The Story of Childhood (35 page)

In their interviews with London schoolboys, they discovered that to be ‘cool' and popular entailed challenging adult authority in the classroom. The boys were anxious not to be thought of as ‘swots' or ‘boffs', though the most common strategy was to negotiate a middle way where they did do schoolwork, ‘but not so single-mindedly that they came to other boys' attention as over-studious.'

Another of their findings calls into question how productive the focus on boys' attainment has been. ‘Boys are well
aware of their standing as socially and educationally problematic and resent this,' wrote the authors, who went on to suggest that sometimes a vicious circle occurred where boys acted up as a way of expressing frustration at feeling ‘written off' – particularly those from ethnic minorities. This sense of injustice translated into a belief that they were treated unfairly by teachers in comparison to girls, who could get away with more bad behaviour. A number of academics have pointed out that white working-class boys, and some Asian boys, face similar pressures to black boys in the education system. The broad categories used in ethnic monitoring fail to show up differences within them (for example, Indian boys fare much better than Pakistani boys, though both are considered under the generic category ‘Asian'). But the fact is that when people talk about boys failing, they are usually talking about African-Caribbean boys and – in a roundabout way – the particular resonance that their failure has in the Western psyche.

It's a resonance that has much to do with the threat of black male success. This historic anxiety was best articulated by beat poet Leroi Jones in his writing about the boxer Sonny Liston, the Mike Tyson of his day. He described him as ‘the big black Negro in every white man's hallway, waiting to do him in, deal him under for all the hurts white men, through their arbitrary order, have been able to inflict on the world … the bad nigger, a heavy-faced replica of every whipped-up woogie in the world. He is the underdeveloped, have-not … backward country, the subject people, finally here to collect his pound of flesh.'

Gus John, who published his influential study of black youth in Britain in 1981, believes that the way that young black masculinity has come to be constructed has much to do with how the white population saw their parents and grandparents. ‘In the fifties and sixties when the first generation
of post-war immigrants arrived, British society didn't confer them any status,' he says. ‘Black males were seen as coming off a Caribbean plantation. Over time, as a result of under-employment, doing manual jobs, and constant prejudice what built up was the idea that the black male was not up to much. Wind forward to the 80s, with black school leavers still not getting decent jobs, and that whole period when the police were using stop and search to criminalise young people. It's very difficult to cultivate high aspirations in the face of such a debilitating stereotype.'

In his 1971 pamphlet
How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Subnormal in the British School System
, the Grenadian academic Bernard Coard identified three factors that were causing black boys to fail: ‘Low expectations on his part about his likely performance in a white-controlled system of education; low motivation to succeed academically because he feels the cards are stacked against him; and low teacher expectations, which affect the amount of effort expended on his behalf by the teacher and also affect his own image of himself and his abilities.'

Coard was one of the first in this country to raise the issue and, more than thirty years later, he has said that he believes the problems have become entrenched. While overall pupil performance has improved, according to the latest statistics only 33 per cent of African-Caribbean boys gain five A*–C grades at GCSE, compared with 51 per cent of white pupils, and they are twice as likely as white boys to be excluded. In the 1970s, Coard urged black parents to set up ‘supplementary schools' for their children, presaging the suggestion by Trevor Philips, current chair of the Commission for Racial Equality, that black boys be taught separately for some lessons.

The sociologist Tony Sewell has written about the way that
black boys exploit popular conceptions of their masculinity, behaviour that is often self-defeating because it serves only to reinforce teachers' stereotypes. He identifies the way that African-Caribbean boys position themselves as superior to white and Asian students in terms of sexual attractiveness, style, creativity and toughness, adopting black masculinity as a collective response to a racist culture.

This response is also examined by the American psychologist Richard Majors, who famously defined the attitude of young black males as ‘cool pose'. Majors argued, ‘Black men often cope with their frustration, embitterment and alienation and social impotence by channelling their creative energies into the construction of unique, expressive and conspicuous styles of demeanour, speech, gesture, clothing, hairstyle, walk, stance and handshake.'

Sewell accepts that this resistance requires careful management. ‘Black boys are aware that their teachers find them threatening, and school is by definition a conformist institution. Boys must be skilled to get the pay-off: to adopt the amount of cool pose that's necessary to maintain street credibility and the amount of conformity that is necessary to continue in education.'

He is unapologetic in tracing the difficulties African-Caribbean boys have at school back to a ‘parental crisis' in the community. Forty-eight per cent of African-Caribbean families are headed by a single parent, compared with 22 per cent of the general population. ‘What's clear is that our reliance on raising males in situations where they are predominantly taken care of by single females is problematic. It can be done but the question is how can you do it successfully, and how do we bring black men back into the role of nurturing their children?'

Others have argued that institutional racism in the
education and criminal justice systems holds black boys back. For Gus John, it is young people's disconnection from their collective past that renders them vulnerable. ‘There's much less emphasis on identity and being competent by virtue of knowing who you are and where you're from. In the seventies there was a confidence in the community that filtered across from the American civil rights movement. Nowadays young people have no idea about that period. For mixed-race children that's even more of an issue. They're at the sharpest end of that dislocation from history.'

Ashley thinks it's true that white kids think black kids are harder. ‘If you're in a group of black kids, and you meet a group of white kids, there's more chance they would run off 'cos they think black kids come with knives and stuff.' His friends have told him: ‘Never let a white boy take the piss out of you, never let a white boy punch you in the face.' It's not like racism; it's the way they've been brought up. The way Ashley was brought up, it was never let
anyone
punch you in the face.

So it was a concatenation of events that left Ashley walking the streets: his parents splitting up, his operation, the attitude of teachers, his own attitude changing. And it was around then that he started smoking skunk. At first he smoked to be in the gang, to show off and that, but then he got addicted. He's seen skunk turn some people mad, but he can handle it. Crack is ten times stronger. ‘If I don't smoke weed my body just feels like shit.' He says he's trying to stop.

His mum hasn't been keeping so well these past few weeks. He's been checking on her a lot. She has her good days and her bad days. He loves his mum, but she can't get about too tough no more, not like when they were younger and
she used to take them to the seaside. Now she takes twelve tablets three times a day. She's always telling Ashley to get an education, so that's why he's trying to sort his life out.

‘I want to get a better education, I want to get a job, nice pay, something that I like doing, I want to settle down, have a wife. A couple of people have asked me what I want to do for a job, I don't really know. But when I do know, it should be good,' he says gently.

Ashley's dad came over from Barbados when he was sixteen or seventeen. He was working on the buses, but now he's retired because he injured his knee. When he met his mum, she was married to his other brothers' dad, then they separated, and she got with his dad, but they didn't get married.

When Ashley's parents first split up, his mum didn't want him to see his father, but he sees him most days now on the estate. A father can teach a son to be a man. If you've got to teach yourself to be a man it's harder. ‘My mum's sick and my dad wasn't there to watch us when we was younger, so we'd just go out on our own. He's your dad, yeah, he's there for a reason. He can teach you things your mum can't. When my dad was around I didn't really get in trouble 'cos I knew I'd get beat.'

He thinks that people should be allowed to hit their kids, but it depends on the way you're hitting them. ‘If you just use your hand and you slap them on their arse or their leg, just once or twice to show them it's wrong, but if you're hitting them with belts and things …'

There are a good many reasons to rue the glut of reality parenting programmes on our screens. But at least they serve to illuminate an unpalatable reality of many children's lives. I have lost count of the number of times that a toddler has
been woefully tendered to a telly nanny as unfathomably violent, only for footage of their home life to reveal that they are regularly on the receiving end of violence themselves.

Despite previous condemnation by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, in the autumn of 2004 the government failed to support an outright ban on smacking in the latest Children Act, leaving open the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement'. The lacuna on smacking is perhaps the most vivid exemplar of this country's failure to treat all children with the respect they are due. Although over the past generation public opinion has shifted to favour a ban, the significance of the legal position cannot be underestimated.

Just as rape within marriage used to be legally sanctioned because a wife was her husband's property, so smacking maintains children's position as chattels. The underlying message is that adults should not be expected to respond to children with the basic tolerance and self-control they are expected to employ towards people their own age. It reinforces children's lack of rights in the most primitive of ways.

Save the Children has noted that in Sweden, where smacking was banned over a decade ago, child deaths at the hands of their parents fell to virtually zero. In the UK, that figure averages one death a week. As Rabbi Julia Neuberger says in her book
The Moral State We're In
, ‘It really makes no sense to allow parents to hit their children when we remain shocked by the deaths of children from violence at the hands of their parents.' Until it is enshrined in law that it is never right to hit a child, one wonders how Britain can ever consider itself a genuinely child-friendly country.

Ashley has friends who are already fathers, but he wouldn't like to have a baby until he's at least in his
twenties. He's not old enough now, and he hasn't got money to buy nappies. That's what he's trying to do, sort his life out, and then think about those things. He's got a proper girlfriend now, been going out a couple of months. He can talk to her about his worries.

Ashley goes on to offer his male perspective on adolescent sexual politics. Girls can be either wifies or hos, he explains carefully. ‘Most people got their ho. When you're with your friends, what's mine is yours, I'll share everything with you. I'll share hos with you except for my wifie, 'cos that's my girlfriend, and you could go out with her for time, or have a baby with her. But hos, they're just girls that get sexed out for the fun of it.'

‘When you meet a girl you think, is she a ho or could she be wifie material? Because there's hundreds of us, and if a girl gets about it gets around to the boys, so it's easy to find out what a girl's like, how many people they've slept with, and that's how you can decide. A girl that has sex with loads of people, people call them prostitutes or slags or whatever.'

Ashley believes it's different for girls, though unlike Laura (in the earlier chapter), he tends towards the anatomical rather than the sociological for explanation. ‘Just remember, yeah, it's worse for girls 'cos they've got different things inside. They've gotta be more hygienic. With boys, if they use condoms, there ain't really nothing for them to do after, so they could have sex three times in a night, but with girls they've got to jump in the shower. If they don't do that, they're just nasty.' He tuts fastidiously. He's never, he adds firmly, had a problem with girls.

The first time Ashley had sex, he was ten. But when he proper had sex he was thirteen, thirteen and a half. There's a difference because when you're little you haven't got come, so you can just keep going, but when you've got come you've
got to stop. Those early times he wasn't really thinking about it. ‘I just wanted to do bare stuff, but when you get older you think: I've done that, I've done that, I've done that. I stole cars, I've had sex, look where it's got me. If you think about things before you do it, it could come out better.'

A week later, Ashley arrives stoned. It's lunch-time. His lids are heavy, but his movements are fidgety. He has to work to stop his mouth falling into a lazy grin. He is rambling about the fakeness of the rap star Fifty Cent with the friend he's arrived with. She wanders off and he gradually straightens out.

His mum's been feeling a bit better. ‘Nothing's going to happen,' he says defensively. ‘I don't think like that. What I think is that my mum's healthy, even though she ain't, she's really sick. I like to think she's healthy, I'm checking up on her, she's got all the help she needs, she just lives until her life's done. Everyone's gonna die, but I don't hope or talk about what's going to happen. I just wait till it comes.' This weekend, he wants to take her to the seaside with his brother. She's got a car on disability so she can drive them there.