Something someone said on another parenting forum has made me have a think. The discussion was on a trial at the Old Bailey involving an eight-year-old girl and two 10-year-old boys she’s accused of a serious sexual assault. The basic premise of our conversation on the forum was a) why was an eight-year-old out on her own in the first place; and b) how did two 10-year-old boys know enough to carry out the attack they’re alleged to have done.

One argument put forward was that parents don’t take enough responsibility for their children growing up without seeing and hearing and watching things which give them this kind of information, but another equally argued for more responsibility from TV programme makers, video games designers, film producers etc. There’s long been this debate that children and young adults can be influenced by the films they watch and the video games they play but it’s something that I’m afraid I don’t subscribe to.

For me, responsibility for how our children grow up starts and ends at their parent’s feet, minus the odd influence of their peer groups at school, and I’m a firm believer that the “odd genetic trait” – for want of a better way to describe it – which turns someone into a mass murderer, a molester, a violent partner, is present at birth and then circumstances help to shape whether or not it ever manifests itself. I also believe that some people are just plain evil, not in a God and Satan type of Biblical way, but just that they have no moral compass with which to measure their actions or they simply choose to ignore it.

The whole nature versus nurture argument has pretty much been decided with studies released in recent years which show that our genes set the archetypal path for us but our environment is what shapes how those genes ultimately express themselves in our personalities and our actions. A similar study showed that homosexuality was largely down to genetic and pre-natal influences and wasn’t, usually, a “learnt” behaviour, which will hopefully go a long way to getting rid of the whole “he could change if he wanted to” argument I’ve seen thrown around again and again.

It’s this whole section of the argument which is why I don’t believe films, TV programmes or video games are responsible for children turning violent. For me, their social environment and personal self-belief, or lack of it, plays a much greater part. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most teens and young adults turned mass murderers have turned out to have a sense of isolation, of being socially excluded even though many have come from a loving family background.

Cruelty

Children are crueler than anything a video games designer can come up with or anything that can be shown on television or on the cinema screen. Golding’s Lord of the Flies isn’t just fiction. Which brings us back to responsibility. Society over the length of my active awareness of what’s been going on around me has gradually eroded away the ability of adults to be able to control and discipline children. And by discipline, I don’t mean a slipper to the backside or a cane to the hand, I mean their ability to remove a misbehaving child from a classroom and be able to deal with them in an alternative environment. When I was at school we were streamed into ability groups and those kids who needed the most one to one work, were in a classroom together where they weren’t disrupting the education of the other kids who wanted and were capable of learning from books or from the teacher’s lectures. It’s something which has been done away with  mostly these days, apart from private and public schools, because it was felt to be demeaning to the children who needed to be in the “special class”.

And yet, of my contemporaries who were in this class at school, only one managed to end up on the educational scrapheap and subsequently lapsed into a life of petty crime and short term jail sentences. The rest of the class, who were lumped together with others who weren’t impressed with their messing about  because they did it to, all managed to leave with some useful and practical vocational qualifications and most of them got jobs, have families and their own homes. My old drama teacher, also one of my best friends since leaving school, said she was proudest of this bunch of kids because they fought from a position of disadvantage.

So, when we take on the awesome responsibility of parenthood, surely it’s our duty to our children to make them feel special and not just in that old grammar school classroom way, to instill in them a pride in themselves, even if they are different from the crowd, to teach them that responsibility begins and ends with them and their own actions. Sadly there are those for whom parenthood is just another means to an end, a council house, more benefit money, someone to do the fetching and carrying as they get bigger, a babysitter for the younger kids. It is these children who are the lost ones, the ones society overlooks because they’re not “technically” abused and it breaks my heart.