What I mean by ‘the family’ is a household in which
at least one child and at least one of that child’s biological parents
(including parents by IVF) or, in some circumstances, other relatives, live
together and the parents/relatives are the recognized custodians and primary
carers. The non-residential biological parent in a divorced or separated couple
is also part of that family.
I exclude adoptive households because they so often
result from forced separation of children from loving parents. In any case, it
isn’t adoptive households that the voices quoted below want to smash – only the
natural ones. Currently the state encourages, praises, and rewards adopters and
fosterers in proportion as it increasingly demonizes parents.
Opposition to the family has sprung from various
ideologies, as the following few quotes and comments will illustrate.
1.
Plato and elitism
‘Each
generation of children will be taken by officers appointed for the purpose … These
officers will take the children of the better Guardians to a nursery and put
them in charge of nurses living in a separate part of the city … They will
arrange for the suckling of the children by bringing their mothers to the
nursery when their breasts are still full, taking every precaution to see that
no mother recognizes her child ….’ (Plato 1987, pp. 181-182)
Plato (1987) The Republic, trans. and ed. by Desmond Lee, 2nd
edition. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.
___
2. Socialism
How
socialists – who actually tend to live in families themselves – hate The
Family! ‘The family
is an important part of capitalist society. It fulfils the role of producing
the next generation of workers. Our rulers also encourage us to think of it as
a refuge from the pressures of work and competition. But … [t]he majority of
children who suffer abuse are abused by a family member’ (Socialist Worker (2014)
‘Get rid of capitalism to root out child abuse’, 5 September, p. 5).
We can perhaps understand this when
considering that the family, for the ruling class, has meant patriarchy,
marriage, and authoritarianism; and the Victorian ‘back-to-basics’ image still
hangs about the idea of the family as projected by the right wing. It’s likely
that, despite right-wingers’ distaste for poor families, some of their positive
associations with ‘the family’, along with their dislike of social workers,
whom they mistakenly see as a left-wing force, have dictated some right-wing
defences of parents against child removal; while, for similar reasons from the
other direction, the left enthusiastically supports it.
In ‘Marx, Engels, and the abolition of
the family’, Richard Weikart, Professor of History at California State
University, outlines the roots of this attitude: ‘Although
Marx and Engels were not the instigators of the anti-family
trend among socialists, they – especially Engels – contributed mightily to it’
(p. 657), and ‘reinforced their point further by assaulting the 'bourgeois
claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of
parent and child'.50 Furthermore, Engels in his draft for The Communist
Manifesto articulated more clearly his vision for children in communist society;
it consisted of 'The raising (Erziehung) of children together in national
institutions and at national expense, from that moment on, in which they can
dispense with the first motherly care51’.
Weikart points out that ‘Fourier and
especially Owen had already vigorously touted the superiority of the communal
education of children and the removal of children from parental control and
influence’, but that ‘these views were by no means universally adopted in
leftist circles in the nineteenth century. Proudhon was an advocate and
polemicist on behalf of the traditional family, which he considered the only
social institution worth salvaging. Even the anarchist Bakunin proposed the
maintenance of parent-child relationships, except in cases where society
perceived deleterious effects on a child’s development’ (p. 665; available at
<https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/History/Faculty/Weikart/Marx-Engels-and-the-Abolition-of-the-Family.pdf>.
3.
Feminism
As with socialism, it’s largely in
reaction to right-wing, patriarchal attitudes towards the family, and the
conditions associated with those attitudes, that feminism and the left have
developed such indifference, and in some cases hostility, to motherhood. In
the 1950s, the conditions and attitudes of which 1970s feminism largely emerged
to counteract, motherhood and marriage meant dependency on a husband; there was
debate not only about ‘working mothers’ but even about childless ‘working
wives’!
In
early-modern feminism’s reaction against this situation, Kate Millett wrote:
‘The care of children ... is infinitely better left to the best trained
practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation... [This] would
further undermine family structure while contributing to the freedom of women’ (Sexual Politics, pp. 178-179 [1970],
quoted in Fanning the Flames, Peter Christopher Pappas, p. 169, available at
https://books.google.co.uk/books?isbn=148340966X).
While, for Chodorow, ‘Women’s mothering is a central defining feature of the social
organization of gender and is implicated in the construction and reproduction
of male dominance itself’ (Chodorow, 1978, p. 9, quoted in Sanders, Adele Ami (2012) ‘Contested
Adoption: the Social Engineering of Families (Negotiating stigma and social
exclusion)’, BSc Dissertation, University of Salford, May, pp. 22-23).
In recent years there has been a
reaction against the anti-motherhood strand of feminism. In an interview with
Dr Andrea O’Reilly, Koa Beck prompted: ‘In the introduction,’ (to O’Reilly’s
anthology The 21st Century Motherhood Movement) ‘you write
that motherhood and feminism have acquired some detrimental distance from one
another. You write that modern motherhood and the struggles of mothers appear
to be the new problem with no name.’ The reply was,
‘Originally, feminism was largely single unmarried childless
women but I think some issues got lost along the way. Just like women of color
got lost along the way or queer women got lost along the way and there have
been measures to correct that. That’s what
mothers are doing now. They’re not faulting feminism,
they’re just saying you should include these things and get them on the agenda’
(Beck, Koa (2011) ‘Matricentic Feminism: Feminism that Prioritizes the Needs of
Mothers’, Mommyish blog, http://www.mommyish.com/2011/06/08/matricentic-feminism-feminism-that-prioritizes-the-needs-of-mothers/).
But it’s still the case that the
ideal for a woman, if she must have children, is to keep a job with the help of
various forms of care for the children, who are seen primarily as impediments
to employment.
4. Laing and
libertarianism
From a libertarian rather than
feminist or socialist direction, parenthood was undermined as repressive to the
children and thus to the development of personality; so, while feminists sought
to free women from motherhood, hippy libertarians sought to free children from
mothers. Radicals quoted Khalil Gibran’s words ‘Your children are not your
children; they are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself’; Bob Dylan
exulted ‘Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command’; and the Ken
Loach film Family Life presented repressive and insensitive parents as driving
a woman to complete mental breakdown. In such soil the rallying cry ‘Smash the
family!’ flourished. However, unlike Plato, Marx, and the Named Person plan,
the intention of Laing and the hippies was hardly to designate children the
sons and daughters of the state (which anti-psychiatry saw as equally
insensitive).
Alongside
these ideals was that of the commune, which was to replace the dreaded
patriarchal, oppressive Nuclear Family.
Here
are some key quotes from Laing, who ‘during
the 1960s and 1970s … became a hero of the counter-culture and the "New
Left”’
– and even treated love as a bad thing:
‘From the moment of
birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby
is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father
have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are
mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is
on the whole successful.’
‘Children
do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have
to love them to get them to do that’ (http://www.quoteland.com/author/R-D-Laing-Quotes/522/).
However, the italics in the following quote are
Laing’s own: ‘Such nexified families may become relatively closed systems; they
are seen again and again in studying families of people diagnosed
schizophrenic. This statement is very
different from any assertion that such families cause schizophrenia’ (R. D.
Laing (1971), The politics of the family
and other essays, London: Tavistock, p.
18).
And the family, for him, was not the only villain: ‘Our
own cities are our own animal factories; families, schools, churches are the
slaughterhouses of our children; colleges and other places are the kitchens. As
adults in marriages and business, we eat the product’ (ibid., p. 102).
5.
Child protection
Social workers and
pro-child-removal children’s charities did not necessarily, either as a body or
as individuals, latch on to these specific visions. But the anti-family
zeitgeist succeeded in destroying the hitherto axiomatic principle that
parents, barring gross inadequacy or cruelty as defined in law, were to be
preferred as the natural, primary carers of their own children.
The murder of 5-yr-old Maria Colwell in 1973 by her
stepfather intensified child protection moves. Since then, the state has moved
from trying to prevent such horrific child-murders – which are actual crimes,
subject to prosecution – to removing children from their parents by
administrative means, backed up by secret family tribunals with civil standards
of proof, and on grounds that are vague (risk of future emotional harm) and/or
prejudicial (e.g. parental low IQ). From there it progressed to the Named
Person plan in Scotland (and its similar predecessor in England, ContactPoint),
with its universal family surveillance and control, imposed ‘just in case’ very
minor problems escalate into serious ones.
In this cumulative project, parents are increasingly
seen as the villains.
Family lawyer Chris Gottlieb comments:
‘The
child welfare system is run by so-called “children’s services” agencies ….
These government agencies and the private agencies that contract with them are
supposed to protect children from being harmed by their parents. Their concern
about children’s welfare goes no further than that. The system does not aim to
improve children’s healthcare or education, or to protect children from
environmental or consumer hazards. Nor does it address the biggest threats to
child safety in this country: car accidents and other unintentional injuries.
Our government (we) have chosen instead
to focus our child welfare efforts on protecting children from their parents’ (Gottlieb,
Chris (2010) ‘Reflections on judging mothering’, Baltimore Law Review, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Spring), pp. 371-388; p. 377).
The
popular image of ‘bad parents’ reached the point where Martin Narey, former
chief executive of Barnardo’s, complained that not enough children were being
taken at birth and too much consideration was given to those terrible people,
parents:
‘“If you can take a
baby very young and get them quickly into a permanent adoptive home, then we
know that is where we have success,” he said. “That’s a view that is seen as a
heresy among social services, where the thinking is that if someone, a parent,
has failed, they deserve another chance. My own view is that we just need to
take more children into care if we really want to put the interests of the
child first.
‘“We can’t keep trying to fix families that are completely
broken. It sounds terrible, but I think we try too hard with birth parents. I
have seen children sent back to homes that I certainly wouldn’t have sent them
back to. I have been extremely surprised at decisions taken. If we really cared
about the interests of the child, we would take children away as babies and put
them into permanent adoptive families, where we know they will have the best
possible outcome.”’
McVeigh, Tracy (2009)
‘Take more babies away from bad parents, says Barnardo’s chief’, The Observer, 6 September. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/sep/06/children-babies-parents-care-barnardos
The trouble is that his
view is far from a ‘heresy among social services, where the thinking is that if
someone, a parent, has failed, they deserve another chance’. In fact, where a
woman has had one child taken into care, any subsequent children will,
virtually automatically, be taken at birth.
This fate can even
befall first-time mothers, deemed unfit on various grounds before they’ve even
had a first chance.
Between 2007 and 2015,
the number of ‘looked-after’ children in England, that is, children taken from
their parents by the state, rose from 3,250 to 12,490. (EU Parliament: Abolish
Adoptions without Parental Consent https://www.change.org/p/eu-parliament-abolish-adoptions-without-parental-consent/u/16651694?tk=nX_kHjd4u2rGMiKGyYMUq6yH8P5xrVK4V46yNRQZZ6U&utm_source=petition_update&utm_medium=email)
It was a natural step
from this suspicion of parents to the view that the state, not parents, should
raise children as a positively preferred arrangement rather than as a response
to cases of parental wrong.
6. The Named Person plan and the rule of
professionals
Named Person
The
trail leads from Maria Colwell – as well as Baby P and other child victims of
atrocities, whose photographs regularly illustrate articles defending
widespread child removal on much lesser and speculative grounds – to the Named
Person plan, which assigns a state guardian to every child and young person in
Scotland between 0 and 18 years old. And the ‘child protection’ label attached
to all stages of this historical process leaves supporters of bereft parents
and advocates of parents’ rights open to moral blackmail.
The
plan is presented as something to ensure the ‘wellbeing’ of all children. It
thus lowers the threshold of state intervention from ‘risk of harm’ to
‘wellbeing concerns’. But when faced with opposition on grounds of family
privacy and autonomy and parents’ rights, then the negative ‘child protection’
side is brought forward. Opponents are told: ‘If Named Person policy saves one
child, it’s worth it’ (The National editorial,
March 9 2016); First Minister Sturgeon similarly declares, ‘If it saves the
life of one child, I think it’s worth it’ (The Express, May 8 2016, http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/668151/Toxic-policy-kills-SNP-dreams-Named-Person-legislation-Nationalists-majority). Scottish Government Minister
Humza Yousaf accused opponents of the plan of ‘put[ting] children’s lives in
danger’ (http://no2np.org/bbc-question-time-named-person-scheme-strange-says-dimbleby/
12 May 2016).
And,
when on July 28 2016 the UK Supreme Court ruled the plan illegal,
pro-independence and pro-Scottish Government blogger Rev. Stuart Campbell wrote
that it was ‘a great day for child abusers’ and ‘paedophiles’ (http://wingsoverscotland.com/a-great-day-for-child-abusers/).
Rule of professionals
The people who judge families and remove children,
namely social workers, are portrayed, and see themselves, as members of a
‘helping profession’, misunderstood, overworked and generally martyred for
their efforts. But they possess two features quite inconsistent with that
image. (1) They are officials of the state, but have powers in excess of those
of the police and the criminal law system, which would at least offer a fair
trial to parents threatened with child removal; and (2) they are members of a
socio-economically privileged class vis-à-vis the majority of their ‘clients’. Their
privileges include the credibility assigned them by the system, so that their
greatest power, even more than the legal advantages, comes from the prestige of
being ‘qualified professionals’, besides which any competing claims of parents
– even middle-class parents – have virtually no chance of success.
And how these powerful people claim to be trying to
overcome the power imbalance! According to Mike Burns, Head of Children’s
Services, Glasgow City Council:
‘We still need that nudge [from the Named Person
plan], because frontline services have to be geared up to support relationships
with children and families. Relationships built on certain attributes: ·
Open and respectful; · Trusting and reliable; ·
Kind and enthusiastic; · Nurturing and challenging; ·
Dignity at all times.’
(‘The “Named
Person” debate: the case for’, Scottish
Journal of Residential Child Care December 2015 – Vol.14, No.3, ISSN 1478 -
1840 64, https://www.celcis.org/files/6514/4922/7367/2015_Vol_14_3_Burns_For_named_person.pdf
Does this work both ways? Must the parents – given
absolutely no choice in this ‘relationship’ – extend respect and dignity to the
professionals who are to nurture and challenge them? Are the professionals,
tasked with ‘nudging’ (that is, coercing) the parents, showing much trust in
them?
The very fact that social workers are trained in
‘anti-oppressive practice’ reveals both the need and, ultimately, the futility
of such training within an oppressive structure.
An inconspicuous indication of professional hegemony
is found in the Scottish Government’s list of risk indicators, a list which
ensures that no parent can possibly avoid being found wanting on some ground or
other. It is introduced as:
‘A collection of Generic Risk Indicators drawn from research and practice that
help highlight potential risk factors within a child's/young person's life
circumstances relative to the three dimensions of assessment within the My
World Triangle - the child (how I grow and develop), parent/carer (what I need
from the people who care for me) and their wider world’ (http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2012/11/7143/9)
The italics are mine, and the
italicized words inform any potential rebels that they had better shut up
because the professionals know best.
A Named Person is, of course, a professional;
he/she ‘will normally be the health visitor for a pre-school child and a
promoted teacher – such as a headteacher, or guidance teacher or other promoted
member of staff – for a school age child’, according to the Government (http://www.gov.scot/Topics/People/Young-People/gettingitright/named-person).
With the Named Person plan, not
only are families more at risk from social workers should parents be found
wanting, but a professional has ‘“responsibility
for overall monitoring of the child’s wellbeing and outcomes”’ (in a form for
child health assessment, we find: ‘Refer
to/request assistance from indicates that the PHN-HV will
formally refer the child/family to the specified service, whilst retaining
responsibility for overall monitoring of the child's wellbeing and outcomes as
their GIRFEC Named
Person’; http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2012/12/1478/7).
And although social workers themselves are not
Named Persons, the ultimate threat of their appearance at the parents’ door,
should the child be deemed ‘at risk’ – by virtue of parental non-cooperation –
or thought to manifest ‘wellbeing concerns’, is what maintains the coercive
powers of the Named Person system, despite the government’s lie that it is
voluntary.
When the left, which mostly supports NP, speaks of
‘class’, it has in mind greedy capitalists on the one hand versus workers and
(to a lesser extent) ‘the poor’ on the other. Of course, this is a quite
genuine version of class, and one which Owen Jones and others have identified
as neglected in favour of identity politics.
This neglect can be quite plausibly attributed to
evasion of another form of class privilege and power by those who benefit from it:
the professional class. Such advantages, when conferred on social workers, constitute
an even more oppressive version of the class system than the greedy-capitalist
one. For nowhere is class hegemony more brutally operative than in the right
afforded to professionals to take away people’s children. Although in practice
this means overwhelmingly the children of ‘the poor’ and ‘the disadvantaged’,
there is still a class issue when people who are middle-class through other
occupations, but are outside the ‘family expert’ class of social workers, are
victimized. The pro-social-worker left doesn’t want to know about this, and the
whole question is treated as a non-political issue revolving around child
protection and personal life.
So, although the government would staunchly deny
that NP, or the child protection system of which it is the culmination, is
elitist, you would have to work hard to demonstrate any degree of legal or
social equality between most parents and the professionals who rule their
private lives, overseeing all child-raising by the privilege and power
conferred on them on grounds of superior professional achievement. Plato would
be impressed.
In
defence of the private family
I go by the certainty/uncertainty test. Certain
knowledge has priority over uncertain claims.
The experts say ‘Yes, you have your traditional,
conditioned, unreflective attachments, but as experts we know that you
personally, and society as a whole, would be better off if the private family
were replaced by a complete system of professional child-raising from birth,
with breeders having little – and preferably no – contact with the children.’
In the case of Laing – who, although I disagree with him, was at least
committed to individuals’ mental health rather than state power – the
recommendation might be for communes.
We don’t know that we would be better off with such
systems, but we do know that we are well-enough off with, and prefer, the
private, free family, warts and all, and don’t want to hand our children over
to ‘qualified professionals’, state-selected fosterers, or even to ‘the
village’/‘the community’, who cannot possibly love them as we do. The family
offers the unconditional love that supports, not inhibits, our emotional
strength and individuality; a refuge from a harsh society, and the courage to
fight it; a place to be ourselves, without pretences. It’s ‘where we go when
we’ve nowhere else to go and where they have to take us in’. And when it fails,
it’s because it lacks those characteristics, not because it possesses them.
We must stand up to those who want to destroy it,
whatever their ideological excuses and however great their power or prestige.
