# Transcript

Esther

So if I continue to play devil’s advocate just for a bit, what is the limit to that? You have talked a lot about the behaviour of teachers and I can see that in terms of classroom behaviour and how they respond to children, a lot of people listening to this might think well, you know, schools are about learning, children are there to learn. Are children going to be given a say in the curriculum, in how they learn, those kinds of things, aren’t teachers trained to do this?

Mary

Well I have to say I don’t see why not, but yes there are limits and the limits are imposed obviously on schools and on teachers. But these kinds of discussions can be part of a curriculum, you know you can frame them as developing skills in all areas of the curriculum and that’s why so many of the programmes that are really effective on, for example, bullying, but also on looking at racism and gender relations, are when you are using drama, you know the creative arts and, for example, mapping the school territory to see where the bullying takes place, you know you can involve all parts of the curriculum in it and make things if you like more real for children, make what they have got to learn more real.

Ann

I think that this again goes to some of the heart of some of the debates around citizenship and childhood, because as I said earlier one of the things that struck me about the film is that children were engaging as active citizens, and this is indeed what we all should be, active citizens. But we need practice at it, adults need practice at it, children need practice at it. And it seems to me the more engaged children are in contemplating in actually assessing and critically evaluating everybody’s behaviour, the curriculum that they are given, and that is limited for teachers as well, teachers don’t have an infinite input into the curriculum. And it seems to be that actually really makes them active citizens, it isn’t just preparation of active citizenship it is active citizenship and it is actually more than a lot of adults currently are being able to do. But it cuts through to some of the most contentious issues in this area and one of them is the ideological tension between what are often posed as parents rights, but in fact are adult rights, and children’s rights, and responsibilities, I mean on both parts. And it seems to me that this is where a lot of people begin backtracking on what is a positive ideology about giving children rights and saying, oh but issues of safety are paramount, or their education is paramount, or their age is not quite right yet, you know we don’t know what the right age is but surely they are too young and they are not well enough developed, and I think that these are some of the most contentious issues in that they are not well worked through, that people disagree about them and yet they are fundamental to sorting out some of these things, they are key.

Esther

To what extent is it possible for them to be citizens as you say in the here and now as opposed to being just prepared for future citizenship which is of course how children are often talked about, they are seen as an investment in the future rather than in the present? Mary

We can certainly think of children as making contributions and being involved and participating in how their worlds are organised around them. They can’t be citizens because they don’t, in law, have the same rights and responsibilities as adults do. I think it would be worth looking at some of the contradictions in the position of children though. For example if on the one hand we are saying that ten year olds can be responsible in front of the criminal law, then are there other things that we should be saying they can be responsible for like selecting the partner they are going to maybe spend the rest of their life or a small part of their life with and I think children are affected by it. They feel very confused about what they can decide about and what decisions they are prevented from taking. I suppose if you are asking me a direct question like when do I think children are ready to be citizens of a community, I couldn’t give an age. I think that we need to think about the point that Ann made about how children are very individual, they grow and engage with themselves and other people and their relationships with other people at a different pace. So I would probably not want to give an age, but acknowledge that of course they can’t be full citizens. They can do more than we allow them to do at the moment.

Ann

Children are not autonomous beings anymore than the rest of us are, but that what they want, their views, are often surprisingly sophisticated or at least surprising to people who don’t work with children asking them about these issues a great deal, that it should be taken very seriously, not just into account which might mean that you listen to it and then leave it alone, but that the onus should be on people to demonstrate why one cannot take children’s views into account rather than that one can, so it should be the other way round.

Esther

Mary can I ask you how you see a service like Childline fitting into the discussion we have been having about increasing children’s rights, seeing children as active citizens. What does Childline offer them in that context?

Mary

Well I think when Childline was originally set up it was set up to, if you like, be a bridge between children who had previously not been able to talk about abuse particularly, and services like Social Services and the police, and in offering the service I think the organisation found that they had opened a space that they had no idea how it would be filled by children. And what children and young people did was they used it enthusiastically and it became for many children the first time that it was possible for them to say I need help, I have a need. Most of the time children are identified as being needy by the adults in the world and taken to a source of help, and here was something that children, by virtue of the technology and that its free, here was something that children could contact themselves and say, you know I want to talk, I need help.

And what we found in developing this service was that children didn’t want matters to be entirely taken out of their hands. They wanted to be if you like, left in charge of the problem that they had as much as possible, or they certainly wanted to be able to have a discussion that didn’t whip that responsibility away from them.

When we are talking about how children talk to us we often talk about it as its consequences, we are having a discussion – well if you did that, what would happen? Supposing you talk to your mum on a Saturday morning would that be a good idea? How could you begin to say to her what you have said to us? So you’re beginning to help children to rehearse and to open up the options that are open to them, and I think that what we have learned from that is that the traditional services I think now need to change, they need to think about how accessible they are to children and whether there isn’t something to be learned from this service, and the way that it operates, that can be applied to education, to health more broadly and to Social Services and Welfare.

Ann

One of the things that I think is brilliant about Childline is that it doesn’t get stuck on the rhetoric of children’s need. What I mean by that is that it is very common to construct what children’s needs are from the outside in a way which is not at all helpful because it is paternalistic and it makes judgements that again often treat children as unitary, as if they were all the same and undifferentiated. It seems to me that one of the things that for example Childline publications make clear, is that children even within apparently the same groupings, gender, ethnic groups, that they are vastly different and that they can very eloquently put their own needs. I mean after all we have chosen the phone so they are a self selected group of children, but nonetheless it makes an important contribution to understanding of the ways in which children’s needs have been constructed by adults, by outsiders previously.