Chapter One - Continued

The Cry of the Children

Daily, children are daily robbed of their innocence. Computer pornography, much involving children, pćdophile rings - many operating with the connivance of people in authority at children's homes and in social services - compete with the standard fare of advertising aimed at children, never-ending games, films and TV programmes saturated with violence, and pimps and drug pushers who operate like urban cadres recruiting children and young people at every opportunity. Children are also targeted in other ways by the conditioners. In June 1996, with three Parliamentary colleagues, I presented a report (Violence, Pornography & the Media) to the House of Commons. Two years earlier I successfully led a campaign to amend the Criminal Justice Bill and in 1998 moved further amendments in the House of Lords. In an effort to protect children, these amendments restricted the broadcast of gratuitous violence on television. On both occasions, proponents of unrestricted broadcasting maintained that what is seen by children has no lasting or damaging effect upon them. Attempts to restrict are characterised as religious interference or reactionary thinking. While I was seeking to persuade Parliament to toughen up the law against violent videos, I went to see the then Home Secretary Michael Howard. One of his officials told me he thought my proposal to curb the flow of violent material into our homes was unjustified, and took no account of the fall in childbirth, "as only 30% of British homes now have children in them. Therefore," they said, "restrictions on gratuitously violent material are undesirable: the majority might want to watch". This is an extraordinary inversion of traditional concerns. For years we have been tilting at imaginary Spanish windmills and French farmers, while remaining indifferent to the Americanisation of European values and our way of life. European culture has been increasingly dictated and conditioned by American tastes, from everything we eat to everything we watch. Drug dependency, street-crime, mugging, screen-violence and the disintegration of the family and community life were all manifesting themselves in America years before they were washed up on our shores.

Our Violent Society

A principal reason why I oppose abortion is because it is an unwarranted act of violence against a defenceless person. Abortion is just another act of violence in an increasingly violent world. Our streets and communities suffer from violence on a daily basis and this is reinforced by a steady stream of violence broadcast into our homes. In Britain in one typical week, TV screens 400 killlings, 119 woundings and 27 sex-attacks on women. The Broadcasting Standards Council says that the broadcasts reinforce the fear of violence. The video Child's Play III appears to have been copied by the two ten year-old murderers of James Bulger. While torturing her, the murderers of Susan Capper repeatedly played the catchphrase "Do you want to play?" used by the demonic doll 'Chucky' in the same film. This video was watched by an estimated 110,000 children under 16 years of age when shown on Sky TV after the so-called 9.30 p.m. watershed. As this is a classic example of the clash of different values and priorities - one arguing for protection and restriction, the other against censorship and for freedom - it is worth cataloguing the eminent views which have been expressed to me but which have been dismissed by the secular establishment which dominates the media. l Professor Andrew Sims, former-President of the Royal College of Psychiatry, states: "There is now vast anecdotal evidence associating the portrayal of violence with violent behaviour and more than one thousand papers linking violence in the media to actual behaviour". l Dr Susan Bailey, Consultant Psychiatrist, carried out studies of adolescent murderers influenced by violent screen images. A quarter of the young people she encountered had watched violent and pornographic films during the period immediately prior to the murders for which they were responsible. l Professor Comstock, in his study TV and the American Child, identified "a very solid relationship between viewing anti-social portrayals or violent episodes, and behaving anti-socially". l The American Psychological Association concluded that research "clearly demonstrates a correlation between viewing violence and aggressive behaviour". l Dr H. Brandon Centerwell, a psychiatric researcher formerly with the University of Washington, claims that it is the young children exposed to TV violence in the 1950s and 1960s who later fuelled the dramatic increase in murder and property crime. He says that without TV violence, rates of crime would have been halved. l Professor Inga Soneson of the Swedish University of Malmo studied 200 children aged 6 to 16, and concluded that, "There was a pronounced correlation between emotional disturbance and intensive viewing of television". l The Professional Association of School Teachers spoke to 1,000 teachers in different parts of the UK. More than 90% of respondents believed that children's emotional, social and moral development is being damaged, sometimes irrevocably, by what they see. It is undoubtedly a major factor in creating the present culture of violence. Presumably the advertising industry, who in 1995-96 spent Ł3,124 million on TV advertising (industry statistics ITC June 1996), to influence our behaviour, would endorse these views.

An Obsession with Violence

Does the media have an obsession with violence? By the age of 13, an average American child has witnessed 8,000 murders and more than 100,000 other acts of violence, according to the American Psychology Association. After the 1998 shootings at a school in Arkansas, the State Governor said he was not surprised by the violence given the material which fills children's minds. In Britain, 47 films broadcast on the four terrestrial channels between January and June 1994 included 244 incidents involving firearms, 199 violent assaults (60 of them against women), 24 incidents of fire-raising or causing explosions, and 21 incidents involving knives. The violence included victims being punched, spat at, dragged by the hair, kicked on the ground, kicked in the stomach, kidneys and genitals. Women were raped and beaten and in one instance, a fork is put through her cheek. They depicted cruel behaviour which included a man having his hand impaled to a door with scissors, another man having his face smeared with dog faeces. In another instance, an ice-pick is forced into a victim's throat, and a serrated knife is held at a bound child's throat. This compilation was made by the National Viewers and Listeners Association. A report by the University of Sheffield, August 1995, found that satellite movie channels broadcast even more violence than terrestrial channels. Carefree magazine (May 1996) found that the Top 60 of video rentals included 35 which were exceedingly violent. and a further eight which were horror. They featured witchcraft, vampirism, serial murder and psychopathic stabbers. And do children see all of this? On 23 June, 1996, The Sunday Times published a survey of children's viewing habits. Children as young as nine are regularly watching adult films depicting sex and brutal murders in X-rated videos. Two thirds of 9-11 year-olds interviewed had watched videos carrying the 18 certificate, such as Pulp Fiction, The Terminator and Silence of the Lambs. More than half had watched films after the nine o'clock watershed. Six out of ten had a television in their bedroom, and a quarter had a video-recorder. Professor Elizabeth Newson, Emeritus Professor of Child Psychology at Nottingham University said that the result in children was a "loss of inocence. That is a terrible thing to do to a child - it is child abuse".

Among those in the industry who have begun to criticise the obsession with violence and its effect on civic society are Stanley Kubrick - who has withdrawn his film A Clockwork Orange; Roger Moore, Frank Capra, Edward James Olmos, Dustin Hoffman - who, speaking at the Cannes Film Festival after the massacres in Dunblane and Tasmania - asked, "Are we really saying that screen violence does not have anything to do with these massacres?"; Gregory Peck, Sir Anthony Hopkins - who has refused to do a sequel to Silence of the Lambs; Clint Eastwood, David Puttnam - "Someone has to say 'enough' because this is a disaster", and John Grisham - who has taken legal action against Oliver Stone after a friend was killed in a copycat murder modelled on Natural Born Killers. Many other actors and film makers are calling for a reassessment of the effects of TV and film (cf David Alton, Signs of Contradiction, 1996). In their homes young people are bombarded with violent images, and on the streets, urban cadres try to recruit them into using drugs. Drugs destroy families and communities; they destroy lives. This too is part of the contemporary culture of death: it is estimated that more than one million young people in Britain use drugs each week (Home Office, 1998). l More than 160 babies were born addicted to purified cocaine during one recent twelve month period in the UK (Sunday Times, 10 July 1994). l A Trustees Savings Bank Survey of 2,700 14-17 year-olds calculated that teenagers spend Ł14 per week on alcohol. l 75% of 15-16 year-olds in 116 British schools in 1987 had used cannabis leaf (Health Education Council). l By the age of 15 years, 24% of all girls smoke regularly, while 17% of boys smoke an average of 52 cigarettes per week.

Lose a Respect for Life - Lose Everything

Behavioural problems flow from the breakdown of family and community life, and from a loss of respect for life itself. In 1992, 66,000 children were expelled from school. In 1994, 36,000 children were on the Child Protection Register in England; 64,000 children are in local authority care, and the Children's Society estimate that 100,000 young people run away or go missing in Britain each year. Patterns of child-rearing have also played their part. In 1996, Professor Forrester Cockburn, President of the European Association of Perinatal Medicine, and head of the Department of Child Health at Glasgow University, pointed to the more distant relationship between working mothers and their bottle-fed, child-minded babies, and the development of a potential for emotional and behavioural problems later: "A mother breast-feeding with a supportive family structure around her, that is the way the human species has evolved. The changes happening now are not good," he says. Professor Cockburn also criticises the UK's arrangements for women in the first year of a baby's life which he describes as "primitive", calling for women to be able to spend a longer time with their child after birth: one or two years. In an earlier age, the phrase 'working mother' would have meant what it said - recognising the importance for a child of having their mother and their father to turn to.

By contrast, in 1998, the Government embarked on a strategy of forcing single parents into work outside the home, the creation of more child-minding, and of leaving more children with no parents for most of the time. The Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, writing in The Times (29.8.94.) pleaded for children to be delivered from "a sense of hopelessness and despair". He also had this to say: "If you were to walk tonight along Golders Green Road, you would see hundreds of Jewish children, good children, standing around aimlessly, some on drink, some on drugs, having everything but believing nothing". And where does all this begin? It begins when a society loses a respect for life. When life is accorded such scant respect in the womb, is it any wonder that life is shown so little respect after birth? Dispense with belief and with what are you left?

Does Society need Religious Belief?

It is instructive to consider how society is getting along without religious belief. The dissolution of civic society - what David Selborne in The Principle of Duty (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994) described as "the process of civic disaggregation" - can be traced to the abandonment of the absolute principles proclaimed in the Decalogue, to a discarding of the sanctity of human life. The love of God and the love of others, the disavowal of killing, truthfulness, faithfulness, respect for the property of others: these basic goods have been at the core of our civic order. Take away the belief on which those values turn and you are left with a jumble of competing claims and notions. In turn this creates a sense of crisis - not the stability for which most people yearn. From Will Hutton's The State We're In (Jonathan Cape 1992), to Anthony Sampson's The Essential Anatomy of Britain (Hodder & Stoughton 1992) which was sub-titled "Democracy in Crisis", the very titles of secular commentaries admit this sense of uncertainty and chaos.

In recognising the scale of civic disaggregation, commentators generally do not like the uncomfortable conclusion that social reform must begin in personal reform; that social sins are no more than personal sins writ large. The failure of successive governments to tackle unprecedented levels of crime, for instance, is due in part to false liberal ideas about the cause of crime and the nature of man. When challenged, the liberal, in turn, behaves like a theocrat whose theories have become articles of faith, and dissension a capital offence. Unwillingness to contemplate other causes for crime leads to a collapse of public confidence. In America and Britain, a frightened public, sceptical of the ability of the Government to protect them, take the law into their own hands. The emergence of vigilante groups - driving out drug pushers from council estates - the demands for guns and ever more sophisticated forms of burglar alarms and property protection - all bear witness to this collapse of confidence.

Our Civic Crisis

Across the political spectrum, political thinkers have begun to sense the scale of the civic crisis; the need to cultivate a richer civic culture, and to develop a sustainable human ecology. At last they are beginning to address the conflicts that lie between the polarities of community and individual; rights versus responsibilities; free markets versus social cohesion; cohabitation versus the family; public duty versus private gain; expediency versus principle. It is not simply nostalgia which is driving them to question the grasping acquisitiveness, selfishness and violence which are the hallmarks of contemporary Britain. Nor is it sentimentality which desires a more decent, kindlier, orderly setting in which to live and to rear children. It is a sense of desperation. The question must surely be whether it is possible to create a society which manifests the attributes of Judaeo-Christian belief while discarding the belief itself. Civic order may be incapable of repair without a new encounter with religious belief. A central question must be whether renewal is possible without overturning the claim that we have the right to kill our offspring.

Reclaiming the Ground

The late John Smith, when he became leader of the Labour Party, began to recognise how much poorer politics had become without faith. Along with Tony Blair, he contributed to a collection of essays revealingly entitled Reclaiming the Ground. Both men candidly admitted private religious beliefs. Blair went further and said that such values have application in public life. In the run-up to the 1997 General Election, however, Blair made an exception: "Abortion," he said, "might be opposed privately but voted for in Parliament". The Labour Party was the first UK party to make abortion a matter of party-policy, and various Labour Party groups - and other organisations, such as the Christian Socialist Movement - were among the founders of Progress, the coalition formed to secure legislation permitting destructive experiments on human embryos (cf Mulcahy, The Human Embryo Debate). Party managers, the 'spin doctors' who fashion image and public profile, have been happy to exploit the unease about society's drift, but the rhetoric and the reality are still far apart. It was reassuring to voters who had once been scared by the bogeymen of the Marxist Militant Tendency, and by nightmare advertising replete with demon eyes, to cultivate a religious image. On the Right, too, God is becoming more fashionable - although the Conservative Party is nervous of emulating the American Republican Party and allowing the emergence of a powerful Moral Majority or Religious Right. Like the proverbial curate's egg, this approach to faith and politics is simply there in parts. As yet there is no consistent pro-life ethic or pro-life idea of politics.

Cafeteria Christianity

There is also an element of cafeteria-Christianity about all this. In situation ethics and convenience theology, we have been encouraged to pick and mix, leave behind what is inconvenient or what displeases. The relativism which is unwilling to speak about truth but only about 'what's true for me' is an evasion of the serious business of living. One expression of this was the suggestion of Prince Charles that he should become 'defender of faith' rather than of 'the faith'. Loss of nerve has meant that although there has been some timorous flirting with Christianity - using it as a decorous detail - no-one has been brave enough to argue that Judaeo-Christian values must become the pillar which upholds a political or civic institution. We might be encouraged to go back to basics but not that basic! Instead of recognising the properties of religious values and their ability to weld together a society, they have been jettisoned in favour of an easy tolerance of 'faith' - which can mean so little that of course anyone can embrace it - so little that it certainly would not take a king to defend it.

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