The Story of Childhood (26 page)

A number of organisations – including the major children's charity Kidscape – have criticised the approach, arguing that without punitive sanction perpetrators fail to learn that their actions have consequences. They worry that forcing victims to challenge their bully in front of a teacher may place them at further risk. The dispute would seem to centre around the kind of bullying that this strategy is applied to. Certainly, it can be of benefit for minor incidents in primary schools, but its use is questionable for the more serious cases that Kidscape deals with.

At a time when the criminal justice system, through curfews and ASBOs, is taking an increasingly punitive approach to young people, it is ironic that this strategy persists in some schools. Of course, the ‘no blame' approach has worthy roots. A bully who is acting out the violence she has experienced in her own life may well respond badly to further sanction. But just as the courts may employ mitigation to reduce the sentence of a drug addict who is convicted of burglary, so schools need to find a way of making punishment fit both
crime and perpetrator. We cannot throw our hands up at children's lack of ‘respect' or moral responsibility, while failing to provide a system of sanction and incentive for them to learn from.

Of course, bullying behaviour is not the preserve of childhood. Even with the buffer of maturity, a variety of Acts of Parliament, and recourse to tribunals, bullying does not stop at the school gates. The quest for status, the exploitation of difference and the pack mentality never absent themselves from our social interactions. But it is in the playground, where the relationship between instinct and self-control is still being tested, that the human capacity for cruelty as well as kindness is laid bare along with the old lie: stick and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me.

It has become an easy adult observation to make, that ‘kids can be so cruel'. It is seldom remembered whether ‘I was cruel'. The development of moral responsibility seems to happen when we are looking the other way. It is hard to know whether our motivations are pure or practical – because we genuinely want to be kind, or because we are self-interested, and recognise that if we are generally pleasant then people will generally be pleasant to us.

The question is whether there is something in the contemporary experience of childhood that makes bullying behaviour more likely. There is the fear that violence on screen makes children more aggressive towards one another. But if childhood is an experience of disempowerment, perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that some children misuse the only power they hold: over each other.

Laura says her teachers didn't really notice what was going on until she left, and by then it was too late. When so many
people start not to like you, you have to think it's something about you. ‘I always feel like people judge me when they meet me and I always think it must be something to do with the way I look. I maybe don't look good enough or look right for people to like me.'

And this is how the spell was cast: ‘When they started beating me up I actually remember thinking to myself, “I want to be pretty.” Part of me thought something must look wrong with me for them to hate me so much and part of me thought if I become really pretty next time I see them that'll show them that I don't care what they did to me.' But the more she tried to make herself pretty the uglier she felt. ‘I used to spend hours just staring in the mirror and it got quite bad, every morning, every evening. If I wanted to get to school on time I'd wake up at six in the morning, though I didn't have to leave till half-eight and sometimes I wouldn't get in till eleven.'

Laura wears her make-up like armour. It appears impermeable, as though it will protect her from all onslaughts. Beneath, the skin may not actually be able to breathe. Though she is attractive, it is her own cosmetic painting that renders her striking – glossily female, defensively so. Laura still feels ugly enough to die, but the bullies have moved on to the next person. Sometimes she'll see them on the street and they'll look through her like she doesn't exist.

Laura lives in a tall house with many rooms in a nice part of town, sandwiched between an even more expensive area and a rotten estate. She calls this the patchwork. In the other rooms live her sister, who is twenty-one, her brother, who is eighteen, and their mother, a university lecturer, who divorced from their father when Laura was five. They have lived here for as long as she can remember.

She did make some friends when she moved to her second
school. There's a group of nine of them, all girls, and they're extremely close. She'd never found that before apart from with her sister, but with these friends she can be completely herself. They go round to each other's houses, or up on to the common. They have parties when people's parents are away or when they make friends with rich boys with big houses. They buy the vodka and buy the Coke and mix it. She giggles. Not very classy.

She doesn't consider herself a child, but ‘teenager' doesn't sound nice either, because teenagers aren't given any credit at all. ‘They're made out like these creatures that for seven years of their life stop feeling for other human beings. I think really they're just more sensitive than most people but not good at showing it.'

‘That might be a reason teenagers get pissed off with parents is that parents are always asking how you feel and sometimes you don't want to talk about it because you just don't know how to.' When Laura can't explain herself out loud she writes poetry, or writes in her diary. She's been to see loads of psychologists – she attends an NHS child and family psychologist now – but some really aren't good at their jobs. ‘When I was in the psychiatric unit the psychology there was really good. But I've been to see a few that were really crap.'

Laura never went back to the school with that one stupid boy. Over the past few weeks she's been sleeping late and feeling low. Today she's wearing no make-up and her skin is peachy and plump. Her voice is still so slight it's as though a wicked fairy has stolen it away, but her mood is more combative. Perhaps it's because she's only just got up. She's sitting outside in the garden by a patio table strewn with empty ten-packs of Malboro Lights. She's still seeing the psychologist once a week, but it's moving quite slowly. Her
dad and her psychiatrist want her to go back to hospital, to the intermediate unit that's next to the one she was in before. She's refusing, and her mum's on her side too.

‘Like, I do want to get better and I know it is affecting my life in a big way but I don't want to miss out on my whole social life and my summer being stuck in some mental hospital.' She pulls a face. ‘There's maybe this other clinic that I would go four times a week, or I might go to this place called Fitzroy House in September which is like a day hospital where you get education and therapy but you don't have to live there.'

She's still dissatisfied with her appearance. ‘But it's getting better, because I used to have really bad mood-swings every day and now it's just once a week. And before I'd blank my friends for weeks because I thought I didn't look good enough and now nearly every weekend I go out with them. And that's why I don't want to go back into hospital. If my life's at least OK then I'd rather be outside.' She's very convincing.

Laura is looking slim today. Her weight goes up and down. Before, she was on Prozac. She thinks that it really makes you lose weight and she was seven and a half stone. (Prozac is not usually associated with weight loss.) Then she went into hospital, and she was just lying in bed getting her dad to bring in McDonalds. A few weeks later she was nine stone. ‘The whole time I was on Prozac I didn't cry once – Prozac won't let you cry. It blocks your depression off from you, just makes you happy, and that just meant I was bottling my depression up even more,' she states knowledgably.

She just gets so frustrated with the way she looks. ‘I think it's unfair that some people are born into life looking so much better than other people and they get treated better throughout their lives because of it.' She's sparring. ‘And I feel like people are always going to judge me because I don't
look as good.' There's definitely a lot of pressure put on girls and women to look a certain way: ‘Because men, if they're not good-looking they can still get far in life just by being intelligent or funny. But girls are told you have to be good-looking as well as everything else.'

Laura has been diagnosed as suffering from body dysmorphic disorder, a recently registered condition which was only reported on by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in 2005, and which is thought to be a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. As yet under-recognised and under-researched, it is defined as ‘a preoccupation with some imagined defect in appearance', and preliminary estimates suggest that it may be present in up to 8 per cent of cases of depression.

Even in cases less extreme than Laura's, levels of dissatisfaction amongst girls with their bodies are high and rising. Four in ten teenage girls surveyed by the magazine
Bliss
in 2005 said that they had considered plastic surgery. Two thirds of the 2,000 fourteen and fifteen-year-olds who took part in the questionnaire said that pressure to look ‘perfect' came from comparing themselves unfavourably with celebrities.

Interestingly, they turned this pressure on each other. Of the one in six who said that they had been bullied, the majority had been harassed because of what they looked like. Only 8 per cent were happy with their bodies, while a quarter had suffered from an eating disorder.

The cultural critic John Berger once wrote: ‘A woman … is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself … She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as her success in life.'

The accessibility of cosmetic procedures, along with a cohort of minor celebrities who are glad to discuss their own surgical enhancement, is gradually distorting not only young girls' idea of what is beautiful, but their notion of what is natural. The more shapes and sizes that become technically possible, the slimmer our inventory of desirable looks becomes.

In many ways, it is the logical extension of the way that capitalism has co-opted the language of empowerment to sell shampoo and mascara, ‘because you're worth it'. After more than a century of the women's movement fighting for the right to participate in public life, liberation has been appropriated for the private preoccupation with presentation. What this tells young women is: you can't change the world but you can, and indeed you have a responsibility to, change yourself.

Aside from the physical consequences and side-effects, how does the burgeoning trade in surgical self-improvement shape young women's sense of self? In her 1990 classic
The Beauty Myth
, Naomi Wolf described the inevitable conclusion of what she called ‘the Surgical Age': ‘Women in our “raw” or “natural” state will continue to be shifted from the category “woman” to the category “ugly”, and shamed into an assembly-line physical identity. As each woman responds to the pressure, it will grow so intense that it will become obligatory until no self-respecting woman will venture outdoors with a surgically unaltered face.'

Worst of all, the further we grope towards commodified physical perfection, the further we stray from what makes us individual – the flaws, the scars, the deterioration. The more we define our own attractiveness in terms of what we can construct, the less likely we are to have a truthful discussion about the nature of attraction itself.

Laura lists her plastic surgery requirements without pause for thought: ‘I want a boob job as soon as I'm eighteen. I want liposuction and lip enhancement and eye-bag removal.' There's no point in questioning the motives behind plastic surgery, she says. ‘It's so much easier said than done, to just be happy with the way you are. People don't have problems with you wearing make-up, though I know that's not permanent. But if you feel self-conscious about the way you look, what's wrong with paying to change it?'

She's not been feeling so good about the way she looks recently. ‘I think that's one of the reasons I'm not getting out of the house much is 'cos it takes so much effort to get ready.' Her routine is extensive and well-honed. ‘First of all I have to prepare my outfit, then have a bath, shave everywhere, and exfoliate, then have a shower and wash my hair, 'cos I don't like doing it in the bath, blow-dry my hair, straighten it, moisturise, fake tan, then I have to wait around for the fake tan to dry, then put my outfit on, deodorant, do a hairstyle, and then all the stages of my make-up, foundation, concealer, powder, blusher, then eye make-up, eye-shadow, eye-liner and mascara, then lipstick, then accessorise.' She comes to rest. ‘But it's the bath and fake tan that takes so long.'