledge the presence of these inchoate impulses is not to invite their exploration according to an adult template.

Freud believed that civilisation in the West was accomplished only through a ‘sacrifice of instincts', in particular the proscription of the sexual life of children. He argued that this denial severely impaired the sexuality of the civilised adult, creating ‘a permanent internal unhappiness, a sense of guilt'

But an understanding of the childhood sex instinct is near impossible when so much is invested in the construction of the child as desirably naive. First, we need to understand why it is that adults need childhood to be innocent, and what they fear will result from the loss of that innocence.

This is the conundrum. Is the antithesis of innocence experience, or is it corruption and guilt, and how are they related? Is adult knowledge inevitably polluting? In his memoir,
Boyhood
, the novelist J. M. Coetzee identifies the curious roundelay when describing his discomfiting attraction to another young boy: ‘Beauty is innocence; innocence is ignorance; ignorance is ignorance of pleasure; pleasure is guilty; he is guilty.'

Another Saturday, and Lois is in the kitchen, finishing off the card she's been making for Grace. A box of her mother's photographs is on the table, and she reads from the text that accompanied one of Sue's exhibitions: ‘ “These photographs all relate to a period around my mother's death and shortly afterward. They are particularly about Lois's feelings towards her grandmother and her first experience of loss.” '

Lois turns to Sue. ‘It wasn't my first experience. Actually in a way it was grandad.'

‘But you were only eight months and you didn't really experience that, did you?'

Lois continues: ‘ “Lois loves her grandmother Enid. She still
talks about her often and although her almost daily crying has subsided Lois feels that if her grandmother were still alive her life would be somehow better. All problems would evaporate. Enid has become a figure with mythical qualities and an ability to transform life's difficulties and make a perfect day. Lois has a portrait of Enid behind her bed, a magic spot by her bedroom door, and frequently has conversations with her grandmother in her head.” '

Lois doesn't remember the spot.

‘You said when you touched it you could talk to Granny,' Sue reminds her.

‘Really?' She wants to know where the spot has gone. It's been thrown away. Now she sounds bothered. ‘Someone who doesn't know Granny might try to talk to her!'

One of the photographs shows Lois's grandmother sitting up in a hospital bed towards the end of her life. She stares non-commitally at the camera. ‘I like that one better even though she looks like she's really desperate. She looks like she's trying to smile but deep down inside she feels really scared.' Another image shows her grandmother's hands folded across a clinical sheet. ‘That's the ring that she gave me.'

This is the set of photographs that also charts the fall from the bed. ‘It's a black eye,' she says. ‘It's actually a purple, red, blue, orange, multi-coloured eye. It was the night before my grandmother's funeral and I was bouncing on the bed and I slipped. I was actually trying to bounce off. It was really unlikely the way I did it. All the ways I've hurt my head have been really unlikely.'

Lois also has a scar above her eye, the result of an altercation with the edge of a coffee-table during a game of front-room football with Kester. One image shows her clutching a mug, the evening after the injury was sustained. ‘I remember
that night they gave me a cup of tea, and it was quite late. The thing I remember most was thinking, “I get to go to bed without having brushed my teeth, after having drunk a cup of tea!”' The voice she uses for her younger self's thought is high up the scale. ‘It was really, really deep. I needed fourteen stitches and then it went yellow above my eye and then my nose went really wide because of all the fluid.' She squirms. ‘I hated that word because it was like blood. My nose kind of widened and my mum said I looked like a lion.'

She still gets teased about her scar at school, but she doesn't mind. ‘They call me Frankenstein's monster. They actually call me Frankenstein, which isn't so bad because he was a scientist. They just laugh at me because I bang my head all the time.' Is she clumsy? ‘No,' says Lois wearily, ‘I'm just wild.'

‘Go in the bushes! There aren't monsters. My mum gone in there.'

Allana says her doll has ticklish eyes. She is playing in the turquoise hall of her mother's second-floor council maisonette, stuffing the raggedy girl with exaggerated irises behind the radiator. Allana is four years old, and she's not a big talker.

Her half-sister Sienna, who is two, is the chatterbox. They live with their mother, Gloria, on the Blackbird Leys estate, south-east of Oxford. It's not as bad as people say, not if you've lived here all your life. Gloria moved away once, to a place by the river, but that didn't last for long. Her own mum still lives just up the street, and helps with the girls whenever she can.

Gloria's colour is almost ebony, but Allana's skin is lighter. She has her mother's strong nose and a rosy cupid's bow. She wears shiny gold hoops in her ears. When she smiles, her two front teeth arrive first. She gets frightened of monsters, especially in the night-time. She knows how to be naughty, and likes to test how naughty she can be before consequences accrue. But mainly, Allana likes to watch. And, because she won't tell, it is hard to know what she makes of what she sees.

Sitting on the top stair, she manages a considerable
cacophony for someone who finds words surplus to requirements. This doll is a talking one. She feeds her some carpet fluff. Dora says, ‘Will you help me find my friend?' in a cherry pie accent. Allana tries to copy the voice but blurs it into ‘da-da-da'.

‘Sit here now,' she orders. When she speaks the sounds are brisk but unconfident, the phrases collected without relish. ‘I turning off now.' Dora's freckled head bangs on the landing floor.

At nursery, Allana has a best friend called Kayleigh. Kayleigh is a chatterbox too. The teachers have explained to Gloria that her daughter lets Kayleigh do the talking for both of them. That's one of the reasons why Allana won't be starting Reception for another term. They say her behaviour can be aggressive too – a bit of pushing, a bit of kicking.

The teachers are hoping that, apart from Kayleigh, Allana's own verbal skills will improve. Gloria isn't sure why her daughter is so quiet. At home, she and Sienna talk plenty to her, but she knows from her own mum that she wasn't talkative at that age, and she thinks that Allana takes after her in a lot of ways. She just doesn't seem to like it. But kids develop in their own way, in their own time, don't they?

What the nursery teachers don't know is that the friends' separation may soon be more permanent. Kayleigh's mum is being evicted because she owes nearly three thousand pounds in rent arrears. Gloria is struggling too. She reckons she has fifty pence left over at the end of each week, if that. She's always borrowing money off her mother, who works for a local supermarket. The benefits she gets just aren't enough, she says. Her friends who have their kids' dads around find it easier, but she's never gone to the Child Support Agency herself because she doesn't think it's worth
it. She knows that many people who've given up on it because they never got any money and it just caused lots of stress.

This is the hard stretch of afternoon between the end of nursery and the serving of tea. Gloria is downstairs in the living-room, watching a
Supernanny
episode which she videoed last night. The eponymous TV child care expert is marshalling twins who won't sleep through the night. Sienna is journeying between her mother and her sister, a large pink rucksack strapped tightly on her narrow back.

Allana narrates her activities on the top stair: ‘That goes
down
.' She is throwing coloured plastic balls from behind the low bannister. ‘I can climb up here. I won't fall 'cos I'll hang on.' She climbs up one, two wooden bars then jumps down heavily with a piercing shriek: ‘I fall down!' She does this again, and again, and again. She finds more balls to dispatch. ‘They all gone down now. Look, it's all.' Gloria calls up not to play on the stairs in case Sienna falls.

Allana and Sienna's bedroom has two bunks, two chests of drawers, two boxes of toys and a Winnie the Pooh frieze that stretches almost all the way round the walls. There are a handful of books – mainly illustrated Disney fairy tales – but Allana isn't interested in them. Gloria thinks she's a bit lazy. She doesn't have the patience to sit down and read, or to write her name.

The more that childhood has been examined, the more it has been debated how the quality of care people receive when they are young, especially in the earliest years of life, influences their capacity to cope in the world. For previous generations, most of this care was the unremarked though utterly remarkable work of mothering. But a historically private occupation is now of huge public concern.

Inquiries into the existence of innate character, and the influence of upbringing, stretch back to Plato. In his
History of Childhood
, Colin Heywood suggests that one of the reasons why medieval writers did not dwell on childhood was that they did not share the contemporary conviction that care is critical to development: ‘To the medieval mind … the nature one is born with is the most important influence on life, the raw material without which the finest nurturing will be wasted. It suited the hereditary aristocracy all too well to promote this line on lineage.'