The Children’s Commissioner is right about Thompson and Venables. But she’s wrong about a whole lot more.

As I write this on Saturday evening, news sites are all abuzz over the…er…shocking news that the Children’s Commissioner doesn’t think we should try ten-year-olds as adults, while the government appparently thinks it’s perfectly OK, despite the fact that no other country in Western Europe does so.

So far, so predictable. But in all the furore over Maggie Atkinson’s comments (in particular her allegedly ‘insensitive’ remarks about James Bulger’s killers), no one seems to have picked up on something far more strange from the same Times interview. Atkinson seems to have some seriously odd views on both what young people’s lives are actually like and what they should be like. For starters, she’s either profoundly unobservant or has just never used Facebook:

After the murder of a young girl who met a rapist on Facebook, Dr Atkinson says that the social networking site must “get with the programme” and have an automatic button that people can press if they feel uncomfortable about somebody who contacts them.

What, like this one?

This link is on every Facebook profile page. Apparently Maggie Atkinson has never seen it.

She then goes on to claim that

Young people will network whether you want them to or not. But if all they do is close the door of their room and play Sudoku down one side of the screen and MSN texting down the other side, with their homework down the middle, and they never go out and meet other youngsters face to face, that’s very sad.

There are several things to note here, which I’ll list in ascending order of importance:

• She seems to think that instant messaging and texting are the same thing – not exactly the most important thing in the world, but definitely the kind of distinction you might expect someone whose job it is to know about the lives of children and young people to be aware of.
• She thinks that kids and teenagers spend their evenings on the internet doing Sudoku…
• …and that this is a bad thing, bearing in mind what else they could be doing on the internet.
• Most disconcertingly, she’s apparently bought into the tired myth that online social networking makes you lonely and socially isolated in the real world (because god forbid that you might ever talk to people you’ve met offline via the internet).

I’ll be nice and leave aside the bit just above the stuff I quoted about kids reading the Beano, because apparently there are some children (albeit a declining number) who still actually do that, but this total ignorance of how children and teenagers use computers isn’t a good sign in someone whose job it is to promote young people’s interests.

Thirdly, there’s this:

If…you take it for granted that when they [children] say ‘I don’t want you in my room’ that’s OK, then you need to have a very serious think about your parenting. The adult in the relationship is the adult.

And finally, on the issues of violent computer games or the sexualisation of children:

If you would feel uncomfortable about it being discussed at your family dinner table, whether it’s violence or sexual images, then you shouldn’t be letting your children look at it… You have to let children be children.

I’ve bolded that last sentence because it encapsulates everything I find unsettling about the views Atkinson is expressing. It’s not that ‘letting children be children’ is a bad idea in itself (it’s so vacuous it could mean pretty much anything, good or bad), but Atkinson’s opinion about what that entails seems to be incredibly narrow. In her view, children and young people (up to the age of 17, mind) don’t have a right to keep any kind of secrets from their parents, and shouldn’t ever encounter anything more disturbing than would be an appropriate topic for conversation over dinner. Seriously? I recognise that parents want to protect their kids and that they probably have their children’s best interests at heart, but is she seriously saying that young people don’t have any right to privacy, to the point that they shouldn’t be able to ask their parents to leave their bedrooms and give them some time on their own? The notion that being under 18 negates your right to a private life is disturbingly authoritarian. As to the sex and violence, Jacob’s already written about how misguided so much of the hand-wringing over ‘sexualised’ children is, and if violent imagery is a problem then banning kids from watching the news should probably be next on the agenda. alongside Asterix books and Playmobil, those other notorious corrupters of today’s youth.

This post isn’t meant to be a hatchet job. As you could probably guess from my post last week, I totally agree with her that ten-year-olds shouldn’t be tried as adults and that we need a more sensitive approach to young offenders, no matter how terrible their actions. Her defence of single parents and criticism of the Tories’ stance on marriage are both laudable as well. I also sympathise with anyone who wants to protect children from the nastier features of the adult world, but there’s a fine line between being protective and being controlling. Atkinson seems to be clamouring for parents to cross that line, and that should really worry us.