Tag: Technology

• Chapter 2: The Fearful Outdoors: Moral Panics, Media Discourse and Normative Childhood Geographies – The Natural Habitat of Youth?

  <- Chapter 1 – Chapter 3 ->

  1. 2.1 Introduction
  2. 2.2 Cars: The Missing Moral Panic
  3. 2.3 Out of the Shadows: The Press ‘Discovers’ Child Abuse
  4. 2.4 The Orkney Satanic Abuse Scandal
  5. 2.5 Stranger Danger and Boundary Making
  6. 2.6 Video Nasties
  7. 2.7 Conclusion
  8. References

  2.1 Introduction

  The relaunch of the previously ailing Sun newspaper in 1969 as Britain’s first modern-style tabloid marked the beginning of a fundamental shift in the country’s media landscape.¹ The format proved popular and by 1978 The Sun had turned around its fortunes to become the country’s best-selling paper, inspiring many others to (re)launch in the same fashion such as The Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, and News of the World. These ‘new’ papers differentiated themselves from traditional strait-laced broadsheets with exciting, polemical, and often inflammatory commentaries alongside a focus on deeper engagement with their readership and public feeling. They were also the product of a consolidating industry with a small number of media moguls – Rupert Murdoch in particular – amalgamating their ownership. By 1987 Murdoch papers like The Sun constituted 1/3^rd of all newspaper sales in Britain, and his symbiotic relationship with the Thatcher governments was a defining factor in both the deregulation of the industry and the explosion in readership of tabloids during the 1980s.² Conversely, local newspapers had for some years been experiencing a ‘provincial meltdown’ as readership plummeted, sending many out of business and stripping those that remained of the income necessary to engage in consistent high-quality reporting, further centralising and concentrating news media production.³

  Despite the growing popularity of the TV, and later the internet, historians have argued that the tabloids defined the media landscape during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and indeed forced new digital media to adapt to their ‘populist priorities’ of ‘speed, brevity, accessibility, drama and controversy’.⁴ The drama-led skew of the tabloid reporting style often led papers like The Sun to spotlight and repeatedly return to specific individual human stories – or ‘scandals’ – with which the public could emotionally connect, and such coverage would frequently turn to campaigning as the newspaper took up the cause of a certain afflicted individual or community. This approach was both one of the keys to the success of tabloid journalism and a key driver behind wider discourse also being defined by various ‘scandals’ during this period.

  Of special relevance to this thesis was the openness of the tabloid press toward collaboration with members of the public – either as individuals or assembled as campaign groups – to bring their issues into national discourse. Parents concerned for the safety of their children around strangers featured in the press often, and conversely so too did people fearing the dangers of a ‘new youth’ that was said to be more uncaring, disrespectful, and violent than ever before. Both narratives problematised the relationship between children and outdoor environments, as either the outdoors was characterised as unsafe for children, or children as unsafe for the outdoors. New technologies were also common subjects of concern, with the discourse around them blending fears about the corruptible nature of children with the dangers of what were seen as unknown, unpredictable digital environments in which – much like the outdoors – adults had less control over children than they would like. Indeed, technologies like the TV and internet played a complex role as both informers of – and subjects of – public discourse about their safety, as symbolised by the 22-year-long TV run of Why Don’t You?.⁵

  This chapter will mirror the tabloid format by focussing on three defining ‘scandal’ stories of the period relating to the dangers children faced by strangers and technology, and how the reporting of those events chose to represent different environments of childhood. The first scandal I discuss is the 1991 Orkney satanic child abuse case, in which city social workers removed nine children from a rural island on suspicion of child abuse, only to return them a month later amidst a massive media storm. In Orkney, I find that the reporting of the event infused the pastoral island landscape with a notion of a middle-class, rural purity in which children necessarily flourish set against an urban environment of cosmopolitan corruption – as embodied by the social workers. This narrative was indicative and promotional of a social belief that not only cast urban environments as improper for childhood but also rural environments as something urban people were not necessarily worthy of.

  The second scandal I examine is that of a longer panic the press played a key role in stoking during the 1990s and 2000s: ‘stranger-danger’. Coverage of stranger-danger problematised all public outdoor space on grounds of safety, as dramatic reports of (in actuality very rare) attacks on children by strangers scared families into restricting childhood freedom and mobility for fear of a danger that was ever-present because it was unknowable. This promoted the use of private enclosed spaces like gardens and sports centres over public streets and parks, disadvantaging households with worse access to such private environments. Very importantly, this also ignored and distracted from the far more pervasive and unseen danger of at-home abuse.

  The final scandal I examine is the ‘video nasty’ panic of the mid-1980s which is an early example of how technological environments accessed at home were also being positioned in the media as spaces that corrupted children. This meant that children who had the least access to ‘acceptable’ outdoor space (and thus spent more time indoors) were left with no physical place where they were not seen to be in danger either from others or themselves. Within this framework, it became increasingly common to think of children themselves, corrupted by modern technology and permissiveness, as the cause of their own decline in outdoor play and the decline of childhood itself, as an idea and experience.

  Overall, this chapter demonstrates the media’s significant role in contributing to the milieux of social anxiety amongst parents and policymakers during this period that led to both an increase in restriction of children’s mobility and an outcry over the laziness of the modern ‘couch potato generation’. Drawing on and adding to the well-established historical literature on media moral panics, particularly the work of Adrian Bingham, Jenny Kitzenger, David Jenkins, and Jennifer Crane, this chapter advances an environmental argument that connects media representations of certain ‘scandalised’ environments with their real-world consequences for children’s relationships with those places – as interpreted and mediated by adults. As with the first chapter, this style of study is justified on the basis Mora et al.’s analytical framework of the ‘circuit of culture’ – connecting public and media representations of childhood environments to how those spaces were produced, identified, and consumed.⁶

  This chapter is also concerned with how parents, carers, and institutions changed their approaches to managing children based on how their perceptions of different environments were shaped by public discourse. This extends not only to parents disallowing younger children from doing things like walking to school or playing outside unsupervised, but also to how adult society at large came to frown on older children for ‘hanging around’ in parks or shopping centres, or indeed for spending too much time indoors. This approach grounds my analysis of public discourse in the physical environments being discussed and, more specifically, how during this period they came to change children and be changed by them. When discussing the two North East case study areas in subsequent chapters, this national context is essential to understand when considering how it impacted upon, and was intermediated by, local communities.

  Importantly, this chapter will also address why there was no moral panic surrounding cars and urbanism as there was for strangers and technology despite (as outlined in Chapter One) the topic’s popularity in expert discourse. I do so by utilising Martin Innes’ concept of ‘signal crimes’, Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’, and Stuart Hall’s concept of the ‘signification spiral’ to explain why Orkney, stranger-danger, and video nasties became such significant and influential media events whereas the destruction of childhood play environments and danger to children’s lives posed by cars was comparatively ignored. Stories such as the dangers of leaded petrol and the construction of new motorways through protected landscapes were reported on and did enter public discourse, but never with the intensity and purpose typical of a ‘moral panic’. Primarily this was because the danger was characterised by ‘slow violence’ – a steady, encroaching change – and not the kinds of explosive scandals or ‘signal crimes’ that fuelled tabloid campaigns, and thus there was no clear single idea that could be latched onto and used as part of a ‘signification spiral’ to draw people to conclude that one event was emblematic of a much larger issue that needed to be addressed. This analysis is key because by revealing how cars’ real threat to children failed to result in a significant panic or response, it demonstrates that what was regarded as dangerous to children was contingent on socially constructed discourse. Therefore, restrictions placed on childhood freedoms were not based simply on pragmatic response to danger, but on perceived danger that was neither inevitable or immutable and was the product of historically specific factors. I also utilise these analytical concepts to bolster the argument that media coverage explicitly and/or implicitly causally linked scandal events not only to the specific environment they took place in, but to a wider category of environment that was then viewed with public suspicion.

  2.2 Cars: The Missing Moral Panic

  The British media’s approach to the reporting of threats to childhood during this period was to focus on specific key events. Certain emotive stories that fit well with tabloid-style journalism were presented as symbolically representative of a wider problem that the British people should demand something be done about, typically by giving their support for new regulations and enforcement measures. Martin Innes calls these events ‘signal crimes’ – media-events which highlight the symbiotic relationships journalists have with the police and criminal justice system. For example, the police commonly used media publicity to appeal for witnesses in cases like the decade-long hunt for serial killer Robert Black during the 1980s; this was in the interests of both detectives and journalists who worked together to both solve a case and get a story.⁷ However, such collaboration worked to amplify the ‘signal value’ of a particular event and ‘either intentionally or unintentionally transform it into a focal point for public concerns about crime and crime control’, as well as lending the authority of the police to whichever moral panic the papers were presenting a particular event as symptomatic of.⁸ The problem with the threats posed to childhood from the new urban environment of the car was that there was no associated explosive ‘signal crime’ to attach the issue to; just a steady, encroaching change. This is very often the case with environmental threats that move predictably but slowly, compared to human threats that can be both fast and unpredictable, as with the sudden introduction of a new technology or appearance of a strange figure. The spread of the motor car was a form of what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’; the sort of ‘catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects’.⁹ Partly because of this spectacle-deficiency, I argue, whilst the car was the primary force exacerbating the decline in environmental quality and choice available to children, it was ignored in favour of the more minor but more ‘newsworthy’ dangers of strangers and technology.

  A defining feature of the signal crime phenomenon is that it is intended to ‘bring something to light’ and therefore reconfigure people’s behaviours or beliefs in some way. Most importantly, the response to the signal may involve either an individual or collective decision to make changes to the environments perceived to be under threat – the environments of childhood in this case. During the studied period, these changes were sometimes physical crime-prevention measures like the installation of CCTV cameras, but more crucially they were also changes in communities’ social fabric that leant toward risk-avoidance and political demands for more policing, laws, and social control. Less explicit, but equally important, these changes involved a reframing of the mental maps that people used to locate potential dangers and threats in everyday life. Thus, the media’s role in amplifying signal crimes not only spread fear about the risks posed by the specific danger in a case (like an individual), but of a more general threat that they came to represent (like a type of individual). To put it simply, parents were being told that if one child wasn’t safe, no child was. As Cutter has shown through studying health risks, people tend to worry more about high-profile, dramatic, and visible risks than they do about the comparatively invisible hazards that they are routinely exposed to, such as that posed by air pollution.¹⁰ Furthermore as Slovic identifies, these worries find particularly fertile soil when centred around a topic that is poorly understood.¹¹ Parents felt they understood the car and its risks – statistically they owned one – but they didn’t necessarily feel they understood the unknowns of new technologies and strangers. This is how car-oriented urban environments could be seen as dangerous, but cars themselves as safe. The car itself was a bubble, a moveable extension of private home space over which a parent had, in theory, total control.¹²

  The ubiquity and symbolism of the car were two further factors making it an unlikely target for the press. Rising rates of car ownership and expansion of facilitating infrastructure during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s did threaten children – but it was the population at large that drove cars, not a specific minority. In the early 20^th century, the ‘extreme danger of motor cars’ came under constant criticism in newspapers due to their high death toll for children in particular, but by 1980 the climate had changed.¹³ If the papers had attempted to create moral panic around the issue of cars, they would have needed to pick out the motorist as a target, which would have meant picking out their own readers as targets. Aside from being unpopular with readership, this would not have aligned with the politics of most of the tabloid press which during this period was supportive of the individualist freedoms that the car had come to represent. This was why even during the height of public protests against the construction of hundreds of new road schemes following Thatcher’s Roads for Prosperity programme during the 1980s and 1990s (most famously Twyford Down in 1992) – widely supported around the country and described by the Economist as a ‘a truly populist movement drawing from all walks of life’ – tabloid press did not get involved or call for legal change to the extent that they did after the Orkney scandal, for example.¹⁴

  2.3 Out of the Shadows: The Press ‘Discovers’ Child Abuse

  The British media and the tabloid press often perpetuated inaccurate and harmful representations of who and what did (and did not) pose a threat to children during this period. However, it must also be acknowledged that during the 1980s the media played a key role in publicising endemic problems of child abuse, and child sexual abuse in particular, that had been ignored in prior decades. In America in 1983 Time declared that ‘private violence’ was finally being ‘yanked out of the shadows’.¹⁵ In the UK, public recognition was emblematised by the launch of the TV show Childwatch in 1986. Childwatch included statistics and in-depth discussion about abuse and how to support victims, and its popularity with viewers led to the setup of the charity Childline. Childline itself received 50,000 calls on its opening day and calls continued at a rate of 8-10,000 per day after that, a fact which generated further media attention.¹⁶ The Childwatch programme was accompanied by a remarkable expansion in attention to child abuse, particularly sexual abuse, from other TV formats as well as the print media. Reporting of sexual abuse in The Times, for example, increased by 300% between 1985 and 1987.¹⁷

  Sexual abuse within families also became an issue for flagship UK documentary series such as Brass Tacks (BBC2, 1987), Everyman (BBC1, 1988), Antenna (BBC2, 1989) and Horizon (BBC2, 1989).¹⁸ TV films also increasingly played an important role. The American made-for-TV drama Something about Amelia broadcast in the UK in 1989 and was ‘often credited with doing for child sexual abuse what Cathy Come Home did for homelessness’ – getting the public emotionally invested in the subject matter.¹⁹ By the early 1990s child sexual abuse also began to appear in drama series. It featured in The Bill and Casualty as well as in a two-year running storyline in Channel 4’s soap-opera Brookside from 1993-1995. The storyline of the victim, Beth, was so important to some viewers that when the news leaked that the producers planned for her to commit suicide, various incest survivors’ groups demonstrated outside the TV studios under banners reading ‘Save Our Survivor’. Under this pressure the producers agreed to rewrite the plot so that Beth would die of natural causes.²⁰

  The decade between 1985 and 1995 was thus a time of dramatic shifts in the public profile of child abuse. Indeed, this was so much the case that journalists who said they had been discouraged from following up stories of child abuse in the 1970s and early 1980s reported to the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC) that they now were suffering from ‘abuse fatigue’ from an over-reporting of these stories.²¹ It must be acknowledged, however, that the groundwork for recognising this abuse came initially from the grassroots work of early feminist activists and organisations, such as Florence Rush at the 1971 New York Radical Feminist Conference, who had called child sexual abuse ‘The Last Frontier’, challenging the pervasive Freudian view which held children responsible for their own abuse as ‘seducers’ of adults.²² In the UK the topic was a focus of the 1982 National Women’s Liberation Conference and the London Rape Crisis Centre made headlines when it reported in 1986 that a quarter of its clients were under 16.²³ Furthermore, media interest in cases of child-abuse during this period focussed on particular forms of abuse at the expense on others, leading to a situation where many cases of at-home abuse from known persons were still being ignored.²⁴

  The issue had broken into the mainstream towards the end of the 1980s, but how did the media portray the perpetrators of these crimes? At the crudest level sex offenders were often personified as sub-human animals. Many headlines dropped the straightforward term ‘man’ in favour of ‘fiend’, ‘pervert’, ‘monster’ or ‘animal’.²⁵ Such reporting was often accompanied by disturbing mug shots of these ‘beasts’ with captions or headlines drawing attention to their distinctive appearance, such as The Sun’s ‘Evil Mr Staring Eyes’.²⁶ On the other hand, if a photograph made an abuser look normal then a Jekyll and Hyde type-metaphor might be used such as The Star’s ‘Smile that hid the violent depravity of sex fiend headmaster’.²⁷ This approach dehumanised the men who committed these crimes as individualised embodiments of evil, and thus avoided some of the trickier questions these incidents brought up around wider societal issues over the relationship between sexuality, masculinity, and power.²⁸ Another related tactic was to associate attacks on children with homosexuality. One study that analysed all national British press reporting during 1991 found that abusers were explicitly identified as ‘homosexual’ in 50 newspaper articles such as The Independent’s ‘Man tells of homosexual abuse by care staff’, yet no article in any newspaper identified an abuser as heterosexual.²⁹ Unlike the use of terms such as ‘monster’ and ‘beast’ which were mostly confined to the tabloids, identifying abuse as gay was common across all the press. A case in point was the coverage of the Frank Beck case, a man who assaulted boys over many years in the care home in which he worked. On that case The Guardian reported dismay at the fact that a care worker was allowed to foster two boys ‘even though there were complaints that he was homosexual’.³⁰ In a clear demonstration of the interchangeability of the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘paedophile’ in the British press, a Sunday Times report on a ‘murderous sex ring’ stated that the police had interviewed 92 men and ‘Not all of them were paedophiles; sometimes they were straight men’.³¹ Children were being ‘swallowed up in large cities’, the article went on to say, linking the urban environment to concepts of danger and depravity.³² This type of disparagement of the cityscape was common in the media during this period, despite the fact that most academic reports found that rural areas had equal to or higher rates of child maltreatment than urban areas, and indeed urban areas were at the ‘forefront’ of activities to prevent child abuse.³³

  The environments of the school and the care home are interesting to examine, as they straddled the line between public and private space. By strict definition they were private premises, but they were not the nuclear family home, and their boundaries were more permissive. Stories about abuse in those environments carried with them the horror factor of the perpetrator being a trusted, known adult, but as they were also public institutions they could be simultaneously thought of as public environments wherein abuse was more ‘expected’ than at home. Furthermore, dangers or even just suggestions of dangers around these institutions were necessarily widely publicised though school letters, local papers, and school-gate gossip because of their public profile, and thus more likely to make it into a national paper. In reporting of child abuse in these settings, press coverage again individualised the problem down to the specific perpetrators, with little to no focus on the patterns of abuse in these settings, such as the preponderance of abuse cases coming out of private schools during the 1990s. Private schools had such an acute problem that Childline set up a specific helpline for them in 1991, yet reporting of abuse always framed the problem as certain men taking advantage of the institution in which they worked rather than also interrogating how the structures of that institution allowed abuse to occur for so long.³⁴ In the prosecution of the headmaster with the ‘smile that hid violent depravity’, for example, the judge in the case made a point of saying that the man was a good teacher and the school ‘had admirable facilities and was well run’, despite what had been taking place there.³⁵

  The media thus helped to bring to light issues of child abuse both at home as well as from strangers, but the question of who was to blame for these issues was more complex than that. Individualising the problem to ‘a few bad apples’ allowed abuse at large to continue. Contrarily, the press did often identify experts – those who had ‘allowed’ these things to occur – as needing institutional reform. Social workers attracted the most concentrated ire despite other professionals like police, doctors, and nurses usually being involved in the same cases. Indeed, these more respected professionals were likely to be portrayed as heroes rather than villains. The Department for Education’s (DfE) Munro Review of Child Protection, carried out in the wake the murder of the 1-year-old Peter Connelly (‘Baby P’) by his parents in 2007, found that 70% of news articles about the event were negative about social services.³⁶ The report analysed all the coverage in The Sun, Mail, Mirror, Telegraph, Times and Guardian, and found that the equivalent figures for medical staff were just 54% negative, and for the police only 30%, when all had had involvement with the family before the death.³⁷ Even more telling was the fact that the proportion of negative coverage given to social services (70%) was equivalent to that given to the parents themselves – the perpetrators of the crime.³⁸ The message – intentional or otherwise – was that social workers were just as much to blame for the infant’s death as the parents.

  Why then was it that social workers attracted such exceptionally negative attention from the press? First, the nature of social work inevitably tended to attract media attention only when something had gone badly wrong; their day-to-day work understandably attracted little media interest, but whenever catastrophe struck it could not help but be dramatic and newsworthy, especially if children were involved. Second, as Leedham and Georgeson have studied, female-dominated professions like social workers were held to higher moral standards than others (and therefore more scathing critique), rooted in a misogynistic expectance for women to be morally pure.³⁹ Third, the stereotype of ‘The Social Worker’ had earned a reputation in the tabloid press as being synonymous with ‘politically correct’ professionals employed by what came to be known as ‘loony left’ Labour councils – especially during the 1987 general election.⁴⁰ In 1984, shortly after the media had generated this concept, the murders of two girls, Tyra Henry and Jasmine Beckford, occurred in London boroughs that were already in the media’s cross-hairs as ‘loony left’, and journalists weren’t slow to draw connections between the left-wing policies of these urban boroughs and the perceived failings of their social services departments. These inner-city places like Islington, Ealing, and Liverpool with a leadership focus on issues of gender, race, and sexuality that the press regarded as fringe issues. The Daily Mail’s ‘Poison at Red Ted’s Town Hall’ (18 July, 1985) focussed on Tyra and divisions in Lambeth council caused by ‘criticism and interference by black councillors especially’.⁴¹ Ted Knight, the leader of Lambeth council, was made (not entirely unwillingly) into a figurehead for the ‘loony left’ due to Lambeth’s famous use of lesbian and gay committees, nuclear-free zones, and flying of red flags.⁴² Another article from The Daily Mail on Brent council and Jasmine’s case read:

  But what of those who could have saved her; who had the legal power, the professional responsibility and, in theory, the trained expertise to save her? What of the social workers of the London Borough of Brent?⁴³

  Because ‘loony left’ councils and associated social service departments were always city-based, urbanity came to be the associated environment of moral suspicion in most of the tabloid press. As a counterpoint the rural environment was commonly represented as a place of safety and common sense, where the more conservative populations knew better than to fall prey to ‘loony left’ ideology. This can be seen most evidently and most explosively in one of the defining child abuse ‘signal’ cases of the 1990s: the February 1991 Orkney satanic abuse scandal.

  2.4 The Orkney Satanic Abuse Scandal

  Early in the morning of the 27 February 1991, and without warning, social workers came to the Orkney island of South Ronaldsay and forcibly removed nine children from their homes and parents on suspicion of widespread ritual child abuse. The allegations, however, would turn out to be false and the children were returned home two months later. The story became a huge media eventduring this period withover quarter of all UK press stories about child abuse during 1991 given over to it – more than 400 features.⁴⁴ This is a prime case study of a moral panic linked to media representations of childhood environments. As will be shown, the way the remote rural island of South Ronaldsay was represented in the press against the city environments the children were taken to, such as Inverness and Glasgow, is telling of how urban places and children were increasingly portrayed as incompatible during this time.

  From an early stage after the ‘dawn raids’ – as they came to be known – coverage by the press and TV was sympathetic to the islanders, particularly after the formation of the South Ronaldsay Parents Action Committee (SRPAC). SRPAC decided to work closely with the media to put their case forward, sharing the highly emotive stories of the moments their children were taken away, such as one mother describing how ‘I actually came running into the house screaming for my own mother who’s been dead for 20 years’.⁴⁵ This parent-paper partnership was recognised by another mother interviewed on the return of her child, saying ‘just thanks, everybody. Thanks press, thank you community, wonderful to have the children home’.⁴⁶ This contrasted starkly with the social workers who communicated very little with the media, partly due to reticence, but also to legal restrictions surrounding client confidentiality.⁴⁷ Indeed, during the two months before the official dismissal of the social workers’ case in April, most reporting was at the very least sceptical of the charges of satanic abuse, and it is my contention that the evidence suggests that South Ronaldsay’s landscape acted as both proof of, and a metaphor for, its inhabitants’ innocence in press coverage. Such stories had always been popular in the printed press, but the unusual popularity of this story with TV news media is evidence of the essentiality of South Ronaldsay’s image to the story. For months, news reports would open with evocative shots of the isolated harbour or scenic countryside, to the extent that in a study asking people their memories of the event, one participant described how she ‘got into the habit of going off to make herself a cup of tea whenever she saw the typical “establishing shot” on TV’.⁴⁸

  

  Figure I. South Ronaldsay’s Harbour, as shown on BBC news.⁴⁹

  In almost all reporting the island was depicted in utopian terms, the perfect place to raise a child. The language used upheld the romanticist association between childhood innocence and natural virtue. Newsnight describedSouth Ronaldsay as a ‘haven of peace’ and the locals as ‘good working people’.⁵⁰ Most had not grown up in Orkney but had moved there in pursuit of ‘the simple life’, according to Channel 4 News, or to ‘escape the rat race of contemporary urban society’ as Scotland on Sunday put it.⁵¹ Indeed the island’s very remoteness and physical distance from the metropolitan sphere, which in prior decades would likely have been used to cast it as uncivilised, was instead a mark of its purity from urban corruption, allowing its inhabitants ‘a quieter, more fulfilling existence’.⁵² Amongst many others, the Sunday Tribune made the point the people were ‘uniformly English, articulate, and middle class’ and had chosen Orkney specifically because ‘It was regarded as a “place of safety” to bring up their children’ – this phrase used with deliberate irony as a ‘place of safety’ order was the name of the ruling used to take the children off the island.⁵³ Making pains to connect South Ronaldsay’s ruralness and its middle-classness pre-empted any reader preconceptions surrounding rural backwardness, but it was also revealing of a prevailing presumption which connected middle and upper-class children to nature and purity in a way that working-class children were not.

  As well as conducting many interviews with individual islanders, the media also worked to broadcast group SRPAC petitions and demonstrations, in which ‘the island’ and its people became synonymous. Very little reporting acknowledged any differences in opinion on South Ronaldsay, creating the impression of a homogenous group of people. The Mail on Sunday wrote of ‘Fears of an outraged island’, The Daily Mail of ‘Village fury’, and Scotland on Sunday went for ‘Orkney Reels’ as a headline.⁵⁴ In these articles, terms like ‘parents’, ‘islanders’, ‘village’, and ‘the island’ were used with little distinction between them to refer to the people of South Ronaldsay, evidencing and propagating the idea that people and place were one and the same. This is a common way to talk about communities generally, but within this construction, no islander could not fit the vaguely held perception that South Ronaldsay’s landscape had the ability to purify its inhabitants. The 1983 film ‘Local Hero’, which follows an uncaring American oil executive redeemed by a ‘dreamlike’ Scottish coastal village, is an example of this idea expressed in the popular culture of the period.⁵⁵ Unlike South Ronaldsay’s residents however, the social workers were incomers who had not stayed long enough to breathe the cleansing air. Some descriptions of the ‘dawn raids’ implied the social workers had introduced a kind of evil to this contemporary Eden. The Daily Record showed a picture of parents looking over the Orkney landscape with the caption ‘Paradise Lost’.⁵⁶ The Daily Telegraph also used the term ‘paradise lost’, and described the morning of the raid in gothic fashion:

  It is a story that can only be thought of in monochrome. There are houses of grey granite and a swirling Orcadian mist.⁵⁷

  Weather was a key component of how the island’s environment came to be integral to the story, partly due to its metaphorical value. Shortly after the event The Times described ‘islands under a cloud’, again demonstrating the monolithic depiction of the Orcadians, but also the pseudo-biblical manner in which weather was often used to synthesise this satanic story.

  

  Figure II. Captioned Photo of St. Margaret’s Hope in The Times, 4 March 1991.⁵⁸

  On the children’s April return to the island The Daily Mirror picked up a similar theme with ‘Storm as sex abuse kids fly home’.⁵⁹ ITV news, on the other hand, reported that ‘After days of rain, the island was bathed in sunshine today, a fitting welcome back for the children’.⁶⁰ Despite two opposing weather-metaphors being used, in both cases South Ronaldsay’s environment was utilised to vindicate the inhabitants – as if the landscape itself knew of how it had been wronged by the social workers. The Express described the ‘brilliant sunshine etching the hills and fields in spring gold’ and explicitly linked this to the island’s status as a secure playground for youngsters: ‘It looked like the perfect safe haven for children to play…’.⁶¹ The Scotsman used ‘Sunshine after the storm’ , and Scotland on Sunday went with ‘From magic summer to winter nightmare’.⁶² In the same article a photo of the quarry where the abuse was alleged to have taken place was captioned poetically as ‘In that long, now lost summer, the place where the water warmed up and brought youngsters from miles around’.⁶³ The island environment did not have to be employed this way, as one anomalous Evening News article from before the children’s return proved. In it, the paper represented the island as a cold, shadowy, and divided place. South Ronaldsay was ‘a place so wild it appears to have been abandoned totally by both God and man’ and described the same quarry from the Scotland on Sunday article as ‘remote… shrouded in mist [and] partially filled with muddy water’.⁶⁴

  

  Figure III. The quarry, as shown on BBC news.⁶⁵

  Similarly, The Evening News’ negative portrayal of the rural focussed on the concept of ‘wilderness’, a dangerous environment in which children hurt themselves and are roughened by. Conversely, the numerous positive portrayals depicted a tamer, more genteel landscape that better fit the image of a middle-class idyll. For much of the press, it was the cities the children were taken away to that took on the role of ‘wilderness’. The corrupting ‘urban jungle’.An interview with one of the returned children was highlighted in the Daily Record and many other newspapers wherein a boy ‘spoke of learning to steal cars, roll a cannabis joint and glue sniffing’ after being taken off the island – a clear demonstration of a loss of childhood innocence and corruption by the urban sphere.⁶⁶

  

  Figure IV. Front page of the Daily Record, 6 April 1991.⁶⁷

  The Daily Mirror ran the headline ‘They left here unharmed, they’re coming home abused’.⁶⁸ One mother described how her daughter had been bullied and withdrawn when they lived on the mainland but had ‘made very good progress’ since moving to Orkney – which she feared would now be ‘set back badly’ after the ordeal.⁶⁹ The whole saga was understandably traumatic for the families, and it was used by tabloid and TV news to promote a general narrative about the benefits of country over city life for children. In reading the Daily Record article more closely, it is made clear that the car-stealing, cannabis-smoking, glue-sniffing boy only ever talked about these things with other kids, though the headlines implied he witnessed and took part in them.⁷⁰ However, while the prevailing impression given was that something so abhorrent as child abuse simply could not happen in idyllic Orkney, almost no papers mentioned that five years earlier a father on South Ronaldsay had been imprisoned for abusing eight children, and that none of the locals had suspected anything at the time.⁷¹ Furthermore, it was accusations made by the abused children during that legitimate case that led to the 1991 dawn raid.

  The Independent did mention this in one article and quoted a local as saying ‘We’d never have thought. He must have been a Jekyll and Hyde character. Nobody could believe it when he was taken away’.⁷² This, The Independent noted, brought under suspicion the claims from locals and the press that they would somehow instinctively know if something like that was going on. It was symptomatic of the common assumption that an abuser had a particular ‘look’ or ‘manner’, and furthermore – I argue – lived in a particular environment. Additionally, what was not reported on was the fact the dismissal of the social workers’ case was overturned not because it had no substance but because it was deemed ‘impossible’ for the sheriff ‘to bring a fair and balanced judgement to the issues’.⁷³ Because the case was then dropped due to being deemed ‘compromised’, the social workers’ evidence was never heard in a court of law or officially dismissed. There was no ritual abuse on South Ronaldsay, but the conviction that there never could be, and the general assumption that the social workers had no evidence because the case was dismissed, was false and partially based on a form of environmental prejudice that favoured an image of South Ronaldsay’s middle-class rustic charm.

  The importance of media representations of the environment during a key a signal-crime ‘scandal’ such as Orkney was made apparent during a study over a decade later into the public’s memories of the event. The powerful image of the rural idyll against the urban mire constructed in the media made a lasting impression on the public, more so than any specific details of the scandal, as most people could (unsurprisingly) only remember headlines, broad strokes, and impressions. What they remembered most were particularly powerful or oft-repeated talking points and imagery: the close-knit united community nestled into a beautiful rural landscape suddenly sundered by the ‘dawn raids’, evocatively described by both reporters and in the emotive pleas of parents.⁷⁴ One of the consequences of newspapers and parents working so closely together on this story was the lasting impact that personal accounts had on the public compared to third-party reporting. For example, very few of the research participants remembered that social services won an appeal against the decision to return the children home, and could have taken them away again if they wanted, but decided not to partly because of the media backlash such a move would have generated. Very few ascribed any blame to the police for the incident, who helped orchestrate and were present at the dawn raids but came under far less media scrutiny. Furthermore, because the parents were absolved in such a high-profile story, the Orkney scandal helped to reinforce the idea of the ‘stranger’ – especially the urban stranger – as the real danger to children. After all, had not the big-city social-workers been the real menace? The pervasive idea that the Orkney islands were ‘not that kind of place’, both at the time and decades after, was propagated by press representation, despite the fact that urban areas were at the ‘forefront’ of child abuse prevention during the period.⁷⁵ Ultimately, the message scandals such as Orkney sent to families was that the best environments to raise a child were rural, remote, and ‘respectable’.

  2.5 Stranger Danger and Boundary Making

  Despite public opinion being led to believe otherwise, there were no significant changes in the prevalence of attacks on children from strangers during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.⁷⁶ As before, during this period less than 1% of all missing children per year were the victims of the ‘stereotypical kidnapping’, as in abduction by a stranger.⁷⁷ As David Pimentel illustratively put it, ‘It would take your child, left outside, 500,000 years to be abducted by a stranger, and 1.4 million years for a stranger to murder them’.⁷⁸ By contrast, in 1995 the ESRC found that 96% of newspaper articles about how to protect children focussed on threats from strangers.⁷⁹ Following a spate of attacks by strangers, The Sun’s ‘WEEP, 3 children murdered in 100 hrs as Britain sinks to a new low’ (14 August 1991) ignored the fact that a child was being killed by their parents every two or three days in Britain, and this statistic had been unchanged for many years.⁸⁰ Similarly, a 2002 study for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence found that TV news reports covering child sexual abuse perpetrated by persons known to the child led only 31% of viewers to assign ‘moral responsibility’ to the abuser because they perpetuated stereotypes about the victim ‘leading them on’.⁸¹ Home abuse, despite being significantly more prevalent than abuse from strangers, was disregarded because it was not proportionally represented in the news and victims were more likely to be considered morally suspect. Indeed, the message of ‘stranger danger’ relied on the idea of the safe home environment to act as its foil. If stranger meant danger, then familiar meant safety. In this fashion, all public space (particularly urban space) was characterised as dangerous and as such the importance of having boundaries between public (outdoor) and private (indoor) space became a critical issue.

  A representative for the Kidscape charity said in an interview in 1995 that stories of home abuse were rarely printed because ‘it’s not a fun subject, it’s likely to put readers off… and it’s easier and safer to concentrate on strangers and bullying’.⁸² The message that an abuser ‘could be anyone’ had reached people to some extent but, as interviews undertaken on this subject in the mid-1990s highlighted, most people – while salient of this fact – were not prepared to believe allegations made against anyone they knew. This assumption was ‘often accompanied by a sense that, if they did meet an abuser, they would instinctively know’, showing how the idea that an abuser would be identifiably different from a ‘normal person’ was pervasive.⁸³ As an extension of this, people also found it hard to believe that an abuser would be living in their community, even if that community was the sort of working-class urban estate usually characterised as the places most at risk of such attacks.⁸⁴ This exemplifies the fact that ‘the stranger’ existed predominantly as a conceptual category. The danger was real enough for people to limit their children’s mobility and freedoms in response to it, but the threat was always thought about as something unknowable and outside the bounds of familial control. The vagueness of the concept affected children too. A survey carried out by Kidscape in 1984 found that 90% of children could not identify or define who might be a ‘stranger’, despite knowing that they were dangerous.⁸⁵

  Media representations of stranger-danger were reinforced and reiterated through everyday conversation, particularly because events involving strangers, such as a strange man hanging around outside a school, were collective experiences in public spaces, whereas events involving known persons were hidden from view inside. It was also common for police officers to go into schools to show videos about stranger danger and give out warning slogans such as ‘keep away from people you don’t know’ and ‘you don’t want to end up dead or in hospital, say ‘No’ to strangers!’, encouraging children and parents to talk over the idea.⁸⁶ When particularly shocking cases of abuse from friends or relatives did make headlines, the perpetrators, dehumanised into ‘monsters’, were represented as if they had been Jekyll and Hyde split-personality types, as if to some extent they had secretly been an ‘outsider’ all along. In this fashion, high-profile cases of abuse perpetrated by known persons were wrapped up into the media’s broader obsession with ‘the stranger’. More to the point, at-home abuse was simply less likely to be reported in the media – or at all – because the issue was not discussed with children or adults, making an already very difficult topic to discuss ever harder for kids who may be manipulated, confused, or ashamed by what was happening at home.

  Depending on the size and strength of a community’s social cohesion, the inside/outside dynamic could also play out at a neighbourhood level as opposed to just a household level. As seen with Orkney, close-knit communities found it hard to believe that one of their own (an insider) could be an abuser.⁸⁷ Accepting such a fact meant admitting that an environment they previously conceived of as safe could, in fact, be corrupted from the inside as well as outside forces. However, the key difference between (most) neighbourhoods and homes is that a neighbourhood’s boundaries are social whereas the walls of the home are physical, meaning outside dangers can more easily cross the community threshold. It is unsurprising then that the visual language used to describe strangers very often positioned them as being on the other side of a boundary like a fence or window, just outside, and therefore placed extreme importance on such boundaries. As Markus noted, the very purpose of a building or built environment is to serve certain people and exclude others. In this way, ‘social structures are made tangible in the spaces and buildings that groups use’.⁸⁸

  For example, the establishing shot of the PIF Say no to Strangers (1985), shown in schools and on TV, framed its stranger through the links of a school fence.⁸⁹ The effect of this representation was to promote an insider/outsider mentality and by extension place a great deal of importance on the fence itself as a barrier to threats beyond it, as well as encouraging parents to ‘always know where they are any time of the day’ as a contemporary PIF put it.⁹⁰ Higher walls, fences, and hedges around private gardens was indeed an increasing trend during this period and new housing developments were also built to more insular design standards, with smaller windows in the front, windowless garages, and smaller front porch areas – in contrast to the growing popularity of fully windowed architecture in commercial and professional environments.⁹¹ This was also evidence of the increasing premium being placed on private spaces as the ‘proper’ place for children to be raised, which meant that those families with the least private space were seen as negligent for letting their kids roam the public realm.⁹² Ironically, the increase in the quantity, height, and opacity of barriers ultimately reduced the amount of ‘eyes on the street’ able to keep a passive watch on kids at play, as had been common on working-class streets in the first half of the 20^th century, reducing child safety.⁹³

  Say no to Strangers also depicted its stranger in a car, a trope in media representation that was fairly accurate as cars were a common tool for kidnappers who wanted to get in and out of an area quickly. To a certain extent this was another symptom of the dangers cars and car infrastructure posed to children who increasingly needed to wait for a lift to get anywhere. Furthermore, it demonstrated how the completely enclosed environment of the car represented a unique danger as it allowed anybody to bring a small piece of dangerous ‘outside’ space into the inside of a community and tempt a child across that threshold. As was shown in many theatrical films and PIFs of the period, once inside a moving car with the doors locked, it was not feasible for the child to leave. In this way, the car’s boundaries could be made permeable or solid at the will of the stranger, and that is why it was promoted in the Never go with Strangers PIF that ‘it is best to think about a strange car as danger’.⁹⁴

  

  Figure V. A stranger beyond the school fence, as shown on the ‘Say no to Strangers’ PIF.⁹⁵

  In the second half of the 1990s a slightly modified version of the traditional threat rose to media prominence and created a more specific and intense moral panic: the paedophile. In essence the threat of the paedophile was no different from the more general ‘stranger’ threat before it, but it chimed with the particular focus placed on child sexual abuse during this period in both expert and public discourse. A number of serial child sex murderers made famous in the 1960s and 1970s were due to be released from prison in the 1990s. Myra Hindley, in particular, who the press had made into ‘the face’ of these crimes, was in and out of the papers during the 1990s and 2000s due to a long twisting string of events including parole hearings and appeals. This reached one moment of culmination in 1990 when, close to her release date, the home secretary David Waddington increased Hindley’s sentence amidst a flurry of fearful tabloid reporting.⁹⁶ Also in 1990, Robert Black, the serial rapist and murderer and Britain’s most wanted man, was finally caught and put on trial after a decade on the run; the extensive reporting further raising the profile of this type of threat.⁹⁷ The murder of James Bulger in 1993 also shook the nation, particularly because his abduction was caught on security camera, allowing parents to visualise the threat. The Newcastle Journal reported that it was this event which had prompted one man from Whitley Bay ‘to invent the revolutionary new child safety strap’ (a lead for your child).⁹⁸

  With danger repeatedly in the news, parents were understandably increasingly fearful of public outdoor spaces because they were portrayed as fundamentally unsafe, especially for their daughters. Indeed, a 1993 survey found that ‘British parents fear the abduction of their children over any other danger’.⁹⁹ Of course, this understanding failed to recognise the higher likelihood of attack from known persons, which also most threatened girls. From the 1970s onwards UK street crime had in fact been falling as a proportion of the population whilst a 1985 NSPCC report found that abuse of children at home had increased by 70% between 1979 and 1984.¹⁰⁰

  

  Figure VI. The Evening Chronicle reporting day-by-day kidnap attempts, not clarifying if these were from strangers or from estranged parents, as was most common.¹⁰¹

  Nevertheless in 1996, in an attempt to assuage public fear over paedophiles, the home secretary Michael Howard introduced legislation to create a register of sex offenders and monitor them after release, generating headlines like The Times’ ‘Paedophile lists for police’, highlighting how child sex offenders were seen to be the primary target of the law, even though the list was for all sex offenders.¹⁰² However, the creation of the register prompted many questions about how the list would be managed and who would have access to it. Community organisations usually based on council estates such as ‘Freedom for Children’, ‘People’s Power’, ‘Parents Opposed to Paedophiles’, and ‘The Unofficial Child Protection Unit’ began to demand public access to the register and that they be notified when dangerous individuals moved into their neighbourhood.¹⁰³ In the US, legislation known as Megan’s Law introduced in 1996 did just that.¹⁰⁴ In this way the creation of the register increased awareness and fears over the paedophile threat, as parents knew that there was a list which could confirm or deny if a former sex-offender lived in their area but that they could not access it.

  The strong correlation between anti-paedophile campaigns and council estates is evidence of the fact that the paedophile threat was understood to be an issue particular to a certain type of community. For practical reasons councils tended to place released prisoners in hostels and housing in working-class areas, often on council estates, where it was cheapest. Furthermore, the growing body of negative press about social workers – a more common sight in working-class neighbourhoods – fuelled distrust in authorities to monitor or investigate properly should a crime occur. Especially within these communities therefore, agitation grew into letter-writing campaigns and petitions set up by newspapers, and then further into demonstrations, civil disobedience, and even attacks on suspected paedophiles. In several instances the police even had to be brought in to protect released sex offenders from the public, and in some cases as with Francis Duffy in 1997, a person was wrongfully attacked after being mistaken for a paedophile identified in the paper.¹⁰⁵ Already more likely to lack access to safe outdoor spaces for play and natural environments, working-class families were now also especially exposed to the perceived dangers of paedophiles in their communities. The very name of a group like ‘Freedom for Children’ alluded to the much broader mission the group saw itself as undertaking to restore lost childhood environments in which their children could safely play. Similarly, ‘The Unofficial Child Protection Unit’ name underlined the lack of faith in ‘official’ child protection organisations.

  The phenomenon of parent-activism had already been seeing a noticeable uptick since the 1960s – following in the post-war tradition of the self-help group – but in the 1970s the nature of these groups began to change into something more political and campaign-oriented. Crane argues that groups post-1945 were often focussed on mutual support and aid of their members, whilst also making ‘representations to Parliament looking to add complexity to visions of “normal family life”’. In the following decades under Conservative governments however, these groups challenged ‘individualist models of responsibility for child protection’ and campaigned directly for more state resources for childcare. As outlined in the previous chapter, Thatcher’s distrust of the public sector resulted in an explosion of new smaller organisations that operated with great freedom in between the bureaucratic cracks, such as Kidscape, Childline, and Children in Need. These new groups were assisted by the media which offered a public forum to discuss children’s experiences and emotions, albeit around a news-cycle built on cases of terrible child abuse. By the time of the paedophile moral panic in the 1990s and 2000s, a number of groups had embraced an ethos of vigilantism, bolstered by media praise and enabled by reporting of suspected paedophiles’ descriptions and addresses. On the other side of things, Parents Against Injustice (PAIN) was a group set up to make it harder for accusations of child abuse directed at parents and other known-persons to result in legal action. This was because, they said, an ‘anxious climate’ had emerged where false accusations were common.¹⁰⁶

  Co-operation between the press and community organisations was thus key to the rise of the paedophile threat in the late 1990s and 2000s. Newspapers almost always sided with parents when protests or even violent attacks occurred; headlines in the national press included: ‘Parents in dark as paedophiles stalk schools’, ‘Paedophile out of prison “fearful for life and limb”’, ‘Mothers drive sex criminal off estate’, ‘Stop hiding perverts say protest mums’, and ‘Town not told of paedophile’s stay’.¹⁰⁷ Such reports were also often accompanied by photographs of local people marching with banners declaring ‘Perverts out’ or children carrying placards reading ‘Make Me Safe’.¹⁰⁸ In this way both the imagery of the child and children themselves were being used to advocate for the cultural and legal changes during this period that resulted in their lives becoming increasingly restricted. A self-perpetuating cycle was created between public protests against paedophiles living in their area and tabloid press fuelling and being fuelled by them, which together gave the impression that working-class estates were the only places at risk.

  In 1997 the Manchester Evening News published a front-page spread about a local sex offender alongside a photograph of him in his car behind a smashed windscreen after ‘a vigilante mob had vented their anger’.¹⁰⁹ Many newspapers took this more proactive role as guardians of public safety over merely reporting local unrest. When Robert Oliver, who had murdered a boy in 1985, was released from prison in 1997 he was pursued by journalists. The Sun asked its readers to phone an emergency number if they spotted him and, when he moved to Brighton the local paper, the Evening Argus, published his picture on their front page with the headline ‘Beware this evil Pervert’.¹¹⁰ In other cases, journalists alerted people to the presence of paedophiles, either through knocking on the doors of neighbours and asking how they felt about living near a sex offender or through outing them on the front page. The Sunday Express printed photographs and details of offenders with their last known address under the headline ‘Could these evil men be living next door to you?’ and the Daily Record produced a similar campaign, devoting the bulk of one issue to asserting a ‘Charter for our Children’ and demanding the ‘legal right for communities to be told when a pervert moves into the area’.¹¹¹ By promoting suspicion, these reports sundered the social boundaries of community, leaving only physical boundaries as the ‘last line of defence’ against sexual predators. This of course ignored the more prevalent danger of abuse from known persons. Particularly revealing is the 1985 Guardian article ‘The Video Nasty that Children Ought to See’ which reviews an education film titled Kids Can Say No!.¹¹² The film was presented by Rolf Harris, who, it was later uncovered, was actively sexually abusing children at the time of the recording of this film. In the film Harris advises that ‘some people don’t act right with kids and they need help… It’s better to say something so that you and the family can get the help you need’. This statement presupposes that ‘the family’ will not be the source of danger. More to the point, Harris’ position as a popular known person helped to protect him from the consequences of his abuses for decades, the reality being that abuse from familiar persons was still a taboo subject being overshadowed by the inflated spectre of stranger-danger.¹¹³

  The British media’s reporting – and that of the tabloid press in particular – clearly contributed to an exaggerated atmosphere of fear and unrest across the country, however this did not mean the entire moral panic was vacuous. What it did mean was the more prevalent, systemic, personal dangers to children went underreported and as such unacknowledged by the public. Because of this, parents across the country were being given an inaccurate picture of where danger lay, and as such promoted an isolationist approach to the physical and social makeup of homes, schools, and communities via the use of high, opaque walls, fences, hedges, private indoor spaces, curfews, and other restrictions on children’s independent mobility. By privatising childhood environments in this way, whilst also placing ‘the outdoors’ on a pedestal, morally acceptable childhoods became restricted to those families who had large gardens and the time, money, and means to take their kids to sports activities and National Trust landmarks. In this environment, technologies like TVs, games consoles, and computers came to be integral to childhood experience across the three decades of this study.

  2.6 Video Nasties

  Due to their vulnerable position in society and reliance on adults, children can prove a perfect vessel for moral panic. This is also true because children as historical agents throughout the 20^th century acted as creators of new attitudes, subcultures, and trends that challenged or subverted those of their elders.¹¹⁴ As such, moral panics in Britain during this period were not always on behalf of children, but about them as well. Unfamiliar and often deliberately insular from adult society, the customs of the young came to be targets of suspicion. The idea of the ‘hoody’ is an example from the 1990s and 2000s where the clothing preferences, drinking habits, and other social choices of teenagers were used in the press to present a negative stereotype of children as menaces to society.¹¹⁵ As discussed in Chapter One, because such terms were commonly used to describe both adults and children (anyone from 15 to 30 years old), their use was symptomatic of a belief that criminal or antisocial behaviour disqualified children from being children; that they were ‘adult in everything except years’, as Michael Howard said about young offenders in 1993.¹¹⁶

  Similarly, the media frenzy surrounding the dangers of the ‘video nasty’ of the late 1980s and 1990s was exemplary of an attitude that cast an element of youth culture as dangerous, to both themselves and others. Further complicating this was the scare’s entanglement with more general fears over new technology and the increasing influence of technological environments in children’s lives. In many ways this scare was a successor to the comic book moral panics of the 1950s and a progenitor of the video game panics of the 2000s, highlighting the constant connection and suspicion placed on children and their tendency towards early adoption of new forms of media.¹¹⁷

  Historical discourse on video nasties as a moral panic has been focussed on the relationship between media, government, and public, and has sought to debate how the scandal came to materialise and its social and cultural impacts. Julian Petley has argued that the scandal was a case study in how the concept of ‘public opinion’ can be invoked by government and media as a tool with which to shape public opinion.¹¹⁸ Kate Egan’s work discusses the manner by which video nasty censorship was not simply a product of law, but of a relationship between regulative, cultural, and economic factors that together were primed and utilised by campaigners to influence public opinion.¹¹⁹ Utilising their work, and that of historians of contemporaneous scandals such as David Miller, I focus on the video nasty panic in order to examine how public discourse came to represent the home and digital environments, and consequently its impact on children’s lives. I argue that tabloid media reporting on video nasties was an early example of what would become a ubiquitous trend during this period: the blaming of the decline in childhood health and mobility on new technologies, and indeed children themselves as willing denizens of these new digital environments. As part of this narrative, the indoor environment of the home, previously cast as a safe space for children, came to be constructed as dangerous due to devices like the TV and video player corrupting it. An important distinction here is that the danger posed was of a different variety to that by strangers, as it was primarily a danger to health rather than safety. Furthermore, the media differentiated the dangers of the technologized home from the stranger-stalked urban street by arguing that, with technology, children became active participants in their own destruction. This narrative left many children, in particular those with worse access to outdoor environments that were regarded as ‘safe’ such as a garden, in a catch-22 situation where almost any environment they could exist in was thought of by adults as either unsafe, improper, or unhealthy.

  In 1984 the Thatcher government introduced the Video Recordings Act to classify every film released on video with an age rating. This act was unique in Europe (aside from Ireland) in that its classifications carried legal force and therefore made it a criminal offence to distribute videos to certain people – children being the primary target – with around 3,200 fines issued between 1984 and 2005.¹²⁰ Why was it, then, that the British system was so uniquely punitive? The answer was a creature known as the ‘video nasty’, around which a significant furore arose in the 1980s and 1990s. Video nasties were home videos that were deemed too inappropriate for even adults to watch and were thus censored in Britain, though the justification for this censorship was primarily based around protecting young people. Public campaigners such as the conservative activist Mary Whitehouse and politicians of all parties helped to create the idea of the video nasty, but it was the national press, often invoking ‘public opinion’ that amplified the message and created a signification spiral in which the threat posed by video nasties was constantly escalated.¹²¹ The result was an increasingly strident campaign for firm legislative measures to be taken.

  Home video took off in Britain after 1979, and at first the industry was dominated by a plethora of small independent film makers. UK video rights could be bought for as little as £1000, and as such the video shelves were stocked with (what was considered at the time as) ultra-violent films and soft-core pornography, usually housed in garish, lurid covers. Indeed, cover art was often analysed more in the press than the actual content of the films, as they were easy symbols to proselytise over, and many film distributers deliberately made violent or sexual covers because they knew the attention they would generate.¹²² This was a radical departure from what British audiences (and regulators) were used to, as this kind of material had mostly been withheld from view in mainstream cinemas, and at this time the home-video scene was unregulated. The prospect of uncensored home video thus rapidly emerged as a ‘threat to societal values and interests’.¹²³ The first complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in 1981 but it was when the first national press story about the dangers of domestic video was published in The Mail in 1982 that a real campaign began to emerge. The Mail’s article read:

  More and more children… are catching on to the fact that their parents’ machine can give them the opportunity to watch the worst excesses of cinema sex and violence.¹²⁴

  This article also introduced what would be a common theme of this media campaign: a figurehead person as stand-in for public opinion. In this case it was Richard Neighbour, a teacher, who worried that ‘video gives the children access to something that the parents may not be able to control’.¹²⁵

  The Sunday Times followed on the 23 May with the headline How High Street Horror is Invading the Home, and this was the first time that the term ‘video nasties’ was used in the national press.¹²⁶ The article warned that:

  Uncensored horror video cassettes, available to anybody of any age, have arrived in Britain’s High Streets.¹²⁷

  Specific titles singled out by The Sunday Times included The Driller Killer, SS Experiment Camp, Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave, and Snuff. As I will show, the totality of newspaper coverage of the supposed dangers of these films came to represent the modern technologically infused home environment as a corrupting influence on young people, and thus problematised the very environment that was simultaneously being promoted as the only safe place left for children. The Sunday Times reported extensively on the video nasty saga, and repeatedly drew attention to itself as a leading actor in the events it described, exemplifying the fact that the parliamentary questions and police actions taken from 1982 onwards were partly a response to journalistic efforts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre featured for the first time in an article for The Express on the 28 May headlined This Poison Being Peddled as Home ‘Entertainment’.¹²⁸ Richard Neighbour was quoted again, alongside Lord Chief Justice Lane, warning about the ‘positive incentives to commit crime’ offered by scenes of violence ‘depicted on various screens of all sizes’.¹²⁹ The Express also suggested that video shops should, like sex shops, be licensed by local councils. The Daily Mail was similarly campaigning:

  The video boom has meant that thousands of out-of-work, unstable teenagers are currently gorging themselves day-in-day-out on scenes of torture and depravity. We need censorship at the moment as we have never needed it before. And if video censorship of the most stringent kind isn’t brought in pretty damned quick we’re going to have an upsurge in violence and terror and abuse in our land and homes the like of which we never suspected in our wildest terror.¹³⁰

  The reference to the ‘out-of-work’ in this quote again points to the class dimension at play here, suggesting a particular type of young person as being at risk of video corruption. The later call to protect ‘our land and homes’ clearly identifies the environments at risk, and the fact that these out-of-work children are part of an ‘other’.

  Around the time of The Express article the news broke that the Metropolitan Police Obscene Publications Squad has seized a copy of SS Experiment Camp and had sent a report to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) with a view to his bringing a possible test case against the video under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act (OPA). In another Sunday Times article on 30 May, Detective Chief Superintendent Kruger was quoted saying that ‘horror videos are a new concept, and I think we’re going to get involved in them more and more’.¹³¹ The following week the newspaper revealed that The Driller Killer and I Spit on Your Grave had also been referred to the DPP and it was from this point onwards that politicians began to get involved with this moral issue, raising a number of questions about videos in both the Commons and the Lords.¹³² Of particular note is Mary Whitehouse, the president of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVLA), who is credited with coining the term ‘video nasties’.¹³³ The NVLA was established in in 1965 by Whitehouse as a pressure group that campaigned to ‘clean up TV’ for ‘taste and decency issues’, but it was under the Thatcher governments she had most success. Whitehouse personally phoned and wrote to Thatcher, forwarded on messages from concerned teachers and parents, and met privately with her in September 1983 after which Thatcher’s private secretary wrote in a letter that she:

  …agrees with Mrs Whitehouse that piecemeal legislation on obscenity is unsatisfactory and that the Government ought to be bringing forward proposals for a general reform of the Obscene Publications Acts, which she believes to be ineffective.¹³⁴

  With her message boosted in the media, politicians began to heed her warnings to the extent that she was able to give MPs a private screening of edited highlights from these films in the House of Commons in late 1983, including extracts from her most-hated film, The Evil Dead.¹³⁵

  Whitehouse found this prominence in concert with the national press, particularly The Mail, in which her voice went uncontested in calling for stricter crackdowns. Even after the DPP did begin to prosecute these films as early as August 1982 Whitehouse was publicly calling in The Mail for their resignation due to the punishments being too lenient.¹³⁶ Even so, since it had now been established that violent videos could be classified as obscene under the OPA, police forces around Britain soon began raiding video distributors and seizing thousands of tapes which they claimed breached the law. The Mail continued to cheer the police on and press for further censorship by running stories that claimed a link between violent films and violent acts. In A Video Nasty Killer the paper called a video nasty the ‘trigger that finally turned a young psychopath into a killer’.¹³⁷ In Hooking of the Video Junkies, The Mail equated video watching to drug use, saying that ‘more and more children are becoming videoholics’ and that their ‘impressionable minds’ could be convinced to ‘recreate murders or rape’.¹³⁸ The Daily Express furthered this impression, calling horror videos a ‘new cult… sweeping the country’ and argued the films fuelled ‘sexual psychopathic fantasies’.¹³⁹ The early 1980s was a period that saw a general rise in violent crime in Britain, and against the backdrop of these newspaper articles, it is perhaps unsurprising – as Dickinson says – that many politicians began to ponder if ‘perhaps there was something in the fact that the 1978-1982 period had seen a rise in both violent crime and video player ownership’.¹⁴⁰ However, as Grieveson noted, the idea of the highly-impressionable innocent child had been used as a justification for film censorship since the debut of cinema, so what made this moral panic significant was that it was about films that could be watched in the private space of the home.¹⁴¹

  The media played such a crucial role in helping to shape people’s perceptions of the video nasty because most people, including by her own admission Mary Whitehouse herself, had never actually seen one. Cohen argues that nebulous threats like ‘absent fathers, feckless mothers… TV violence and video nasties’ were able to be made into a ‘potent symbol for everything that had gone wrong in Britain’ via a whole series of processed images and coded representations.¹⁴² Panic-inducing media reporting has the power to make ‘people become indignant or angry, formulate theories and plans, make speeches, write letters to the newspapers…’.¹⁴³ The threekey ingredients in this process, Cohen argues, are exaggeration, prediction, and symbolisation. Exaggeration is typified by sensational headlines, melodramatic vocabulary, and the deliberate heightening of those elements of the story considered as news – such as with The Mail’s Secret Video Show article warning of children watching ‘the worst excesses of cinema sex and violence’.¹⁴⁴ Prediction involves a dire warning that the events in question will get worse if nothing is done, such as with Tory MP Peter Lloyd quoted in The Sunday Times saying that ‘these video sales and rentals will be the problem of next year and the year after’.¹⁴⁵ The final ingredient is symbolisation, which is where certain words or terms come to acquire wholly negative meanings and connotations, as in the phrase ‘video nasty’, and the focus of newspapers on the covers rather than the contents of the films.¹⁴⁶ The image of the child ‘glued’ to the TV screen came to symbolise a corruption brought into the usually safe environment of the home. As a Loughborough university report in 1993 said, ‘today’s youth culture of discos, computers and video games’ was to blame for dramatic falls in levels of physical activity in children and the birth of the ‘couch potato generation’.¹⁴⁷ In this way a parallel culture of suspicion arose in indoor as well as outdoor environments, the difference being the threat was an internal corruption of children rather than an external attack.

  Concerns in the papers began to filter into the political space as they both invoked and incited public opinion on this issue. On 15 December 1982, Gareth Wardell, Labour MP for Gower introduced a bill which would have made it an offence to rent or sell adult videos to children and young people, describing the video recorder as ‘a potential weapon that may be used to attack the emotions of our children and young persons’ and the videos as ‘a slur on British life’.¹⁴⁸ The bill failed to win government support however, as Thatcher’s governments were always reluctant to regulate the private sphere despite their desire to return to ‘Victorian values’.¹⁴⁹ It was the government’s lack of support for Wardell’s bill which set off what would become the next stage of The Mail’s ‘Ban the Sadist Videos’ campaign, with a February 1983 headlined We Must Protect Our Children Now.¹⁵⁰ Other headlines in the series included Rape of Our Children’s Minds and Sadism for Six Year Olds.¹⁵¹ The pressure from the press was so effusive that by April 1983 Norman Abbott of the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) wrote for the trade magazine Broadcast that he didn’t think the voluntary classification scheme he was setting up was going to be given a ‘fair chance’, and indeed the scheme was denounced by Mary Whitehouse as ‘unworkable’ as soon as it was announced.¹⁵²

  After winning the 1983 general election, Thatcher spoke again on the matter, saying that ‘it is not enough to have voluntary regulation. We must bring in a ban to regulate the matter’ and indeed it soon became apparent that a draft bill had already been completed. Stories in the papers continued apace leading up to the bill’s first and second readings in the Commons, particularly about crimes committed under the supposed influence of a video nasty. One now notorious article in The Mirror titled Pony Maniac Strikes Again quoted a police spokesman as saying that the perpetrator of a series of sexual attacks on ponies ‘could have been affected by video nasties or a new moon’.¹⁵³ The same year Conservative MP Graham Bright claimed in a TV interview that ‘research is taking place and it will show that these films not only affect young people but I believe they affect dogs as well’.¹⁵⁴ A claim that four in ten children had seen a video nasty, based on a 1983 academic report, was often banded around both in parliament and the press despite the fact that one of the researchers on that study had said its lead researcher had ‘selectively interpreted, and in some cases outright fabricated, a good deal of the evidence to support the predetermined conclusion that the videos were responsible for criminal activity’.¹⁵⁵

  It was not just children who needed protecting, however. After watching a screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, BBFC chief censor James Ferman said that ‘It’s all right for you middle class cineastes to see this film, but what would happen if a factory worker in Manchester happened to see it?’ – suggesting that person would take the film as inspiration for violent acts.¹⁵⁶ Lord Chief Justice Lane was also quoted in The Mail as saying ‘it is not merely children who need to be preven­ted from seeing these frightful publications. There are others upon whom the effects may be even more disastrous… human beings are imitative, and the less strong-minded the more imitative they are’.¹⁵⁷ This type of language was reminiscent of the infamous 1960 obscenity trial brought against Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where the chief prosecutor was laughed at for asking if it was ‘a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ or ‘working class youths’.¹⁵⁸ The Chatterley trial highlighted that social difference was still considered a factor in who could be ‘trusted’ to consume certain pieces of media, and the same was true of the discussion around video nasties, although this time children were also being used as a justification for general censorship.

  The video nasty panic erupted and escalated in the media with surprising speed and intensity. Largely this can be attributed to what Hall calls the ‘signification spiral’, wherein an issue is identified and then linked to a much wider fear to the ultimate end of calling for action.¹⁵⁹ The video nasty panic was particularly rich in links to other perceived issues, such as the tropes of the anti-social family, absentee father, and feckless mother, and therefore could easily be used as a catalytic issue around which to press more general fears. For example, a Mail story about a ‘video rapist’ quoted the director of the NSPCC saying ‘I had a case where a worker was not able to interview a family until all of them, including children, had finished viewing the rape scene in I Spit on Your Grave’.¹⁶⁰ Links to organised crime were also common. The News of the World lambasted the ‘evil sex-kings’ and ‘get-rich-quick gangsters’ of the video trade.¹⁶¹ Mean­while The Mail’s Rape of Our Children’s Minds editorial asked:

  Are we insane? Are we bent on rotting our own society from within? Are we determined to spur to a gallop the forces of decadence that threaten to drag us down?.¹⁶²

  The threat identified as coming from ‘within’ shows that technology was considered a substantively different category of to the ‘outsider’ danger of strangers, social workers, or urban cityscapes. The use of this kind of framing also placed more blame on children themselves, as it suggested they had chosen the TV to become an integral element of ‘youth culture’, and as such the threat from ‘within’ came from inside their minds as well as their homes. This is partly why video nasties were so often linked to real-world acts of violence, as it was thought they had the potential to incite violence. DCI Kruger was prominently featured in the press on this point, stating in The Telegraph that ‘the police are here to prevent violence for violence’s sake, which is precisely what these films glorify’.¹⁶³

  Along similar lines in June 1983, under the headline Fury Over the Video Rapist The Mail reported that ‘Demands for action on video “nasties” mounted last night following the case of a teenage rapist who struck twice after watching pornographic films’.¹⁶⁴ However, according to the rest of the article, it was not pornographic but horror videos that he had watched. Furthermore, it omitted the fact that the teen had seven previous offences for theft and burglary, and that he had just been released from a detention centre when he raped the two women. The shakiness of the story, however, did not deter the reporter from warning that ‘the impact that this sick, beastly money-making corruption is having on innocent minds is going to make previous anxieties about violence on television look like worries about the impact of Enid Blyton!’.¹⁶⁵ Further links between violent videos and actual violence were drawn by The Times under the headline Rapist ‘Was Addicted to Video Nasties’.¹⁶⁶ In the article the perpetrator’s wife is quoted as saying ‘He was loving, kind and considerate until he became addicted to watching an endless string of horrifying video films containing detailed scenes of the most depraved and vicious kind’.¹⁶⁷ However the films named in the paper, The Thing and Last House on the Left do not contain ‘multiple sex attacks’ as the paper suggested and, more to the point, the perpetrator had undergone a severe personality change after suffering brain damage in a car crash in 1979, had taken a cocktail of drink and drugs before the rape, and at the time of the offence was on bail – which had been strongly opposed by the police – for two previous assaults.¹⁶⁸ In a case such as this, it is clear that the paper selectively reported the facts in order to build a particular case against these at-home videos.

  Some critical voices in The Times, Telegraph, Financial Times, and Guardian were apprehensive about Thatcher’s proposed new law, which would give the government censorship rights over a great deal more than simply a few ‘nasties’, most of which had already vanished from the market thanks to police and court actions under the OPA anyway. These were minor interventions, however, against an overwhelming wall of media support for the bill, and as such it passed into law in July 1984. Interestingly, public opinion – whilst being frequently called on in the press as the driver of their campaigns – was not in support of this bill. Firstly, there is very little evidence of any gathering of data about public opinion at all, and what little there is does not support the idea that the ‘nasty’ panic was widespread. A What Video survey in 1982 concluded that for 60% of those who rented or bought videos, horror/science fiction was their favourite category. A MORI poll in October 1983 revealed that 92% of those polled had never been offended by the contents of a pre-recorded video cassette, and another in March 1984 showed that 65% of those interviewed were opposed to the government deciding which videos were available for home viewing. As Miller wrote of the moral panic concept in general:

  It is never very clear who is doing the panicking. Is it the media, the government, the public, or who? One reason for this lack of clarity is that distinctions between the media and the state, between the media and public belief, and between the state and other social institutions and groups are dissolved.¹⁶⁹

  

  Figure VII. Children gathered round a PlayStation, as seen on BBC News, 1999.¹⁷⁰

  The link drawn in the press between video nasties (and digital technologies more broadly) and the correlating decline in children’s physical health was very clear, even though the headlines about declining play were usually based on academic work that would tend to acknowledge that technology was only part of the narrative.¹⁷¹ This disconnect between truth and popular perception meant the computer and TV were often talked about publicly as the problem to the exclusion of other factors. It was certainly the case, as a 2006 report for the NSPCC found, that restricting children to the indoors and digital environments was contributing to rising levels of obesity, diabetes, depression and other health problems, but in majority this was due to children no longer being allowed outside because of the perceived dangers of strangers and cars.¹⁷² In truth children with a lack of access to new technologies found themselves on the wrong side of a ‘digital divide’ which exacerbated pre-existing social divergences as highly social children more readily adopted digital devices as a means for deepening and expanding relations whereas less social children showed the opposite pattern.¹⁷³ Furthermore, the ‘billion-dollar industries’ in technology surrounding children were making increasingly enviable profits from the sale of both security and safety devices as well as indoor education and play devices, in essence selling products that were both ‘the problem’ and ‘the solution’.¹⁷⁴

  2.7 Conclusion

  Young people during this period found themselves sandwiched between the threats of urban spaces, paedophiles, and new technologies. The British media and the tabloid press especially, working in tandem with figures and groups representing the public, had taken a number of real but minor dangers and had created from them a series of moral panics, based around key ‘signal crimes’, that caused adults to restrict children’s independence and mobility for fear that the environments of childhood had become corrupted. The media not only reflected but actively produced a cultural geography of fear that redefined where children could and should exist. The Orkney scandal, the stranger-danger panic, and the video nasty controversy each reveal how different environments – rural, urban, and domestic – were symbolically charged with moral meaning. These meanings were not neutral but deeply classed, gendered, and spatialised, often privileging middle-class rural domesticity as the idealised space of childhood while casting urban, public, and technological environments as sites of danger, corruption, or moral failure.

  Considering these moral panics within the ‘circuit of culture’ framework clarifies how media representations translated into material consequences. They contributed to a widespread culture of restriction toward children’s independent mobility, a reconfiguration of public and private space, and a growing suspicion of both outdoor and indoor environments. The result was a paradoxical situation in which children were increasingly expected to be confined to environments that were themselves problematised either as unsafe or unhealthy. Moreover, the media’s selective focus on certain dangers (strangers, paedophiles, video nasties) over others (cars, environmental degradation, domestic abuse) reveals how public anxieties were not simply responses to risk but were shaped by historically specific discourses of morality, class, and control. In reality the scale of these ‘new’ threats was not evidently greater than those of previous decades. Nevertheless, the belief in these dangers resulted in physical changes to children’s environments, as houses, schools, playgrounds, and neighbourhoods were built to be more insular – shielding those ‘inside’ from those ‘outside’. The threats from cars and car-oriented infrastructure were far more real to children, and indeed were the inciting factors behind the initial decline in children’s outside activity, but they did not provoke moral panic because they were not newsworthy. Instead, the media reporting of tabloids specifically created a climate of fear that represented most childhood environments as unsafe; particularly the tv-homes and stranger-stalked public urban spaces of working-class areas.

  As the following chapters will explore through the two North East regional case studies of Byker and Chopwell, national narratives were not uniformly experienced but were mediated, resisted, or reinforced in different ways depending on local context. Understanding this interplay between expert discourse, public discourse, local environment, and individual childhoods is essential for grasping how the landscapes of play, safety, and risk were constructed and contested during this period. This is the context of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in which real families and children, like those featured in the following interviews, had to negotiate the tricky process of growing up.

  <- Chapter 1 – Chapter 3 ->

  References

  1 ‘Tabloid’ as in the style of journalism, as supposed to the format of paper.

  2 Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the Present (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015) 86; Kevin Williams, Read All about It!: A History of the British Newspaper (London: Taylor & Francis, 2009), 211.

  3 Ibid, 217.

  4 Bingham and Conboy, Tabloid Century, 224.

  5 Finlo Rohrer, ‘In praise of summer mischief,’ BBC News Magazine, accessed 15 February 2022, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7510372.stm.

  6 Mora et al., ‘Practice Theories and the “Circuit of Culture”,’ 59.

  7 Dick Hobbs, Doing the Business: Entrepreneurship, the Working Class and Detectives in the East End of London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 89; Martin Innes, ‘Signal crimes’: Detective Work, Mass Media and Constructing Collective Memory (London: Taylor & Francis, 2003), 63.

  8 Ibid, 66.

  9 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 10.

  10 Susan Cutter, Living with Risk: The Geography of Technological Hazards (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 54.

  11 Paul Slovic, ‘Perceptions of Risk: Reflections on the Psychometric Paradigm,’ in Social Theories of Risk, eds. Sheldon Krimsky and Dominic Goulding (Westport: Praeger, 1992), 55.

  12 In practice they of course did not.

  13 S.N. ‘Dangers of Motor Traffic,’ Daily Mirror, 4 August 1910.

  14 S.N. ‘The classless society,’ Economist, 19 February 1994, 27.

  15 John Myers, The Backlash: Child Protection Under Fire (London: Sage, 1994), 70.

  16 Kate Hunt and Jenny Kitzinger, ‘Public Place, Private Issue: The Public’s Reaction to the Zero Tolerance Campaign against Violence against Women,’ in Defining Violence, ed. Hannah Bradby (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1996), 45.

  17 Ibid, 59.

  18 Ibid, 59.

  19 Jenny Kitzinger, Framing Abuse: Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 36.

  20 Keith Soothill and Sylvia Walby, Sex Crime in the News (London: Routledge, 1991), 118.

  21 Paul Skidmore, ‘Telling Tales; Media Power, Ideology and the Reporting of Child Sexual Abuse,’ in Crime and Media; David Kidd-Hewitt and Richard Osborne, The Post-Modern Spectacle (London: Pluto Press, 1995), 83.

  22 Bingham, ‘It Would be Better for the Newspapers to Call a Spade a Spade,’ 102; Melanie McFadyean, ‘Sex and the Under-age Girl,’ New Society, 14 June 1984.

  23 Audrey Droisen and Emily Driver, Child Sexual Abuse: Feminist Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 148.

  24 Bingham, ‘It Would be Better for the Newspapers to Call a Spade a Spade,’ 106.

  25 Rosaline Barbour, Developing Focus Group Research (London: Sage, 1999), 202.

  26 S.N. ‘Evil Mr Staring Eyes,’ Sun, 2 May 1991.

  27 S.N. ‘Smile that hid the violent depravity of sex fiend headmaster,’ Star, 12 April 1991.

  28 Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Bantam Books, 1975), 194.

  29 S.N. ‘Man tells of homosexual abuse by care staff,’ The Independent, 10 October 1991; Kitzinger, Framing Abuse, 139.

  30 Ian Katz, ‘Child Abuse Case Officer “Framed”,’ Guardian, 30 October 1991, 2.

  31 James Dalrymple, ‘Slaughter of the Lambs,’ Sunday Times, 23 June 1991, 5.

  32 Ibid, 5.

  33 Specific 1980s/90s North East statistics are not available on this point, but more general studies from Britain and other countries around the world support this point: Kathryn Maguire-Jack et al., ‘Rural Child Maltreatment: A Scoping Literature Review,’ Trauma, Violence, & Abuse 22, no. 5 (2021): 1316; Kathryn Maguire-Jack and Kim Hyunil, ‘Rural Differences in Child Maltreatment Reports, Reporters, and Service Responses,’ Children and Youth Services Review 120 (2021): 105792; Ryo Uchida, ‘“Child Abuse” Occurs in Urban Areas,’ The Journal of Educational Sociology 76 (2005): 129-148.

  34 Rebecca Hardy, ‘Scandal of sex abuse at top public schools,’ Daily Mail, 10 January 1991, 17.

  35 S.N. ‘Twelve years for sex charge headmaster,’ Dundee Courier, 13 April 1991, 8.

  36 Eileen Munro, Munro Review of Child Protection: A child-centred system (London: Department for Education, 2011), 19.

  37 Ibid, 19.

  38 Ibid, 125.

  39 Maria Leedham, ‘“Social Workers Failed to Heed Warnings”: A Text-Based Study of How a Profession Is Portrayed in UK Newspapers,’ The British Journal of Social Work 52 (2022): 1110; Aimee Georgeson, ‘A Feminist Social Work Perspective on Misogyny and the Function of Empathy,’ Feminist Dissent 8 (2025): 103.

  40 John Gyford et al., The Changing Politics of Local Government (London: Routledge, 1989), 310.

  41 S.N. ‘Poison at Red Ted’s Town Hall,’ Daily Mail, 18 July 1985.

  42 ‘Lambeth: The Council that Cares,’ BFI Video, 20:00, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-lambeth-the-council-that-cares-1982-online.

  43 S.N. ‘Why did they not save her?,’ Daily Mail, 29 March 1985, 6.

  44 Kitzinger, Framing Abuse, 86.

  45 News at Ten, aired 12 March 1991 on ITV, ITV Archive.

  46 News at Ten, aired 4 April 1991 on ITV, ITV Archive.

  47 Social Work England, ‘Guidance on the Professional Standards,’ Accessed 27 September 2022, https://www.socialworkengland.org.uk/standards/professional-standards-guidance/.

  48 Kitzinger, Framing Abuse, 95.

  49 Newsnight, aired 15 March 1991 on BBC 2, BBC Archive.

  50 Newsnight, aired 15 March 1991 on BBC 2, BBC Archive.

  51 Seven O’clock News, aired12 March 1991 on Channel 4, National Archives; S.N. ‘Islanders Trapped in a Nightmare,’ Scotland on Sunday, 10 March 1991.

  52 James Dalrymple, ‘Secrets of Orkneys ‘vice ring’ untravel,’ Sunday Times, 1 September 1991, 4.

  53 William Paul, ‘Orkney outcry over child abuse,’ Sunday Tribune, 10 March 1991, 7.

  54 S.N. ‘Fears of an Outraged Island,’ Mail on Sunday, 3 March 1991; Stephen Oldfield, ‘The day of hope for Satan case children,’ Daily Mail, 2 March 1991; S.N. ‘Orkney Reels,’ Scotland on Sunday, 2 March 1991. Other headlines of the period: ‘Islanders threaten to picket hearing into child abuse,’ Observer, 3 March 1991; ‘Islanders support families,’ Glasgow Herald, 5 March 1991; ‘OUTRAGE: They all came together in the small hall to demand: give us back our children,’ Mail on Sunday, 3 March 1991; ‘Island anger,’ Evening News, 4 March 1991.

  55 As described in the New York Times’ review, which also describes that the village ‘casts its spell’ over the main character: Janet Maslin, ‘Film: “Local Hero,” Houston-to-Scotland Odyssey,’ New York Times, 17 February 1983, 25.

  56 Anna Smith, ‘Taught to Nick Cars,’ Daily Record, 6 April 1991, 1.

  57 Eric Bailey, ‘Family Impatient to Start Work on Rebuilding their Paradise Lost,’ Daily Telegraph, 4 March 1991, 10.

  58 Kerry Gill, ‘Orkney parents dismiss child abuse allegations as ridiculous,’ Times, 4 March 1991, 2.

  59 S.N. ‘They left here unharmed, they’re coming home abused,’ Daily Mirror, 5 April 1991.

  60 Early Evening News, 5 April 1991 on ITV, ITV Archive.

  61 Express, 6 April 1991.

  62 Scotsman, 6 April 1991; Scotland on Sunday, 7 April 1991.

  63 Scotland on Sunday, 24 March 1991.

  64 Evening News, 28 March 1991.

  65 BBC2, Newsnight, 15 March 1991.

  66 Daily Record, 6 April 1991; ‘They taught me how to nick cars, mum’ Daily Star, 6 April 1991.

  67 Anna Smith, ‘Taught to Nick Cars,’ Daily Record, 6 April 1991, 1.

  68 Daily Mirror, 5 April 1991.

  69 Daily Record, 6 April 1991, 5.

  70 Daily Record, 6 April 1991, 5.

  71 David Jenkins, Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992), 186.

  72 Independent, 1 April 1991.

  73 Independent, ‘The Orkney Inquiry: “Reporter” is central figure in emotional saga,’ 28 October 1992.

  74 Kitzinger, Framing Abuse, 95.

  75 Kathryn Maguire-Jack and Kim Hyunil, ‘Rural Differences in Child Maltreatment Reports, Reporters, and Service Responses,’ Children and Youth Services Review 120 (2021): 105792.

  Ryo Uchida, ‘“Child Abuse” Occurs in Urban Areas,’ The Journal of Educational Sociology 76 (2005): 129-148.

  76 Geof Newiss, Beyond ‘Stranger Danger’: Teaching Children About Staying Safe from Abduction (London: Action Against Abduction, 2014), 10; Craig John Robert Collie and Karen Shalev Greene, ‘Examining Offender, Victim and Offence Characteristics in Cases of Stranger Child Abduction: An Exploratory Comparison of Attempted and Completed Cases Using Publicly Available Data from the UK,’ Aggression and Violent Behaviour 35 (2017): 73.

  77 Aimee Wodda, ‘Stranger Danger!,’ Journal of Family Strengths 18, no 1 (2018): 10.

  78 David Pimentel, ‘Criminal child neglect and the “free range kid”: Is overprotective parenting the new standard of care?,’ Law Review 2 (2012): 960.

  79 Jenny Kitzinger and Paula Skidmore, ‘Playing safe: Media coverage of child sexual abuse prevention strategies,’ Child Abuse Review 4, no. 1 (1995): 48.

  80 NSPCC, NSPCC Fact Pack (London: NSPCC, 1992).

  81 Steven Collings, ‘The Impact of Contextual Ambiguity on the Interpretation and Recall of Child Sexual Abuse Media Reports,’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence 17 (2002): 1063–1074.

  82 As quoted in: Kitzinger and Skidmore, ‘Playing safe,’ 47–56.

  83 Jenny Kitzinger, Framing Abuse: Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 130.

  84 Camilla Gleeson Mead and Sally Kelty, ‘Violence next Door: The Influence of Friendship with Perpetrators on Responses to Intimate Partner Violence,’ Journal of Interpersonal Violence 36 (2021): 7–8.

  85 Michele Elliot, Bullying: A Practical Guide to Coping for Schools (London: Longman, 1991), 20, 121.

  86 Dougal Shaw, ‘Stranger Danger: Still the right message for children?,’ BBC News 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-45813069.

  87 Kate Richardson, ‘Dissecting Disbelief: Possible Reasons for the Denial of the Existence of Ritual Abuse in the United Kingdom,’ International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 4 (2015): 77.

  88 Thomas Markus, Buildings & Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (London: Routledge, 1993), 13.

  89 Home Office, ‘Say no to Strangers’ September 1985.

  90 ITV, ‘Strangers – Mr Punch,’ 1980.

  91 Ibid.

  92 Joe Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments (London: Routledge, 2010), 229.

  93 Cowman, ‘Play streets,’ 254.

  94 As seen in the portrayal of cars and slogan of this PIF: Central Office of Information, ‘Never go with Strangers,’ Public Information Film, 1971; Once again, the notion of a ‘strange car’ is a vague one that could mislead children if they do not perceive a particular car to be ‘strange’.

  95 Home Office, ‘Say no to Strangers,’ Public Information Film, September 1985.

  96 Duncan Staff, The Lost Boy (Bantam Press, 2007), 17-18.

  97 Robert Church, Well Done, Boys: The Life and Crimes of Robert Black (London: Constable, 1996), 77.

  98 ‘New Safety Strap Wins High Praise,’ Newcastle Journal, 22 July 1993, 9.

  99 How Safe are Our Children, Kidscape (1993), 1.

  100 NSPCC Annual Report 1985.

  101 ‘Attempts to steal children reinforce danger message,’ Newcastle Journal (20 June 1990), 7.

  102 The Times, Paedophile lists for police, 19 December 1996.

  103 Terry Thomas, ‘The Sex Offender Register, Community Notification and Some Reflections,’ in Managing High Risk Sex Offenders in the Community, ed. Hazel Kemshall and Gill McIvor (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2010), 57.

  104 Richard Wright, Sex offender laws: failed policies, new directions (New York: Springer, 2014), 50.

  105 Ian Burrell, ‘Paedophile lists prompt mob attacks,’ The Independent (24 February 1997), 2.

  106 Crane, Child Protection in England, 33.

  107 The Guardian, 24 November 1996; The Observer, 15 December 1996; The Times, 11 January 1997; The Daily Mail, 3 February 1997; The Times, 12 October 1997.

  108 Press and Journal, 9 June 1997; Torquay Herald Express, 2 September 1997.

  109 Bill Hebenton and Terry Thomas, ‘Sexual Offenders in the Community: Reflections on Problems of Law, Community and Risk Management in the USA, England and Wales,’ International Journal of the Sociology of Law 24 (1996): 430.

  110 Guardian, 18 October 1997; Evening Argus, 14 October 1997.

  111 Hebenton and Thomas, ‘Sexual Offenders in the Community,’ 427; Daily Record, 25 February 1997.

  112 Graham Wade, ‘The Video Nasty that Children Ought to See,’ The Guardian,15 Oct 1985, 13.

  113 Mama Fatima Singhateh, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Sale, Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse of Children, United Nations Human Rights Council, March 2024, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4036606.

  114 Carolyn Jackson and Penny Tinkler, ‘“Ladettes” and “Modern Girls”: ‘Troublesome’ Young Femininities,’ The Sociological Review, 55 (2007): 251.

  115 Ibid, 252.

  116 Barry Goldson, ‘A Reasoned Case for Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility,’ The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 48, no. 5 (2009): 514.

  117 April Armstrong, ‘Comic Books, Censorship, and Moral Panic,’ Princeton University Archives,https://blogs.princeton.edu/mudd/2018/04/comic-books-censorship-and-moral-panic/.

  118 Julian Petley, ‘“Are We Insane?”. The “Video Nasty” Moral Panic,’ Recherches Sociologiques Et Anthropologiques 43, no. 1 (2012): 12.

  119 Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 5.

  120 Petley, ‘Are We Insane?,’ 35.

  121 Ibid, 3.

  122 Kate Egan, Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 57.

  123 Stanley Cohen, ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics,’ 2002.

  124 The Secret Video Show, The Mail, 12 May 1982.

  125 Richard Neighbour, ‘The Secret Video Show,’ Mail, 12 May 1982.

  126 As far as I have been able to determine.

  127 ‘How High Street Horror is Invading the Home,’ Sunday Times, 23 May 1982.

  128 ‘This Poison Being Peddled as Home “Entertainment”,’ The Express, 28 May 1982.

  129 Ibid.

  130 ‘Switch Off the Nasties,’ Daily Mail, 29 June 1983, 7.

  131 ‘Watchdog is unleashed on video horror,’ Sunday Times, 30 May 1982.

  132 Commons: John Fraser, ‘Amendment Of Section 21 Of 1956 C 74,’ House of Commons (9 July 1982), https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1982-07-09/debates/3f6e23b2-2866-4721-8a94-f69c2157907f/AmendmentOfSection21Of1956C74?highlight=video%20nasty#contribution-f7ea551f-76c9-4dd3-a757-8e3d847a530b; Lords: Viscount Colville of Culross, ‘Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill,’ House of Lords (9 June 1982), https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/1982-06-09/debates/16b0a2b1-4c58-4a93-9233-a6d26a0cc504/Cinematograph(Amendment)Bill?highlight=video%20nasty#contribution-f9f0b05d-c2ea-4c4c-948a-9d7cb32de9b1.

  133 Andrew Holmes, ‘Let there be blood,’ Guardian, 5 July 2002.

  134 ‘Home Affairs. Obscenity legislation (video nasties): meetings with Mary Whitehouse,’ Margaret Thatcher Foundation, accessed 20 April 2021, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/source/prem19/prem19-1792.

  135 Richard Stanley, ‘Dying Light: An Obituary for the Great British Horror Movie,’ in Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley (eds.) British Horror Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002), 184.

  136 Ben Thompson, Ban This Filth!: Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive (London: Faber & Faber, 2012), 335.

  137 Christopher White, ‘A Video Nasty Killer,’ Daily Mail, 13 July 1983, 1.

  138 Richard Neighbour, ‘Hooking of the Video Junkies,’ Daily Mail, 13 August 1983, 6.

  139 Tony Dawe, ‘This Poison Is Being Peddled as Home “Entertainment”,’ Daily Express, 28 May 1982, 7; David Ross and Owen Summers, ‘God Help Our Little Children,’ Daily Express, 22 August 1983, 8.

  140 Kay Dickinson, Off Key: When Film and Music Won’t Work Together (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 132.

  141 Lee Grieveson, Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth Century America (Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 14.

  142 Cohen, ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics,’ ix.

  143 Ibid, 18.

  144 Ibid, 20.

  145 Ibid, 38.

  146 Ibid, 28.

  147 Lorraine Cale and Joe Harris, ‘Exercise Recommendations for Children and Young People,’ Physical Education Review 16, no.2 (1993): 97.

  148 ‘Video porn ban urged,’ Telegraph, 16 December 1982; ‘Video fears for the young,’ Guardian, 16 December 1982.

  149 Stephen Evans, ‘Thatcher and the Victorians: A Suitable Case for Comparison?,’ History 82, no. 268 (1997): 607.

  150 ‘We Must Protect Our Children Now,’ Mail, 25 February 1983.

  151 ‘Rape of Our Children’s Minds,’ Mail, 30 June 1983; ‘Sadism for Six Year Olds,’ Mail, 24 November 1983.

  152 Norman Abbott, ‘Film Classification,’ Broadcast, 4^th April 1983.

  153 ‘Pony Maniac Strikes Again,’ Daily Mirror, 3 January 1984.

  154 Graham Bright, ‘‘Interview: Video Nasties,’ Channel 4, 1984.

  155 Brian Brown, “Exactly What We Wanted,” The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 80.

  156 James Ferman, speech at London Film Festival, December 1975.

  157 Lord Chief Justice Lane quoted in ‘We must outlaw the hard porn,’ Mail, 9 November 1983.

  158 JSTOR Daily, Would You Let Your Servant Read This Book?, https://daily.jstor.org/would-you-let-your-servant-read-this-book/.

  159 Stuart Hall, Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (Birmingham: University of Birmingham press, 1973).

  160 Lynda Lee Potter, ‘Fury Over the Video Rapist,’ Mail, 28 June 1983.

  161 News of the World, 13 November 1983.

  162 ‘Rape of Our Children’sMinds,’ Mail, 30 June 1983.

  163 ‘War on Video Violence,’ Telegraph, 5 September 1982.

  164 Lynda Lee Potter, Fury Over the Video Rapist, Mail, 28 June 1983.

  165 Ibid.

  166 Times, 5 August 1983.

  167 Ibid.

  168 Petley, ‘Are We Insane?,’ 52.

  169 David Miller, ‘AIDS, the Policy Process and Moral Panics,’ in David Miller et al. (eds) The Circuit of Mass Communication: Media Strategies, Representation and Audience Reception in the AIDS Crisis (London: Sage, 1998), 216.

  170 BBC Archive, ‘Children Playing PlayStation, 1999,’ https://archive-downloader.bbcrewind.co.uk/remarc/19990101_Childhood_Playstation?decade=1990s&theme=Childhood.

  171 As charted in this literature review of the period 1985-2010: Nor Fadzila Aziz and Ismail Said, ‘The Trends and Influential Factors of Children’s Use of Outdoor Environments: A Review,’ Asian Journal of Environment-Behaviour Studies 2 (2017): 204.

  172 Ruth Gardner, Developing an effective response to neglect and emotional harm to children (London: NSPCC, 2008), 14; ‘The Impact of Media Use and Screen Time on Children, Adolescents, and Families,’ American College of Pediatricians, accessed 14 April 2020, https://acpeds.org/position-statements/the-impact-of-media-use-and-screen-time-on-children-adolescents-and-families.

  173 Danby, Digital Childhoods, 61.

  174 Ibid, vii.

  2026.02.03

• Chapter 1: Changing Childhoods and Changing Britain: Expert Discourse and the Universal Child – The Natural Habitat of Youth?

  <- Introduction – Chapter 2 ->

  1. 1.1 Introduction
  2. 1.2 The Urbanised Landscape: Constructions of the Urban as Anti-Child
     1. 1.2.1 Driven Out; Driven In: The Rise of the Car
     2. 1.2.2 Places without Play? Making Space for the ‘Normal’ Children
  3. 1.3 Safeguarding, Crime, and Children: Challenging Traditional Expertise
  4. 1.4 Technology: Exploring an Unknown Environment
  5. 1.5 Conclusion
  6. References

  1.1 Introduction

  This chapter looks at how expert discourse both in policymaking and academic circles sought to understand and shape children’s lived experiences of place and play in Britain leading up to and during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, bringing different categories of discourse into dialogue. The framework of rules that experts built up attempted to define where children could be and what they could do there, as well as the physical makeup of those places and parental and societal attitudes towards them. Here this chapter will apply du Gay et al.’s analytical framework of the ‘circuit of culture’ which identifies five key aspects to understand when analysing cultural texts: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation.¹ In particular, Mora et al.’s connection of the circuit to the study of material culture allows this chapter to examine experts’ changing approaches to childhood environments as cultural artefacts to be understood through the circuit’s five key aspects.² This methodology reveals how the changing attitudes of experts in planning and policymaking circles during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s translated into material changes in the character and policing of the environments of British childhoods. Evolving from the ‘child centred’ pedagogy of the post-war era, the late 20^th century saw the continued development of discourses that conceived of ‘a universalist model of childhood vulnerability, characterised around an ageless, classless, genderless “child”’.³ At the same time public discourse (discussed in Chapter Two) was beginning to challenge traditional sources of expertise and forward child-led experiential methods, which sometimes were incorporated and sometimes rejected by planners and policymakers. Many academics during this period – in conversation with policymakers and planners but also apart – were also in tension with these traditional sources, forwarding an alternative vision of childhood that was less safety-conscious and more freedom-conscious.

  During the last three decades of the twentieth century in Britain there were three main expert discourses surrounding children and their environments, each concerned with a factor that was perceived to threaten or degrade those environments. As will also become evident in Chapter Two’s assessment of the impact of media discourse, each of these points of concern reflected the moral panics that were coming to surround constructions of childhood. The first threat was the urbanisation of the landscape, more specifically the increasing dominance of cars and roads. The second was fear over dangerous ‘strangers’ on the streets, and also dangerous ‘youth’ from the 1990s onwards. The third was technologies like the TV, games console, mobile phone, and internet. All three subjects captured the attention of experts, but professional opinion was divided. Whilst almost all experts agreed on what these ‘new’ threats to childhood constituted, policymakers and academics were quickly split on proposed solutions. In general, policymakers approached problems from a health-and-safety perspective that led to greater regulation of children’s independence and mobility in response to these threats, as can be seen in the reports, white papers, speeches, and bills produced by the government and civil service during this period. Conversely, academics addressed the same problems from a freedom-and-agency perspective, consistently arguing for less regulation of children and more regulation toward creating child-friendly public spaces whilst also studying the impacts (health and otherwise) of changing policy.

  These competing views interacted during a period when public as well as expert attitudes towards the two realms of the ‘outdoors’ and ‘indoors’ were changing. The threats of urbanism and strangers were said to be pushing children away from the outdoors but it also appeared that technology that was pulling them in. The indoor environment was predictable and safe, yet it was also unhealthy and lazy. The outdoors was unpredictable and dangerous, yet also active and exploratory. A set of social stereotypes was perpetuated and accompanied these representations: indoors was for girls, outdoors for boys. Indoors for young, outdoors for old. Furthermore, because these ideas were about the environment, they were contingent not only on a family’s personal wealth and social class, but that of the community they lived in.

  Chapters Three and Four of this thesis will look at the attitudes and actions of children themselves, those most directly affected by the policy and cultural outcomes of this expert discourse, in two specific North East communities. The subject that most impacted them, I argue, was the one that most drastically altered the physical environment: the expansion of urban, car-based, landscapes. This had a very significant impact on where it was deemed appropriate for children to be, and experts played a fundamental role in both implementing and condemning these changes.

  1.2 The Urbanised Landscape: Constructions of the Urban as Anti-Child

  1.2.1 Driven Out; Driven In: The Rise of the Car

  Following the post-war baby boom, the volume of vehicles on Britain’s roads increased as dramatically as did its population. The Preston Bypass, Britain’s first motorway, opened in 1958, and in 1963 the Ministry of Transport’s Traffic in Towns report forecast that the car would soon be taken ‘as much for granted as an overcoat’, even though 70% of households did not yet own one.⁴ Michael Dower’s 1965 ‘Fourth Wave’ report was also influential on experts in the field, tying the idea of a new ‘leisure oriented existence’ for the British citizenry to car-oriented infrastructure.⁵ The car was seen not only as inevitable but essential to a modern economy, and in the post-war decades rates of car ownership increased to the point that 1981 marked the first time that more British households owned a car than did not.⁶ Furthermore, the 1980s itself saw a 50% increase in the volume of vehicles on Britain’s roads, more than had been seen in any decade prior, or has occurred in any decade since.⁷ In 2011, the Department for Transport (DfT) estimated that whereas there were approximately 12 million vehicles in Britain in 1970, in 2010 there were 34 million, the 1980s being the decade that provided the largest increase.⁸

  In government, this expansion was embraced with a pro-road agenda to serve what Margaret Thatcher called ‘the great car economy’.⁹ The 1989 Roads for Prosperity white paper, and lesser-known follow-up Trunk Roads, England into the 1990s detailed the plan to embark upon what the government touted as ‘the biggest road-building programme since the Romans’ based upon a predicted 142% increase in traffic by 2025.¹⁰ The 500 road schemes proposed were to cost £23bn, and as a result of the government’s enthusiasm and funding, 24,000 miles of new road was built between 1985-1995.¹¹ However, during the 1990s it became increasingly clear that the 142% increase prediction that the Roads for Prosperity programme was built upon was wildly overestimated, the real figure re-estimated to be closer to just 40%, and as such John Major’s Conservative government cut spending on roads significantly during its last years in power.¹² Furthermore, the road-building agenda had sparked a significant number of protest groups around the country against works in their local areas, alongside national protest organisations like Alarm UK!, formed in 1991 in direct response to Roads for Prosperity.¹³ The construction of the M3 through Twyford Down in 1992 catalysed popular support for protests against road building, as the site had been the ‘most protected landscape in southern England’ before the incident, having contained two Sites of Special Scientific Interest, two scheduled ancient monuments, seven rare species, and a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.¹⁴ The European Union issued a complaint and several organisations protested at the site including Friends of the Earth, Alarm UK!, EarthFirst! and the Dongas Tribe, a group of ‘new age’ travellers local to the area, who garnered public support in particular after featuring on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme.¹⁵ Further road projects that received significant opposition were Newbury road (1994), M77 Glasgow (1994), and the M11 link-road (1995); in the North-East, Newcastle saw one of the earliest protests when the Flowerpot Tribe occupied trees in Jesmond Dene in 1993 to protest the construction of the Cradlewell Bypass.¹⁶

  Due to this local and national protest, and to the forecasted explosion in traffic failing to materialise, by 1996 most of the road schemes had been cut. After coming to power in 1997 Labour cut down further, from an initial 500 schemes to 37, with John Prescott promising ‘many more people using public transport and far fewer journeys by car’.¹⁷ Rates of increase in car ownership and traffic slowed, and between 1996 and 2006 the road network expanded in total by just 1.6%.¹⁸ However, whilst being more gradual, increases over the 1990s and 2000s still led to the point where 2006 was the first year that more households owned 2 cars than none, and indeed Labour embarked on its own programme of road construction following its 2000 10-year transport plan, with £59bn earmarked for new roads.¹⁹ In Chapters Three and Four, we will see how this car-oriented governance impacted childhoods even in working class North East neighbourhoods where rates of car ownership fell far below the national average (whereas most British households owned a car by 1981, Newcastle and Gateshead only reached this level in the mid-2000s).²⁰

  

  Figure I. A DfT graph estimating the rise of traffic in Britain over 70 years, 2019.²¹

  The motorisation of the British landscape, driven by the policies of planners and experts in government, saw parents grow more wary of letting their children out to play or walk to school or other activities. The term ‘helicopter parent’ had been coined in 1969, but it became commonplace in Britain and America in the late 1980s as more and more parents ferried their children by car.²² As will be explored later in this chapter, much was made of this rise in the driven-child by academics across the period such as with Mead’s ‘Neighbourhoods and human needs’ (1984), Bartlett’s Cities for Children (1999), and Frost’s A History of Children’s Play (2010).²³ These contributions developed existing anxieties about road safety, particularly in working-class neighbourhoods which more often had busy roads running through them and relatively little access to alternative outdoor spaces such as parks.²⁴ These developments raised serious concerns about the health and safety of children, and expert discourse began to focus on what could be done to keep children safe. Experts presented a range of views, but generally opinion fell into two camps: The first view, which was the predominant concern expressed by both Conservative and Labour governments, was to accept cars as necessary and instead focus on what children and parents could do to protect themselves from road injury. The second view, promoted by the freedom-and-agency school of academic commentators such as Hillman and Adams (and many others who wrote for the Children’s Environments journal) was that cars were not so necessary, and that work should be undertaken to reduce traffic to make streets safer for children.²⁵

  The first view had been held by governments since the 1960s and expressed itself most publicly through road safety advertising campaigns. These campaigns were usually aimed at children or parents, and commonly featured children as road victims: one of the earliest road Public Information Films (PIFs) was Batman’s Kerb Drill in 1963.²⁶ The 1980 Mark PIF unequivocally told parents to ‘Make sure the under fives stay inside’ and 1987’s Funeral Blues used footage of a real funeral, showing a class of children mourning their dead friend.²⁷ Many campaigns also centred on the danger caused by drink-driving, such as 1983’s Fancy a Jar? Forget the Car and 1995’s One More, Dave. These PIFs placed the onus on drivers to be responsible on the roads rather than parents or children, but by focussing on alcohol they ignored the 75-90% of road fatalities that did not involve drink drivers in the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s.²⁸ More to the point, these films clearly evidence that their creators did not consider road infrastructure itself to be an issue, only the people using it. The 1990s Kathy Can’t Sleep and 2000s Hedgehog Family PIFs – among many others – condemned bad drivers, but still framed the dangers of the road as inherent and thus emphasised the responsibility of the pedestrian to be safe.²⁹ Alongside improvements to the safety features of cars this messaging was effective as child injuries and deaths on roads did decrease during this period despite increased road traffic. Indeed, in the long run the death rate of child-per-vehicle in Britain fell consistently from 1922 to 1992 by over 98%, from c.80 deaths per 100,000 vehicles to c.2.³⁰ In 2000 THINK! was established as a specific government road-safety campaign, and they reported in 2010 that they had reduced road deaths in the decade by a further 46%.³¹ This did not mean the roads were environmentally safer, of course – although some residential areas did have 20mph speed limits introduced from 1991 onwards – it meant that expectations and behaviours surrounding roads had changed with the rise of a more safety conscious mindset.³²

  The expansion of the road network and the emphasis placed on pedestrian responsibility logically led policymakers and urban planners during the 1980s to the idea of segregating road and footpath networks. If cars and pedestrians never came into contact, both would be safer. Since the beginning of the century the car had already been slowly changing what people saw the ‘street’ as being for, as children’s play came to be understood as being in conflict with its function as a transport corridor.³³ From the 1960s onwards, guard rails and ‘cattle pen’ road islands became popular in road design as they allowed speed limits to be raised whilst ostensibly keeping pedestrians safe.³⁴ However as Ishaque and Noland point out, this not only cut people off from using streets, but there is also ‘no conclusive research evidence’ on whether guard rails made pedestrians safer overall.³⁵ This is because they irritated people into crossing at unmarked crossing points, allowed for increased speed limits, and gave drivers a false sense of separation, since they were generally not strong enough to stop a speeding car in the event of a collision.³⁶ The remnants of Newcastle council’s plans in the 1960s and 1970s to fully separate people and roads via a system of skywalks can still be seen today, an emblematic relic of a vision that sought to separate people from the streets, and demonstrative of the fact that this design ethos was present in both national Conservative and Labour governments and North East Labour councils.³⁷ While skywalks fell out of fashion in the 1980s, the principle of car-people traffic segregation continued into the 1990s and 2000s. The DfT’s 1995 Design of Pedestrian Crossings paper recommended greater use of guard railings and traffic islands to local councils, along with ‘any other means of deterring pedestrians to prevent indiscriminate crossing of the carriageway’.³⁸ Segregated networks affected children in an especially acute way, because they allowed the conversion of streets (places of mixed-use) into roads (used only for the purpose of transport), which impacted those most profoundly who had used the street most often as a destination rather than a thoroughfare. It is a much riskier proposition to play football on a road, or skywalk, than a street.

  

  Figure II. One of Newcastle’s last skywalks curving past Manors car park.³⁹

  Throughout the second half of the 20^th century children had been losing ground to cars, but at the turn of the millennium there was an effort to reclaim the street as a pedestrian space with the introduction of the ‘Home Zone’ scheme. In part, home zones were based on Dutch ‘Living Street’ schemes, but they were also a resurrection of the 1938 Street Playgrounds Act which had given local authorities the power to close streets ‘to enable them to be used as playgrounds for children’.⁴⁰ Indeed, playground streets had never technically been abolished, but from the mid-1960s onward they simply started disappearing as councils either removed or stopped enforcing Play Street Orders as cars proliferated.⁴¹ The DfT described home zones on their website in 2005 as having ‘children in mind’ and being ‘places for people, not just for traffic’.⁴² The DfT’s 2001 Home Zone Design Handbook also specifically framed the programme as endeavouring to create ‘streets where children can play safely’.⁴³ Public and local government support for the schemes was strong, so much so that the government launched the £30 million programme whilst the pilot was still ongoing, styling it as a ‘challenge’ where local authorities competed for funding, and ultimately sixty-one projects were undertaken.⁴⁴ The academic response at the time was unimpressed however, complaining that the schemes were few in number and limited in scope. As Gill argued, ‘few schemes have succeeded in creating spaces between houses that look as if they are genuinely designed for social rather than car use’.⁴⁵

  Ultimately the weight of expert opinion behind policymaking and urban planning in the 2000s had shifted little from the 1980s design principles that had made vehicles a priority and pedestrian protections a lesser one. In comparison to Labour’s investment of £16.2bn over 10-years in new road construction under the 2000 Strategic Road Network Scheme, the one-off £30m Home Zone Scheme was more of a trial rather than a genuine attempt to reconfigure the character of the British road network.⁴⁶ In its second term Labour invested significantly more into road projects than public transport and in 2002 quietly shelved its target of cutting congestion by 2010.⁴⁷ Whilst New Labour had promised a move away from Conservative car-oriented transport policy – and did initially make moves to do so – over time its approach ‘reverted to the mean’, largely due to the scale of the task and Blair himself having ‘little interest in transport’.⁴⁸

  The Department of the Environment (DoE) stated in its 1990 This Common Inheritance paper on the future of British land management that ‘The Government welcomes the continuing widening of car ownership as an important aspect of personal freedom and choice’. By doing so they failed to recognise that the freedom for drivers limited the freedom of non-drivers, children especially.⁴⁹ As Hillman and Adams reported at the publishing of This Common Inheritance in 1990, their data showed that ‘only 9%’ of 7-8 year-old children were allowed to go to school on their own, whereas 19 years earlier in 1971 this figure had been 80%.⁵⁰ Hillman and Adams lamented these ‘restrictions on independent mobility’, framing the issue around parental restrictions, but this trend was as much a direct consequence of government policy as parenting.⁵¹ The DfT’s 1990 Children and Roads: A Safer Way plan concluded with the intention to ‘educate parents so that they more fully understand the risks involved and therefore take responsibility for the safety of their children’, continued the characterisation of the issue of road danger around ignorance.⁵² Children and Roads notably also involved a plan towards lowering speed limits around schools and residential areas, however in implementation most of the scheme’s efforts were spent on encouraging parents to keep their children off the streets, increasing road safety training in schools, and campaigning against drink-driving. The ‘main elements’ of the scheme, as described by minister Christopher Chope, were ‘a television commercial… designed to bring home to parents and to motorists the scale of the problem and 13 million leaflets for parents and drivers giving advice on what they can do to ensure that children are safe on our roads’.⁵³ A similar stance was adopted towards cyclists who, it was suggested, should wear dayglo vests when riding as ‘conspicuity is vital for any cyclist who is concerned about his or her safety’.⁵⁴ That roads were for cars first and foremost was an assumption that went practically unquestioned, and as cars were so dangerous to children, children needed to kept away from them.

  1.2.2 Places without Play? Making Space for the ‘Normal’ Children

  Children’s physical safety was not the only reason successive governments took a restrictive approach regulating childhood mobility. The practice had a history of being partly an attempt to protect children’s moral health too. Early attempts to remove children from the streets in the 1900s were undertaken in the name of what become known as the ‘child saving movement’. The movement, which first emerged in the US, was initially based around the creation of a juvenile court system but also encompassed more general efforts to combat ‘juvenile delinquency’, more so than stopping kids being run under the wheels of motor cars.⁵⁵ The development of playgrounds as specific off-street play spaces was closely linked with this movement, which whilst having no specific campaign behind it was mostly centred around Britain’s Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCCs) that was established as a national charity in 1889.⁵⁶ The very first such playgrounds in the world were opened in Manchester in 1859, and many more opened in the years afterwards as part of the shift pushing British youth towards more guarded forms of play.⁵⁷ Octavia Hill, one of the three founders of the National Trust and campaigner for the protection of green spaces like Hampstead Heath, pioneered this type of campaigning in her concern for the poor of London. The playgrounds she created, however, did not provide an equitable alternative to street play. They charged a fee for entry, were supervised by adults, were walled off from the rest of the neighbourhood and were not open all the time. It is, perhaps, little wonder then, that they were often vandalised by local children.⁵⁸ Because the play space provided was of a single, universal type, it excluded all the children who did not fit the normative idea of ‘the child’ who would be using it, most evidently the children whose families could not pay to access it.

  As Anthony Platt argues in Child Savers, the child-saving movement was largely led by parents of upper and middle-class background and largely directed at working-class parents’ children. Whilst intentions may have been noble and the movement was a force for good in many young people’s lives, at its core it was an imposition of a method of social control on many working-class people: people who may have gained a play park but had lost the streets to the vehicles of the middle and upper classes.⁵⁹ In 2009 when Platt revisited his 1977 edition of Child Savers, his main point of revision was to emphasise the ‘staying power’ of the 19^th century idea of ‘hard-core biological determinism’ in planning and policymaking expert circles.⁶⁰ By this he meant that, subconsciously or otherwise, the approach to the management of working-class children’s environments in middle and upper class expert circles in the 21^st century still followed a ‘social Darwinist ideology’ that sought to reform children by removing them from the streets which, by being the domain of the working class, would corrupt them.⁶¹

  The child-saving approach waned in the 1930s and 1940s, but in the 1950s and 1960s it took hold again in a changed form known as ‘child centred’ pedagogy.⁶² In theory child centredness meant talking to children and basing childcare and education around their needs, but as Tisdall argues in A Progressive Education? the underlying logic of this philosophy was that children were ‘fundamentally separate from adults, distinguished by their developmental immaturity’.⁶³ Everything was to be done for children because children themselves could not be trusted to do things for themselves, in the same vein as the child-saving movement did not trust children to play on the street by themselves. Whilst child-centred pedagogy evolved to be ever more responsive to children throughout this period it never conceded any control to children, only contingent consultation.⁶⁴ Evidence of this approach in the 1980s can be seen in safety legislation introduced to regulate playground equipment such as the sharpness of edges and the size of gaps between components whilst informal unregulated places of play such as former bombsites and scrublands were increasingly subject to redevelopment, as catalogued by academic works at the time like Robin Moore’s Childhood’s Domain.⁶⁵ Moore pointed out that the establishment of the Association for Children’s Play and Recreation (ACPR) in 1983, a charity tied to the National Playing Fields Association with the aim of providing play spaces such as adventure playgrounds, was both a response to decreasing outdoor play and a means by which to control it, because recent developments had led Britain to a point where ‘children’s play must be increasingly regarded as a policy imperative’.⁶⁶

  The aim of the ACPR was to provide places for children to play, and this meant getting them off the road. Mirroring closely early 20^th-century ideals, increasingly children playing games in the street were seen as a nuisance or menace, as they might get in the way of moving vehicles, or damage a parked one, as evidenced in the slow but steady un-designation of Play Streets across Britain during this period.⁶⁷ Teenagers especially were the target for accusations of ‘hanging around’ on streets, although they were also unwelcome on playgrounds, hence the propensity of some to find places abandoned or cut-off to be in, where they could ‘look out and not be seen’, as Patsy Owens’ 1988 interviews documented.⁶⁸ This fear of the child will be explored in the next section of this chapter, but the point here is that experts in policymaking and planning – by encouraging children to keep out of the street – were following a tradition that cast independent outdoor street play as both physically and morally dangerous.

  This aspect of the universalised approach to childhood environments is especially pertinent to the context of the North East in the 1980s and onwards, as more and more of the region’s characteristic urban play space – the back-lane – became less attractive or off-limits to children, with relatively little land provided as replacement in the form of playgrounds. This was further explained by parallel developments in 1980s British society which saw an increasing emphasis on the importance of individual identity and agency, causing communal spaces such as parks to fall out of favour with parents as play areas compared to individualised spaces such as private gardens and living rooms.⁶⁹ The government’s encouragement of the creation and commercialisation of semi-public-semi-private areas such as malls and town centres led to a situation where even semi-public, car-free places were unfriendly to the idea of young people ‘hanging around’, pushing children to the fringes. This created a new role for the police in ‘protecting the interests of private business and regulating the activities of the “non-consumer”’.⁷⁰ In 1989, Nikolas Rose characterised recent developments as a pervasive underlying ‘process of bureaucratisation’.⁷¹ Rob White worried that this situation ‘frequently leads to conflict between the police and teenagers over the use of public spaces’.⁷² Once again, working-class children, less likely to have access to significant private outdoor space and more likely to be in commercial areas as a ‘non-consumer’, were more often impacted by this change in the policing of environments than their wealthier contemporaries.

  Experts in the fields of education and urban planning did not always support this trend, but mostly accepted it as unassailable and instead spent energies on discussing how the ‘playground of tomorrow’ could be made into a safe, fun, and integral part of modern Britain.⁷³ The consequences of focussing on playgrounds over broader play-friendly civic spaces were not lost on designers however, who foresaw that ‘such a setting would not make a good play environment because it would lack many of those elements necessary for meaningful play: variety, complexity, challenge, flexibility, adaptability, etc.’ and that children ‘want to be where it’s at, to see what is going on, to engage with the world beyond’.⁷⁴ Paul Wilkinson even noted that contemporary playgrounds ‘are not being heavily used because children do not like them; simply put they are neither fun nor challenging. Incidentally, this also gives them the appearance of being safe: few accidents are reported because few children use them’.⁷⁵ However in the face of a lack of funding and political will, the prospect of changing the entire environment rather than creating better refuges from it – making the world safe for play rather than making a world safe for play – seemed an impossible task and was thus not seriously considered by many.⁷⁶

  However, less constrained by practicalities and more concerned with possibilities, the freedom-and-agency school of academic commentators (prominent voices like Sheridan Bartlett, Ulrich Beck, Louise Chawla, Mayer Hillman, and Robin Moore) took a very different view, even if ultimately – as we shall see – it was the case that the shift away from street play could not be easily reversed. Generally, they argued that it was not the responsibility of individual children and parents to act safely, but the communities they live in to be safe for them. Criticism of the individualist approach to childcare was sharpened by opposition to Thatcherite ideologies, which were associated with social atomisation and marketisation. This critique is commonly remembered through the issue of the free school milk furore, but the 1980 Education Act liberalised the school services more generally, as did the 1986 Social Security Act, 1988 Local Government Act, and 1988 Education Reform Act.⁷⁷ Although most associated with Thatcher, New Labour governments also adopted the ‘choice agenda’, as evident with the creation of Academies under the Learning and Skills Act 2000. Tony Blair famously sent his own son to a school that had opted out of local government control under Thatcher’s 1988 act, demonstrating his administration’s endorsement of a marketised, individualised approach to childcare.⁷⁸

  The argument that academic proponents of the freedom-and-agency school put up against the prevailing neoliberal perspective was that the personal-choice-and-responsibility approach to childcare was ultimately limiting children’s choices about where they could be. As a first example, Mayer Hillman et al.’s 1990 One False Move took a road safety poster to be exemplary of their issue with the government narrative:

  

  Figure III. A government road safety poster c.1980s/1990s.⁷⁹

  Hillman et al. were concerned that young people’s freedom of mobility was being eroded, finding that whereas in the 1970s ‘nearly all’ British 9-year-olds were allowed to cross the street independently, now in the 1990s only half were.⁸⁰ They contested the DfT’s claim in Children and Roads as part of the 1990 Safety on the Move campaignthat ‘Over the last quarter of a century, Britain’s roads have become much safer’ and words of the Association of Chief Police Officers which stated that Britain was ‘the safest country… in Europe’ regarding its roads.⁸¹ Accidents and deaths may be down, Hillman et al. argued, but this did not mean the roads were safer; they contended the statistics indicated that the roads were considered more dangerous than ever, and thus avoided.⁸² Exceptionally for the time, One False Move attributed reduced rates of child road accidents to a loss of childhood freedoms, saying that ‘the accident statistics are reconciled by the loss of children’s freedom… it is the response to [the] danger, by both children and their parents, that has contained the road accident death rate’.⁸³

  The founding of the Children’s Environments Quarterly journal in 1984 manifested the growth of academic interest in these issues. Based in the US, but with many British and international contributors, the journal was designed to be an interdisciplinary ‘low-cost, highly graphic alternative to more conventional journals, without the detached formality that many were finding troubling in “serious” academic publications’.⁸⁴ Despite being told the idea was not economically viable by publishers, interest was strong enough to keep the journal running, and it served as a collector of academic work that challenged urban design trends of the day.⁸⁵ The transatlantic nature of the journal reflected a transatlantic interest in children’s environments, with American academics sharing many of the same concerns as British ones. Indeed, then as now, British academics in this field relied upon and were entangled with work coming out of the US. For example the essay ‘Neighbourhoods and Human Needs’in the opening volume of the journal came from the influential American anthropologist Margaret Mead, but was obviously also applicable to the British context:

  When children move into a newly built housing estate that is inadequately protected from automobiles, parents may be so frightened… that they give the children no freedom of movement at all.⁸⁶

  Those writing for the Children’s Environments journal turned the scope against experts in positions of power, questioning their methods and philosophies. Colin Ward’s popular 1978 text on urbanism The Child in the City described the myriad ways ‘a significant proportion of the city’s children have come to be at war with their environment’, and found city planners to hold simplistic notions of children characterized by a concept of a ‘universal child’ which excluded lower-income, non-white, and female childhoods that typically had less access to the cars and technologies that facilitated their vision of late 20^th century life.⁸⁷ Ward’s text would go on to influence many others, including Claire Freeman’s 1995 Planning and Play, which examined British planning literature of the period and lamented the ‘lack of recognition given to children’s needs’ as ‘clearly evident in the almost total omission of any discussion of children in mainstream planning literature’.⁸⁸ In a later study (2005), Freeman questioned urban planners on their methods and found that children were considered only in the planning of ‘recreation spaces’, and ignored in the planning of streets, houses, shops, leisure facilities, and infrastructure.⁸⁹ This is demonstrative of the fact that whilst many scholars had been denouncing planning methods for the past 3 decades, little had changed in response to their calls for action.

  Whilst the general argumentative thrust of the freedom-and-agency school of academic work did not much change across these decades, the methods of argument did. In the 1970s, academic literature of this type tended to focus specifically on the benefits the natural world had on children with psychological differences, rather than children more generally. Kaplan’s 1977 Patterns of Environmental Preference found that suburban-child participants with diagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) reported beneficial outcomes on their mental health up to several years after being sent on an extended nature-camp expedition.⁹⁰ Similarly Behar and Stevens’ 1978 Wilderness Camping placed American city children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) on a ‘residential treatment programme’ centred around outdoor activities, and found that the majority of their subjects demonstrated ‘improved interpersonal skills and school performance’ after the activity.⁹¹ During the 1980s and 1990s, this approach began to change so that it was most common for studies to consider children in general as being under threat from reduced access to outdoor space, particularly natural outdoor space, such as with Boyden and Holden’s 1991 Children of the Cities.⁹² Media in both Britain and the US picked up on this transatlantic concern during the 1980s and 1990s and indeed was ahead of experts in expressing alarm about the role new technologies were playing in children’s lives – as will be explored in Chapter Two. A 1997 article in Time claimed that a chronic lack of play and physical touch during childhood due to too much time spent indoors could result in developing a brain ‘20 percent to 30 percent smaller than normal’, which whilst being wrong, demonstrates the acute fears of the period, and that academics were far from alone in their concerns.⁹³

  Judy Wajcman’s 1991 Feminism Confronts Technology is exemplary of the parallel growing academic interest in past struggles over urban environments. Wajcman used an assessment of the ‘play streets’ movement of the 20^th century as a lens through which to view contemporary debates over similar issues, the movement being an example of working-class people, predominantly women, creating an alternative vision of how childhood environments could be managed. Beginning in the 1930s, Play Streets sought to stop the frequency with which middle-class drivers, or delivery drivers working for business-class bosses, were running over working-class children.⁹⁴ Wacjman argued that increased traffic was a major factor in the decline of working-class street sociability because adults were no longer required to be out on the streets to watch over their and others’ children.⁹⁵ As formerly unassuming activities such as playing football or tag became acts of delinquency or hooliganism, working-class people – women and children in particular – were ‘literally left stranded in… cities designed around the motor car’.⁹⁶ Katrina Navickas describes this as a lost form of ‘commoning’ (a process that generates relationships) in a forthcoming book.⁹⁷ Wacjman framed play streets as a form of counter-cultural resistance, one that ‘started from the assumption that city children had the right to play in the streets where they lived, and that cars, not children, were the main problem’.⁹⁸ Indeed, it was common for academics to invoke a form of ‘nostalgic progressivism’ that used memories of the past to argue for a radical shift in policy. Conversely, government experts offered a kind of ‘futurist conservatism’.

  Although practical experts and theoretical and historical experts had their differences over urban design, both tended to overlook dangers that children faced in environments aside from the street. For example, the AA motoring trust’s 2003 report Accidents and Children found that the deaths of children as passengers in cars was considerable and overlooked; for young children in particular the risk of being killed in a car was greater than for being hit by one.⁹⁹ There was no wide debate about whether children should or should not be driven. The National Children’s Bureau also found that in the 2000s three times as many children were taken to hospital each year for falling out of bed than from falling out of trees.¹⁰⁰ The National Trust’s 2012 Natural Childhood report found that during the 2000s one million children aged 14 or under went into A&E departments from home injuries: ‘30,000 with symptoms of poisoning, mostly from domestic cleaning products, and 50,000 with burns or scalds’.¹⁰¹ Additionally, it found that 500,000 infants and toddlers each year were injured in the home, 35,000 from falling down stairs, and that almost half of all fatal accidents to children were caused by house fires.¹⁰² In terms of sheer numbers, this meant that the home for a child was by far the most dangerous place to be. While cars had made the streets unsafe, the home was not the haven it was perceived to be, and the dangers it posed were, in general, far more serious than the injuries a child could sustain from outdoor play. On a much bigger scale, in relative terms the dangers of cars, strangers, and natural spaces were nowhere near as important in determining children’s lifespans as those of poverty and inequality between children.¹⁰³ All this to say that the danger of the outdoors was real, but it was also specifically focussed on as a danger to children in a way that the dangers of being in the home or being a car passenger were not.

  The debate between the health-and-safety approach of policymakers and planners and the freedom-and-agency approach of many academics defined much of how the physical environments that children inhabited came to change and be understood across these decades, especially in response to the rapid growth in car ownership and campaigns to take children off the streets. This debate was not an equitable one, however. The work of Chawla and others did not materialise in any extensive physical changes to the landscape; New Labour’s experimental and limited home zone scheme being the largest attempt to rebalance streetscapes.¹⁰⁴The process of further restrictions being placed on children’s mobility continued, with the burden falling especially on those that did not fit the mould of the universal child. Thus a health-and-safety approach brought reductions in the spaces available to children who could not easily access a park, garden, sports centre, National Trust property, or some other outdoor space.

  1.3 Safeguarding, Crime, and Children: Challenging Traditional Expertise

  Girls in particular were said to be threatened by one of the most enduring dangers of late-20^th and early 21^st Britain; not the motor car but ‘The Stranger’, an ideathat captured the public imagination. Promoted by parents, newspapers, charities, and indeed experts in government, a national ‘stranger-danger’ discourse arose which asked: ‘what can be done to protect our children?’. This section will explore the impact of this popular and media discourse on experts, and how – once again – policymakers and academics differed in their response to the rise of this new threat, whilst also grappling with a movement that challenged their traditional authority. I will also explain how expert discourse that conceived of child safeguarding as a societal issue rather than individual one both clashed with the dominant individualist culture of the period and perpetuated solutions based on the idea of a universal child. Safeguarding solutions, whilst partially valid, inevitably led to the undervaluing of issues with children who did not fit the normative model.

  The strangerprovoked a response in the public that the motor car did not, even though the latter was evidently more deadly. Why? First, strangers posed an intentional threat rather than accidental, making the danger more malicious. Second, the inherent humanness of stranger-danger made it feel more personal and immediately understandable as compared to the more complex system of factors that constituted car danger. Finally, the unknowability of the strangergave the idea power. Its theoretical, semi-fictional quality gave it an air of mystery so often used in fiction to create atmospheres of anxiety, suspense, or horror – feeding people’s fears of a threat that they knew was out there but could not see. Indeed, whilst abductions, abuses, and murders by strangers did pose a threat to children, the specific idea of the stranger that emerged during this period arose largely on the back of what Jennifer Crane calls a ‘sensationalist’ media narrative that began with the Moors murders in 1966 and entered its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s.¹⁰⁵ The construction of the idea of strangers during this period – which contributed to parents being more restrictive over their children’s mobility – overstated the dangers and underplayed the benefits of allowing children independent outdoor play.¹⁰⁶ Additionally, particularly following James Bulger’s murder in 1993, a second construction arose in public, media, and expert discourse which argued children themselves (teenagers especially) were something to be fearful of. Like the idea of ‘The Stranger’, the idea of ‘The Youth’was representative of a broad fear: that the younger generation had lost discipline, leading them to become antisocial and dangerous menaces to society. As with cars, experts were divided into two camps on the issue. In general government experts of the health-and-safety school endorsed stricter control of children’s independent mobility to protect them from strangers and to protect strangers from them. Meanwhile, academics of the freedom-and-agency school supported less control over children’s mobility. For example, in 1992 historian Philip Jenkins called the recent focus on stranger-danger a baseless effort to ‘induce fear and moral panic’ from politicians and the press.¹⁰⁷

  The stranger narrative of the 1980s had its roots in the high-profile reporting of child abuse (also called child maltreatment) cases from 1960s onwards, most notably the 1966 Moors murders of five children. The fact that one of those convicted in that case, Myra Hindley, was a woman gave it particular traction in the press, with Hindley earning the tagline ‘the most evil woman in Britain’.¹⁰⁸ Later investigations into possible other victims and Myra’s repeated appeals for release from prison in subsequent years kept the case alive in public consciousness. The nature of the media coverage into the Moors murders and subsequent similar cases was twofold. First, its aim was to covey the horror of the story to the public and condemn the criminals, but simultaneously it was to critique the organisations which had failed to prevent the crimes occurring. Indeed, traditional experts such as social workers, police, doctors, psychiatrists, government officials, and teachers were often heavily criticised in the press for their failures in cases of child abuse and murder, particularly if the perpetrator was related to the child.¹⁰⁹

  In the infamous 1973 case of Maria Colwell, where the seven-year-old was abused and murdered by her stepfather, much of the reporting, and the ‘primary focus’ of the subsequent expert-led public inquiry, was into the failings leading up to Maria’s death of institutions such as social services, the NSPCC, and the health service.¹¹⁰ Criticisms centred on poor communication between services, a general lack of competence, and institutional intransigence. Maria Colwell was by no means a one-off; the media responded analogously throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to similar cases including a spate of three in 1984: the murders of Jasmine Beckford, Tyra Henry, and Heidi Koseda, all young girls killed by their father or stepfather. Black children and girls especially were at disproportionate risk of such a danger, including Jasmine, Tyra, and, 16 years later, Victoria Climbié, whose death kickstarted several pieces of child-protection legislation under Tony Blair. In the report into the case of Tyra Henry, white social workers were found to have failed to intervene despite being aware of domestic abuse because they ‘lacked the confidence to challenge the family because they were black’.¹¹¹ Once again, the experts had failed, and media coverage encouraged the public to take notice.¹¹² Stephen Bubb, the leader of Lambeth Council where Tyra had lived, called for an end to a ‘trial in the press of the social workers’.¹¹³ Margaret Thatcher’s government responded to the 1984 cases with new guidelines for social workers on how to handle child abuse cases and by passing the 1984 Child Abduction Act, which more explicitly recognised the rights of the child than the old 1861 Offences Against a Person Act, created separate categories of crime for ‘Abduction by a Parent’ and ‘Abduction by Other Persons’.¹¹⁴

  In the Noth East the Cleveland scandal of 1987/1988, which a local MP called ‘the greatest child abuse crisis that Britian has ever faced’ also spawned a national media storm surrounding social workers.¹¹⁵ 121 children were taken away from their parents in the borough under accusations of sexual abuse, only for 94 to be returned after being determined to have been ‘incorrectly diagnosed’.¹¹⁶ Some scholars have since argued that many of the original diagnoses were in fact correct, and that government officials suppressed evidence supporting the diagnoses because acknowledging the scale of abuse would have required significant new resources.¹¹⁷ Either way at the time and in popular memory the Cleveland case became a totemic example of expert overreach, and is popularly credited with part-inspiring the 1989 Children Act,which shifted the focus of responsibility for children away from the state and towards individual families.¹¹⁸

  By the mid-to-late 1980s, following two decades of increasingly publicised cases of child abuse, the issue of sexual abuse in particular entered expert discourse as a significant political talking point and agenda. Moreover, the growing recognition of the idea of ‘Battered Child Syndrome’ amongst medical professionals after 1962, following an article of the same name in the Journal of the American Medical Association, gave legitimacy among experts to the problems of child protection and abuse.¹¹⁹ The overall conception of abuse was moving away from being understood as a medico-social problem of mental or physical health and toward a socio-legal problem with multitudinous societal influences and effects. This, together with the increased interest from the public and media in cases of child abuse, represented an experiential and emotional turn in the study of child abuse; that being a greater value placed on ‘normal’ people’s views over the views of experts. The Childline charity, established in 1986, was founded on this principle. Esther Rantzen, Childline’s founder, described the organisation’s concept of child abuse as ‘incorporating sexual abuse, but moving beyond it to encompass physical and emotional abuse, and neglect’, something she criticised experts of the period for ignoring.¹²⁰ Thus, experts found themselves asking: how are we to address this ‘new’ Battered Child condition, for which our traditional methods are inadequate?

  The direction of travel of expert analysis on this issue from the 1970s through into the 1990s involved turning away from thinking about child protection in the (now old-fashioned) paternalistic sense, wherein those in authority assumed they knew what was best for children. Instead, Tisdall explains, it became accepted amongst theorists that parents or even children themselves could be treated as sources of expertise on such issues, and this widened the discursive space surrounding what forces in society contributed to environments in which cases of abuse occurred, and who was best-placed to understand those forces.¹²¹ When child abuse had been seen as primarily a medical issue in the first half of the 20^th century, assessment of it had been taken at the level of the individual, asking: ‘what is wrong with this person?’, when considering either the abused or the abusers. Now child abuse was understood as a social issue with medical consequences, the question had become ‘what is wrong with society?’. The older individualistic medical approach was deeply flawed in its inability to address patterns and trends of abuse, but the social approach also had its problems. As Crane argues, the impact of this new expert discourse was to bring about the emergence of ‘a universalist model of childhood vulnerability, characterised around an ageless, classless, genderless “child”’.¹²²

  This was connected to the ‘child-centred’ pedagogy of the era which, as discussed in the Urban Landscapes section, was an approach to teaching and parenting that ostensibly put children at the centre of its philosophy, but was mostly interested in fitting ‘incomplete and incapable’ young people into a particular universal societal mould.¹²³ Child-centredness influenced many aspects of children’s lives from the way school buildings were designed to the way social services operated, because, as Roy Kozlovsky explains, the idea of catering to ‘child’ as supposed to ‘children’ led to certain groups being excluded from supposedly inclusive environments.¹²⁴ For children with disabilities, for example, the poor accessibility of school buildings built during the 1970s and 1980s mirrored the ill-provision of their education, which by treating all children as one actually furthered certain inequalities between them.¹²⁵ Furthermore, because the child-centred approach to child protection was far more attentive to identifying and addressing threats to children from outside the universal model rather than inside, it disproportionately focussed on the dangers of strangers. People known to children – parents, teachers, and peers – were inside the model, and so even though the majority of child maltreatment cases (sexual abuse cases especially) were and are perpetrated by people already known to the child, considerably less emphasis was placed on the dangers those ‘internal’ threats posed.¹²⁶ Waters highlights how this institutional suspicion of the unfamiliar also fed into other societal prejudices, notably that of race.¹²⁷

  Policymakers under Thatcher governments endorsed this universalised ideal of childhood as evidenced in the acts they introduced to centralise control over children’s lives at home and school. There were obvious efforts such as the imposed ‘prohibition on promoting homosexuality’ placed on schools and local authorities under the Local Government Act 1988, but there were also a number of acts that enforced family uniformity by more indirect means. To the Thatcher administrations of the 1980s, home and family meant – even symbolised – safety and normality, and the way they approached the legislation of childhood reflected that. The 1980 Child Care Act,for example, focussed on keeping families together by encouraging councils to work with private organisations to ‘diminish the need to receive children into or keep them in care… or to bring children before a juvenile court’.¹²⁸ John Major’s government continued this approach with the 1991 Child Support Act,and consequent establishment of the Child Support Agency in 1993, which required the tracking down of ‘absent’ parents (fathers primarily) to get them to pay child support instead of the government; the intention thereby being to make sure parents met their legal obligations and discourage family breakups.¹²⁹

  The 1989 Children Act is the crucial piece of legislation to examine on this issue, as it introduced the most significant changes to encourage the Conservative model of family life. Somewhat following ideas of the new ‘child-centred’ approach to childcare the Act specified that local authorities should give ‘due consideration’ to children’s wishes about where they wanted to live, but that ultimately parents had total authority on the matter:

  ‘Any person who has parental responsibility for a child may at any time remove the child from accommodation provided by or on behalf of the local authority’

  – Children Act 1989, Part 3, Section 20 (8).¹³⁰

  The law stipulated that only unmarried fathers could lose parental responsibility (PR); mothers and married fathers could only ever have PR restricted in rare and severe cases.¹³¹ This, along with the rule that unmarried fathers did not automatically have PR, meant the act tacitly endorsed a ‘traditional’ nuclear-family structure.¹³² Even in cases where it was deemed that a child should be taken away from their parents, the act still required that they be housed as close to their parents’ home as possible, and that they keep the family name.¹³³ Furthermore, in part 5 (‘The Protection of Children’), the act firmly established child abuse as a legal issue first and social/medical issue second, which – after implementation – led to a greater reliance on hard to gather forensic evidence to convict in such cases, leaving children stuck in ‘forensic limbo’ as cases drew out longer, and fewer were processed overall.¹³⁴

  

  Figure IV. ‘Estimate average duration of care proceedings across all courts’.¹³⁵

  The focus of the Children Act was thus on addressing exceptionally horrific newsworthy individual cases of child abuse as opposed to the broader pervasive issue of child abuse, an approach which was supported by the press’ own fascination with such cases. This type of legislation which assumed a singular preferred family model lost sight of the specificity by which any one child’s life differs from another’s under the same societal forces, altered by crucial variables including race, class, gender, and environment. The Children Act’s insistence on the home and family being thepreferred safe space for children, for example, and that authorities should only intervene if a child is ‘beyond parental control’, failed to consider the increased risk of sexual abuse that girls faced in the home, particularly from father-figures, and the protection that being outdoors with other children could offer from such threats.¹³⁶

  To say that the child-protection agenda of experts in government and social services during the 1980s and 1990s was totally based around efforts to encourage ‘family values’ however, would be untrue. As part of the experiential and emotional turn of the era and the Thatcherite distrust of the civil service, policymakers were also keen to consult about new approaches to the management of the systems of child protection with non-traditional sources such as feminist critics, charities, and public campaign groups who ‘spoke for children’.¹³⁷ This led to a considerable degree of independence being given to small-scale voluntary-sector groups – at the expense of government and social services – to run often quite radical programmes of education and activity.¹³⁸ For example, in 1986 the Central Office of Information (COI) hired one such small charity, Kidscape, to create official child-safety public information films (PIFs) on their behalf, because they had assessed their own Charley PIFs to have been ineffective.¹³⁹ More broadly, this approach devolved the responsibility for child-support programmes to local authorities and charities, which allowed certain groups to pursue new approaches to child protection, but it also meant less regulation and uniformity in the support available to children. The largest of these groups founded in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Kidscape, Kids Company, Childline, Children in Need, KidsOut, and the WAVE Trust were based in London, and as such their services were harder to learn about and access for children in the North East.¹⁴⁰ Groups in the North East, like the Gateshead Young Women’s Outreach Project (GYWOP), which drew on the experiential and emotional expertise of the children they worked with to discuss issues of contraception and sexual abuse, were smaller and had less influence over experts in government.¹⁴¹

  

  Figure V. Scene from stranger-danger film ‘Adult & Child’ (1994).¹⁴²

  The growing significance of charities marked an important shift in the government’s concept about who was considered an authority on issues of child protection, as now parents and even children themselves were being consulted as experts, not directly by policymakers, but by the private organisations they worked with. This approach complemented Thatcher’s distrust of the public sector and drive to focus on new alternative sources of expertise such as those in private charities.¹⁴³ ChildLine is one prominent example, the charity coming out of the success of the BBC show Childwatch at the insistence of its producer Esther Rantzen.¹⁴⁴ Many traditional experts such as those at the NSPCC and National Children’s Home (NCH), whilst supportive of the effort, expressed doubts as to its longevity because it was run by journalists and inexperienced volunteers, but it proved extremely popular.¹⁴⁵ In a retrospective seminar in 2016, the MP Shaun Woodward said of Childline:

  Thirty years ago we didn’t talk about child abuse. Child abuse was something that most people thought happened in extreme cases in places that had nothing to do with them… What Esther brought to it was her journalism and what she found was that there were these kids who for whatever reason weren’t being picked up by the NSPCC, weren’t being picked up by the statutory services.¹⁴⁶

  Interestingly though, whilst policymakers in the 1970s and 1980s were often keen to consider popular sentiment and consult with non-traditional experts, academics were not so quick.¹⁴⁷ The trust in experiential and emotional expertise that organisations like Childline represented, in some respects undermined the value of traditional experts, challenging their authority. Until the 1990s the academic response to the topic of stranger-danger and child protection was notably muted, especially when compared to the literature about the threats that urbanism posed to childhood, for example. Why was this? Experts often failed to grapple effectively with these emotionally charged public debates because they were unfamiliar with them. Debating the dangers of cars and urbanism was known territory for many, as this involved relatively formalised and detached discussions within expert circles. In the realm of strangers, however, the prevalent discourse was non-traditional: it was passionate, experiential, and led by journalists and public campaign groups who were often distrustful of established sources of authority. For example, Colin Ward’s The Child in the City (1978), Robin Moore’s Childhood’s Domain (1986), and Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1992) were three influential texts from across the era which lamented the loss of childhood freedoms – and have been subsequently frequently referenced in academic work – but did not address the topic of strangers or child abuse.¹⁴⁸

  The arguments these academics made about ‘lost childhoods’ may be seen as largely legitimate and, indeed, the work of this thesis supports many of their ideas, but because they were written in response to what they saw as an emerging threat to childhood liberties, they did not engage with the stranger-danger narrative as they did the urbanism narrative. A scepticism about the protection debate led those scholars who did write about child murder cases to talk less about issues of child protection, and more about policy responses to issues of child protection. For example, Nigel Parton’s 1986 analysis of the official report into Jasmine Beckford’s murder found its conclusions to be ‘very much open to doubt’ and ‘misdirecting our attentions from the major issues’ because of its tight focus only on issues within the Beckford family, classifying them as the problem, and not thinking more broadly about societal forces acting upon the family.¹⁴⁹ Reading the report, its focus on ‘high risk’ cases does distract it from addressing how child abuse could be better prevented generally, but similarly Parton’s critique can also be judged as paying too little attention to the importance of these high-profile cases. Much academic discourse in the field was preoccupied with structural analyses, and critiqued ‘experientialist’ approaches taken by policymakers in conjunction with the media as being too often anecdotal, sensationalist, and lacking a serious methodology. However, the value in ‘experientialism’ came to be more recognised in the 2000s.

  An emphasis on experience and emotion initially acted to exclude traditional experts but by the mid-1990s more and more academic work started to address the stranger-issue and, indeed, to engage with experiential and emotional sources of expertise.¹⁵⁰ In an article for Children’s Environments in 1994, one of the journal’s first to assess the topic of strangers, the researchers interviewed parents about their fears for their children and found that ‘for most parents the fear of random physical assault by a stranger superseded all other fears of violation or harm’.¹⁵¹ The researchers also concluded that ‘Parents commonly fail to recognize that children’s safety is an illusion’- meaning that danger was an inherent and in some ways essential part of childhood, and this quote is exemplary of the broader academic approach to the stranger.¹⁵² Whilst not dismissive of public and media concerns about strangers, many academic contributors argued the issue had been overblown by newspapers and that the measures parents and policy-makers were taking to combat stranger-danger were disproportionately restrictive. Pain’s ‘Paranoid Parenting?’(2006) described ‘risk-averse’ parents as ‘cosseting their children indoors’.¹⁵³ Katz in Power, Space and Terror (2006) made the point that street crime had been falling since the 1970s and 1980s, meaning that – in terms of crime – parents generally played in more dangerous streets than those they denied their children.¹⁵⁴ Handy et al.’s 2008 ‘Neighbourhood Design and Children’s Outdoor Play’ similarly emphasised that it was the ‘parental perception of neighbourhood safety’, rather than actual safety, that was the significant restrictor of child mobility.¹⁵⁵

  This tendency toward disagreement in expert discourse over child protection between academics and policymakers was expedited by the rise of a new fear following the murder of James Bulger in 1993. James Bulger’s case was as widely publicised as those of Maria Colwell or Jasmine Beckford, but what made it particularly notable was that the killers were children themselves. Two ten-year-old boys who led James away from his mother in a busy shopping centre and were caught on CCTV doing so. The evocative image of the toddler been led away spread widely, and the event sparked much discourse surrounding ‘the state of the youth’ in modern Britain.¹⁵⁶ In the North East, response to the Bulger case was shaped by the memory of 11 year old Mary Bell, who in 1968 had murdered two young boys by strangulation on Tyneside, and loomed large in popular memory. This was so much the case that soon after the story of James Bulger broke, reporters tracked down the now 41-year-old Bell, who had assumed a new identity, and consequently was forced to do so again after members of the public caught wind of her address and threatened assault.¹⁵⁷

  The media and public concern that arose following the Bulger case in particular led to a notable change in policy approach from the government, with both John Major and Tony Blair promising to ‘crack down’ on child-crime. In the 1980s the Thatcher governments had been comparatively lenient towards youth crime with the 1982 Criminal Justice Act significantly reducing the imprisonment of under 21s and limiting the use and length of custody in young offender institutions, subsequently leading to reduced crime rates and prison populations for young people.¹⁵⁸ In the 1990s however Major and Blair’s governments took a much harder – and electorally popular – stance toward youth crime. Major’s notorious 1993 ‘Back to Basics’ speech summed up the approach succinctly in the insistence that society should ‘condemn a little more and understand a little less’.¹⁵⁹ One month later the home secretary Michael Howard increased the maximum sentence of detention for 15-17-year-olds and the 1993 Criminal Justice Act introduced Secure Training Centres (STCs), privately-run facilities in the style of US ‘boot camps’.¹⁶⁰ Despite Blair calling the proposal a ‘sham’ in 1994, Labour would go on to further invest in the programme once in power.¹⁶¹ On the announcement, Howard stated that child offenders ‘are adult in everything except years’ and between 1993 and 1998 the number of imprisoned teenagers doubled.¹⁶² Similarly, the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act and 1997 Confiscation of Alcohol Act gave the police greater powers to break-up and move along groups of young people on the street.¹⁶³

  Under Tony Blair’s premiership this basic approach changed little, first introducing the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act which abolished the principle that children under 7 were ‘doli incapax’ (incapable of committing a crime) and creating a system of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which could be used in any event where a child behaved ‘in a manner that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons’.¹⁶⁴ Under the same legislation ‘parenting orders’ were introduced, which legally required parents of children with ASBOs to impose curfews and attend parenting classes.¹⁶⁵ The 2003 Anti-Social Behaviour Act strengthened the ASBO system, giving police the power to disperse groups of 2 or more children in any public place if their presence ‘has resulted, or is likely to result, in any members of the public being intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed’.¹⁶⁶ This was strong policy that matched Blair’s ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ slogan, paired with an emphasis on personal responsibility.

  This philosophy enabled an approach towards crime that not only focussed more on punishment of individuals but, particularly in the case of children, distanced government from responsibility towards them. Major and Blair’s more punitive policy platforms increased the level of state intervention but decreased the level of care the state was expected to provide or take responsibility for. For example, the 2007 paper The Children’s Plan: Building Brighter Futures placed emphasis on children specifically as being outside of the government’s remit. In language reminiscent of the Thatcher administrations, the stated first principle of the paper was that ‘Government does not bring up children – parents do’.¹⁶⁷ What differentiated Blairite youth-justice from Thatcherite youth justice however, and what meant Blair brought far more children into contact with the youth justice system, was the belief that young people had become dangers to society, not only that society was a danger to them. This can be seen in how the term ‘child’ was often withheld from child-criminals, instead being referred to as youths, yobs, teens, young offenders, delinquents, or any number of other terms. Emblematic of this was the Secretary of State for Justice Jack Straw’s comments in 2008, when questioned on Britain having ‘more young people in custody than any other comparable country in Europe’, that:

  Most young people who are put into custody are aged 16 and 17 – they are not children; they are often large, unpleasant thugs, and they are frightening to the public.¹⁶⁸

  This categorisation of young offenders as ‘not children’ is indicative of the perception held of them in policymaking circles during the 1990s and 2000s, and of the STC and ASBO systems set up to deal with them. In some respects, this child-danger discourse was a response to the 1980s stranger-danger narrative construction of the child as being pure and powerless.¹⁶⁹ Children are not so innocent, the argument went, they are not always the ones to be fearful for, but to be fearful of. The Bulger case was only an extreme symptom of a wider problem. This was not only the view in expert circles, and indeed the strong public and media response to the Bulger case galvanised government action (this will be explored further in Chapter Two). To give an understanding of the nature of the response, the Daily Star’s headline after Bulger’s killers were convicted read: ‘How do you feel now, you little bastards?’.¹⁷⁰

  1.4 Technology: Exploring an Unknown Environment

  The role that technologies played in the trend toward indoor childhoods from the 1980s onwards was different to that of urban landscapes or strangers. Cars and ‘creeps’ kept children inside through fear, creating an atmosphere where many parents decided it was too dangerous to let their children out of sight. Technology, on the other hand, was something about the indoors that was attractive to children, something to make them choose it over outside play, or indeed just something to do when they weren’t allowed out.

  By 1980 97% of UK households had a TV and after the first home computers launched in 1977 they too became commonplace, first in schools during the 1980s, and then in homes during the 1990s and 2000s.¹⁷¹ The children of this generation were thus the first to grow up with these technologies meaning that, as Peter Buchner observed in 1995, many parents’ frames of reference for childhood had become ‘invalidated’.¹⁷² The World Wide Web launched in Britain in 1991 and as household adoption grew (from 9% in 1998 to 73% in 2010) the ‘digital world’ grew as an entirely new environment of childhood that young people often understood better than adults.¹⁷³ This was not the case for all children however. Just as the dangers of cars or strangers disproportionately affected BAME kids, working-class kids, and girls, access to many of the benefits of technology was more difficult for them.

  As Helsper and Livingstone contend, whilst most children had access to new technology, disparity lay in the fact that the white children, middle-class children, and boys were given a better-quality technical education, allowing them the skills to make the most of technological opportunity.¹⁷⁴ The GCSE for Information Technology (started in 1986) is a good example of this, as it had consistently low take-up rates with female, black, and Free School Meal students throughout the 1990s and 2000s.¹⁷⁵ This meant, I argue, that the pervasive concept of the universal child that had for so long gone unnoticed in expert circles started to adopt a new characteristic – that the universal child was technologically literate. Digital devices, conceived of as universal tools, fell prey to the same notions of the universal child which meant little provision was given for accommodating differences.

  Technology was not seen only as a source of opportunity however, as during the 1980s and onwards media and public fears grew significantly over the negative impacts that TVs, games consoles, and computers might have on childhood. Technology’s effect on addiction, obesity, anxiety, bullying, social exclusion, and antisocial attitudes were all talking points. Perhaps the ‘white heat of technology’ was too hot for kids to handle? Different to fears over cars and strangers though, this fear emphasised the dangers of the indoors over the outdoors. The theme of the BBC show Why Don’t You? (which ran from 1973 and 1995) asked why children did not ‘just switch off your television set and go do something less boring instead’.¹⁷⁶ The irony that this was a tv programme is self-evident, and not lost on children at the time,¹⁷⁷ but the greater irony is that after 1988 the show mostly dropped its central message to morph into a more standard drama, resulting in a threefold increase in viewing numbers from 0.9 to 3 million per series.¹⁷⁸ Public and media concern (which will be examined in greater detail in Chapter Two) over the issue of ‘square-eyed’ children was common, but these concerns ultimately had little impact on the technologisation of youth, and the fact that parents were choosing to keep their kids at home more than ever in the face of cars and strangers only accelerated the process.

  Expert discourse, both in academia and government, took a different path to the popular. As part of efforts to expedite Britain’s continuing post-war transition away from a manufacturing to a services economy, policymakers under Thatcher, Major, and Blair encouraged a general development toward, adoption of, and education in new technologies.¹⁷⁹ Indeed, the computer was at the heart of this effort, and the perception that children needed education in digital literacy was strong, with Thatcher’s government promising to ‘put a microcomputer into every secondary school in the country by the end of 1982’ because, in her own words:

  We must remember that today’s school children will still be working in the year 2030… My generation has perhaps been too cautious about accepting new technology in micros. Younger people are quick to use new things and have an aptitude for them… familiarity with keyboards and TV screens will help them to take in their stride the new technologies on the shop floor, in the office and in the home.¹⁸⁰

  Similarly, Blair’s commitment to ‘education, education, education’ in large part was underpinned by an understanding that ‘the age of achievement will be built on new technology’, and a promise to connect all schools, colleges, and universities to the ‘information superhighway’.¹⁸¹ In regard to TV, Thatcher described it as ‘one of the great growth industries, creating jobs, entertainment, inspiration and interests’.¹⁸² It is not unsurprising, then, that whilst in government neither took steps to significantly restrict or regulate children’s TV or other media. The closest thing to this was the founding of Ofcom in 2003 under the Communications Act which formalised the requirement to consider ‘the vulnerability of children’ when deciding the media they could be shown.¹⁸³ Ofcom’s establishment did not respond to contemporary fears over the dominance of TV in children’s lives however, its prerogative being to strictly concern itself with the content of children’s media, as it was founded off the back of public fears over children’s exposure to violence and pornography.¹⁸⁴ In other words, regulators were not concerned about how much TV children were watching, only that they weren’t watching ‘the wrong things’.

  During the 1990s and 2000s, in response to reductions in unstructured outdoor play time many more families started to send their children to pre-booked sessions for sports, hobbies, and lessons, which often came with a price tag.¹⁸⁵ This commercialisation of play meant that opportunities for free play, in both senses of the word, were further reduced and considered lower status than those with an associated cost, as the price connoted quality.¹⁸⁶ This disadvantaged families without the money or time to take their children to such sessions, pushing them by necessity towards indoor play and technologies like the TV. A 2001 study for British Telecom (BT) which found that working-class children were significantly more likely to have a TV, games console, or video recorder in their room than middle-class children was indicative of this fact and showed how the use of technology was linked to a lack of access to outdoor environments.¹⁸⁷ It was also the case that middle-class parents were generally more receptive to arguments about the dangers of the TV than both working and upper-class parents, and therefore stricter over their children’s access to it.¹⁸⁸

  Concerns over childhood obesity linked to technology were also rising, but policymakers generally framed this as a parenting problem rather than a government one. On the release of the 2004 health white paper the Department of Health stated that ‘parents know that their children’s health is primarily their responsibility’; similarly, the Children’s Commissioner for England in 2006 argued that ‘[parental] education should start in ante-natal classes’ on how to manage their children’s relationship with technology.¹⁸⁹ This expanded on the remit of the universal child. With regard to use of technology, children were assumed to be healthy and have a healthy relationship to it, but this was the preserve of those children who had families who could facilitate outdoor play and exercise as alternatives. Once again this meant middle class white boys most benefitted.

  The overarching expert discourse in government over children and technology, then, was one that concentrated on positives at a policy level and delegated management of negatives to the family level. Attempts to restrict children’s access to technology would have been seen as draconian and limiting towards their future prospects; furthermore, dealing with the issues that had driven most children indoors in the first place (cars and strangers) would have been both an enormous undertaking and one experts in government would not have endorsed, as demonstrated earlier in this chapter. Public and media discourse stood in stark contrast to this approach, often viewing technology with far greater suspicion. The health consequences for children of increasingly indoor lifestyles were obvious to all parties, but they did not agree on the cause or the solution. The policymakers’ view was that education for parents and children was the answer, whereas the popular view was that the technology itself was the problem. Both views denied any agency to children themselves, assuming them too naïve to do what was best for themselves, when in reality most children weren’t given much of a choice.

  

  Figure VI. A satirical cartoon illustrating parental fears (2007).¹⁹⁰

  The relationship between technology and children gained attention in academic research in the 1990s. In contrast to academic work on cars and strangers which tended to reach similar conclusions, academic opinion on technology generally covered a broad spectrum. Much work was concerned with understanding the impacts of an indoor lifestyle and spending long periods of time in front of a screen, and the benefits of outdoor activity, but much also looked at the benefits technology could have for young people.¹⁹¹ The conversation was new and the consequences for childhood were far-reaching, complicated, and mostly speculative at this stage. As David Buckingham observes, the discussion was ‘marked by a kind of schizophrenia that often accompanies the advent of new cultural forms. If we look back to the early days of the cinema, or indeed to the invention of the printing press, it is possible to identify a similar mixture of hopes and fears’.¹⁹²

  Early academic interest in technology often had a parallel interest in late-20^th century neoliberalism, closely relating the two. For example Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992) drew a connection between the increasingly diverse and individualised ways people were able to consume media and a broader ‘western trend towards individualisation’.¹⁹³ Whether technology was accelerating this trend or was a symptom of it is beside the point, but it certainly was the case that the majority of the modern technology sector in both the UK and US was born into a market seeing widespread deregulation of financial services and emphasis on private over public ownership.¹⁹⁴ Many scholars during this period castchildren as innocent participants in a process of their own decline, pushed towards embracing a technological ‘media environment’ that was damaging for their healthy development. Sandra Calvert’s Children’s Journeys through the Information Age (1999) and Kirsten Drotner’s Dangerous Media? are two examples that described mass media as a ‘moral threat’ to young people.¹⁹⁵ Ray Lorenzo’s Too Little Time and Space for Childhood (1992) and Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1994) both identified the TV in particular as part of a wider problem of ‘lost childhoods’, Postman writing that ‘children today are captive in their homes… They are institutionalized, over programmed, information stuffed, TV dependent, “zoned in” and age segregated’.¹⁹⁶

  For other academics, though, technological promise resurrected some of the visions of the inter-war years of a connected, intelligent, globalised world. Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word (1993) argued that digital technologies, with the particular aid of the internet, would enable a mass form of democratic literacy that would allow countries to ‘enfranchise the public imagination in genuinely new ways’, as did John Tomlinson’s Globalisation and Culture (1999).¹⁹⁷ Likewise Jon Katz in Post Politics in the Digital Nation (1997) saw the digital as a means of children’s liberation from the increasingly restrictive adult physical world, where computer games and TV technology offered an escape to children from restrictions, a place where they could engage in unstructured play, when their outdoor activities were increasingly timetabled.¹⁹⁸ Much of this work was based on the potential of technology however, and such assessments diminished as academic work became increasingly sceptical during the 2000s. This duality of the moment in academic thought between seeing technology in either dystopian or utopian terms was reflected in Todd Oppenheimer’s The Flickering Mind (2003) where he argued that children were on the verge of either being able to harness technology to help them become ‘creative problem solvers’ or falling victim to ‘computerisation and commercialization careening out of control’.¹⁹⁹

  This duality was also seen in assessments of the rise of mobile phone use among children. Sonia Livingstone’s Young People and New Media (2002) found that the mobile phone was allowing children to cross ‘hitherto distinct social boundaries’, by allowing them to talk and arrange meetups with kids from different neighbourhoods.²⁰⁰ Marilyn Campbell’s 2005 study demonstrated the negotiating power that a mobile phone could grant children when discussing curfews and boundaries for roaming with their parents, allowing more freedom.²⁰¹ Simultaneously though, Williams and Williams’ 2003 study suggested that the expectation of parents to be able to communicate with their children at all times created an environment where children felt they had no private space and their mental health suffered for it.²⁰² A 2002 study pointed out how phones could exacerbate existing inequalities as those without a mobile (mostly likely working-class kids) were excluded from the friendships and communities built around them.²⁰³ Additionally, as Dominique Pasquier highlighted in Children and Their Changing Media Environment (2001), the problem was not always access to devices like mobile phones, but the skills necessary to operate them; Pasquier found that both girls and working-class households demonstrated a ‘problematic skills gap’ in the use of digital devices.²⁰⁴

  Livingstone also argued that because technology, like the mobile phone, had invalidated many parents’ frames of reference for childhood they had been forced to become ‘involved in a process of negotiation with their children over mutual identities, rights and responsibilities’.²⁰⁵ This contributed, she argued, to the fall of the nuclear family in favour of the ‘democratic family’, wherein traditional parental and child roles of the authority and the subordinate were replaced by a mutual expectation of love, respect, and intimacy.²⁰⁶ However, as Joe Frost reasoned in A History of Children’s Play, changing family formations also meant that people were increasingly moving away from their hometowns once reaching adulthood, isolating their own children from traditional familial networks such as cousins and grandparents.²⁰⁷ Then again, Frost admitted, technology like the phone or internet could facilitate reconnection.²⁰⁸ Tonya Rooney’s Trusting Children (2010) also noted the multiplicity of technology’s impact on childhood freedoms. On the one hand, the monitoring and safekeeping of children in a ‘just in case’ model meant parents gave children more freedom.²⁰⁹ One the other, she warned: ‘Rather than simply “playing it safe”, parents and carers may be depriving children of the opportunity to be trusted and to learn about trusting others, and the opportunity for growing competence and capacity that can result from this’.²¹⁰

  In 1999, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler coined the term ‘Plant Blindness’ to describe the idea that children were becoming disconnected from the natural world, and therefore unable to recognise or name common species.²¹¹ During the 2000s, arguments of this nature became popular in academic work, catalysing around the term ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ (NDD), coined by Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods (2005).²¹² In this work the focus was not explicitly on technology, rather it was on a lack of time being spent outdoors ‘close to nature’, but technology was always very closely associated with this discussion.²¹³ This association was unavoidable as it was clear that time which children of previous generations had spent playing outdoors was being spent by children of current generations watching TV or playing computer games.

  However, this association was somewhat misleading, as it appeared to logically lead to the conclusion that technology was the cause of the problem. This was not really the case. Technology played a role, but parental restrictions based on fears of cars and strangers had already been moving kids inside for decades. The 2003 study Cyberkids found that ‘children overwhelmingly preferred to be outside if the weather and light allowed’ and that the time they spent doing indoor activities like watching TV was a replacement for ‘doing nothing time’, when they or their friends were not allowed outside.²¹⁴ These results were echoed in a 2014 study for the National Children’s Museum where ‘81% of children said they preferred outdoor play’ to watching TV. ²¹⁵ The same study also found that 59% of children were not allowed to leave their house unsupervised, and half were not allowed to play in a garden unsupervised.²¹⁶ A 2020 study for the Biomedical Public Health journal found that ‘screen media activity does not displace other recreational activities’ amongst children, instead concluding the amount of time a child spent playing outdoors was much more dependent on their socio-economic background.²¹⁷

  Whilst academic work may not have explicitly cited technology as the cause of the growing concern around decreased outdoor play, this was a conclusion that could be easily inferred (and often was by the press) from work that compared the healthiness of kids based on how many hours they spent watching TV, for example.²¹⁸ The concept of NDD in particular, though not recognised as an official psychological ‘disorder’, gained traction in the 2000s with a wide variety of UK groups such as The National Trust, The Council For Learning Outside the Classroom, and The Children and Nature Network. Louv did not say in Last Child in the Woods that technology caused NDD, but he did use language which implied as much, such as: ‘as electronic technology surrounds us, we long for nature’ and ‘television remains the most effective thief of time’.²¹⁹ The clear purpose of academic interventions like Louv’s was to argue for a material change in modern childhoods, attempting to draw the attention of experts in government to an issue which they thought not properly recognised. This work was influential in the media, and on the work of charities and organisation like the National Trust, but in the 2000s policymakers did not much address it. In 2010 Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows took a graver view even than Louv, arguing that children’s ‘malleable minds’ were being degraded by exposure to the digital world.²²⁰ Carr wrote that: ‘What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization… we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting’.²²¹

  Work such as Louv and Carr’s gained interest from the media as the issues they raised unsurprisingly played into common parental fears over safety, health, and freedom. Indeed, many authors did not obscure the fact that they regarded resolution of the issue not only as a practical but moral imperative; the solution of course being, as Louv defined it, for children to be ‘reunited with the rest of nature’.²²² In translation from academic to public discourse however, an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of childhoods was lost, particularly from a historical perspective. Often reports that were assessing the state of contemporary childhood would recall childhoods of earlier generations, such as that of the authors, and these recollections portrayed dualistic notions of childhood as a ‘now versus then’ phenomenon. For example, Louv’s statement that ‘baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems… like a quaint artifact’ or Lenore Skenazy’s reference to ‘the freedom we had as kids’.²²³ The world of child’s play does not stand apart from factors of gender, race, class, region, and ability, but when speaking on what ‘children used to do’, experts, charities, and journalists could overlook this. Furthermore, Holloway and Valentine’s Cyberkids highlighted how computer use was highly controlled and negotiated in homes, and that parents were not at all powerless to prevent children being ‘drawn in’ to screen-time if they wanted to stop them.²²⁴ The crux of the problem lay neither with children, parents, or with technology, but with the reality, or the perception of the reality, that children’s outdoor environments were dangerous, and their indoor environments were safe.

  1.5 Conclusion

  Examining the course of expert discourse across this period we can identify common factors that led to children spending less time outdoors than their parents’ generations. Policymakers under Thatcher, Major, and Blair, by encouraging car-oriented expansion and urbanism, the segregation of road and footpath networks, and stringent parental restriction over children reduced the number of outdoor places children could use. By concentrating on the threat of stranger-danger, and later also youth-danger, they encouraged people to view even car-free outdoor environments as unsafe, and children themselves as sometimes the danger that should be kept out. Furthermore, by encouraging technologization at a policy level whilst delegating management of its negative effects to the family level, they left parents to negotiate technology use with their children without accounting for differing family circumstances. The futurist conservatism of experts in government perpetuated existing trends towards cars, stranger-danger fears, and adoption of technology that significantly reduced children’s access to quality outdoor spaces, particularly those in working-class neighbourhoods. Conversely the nostalgic progressivism of academics invoked memories and notions of the past to inform their calls for change.

  Academics’ proposals focussed mostly on cars and strangers and argued for a reclamation of public land for pedestrians and against the moral panics over child safety that had been fuelled by sensationalist media stories. In their arguments for structural change, however, they were also often dismissive of the experiential and emotional knowledge that individual children and parents could provide which – to a certain extent – threatened their authority. Regarding technology many academics were also critical, concentrating on the health risks of screen time and sedentariness, and in doing so they, like experts in government, placed significant emphasis on the idea that it was by the choice of individual children and families that playtime had moved indoors. In truth technology played a supplemental role to cars and strangers. Indeed, despite the efforts of those with expertise, the public perception of the dangers of all three factors was very different to their reality. This was due, in large part, to the role that newspapers and public campaign groups played throughout this period to inform popular opinion. What was the extent of this role? In the next chapter I will explore this subject and explain the origins and legacies of the period’s most influential public scandals, both legitimate and otherwise.

  <- Introduction – Chapter 2 ->

  References

  1 Du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1997), 3.

  2 Emanuela Mora et al., ‘Practice Theories and the “Circuit of Culture”: Integrating Approaches for Studying Material Culture,’ Sociologica 13, no. 3 (2019): 59.

  3 Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 13.

  4 Colin Buchanan, Traffic in Towns. Reports of the Steering Group and Working Group appointed by the Minister of Transport (London: H.M.S.O, 1963), 223.

  5 Michael Dower, ‘Fourth Wave, the Challenge of Leisure,’ Architects’ Journal 20 (1965): 123; ‘Leisureopolis’, Yorkshire Architect May/June (1969).

  6 David Leibling, Car ownership in Great Britain (London: RAC Foundation, 2008), 4.

  7 Department for Transport, Road Traffic Estimates: Great Britain 2019, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/916749/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2019.pdf.

  8 Department for Transport, Transport Statistics Great Britain: 2011, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/8995/vehicles-summary.pdf; Joe Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments (London: Routledge, 2010), 202.

  9 Geoffrey Lean, ‘Tories ditch the “car economy”,’ The Independent,21 January, 1996, 21.

  10 John Prescott, speech in the house of commons, 18 May 1989; Department for Transport, Towards a Sustainable Transport System: Growth in a Low Carbon World (London: Department for Transport, 2007): 85.

  11 Prescott, speech in the house of commons, 18 May 1989; Department for Transport, Towards a Sustainable Transport System: Growth in a Low Carbon World (London: Department for Transport, 2007): 85.

  12 Ben Webster, ‘Broken promises leave dozens of towns in queue for a bypass,’ The Times, 11 September, 2006, 16; Department for Transport, Transport Statistics Great Britain: 2011, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/8995/vehicles-summary.pdf; Lean, ‘Tories ditch the “car economy”,’ 21.

  13 John Stewart, Roadblock: How People Power Is Wrecking The Roads Programme (Alarm UK, 1995), 1.

  14 Chris Miller, Environmental Rights: Critical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2012), 86.

  15 Gerard Gilbert, ‘Motorway madness,’ The Independent, 17 February, 1993. ‘An unlikely alliance has grown up between conservationists, Nimbys and a New Age tribe called the Dongas.’

  16 Kate Evans, Copse: the Cartoon Book of Tree Protesting (Self Published, 1998), 12.

  17 As quoted in: Paul Brown, ‘Prescott Points Buses to Fast Lane,’ The Guardian, 6 June, 1997, 10.

  18 Webster, ‘Broken promises,’ 16.

  19 Leibling, Car ownership in Great Britain, 4.

  20 RAC Foundation, ‘Car ownership rates per local authority in England and Wales,’ https://www.racfoundation.org/assets/rac_foundation/content/downloadables/car%20ownership%20rates%20by%20local%20authority%20-%20december%202012.pdf.

  21 Department for Transport, Road Traffic Estimates: Great Britain 2019, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/916749/road-traffic-estimates-in-great-britain-2019.pdf.

  22 Patricia Somers and Jim Settle, ‘The helicopter parent: Research toward a typology,’ College and University 86, no.1 (2010): 18.

  23 Margaret Mead, ‘Neighbourhoods and human needs,’ Children’s Environments Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1984); Sheridan Bartlett et al., Cities for Children: Children’s Rights, Poverty and Urban Management (London: Earthscan, 1999); Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments.

  24 Ibid, 202.

  25 Mayer Hillman and John Adams, ‘Children’s Freedom and Safety,’ Children’s Environments 9, No. 2 (1992): 10-22.

  26 The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, A History of Road Safety Campaigns: Drink Drive, Seat Belts and Speeding (Birmingham: ROSPA, 2018), 1.

  27 Ibid, 3.

  28 Department for Transport, ‘Reported road casualties in Great Britain, provisional estimates involving illegal alcohol levels: 2019,’ https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-involving-illegal-alcohol-levels-2019/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-involving-illegal-alcohol-levels-2019.

  29 ROSPA, A History of Road Safety Campaigns, 5.

  30 Hillman and Adams, ‘Children’s Freedom and Safety,’ 11.

  31 ‘Story of THINK!,’ Think!, accessed 15 February 2022, https://www.think.gov.uk/about-think/story-of-think/.

  32 Department for Transport, Traffic Advisory Leaflet 9/99 (London: Department for Transport, 1999).

  33 Muhammad Ishaque and Robert Noland, ‘Making Roads Safe for Pedestrians or Keeping Them Out of the Way?: An Historical Perspective on Pedestrian Policies in Britain,’ The Journal of Transport History 27, no.1 (2006): 123.

  34 Ibid, 129.

  35 Ibid, 131.

  36 Ibid, 132.

  37 Karl Whitney, ‘“A brave new world”: what happened to Newcastle’s dream for a vertical city?,’ The Guardian, 7 February, 2017.

  38 Department for Transport, The Design of Pedestrian Crossings (London: Department for Transport, 1995), 2.

  39 Mark Pinder, ‘The “parallel world” of Newcastle’s walkways,’ photograph, 2017, The Guardian.

  40 StreetPlaygrounds Act1938, Chapter 37, Section 1.

  41 Cowman, ‘Play streets,’ 254.

  42 Tim Gill, ‘Home Zones in the UK: History, Policy and Impact on Children and Youth,’ Children, Youth and Environments 16, no.1 (2006): 91.

  43 Mike Biddulph, Home zones: A planning and design handbook (London: The Policy Press, 2001), 1.

  44 Gill, ‘Home Zones in the UK,’ 92.

  45 Ibid, 93.

  46 House of Commons, ‘Select Committee on Transport, Local Government and the Regions Eighth Report,’ 2002.

  47 House of Commons Transport Committee, ‘Better roads: Improving England’s Strategic Road Network,’ 2014, 7.

  48 Anthony Seldon, Blair’s Britain, 1997-2007 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15.

  49 Department of the Environment and Department of Transport, This common inheritance: Britain ‘s environmental strategy (London: HMSO, 1990), 13.

  50 Hillman and Adams, ‘Children’s Freedom and Safety,’ 18-19.

  51 Ibid, 18-19.

  52 Department of Transport, Children and roads: A safer way (London: HMSO, 1990), 16.

  53 Christopher Chope, speech in the House of Commons, 16 November 1990.

  54 Ibid.

  55 Elizabeth Clapp, ‘Welfare and the Role of Women: The Juvenile Court Movement,’ Journal of American Studies 28, no. 3 (1994): 360.

  56 Jon Winder, Designed for Play: Children’s Playgrounds and the Politics of Urban Space, 1840–2010 (London: University of London Press, 2024), 227; Monica Flegel, ‘“Facts and Their Meaning”: Child Protection, Intervention, and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Late Nineteenth-Century England,’ Victorian Review 33 (2007): 38.

  57 Manchester Guardian, ‘England and Its Playgrounds,’ The Manchester Guardian, 25 November 1927.

  58 Cranwell, ‘Street play and organized space,’ 45.

  59 Platt, The Child Savers, 10.

  60 Ibid, 126.

  61 Ibid, 126; Winder, Designed for Play, 47.

  62 Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 248.

  63 Ibid, 248.

  64 Ibid, 20.

  65 Moore, Childhood’s domain, 14, 223.

  66 Ibid, 20.

  67 Rob White, ‘Youth and the Conflict Over Urban Space,’ Children’s Environments 10, no.1 (1993): 89.

  Play Streets are discussed in further detail later in this chapter.

  68 Patsy Eubanks Owens, ‘Natural Landscapes, Gathering Places, And Prospect Refuges: Characteristics of Outdoor Places Valued by Teens,’ Children’s Environments Quarterly 5, no.2 (1988): 21.

  69 Pete King and Polly Sills-Jones, ‘Children’s Use of Public Spaces and the Role of the Adult – a Comparison of Play Ranging in the UK, and the Leikkipuisto (Play Parks) in Finland,’ International Journal of Play 7 (2018): 28; Mark Francis and Randolph Hester, The Meaning of Gardens: Idea, Place, and Action (London: MIT Press, 1990), 28.

  70 White, ‘Youth and the Conflict Over Urban Space,’ 85.

  71 Nikolas Rose, Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self (London: Routledge, 1990), 203.

  72 White, ‘Youth and the Conflict Over Urban Space,’ 85.

  73 See these works of the period: Paul Wilkinson, ‘Safety in Children’s Play Environments,’ Children’s Environments (1985); Peter Heseltine, ‘Accidents on Children’s Playgrounds,’ Children’s Environments (1985); Tom Jambor, ‘Risk-Taking Needs in Children: An Accommodating Play Environment,’ (1986); Joe Frost, ‘Play Environments for Young Children in The USA: 1800 – 1990,’ Children’s Environments (1989); Kaj Noschis, ‘Child Development Theory and Planning for Neighbourhood Play,’ (1992); Lorraine Maxwell, Mari Mitchell, and Gary W. Evans, ‘Effects of Play Equipment and Loose Parts on Preschool Children’s Outdoor Play Behavior: An Observational Study and Design Intervention,’ Children, Youth and Environments (2008).

  74 Wilkinson, ‘Safety in Children’s Play Environments,’ 10; Rob Wheway and Alison Millward, Facilitating Play on Housing Estates (York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1997), 15.

  75 Wilkinson, ‘Safety in Children’s Play Environments,’ 10.

  76 Maxwell et al., ‘Effects of Play Equipment and Loose Parts on Preschool Children’s Outdoor Play Behavior,’ 60.

  77 Stephen Wagg, ‘“Don’t Try to Understand Them”: Politics, Childhood and the New Education Market,’ in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, eds. Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (London: Routledge, 1996), 18.

  78 John Carvel, ‘Blair Relives School Dilemma,’ The Guardian, 20 January 1999, 2.

  79 Wikimedia Commons contributors, ‘File: Campaign – One false move and you’re dead.png,’ Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Campain-_One_false_move_and_you%27re_dead.png&oldid=127818792 (accessed 3 June, 2021).

  80 Mayer Hillman et al., One False Move: A Study of Children’s Independent Mobility (London: PSI, 1990), 106.

  81 Department of Transport, Children and roads, 3; Letter to The Times on 27 March 1989, from the Chief Constable of Warwickshire writing in his capacity of secretary to the Safety Committee of ACPO, as quoted in Hillman et al., One False Move, 7.

  82 Hillman et al., One False Move, 105.

  83 Ibid, 2.

  84 Roger Hart et al., ‘Introduction,’ Children, Youth and Environments 13, no.1 (2003): I.

  85 Ibid, II.

  86 Mead, ‘Neighbourhoods and human needs,’ 4.

  87 Ward, The Child in the City, 206.

  88 Claire Freeman, ‘Planning and Play: Creating Greener Environments,’ Children’s Environments 12, no. 3 (1995): 382.

  89 Claire Freeman and Elizabeth Aitken-Rose, ‘Future Shapers: Children, Young People, and Planning in New Zealand Local Government,’ Environment and Planning 23 (2005): 233.

  90 Rachel Kaplan, ‘Patterns of Environmental Preference,’ Environment and Behaviour 9 (1977): 213.

  91 Lenore Behar and David Stevens, ‘Wilderness camping: an evaluation of a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed children,’ Orthopsychiatry 4 (1978): 644, 653.

  92 See also such studies as Hugh Matthews and Melanie Limb, ‘Defining an agenda for the geography of children,’ Progress in Human Geography 23 (1999): 61-90; Jo Boyden and Pat Holden, Children of the Cities (London: Zed, 1991); Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Bartlett et al., Cities for Children.

  93 Madeleine Nash, ‘Fertile minds,’ Time 149 (1997): 51.

  94 Cowman, ‘Play streets,’ 254.

  95 Ibid, 233.

  96 Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, 129.

  97 Katrina Navickas, Contested Commons (London: Reaktion Books, 2025), abstract.

  98 Cowman, ‘Play streets,’ 241.

  99 AA Foundation for Road Safety Research, The facts about road accidents and children (London: AA Motoring Trust, 2003), 8; Michael Ungar, ‘Kids Are Safer Outside Than Inside Their Homes,’ Psychology Today, 11 June, 2015; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts 2017 Data: Pedestrians: 2019 (Washington: NHTSA, 2019).

  100 Play England, as quoted in: Anushka Asthana, ‘Kids need the adventure of ‘risky’ play,’ The Observer, 3 August 2008, 6.

  101 Stephen Moss, Natural Childhood (Corsham: Park Lane Press, 2012), 13.

  102 Ibid, 13.

  103 Cindi Katz, ‘Power, Space and Terror: Social Reproduction and the Public Environment,’ in The Politics of Public Space, ed. Setha Low(New York: Routledge, 2006), 31-32.

  104 As discussed in 1.2.1.

  105 Crane, Child Protection in England, 33.

  106 Ibid, 33.

  107 Philip Jenkins, Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1992), 154.

  108 Thérèse Murphy and Noel Whitty, ‘The Question of Evil and Feminist Legal Scholarship,’ Feminist Legal Studies 14, no. 1 (2006): 8.

  109 Crane, Child Protection in England, 6.

  110 Ian Butler and Mark Drakeford, Scandal, Social Policy and Social Welfare: How British Public Policy is Made (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 88.

  Ashley Wroe, Social work, child abuse and the press (Norwich: Social Work Monographs, 1988), 11.

  111 ‘What have we learned? Child death scandals since 1944,’ Community Care, accessed 30 September 2021, https://www.communitycare.co.uk/2007/01/10/what-have-we-learned-child-death-scandals-since-1944/.

  112 Ted Oliver, ‘Baby death case workers rapped,’ Daily Mail, 1 October 1984, 10; Sarah Boseley, ‘Social Workers Denounce Councils,’ The Guardian, 27 July 1985, 3; BBC Radio News, ‘Lambeth social services failure,’ archived by British Universities Film and Video Council, accessed 2 November 2021, http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/0011300005011.

  113 BBC Radio News, ‘Social services criticised over Tyra Henry death,’ archived by British Universities Film and Video Council, accessed 2 November 2021, http://bufvc.ac.uk/tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/0000400037008.

  114 Child Abduction Act 1984, Introductory Text (1).

  115 Nick Basannavar, Sexual Violence against Children in Britain since 1965: Trailing Abuse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 186.

  116 Ibid, 188.

  117 Beatrix Campbell, Secrets and Silence: Uncovering the Cleveland Child Sexual Abuse Cover-up (Bristol: Policy Press, 2023), 5-6.

  118 See analysis of the 1989 Children Act later in this chapter.

  119 Following the publication of this article: Henry Kempe et al., ‘The Battered-Child Syndrome,’ Journal of the American Medical Association 181 (1962): 143-154.

  120 Esther Rantzen, ‘30 Years of ChildLine (1986-2016),’ Witness seminar held 1 June 2016, at the BT Tower, London, transcript held at Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry.

  121 Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 86-87.

  122 Crane, Child Protection in England , 13.

  123 Tisdall, A Progressive Education?, 3.

  124 Roy Kozlovsky, The Architectures of Childhood (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 18.

  125 As revealed in the dismissive approach to the issue in: Roy Kozlovsky, The Architectures of Childhood.

  Elizabeth Anderson, The Disabled Schoolchild: a study of integration in primary schools (London: Routledge, 1973).

  126 Crane, Child Protection in England , 6; Lorraine Radford, Child abuse and neglect in the UK today (London: NSPCC, 2011), 11.

  127 Chris Waters, ‘“Dark strangers” in our midst: discourses of race and nation in Britain, 1947–1963,’ Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 222.

  128 Child Care Act 1980, Part 1, Section 1.

  129 Child Support Act 1991, Part 1, Section 4.

  Academic response to these pieces of legislation will be explored later in this sub-section.

  130 Children Act 1989, Part 3, Section 20 (8).

  131 Peter Rothery, ‘Terminating and Restricting Parental Responsibility,’ Deans Court Chambers, accessed 17 August 2025, https://www.deanscourt.co.uk/articles/terminating-and-restricting-parental-responsibility.

  132 Children Act 1989, Part 1, Section 2.

  133 Ibid, Part 2, Section 8.

  134 Chris Beckett, ‘Waiting for Court Decisions: A Kind of Limbo,’ Adoption & Fostering 24 (2000): 55-62; Children Act 1989, Part 5, Section 8; Nick Allen, Making Sense of the Children Act 1989 (Chichester: Wiley, 2005), 204-205.

  135 Bridget McKeigue and Chris Beckett, ‘Care Proceedings under the 1989 Children Act: Rhetoric and Reality,’ The British Journal of Social Work 34, no. 6 (2004): 835.

  136 Nellie Trickett et al., ‘The Impact of Sexual Abuse on Female Development: Lessons from a Multigenerational, Longitudinal Research Study,’ Development and Psychopathology 23, (2011): 453; Paul Mullen et al., ‘Childhood Sexual Abuse and Mental Health in Adult Life,’ The British Journal of Psychiatry 163 (1993): 721; Lucy Delap, ‘“Disgusting Details Which Are Best Forgotten”: Disclosures of Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-Century Britain,’ Journal of British Studies 57 (2018): 79.

  137 Jane Pilcher, ‘Gillick and After: Children and Sex in the 1980s and 1990s,’ in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, eds. Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (London: Routledge, 1996), 77.

  138 Local Government Act 1988, Part 4, Section 28 (1).

  139 Crane, Child Protection in England, 85.

  140 ‘Child Protection Charities,’ Charity Choice, accessed 3 August 2021, https://www.charitychoice.co.uk/charities/children-and-youth/child-protection.

  141 Other charities of this nature from the North East include: Children North East, The Children’s Foundation, Being Children, and Home Start Teeside.

  142 Central Office of Information, ‘Think Bubble – Adult & Child,’ public information film aired 1994, 1 minute, National Archives.

  143 Pilcher, ‘Gillick and After,’ 77.

  144 Eve Colpus, ‘30 Years of ChildLine (1986-2016),’ witness seminar held 1 June 2016, at the BT Tower, London, transcript held at Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry.

  145 Shaun Woodward, ‘30 Years of ChildLine (1986-2016),’ witness seminar held 1 June 2016, at the BT Tower, London, transcript held at Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, Coventry.

  146 Woodward, ‘30 Years of ChildLine (1986-2016),’ witness seminar.

  147 Matthew Hilton et al., A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain: Charities, Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector since 1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 84.

  148 Other examples of popular academic texts of this nature include: Howard Gadlin’s Child Discipline and the Pursuit of Self (1978), Marion Shoard’s The Theft of the Countryside (1980) and This Land is Our Land (1987), Nikolas Rose’s Governing the soul (1990), Ray Lorenzo’s Too Little Time and Space for Childhood (1992), Sheridan Bartlett et al.’s Cities for Children (1999).

  149 Nigel Parton, ‘The Beckford Report: A Critical Appraisal,’ The British Journal of Social Work 16, no. 5 (1986): 569.

  150 Alex Mold and Virginia Berridge, Voluntary Action and Illegal Drugs: Health and Society in Britain since the 1960s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 22.

  151 Kim Susan Blakely, ‘Parents’ Conceptions of Social Dangers to Children in the Urban Environment,’ Children’s Environments 11 (1994): 23.

  152 Ibid, 24.

  153 Rachel Pain, ‘Paranoid Parenting? Rematerializing Risk and Fear for Children,’ Social & Cultural Geography 7 (2006): 221.

  154 Katz, ‘Power, Space and Terror,’ in The Politics of Public Space, 31-32.

  155 Susan Handy et al., ‘Neighborhood Design and Children’s Outdoor Play: Evidence from Northern California,’ Children, Youth and Environments 18, no. 2 (2008): 162.

  156 Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society, 1880–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 98-99.

  157 Nicci Gerrard, ‘The mob will move on, the pain never can,’ The Observer,3 May 1998.

  158 Tim Newburn, ‘Back to the Future? Youth Crime, Youth Justice and the Rediscovery of “Authoritarian Populism”,’ in Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood and Society in the 1980s and 1990s, eds. Jane Pilcher and Stephen Wagg (London: Routledge, 1996), 64.

  159 John Major, ‘Back to Basics,’ transcript of speech delivered at Conservative Party Conference, Blackpool, 8 October, 1993, http://britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=139.

  160 Barry Goldson, ‘“Difficult to Understand or Defend”: A Reasoned Case for Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility,’ The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 48 (2009): 514.

  161 Tony Blair, speech in the House of Commons, 11^th January 1994.

  162 Ministry of Justice, ‘Youth Justice Statistics,’ GOV.UK, accessed August 22, 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/youth-justice-statistics; Barry Goldson, ‘A Reasoned Case for Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility,’ The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 48, no 5 (2009): 514.

  163 Tim Bateman and Neal Hazel, Youth Justice Timeline (Manchester: Beyond Youth Custody, 2014), 3.

  164 Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Part 1, Section 1 (1A).

  165 Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Part 1, Section 8.

  166 Anti Social Behaviour Act 2003, Part 4, Section 30 (3).

  167 Department for Children, Schools and Families, The Children’s Plan: Building brighter futures (London: Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2007), 5.

  168 Simon Hughes, Commons Debate, 10 June 2008; Jack Straw, Commons Debate, 10 June 2008.

  169 Ishita Pande, ‘Is the History of Childhood Ready for the World? A Response to “The Kids Aren’t All Right”,’ The American Historical Review 125, no. 4 (2020): 1304.

  170 Brian Hitchen, ‘How do you feel now you little bastards?,’ Daily Star, 25 November 1993, 1.

  171 Yago Zayed, TV License Fee Statistics (London: House of Commons Library, 2022), 7.

  Jennifer Zosh, Learning in the Digital Age: Putting Education Back in Educational Apps for Young Children (Montreal: Encyclopaedia on Early Childhood Development, 2016), 1.

  172 Peter Buchner, ‘Growing Up in Three European Regions,’ in Growing Up in Europe: Contemporary Horizons in Childhood and Youth Studies, ed. Lynne Chisholm (Berlin: Gruyter, 1995), 47.

  173 Petroc Taylor, ‘UK Households: Ownership of Internet Connection 1998–2018,’ Statista, published January 18, 2023, accessed July 22, 2025, https://www.statista.com/statistics/369035/uk-households-internet-connection/.

  174 Ellen Helsper and Sonia Livingstone, ‘Gradations in Digital Inclusion: Children, Young People and the Digital Divide,’ New Media & Society 9 (2007): 684.

  175 ‘Gender Insights in Computing Education,’ National Centre for Computing Education, April 2023, 7.

  176 Finlo Rohrer, ‘In praise of summer mischief,’ BBC News Magazine, accessed 15 February 2022, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7510372.stm.

  177 Matthew Kelly, written message to author, August 2025.

  178 Mark Aldridge and Andy Murray, T is for Television (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2008), 38-41.

  179 Office for National Statistics, ‘170 Years of Industrial Change across England and Wales,’ The National Archives, accessed 15 February 2022, https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20160106001413/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/170-years-of-industry/170-years-of-industrial-changeponent.html.

  180 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech on Microcomputers in Schools,’ transcript of speech delivered at unknown location, 6 April, 1981, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104609.

  181 Tony Blair as quoted in: Ewen MacAskill, ‘Blair’s Promise: Everyone,’ The Guardian, 2 October, 1996, 6.

  182 Margaret Thatcher, ‘Remarks visiting TV South,’ transcript of speech delivered at Vinters Park, Maidstone, Kent, 6 January, 1984, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105595.

  183 Communications Act 2003, Part 3, Section 4.

  184 Kevin Browne and Catherine Hamilton-Giachritsis, ‘The influence of violent media on children and adolescents: a public-health approach,’ The Lancet 365 (2005): 702-704.

  185 Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 229.

  186 Martin Herbert, Clinical Child Psychology: Social Learning, Developments and Behaviour (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), 170.

  187 Moira Bovill and Sonia Livingstone, Families and the Internet: An Observational Study of Children and Young People’s Internet Use (London: British Telecom, 2001), 31.

  188 Cora Martin and Leonard Benson, ‘Parental Perceptions of the Role of Television in Parent-Child Interaction,’ Journal of Marriage and Family 32, no. 3 (1970): 411.

  189 Norman Warner, speech in the House of Lords, 16 November, 2004.

  Al Aynsley-Green as quoted in: ‘Mothers ‘must learn obesity risk’,’ BBC News, accessed 15 February 2022, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6078490.stm.

  190 Gary Varvel, ‘Nature Deficit Disorder,’ Indianapolis Star, January 2007.

  191 Ann Heilmann et al., ‘Longitudinal associations between television in the bedroom and body fatness in a UK cohort study,’ International Journal of Obesity 41 (2017): 1503; Alice Goisis et al., ‘Why are poorer children at higher risk of obesity and overweight? A UK cohort study,’ European Journal of Public Health 26 (2015): 8.

  192 David Buckingham, ‘New media, new markets, new childhoods? Children’s changing cultural environment in the age of digital technology,’ in An Introduction to Childhood Studies, ed. Mary Jane Kehily (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015), 158.

  193 Beck, Risk Society, 10.

  194 Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1 (New York: TV Books, 1999), 178.

  195 Sandra Calvert, Children’s Journeys through the Information Age (Pennsylvania: McGraw, 1999); Kirsten Drotner, ‘Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity,’ Paedagogica Historica 35 (1999): 593-619; Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 199.

  196 Ray Lorenzo, Too Little Time and Space for Childhood (UNICEF International Child Development Centre, 1992).

  Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte, 1994), 52.

  197 Richard Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)¸ 60; John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).

  198 Jon Katz, Media Rants: Post Politics in the Digital Nation (San Francisco: Hardwired, 1997), 159.

  199 Oppenheimer, The Flickering Mind, 218.

  200 Livingstone, Young People and New Media, 20.

  201 Marilyn Campbell, ‘The impact of the mobile phone on young people’s social life,’ in Social Change in the 21 Century, ed. Karen Barnett (Queensland: Queensland Press, 2005), 10.

  202 Stephen Williams and Lynda Williams, ‘Space Invaders: The Negotiation of Teenage Boundaries through the Mobile Phone,’ The Sociological Review 53 (2003): 314-331.

  203 Tony Charlton et al., ‘Mobile Telephone Ownership and Usage among 10- and 11-Year-Olds,’ Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties 7 (2002): 156.

  204 Dominique Pasquier, ‘Media at home: domestic interactions and regulation,’ in Children and Their Changing Media Environment, ed. Sonia Livingstone (London: Routledge, 2001), 145.

  205 Buchner, ‘Growing Up in Three European Regions,’ 47.

  206 Livingstone, Young People and New Media, 169.

  207 Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 239; Freeman and Tranter, Children and Their Urban Environment: Changing Worlds, 23.

  208 Frost, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, 239.

  209 Tonya Rooney, ‘Trusting children: How do surveillance technologies alter a child’s experience of trust, risk and responsibility?,’ Surveillance & Society 7 (2010): 344.

  210 Ibid, 350.

  211 James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, ‘Preventing Plant Blindness,’ The American Biology Teacher 61, (1999): 82.

  212 Ian Rotherham, Cultural Severance and The Environment (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), V; Louv, Last Child in the Woods, 3.

  213 See many texts from this period including: Louv, Last Child in the woods; Carr, The shallows; Skenazy, free range kids; Frost, A history of children’s play ; Lorenzo, Too Little Time and Space for Childhood; Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood; Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, The Nature of Childhood: An Environmental History of Growing Up in America Since 1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014).

  214 Sarah Holloway and Gill Valentine, Cyberkids: Children in the Information Age (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002), 51.

  215 Rebecca Caswell and Tom Warman, Play for Today (Halifax: The National Children’s Museum, 2014), 5.

  216 Ibid, 5.

  217 Briana Lees et al., ‘Screen Media Activity Does Not Displace Other Recreational Activities among 9-10 year-old Youth: A Cross-sectional ABCD Study,’ BMC Public Health 20, no. 1 (2020): 1792.

  218 Heilmann et al., ‘Longitudinal associations between television in the bedroom and body fatness in a UK cohort study,’ 1503. For press see: Christine Ro, ‘Why ‘plant blindness’ matters,’ BBC, 29 April 2019, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190425-plant-blindness-what-we-lose-with-nature-deficit-disorder; Neil Midgley, ‘The explosion of countryside TV helping treat our “nature deficit disorder”,’ The Guardian, 27 March 2016, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/27/countryfile-bbc-nature-deficient-disorder; Tamara Cohen, ‘Let Granny teach our children how to play outside, say National Trust as it warns of “nature deficit” curse,’ The Daily Mail, 30 March 2012, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2122543/Nature-deficit-latest-curse-hit-children-obesity-health-safety.html; Alice Wilkinson, ‘Have you got Nature Deficit Disorder? Then ditch the gym – it’s time to get outdoors,’ The Telegraph, 6 February 2017, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/have-got-nature-deficit-disorder-ditch-gym-time-get-outdoors/; Caroline Lucas and Mary Colwell, ‘Children are developing a nature deficit disorder,’ The Sunday Times, 25 October 2018, accessed 4 June 2020, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/children-are-developing-a-nature-deficit-disorder-z50bhflxz.

  219 Louv, Last Child in the Woods, 73, 127.

  220 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 32.

  221 Ibid, 141.

  222 Louv, Last Child in the Woods, 3.

  223 Ibid, 33.

  Lenore Skenazy, Free Range Kids (San Francisco: Wiley, 2009), 228.

  224 Holloway and Valentine, Cyberkids, 52.

  2026.01.30

• Reconnecting… Considering Digital Environments in Narratives of British Childhood Decline 1977-2010CE

  

  Download this Article (includes footnotes and bibliography)

  Update Jan 2026: This article is 5 years old as I am publishing it, and since it was written I feel I have come a long way in my understanding of the topic. It is, however, an important precursor to my doctoral thesis, the North East Environments of Childhood Project, and as such I think it is worth preserving.

  We could never have loved the earth so well,

  if we had had no childhood in it.

  – George Eliot, ‘The Mill on the Floss’.

  INTRODUCTION

  Play Across Time

  Across cultures and continents our archaeological records teach us of children at play. In 2017 in southern Siberia archaeologists uncovered a rare collection of dolls and figurines dated to c. 2,500BCE, buried in graves alongside their childhood owners. In 1,000BCE, Ancient Egyptian children played with spinning tops, bouncy balls, and dice. In 200CE, Mesoamerican children played with wheeled toys, especially noteworthy as the wheel was only ever designed for the purposes of play in in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican societies, never transport. Alongside and earlier than any of these, natural playthings such as sticks, stones, streams, and bones are tools of play with which almost any child in history will be familiar, and indeed other creatures such as dolphins and chimpanzees have also been observed to toy with such objects. In your own youth you will undoubtedly have played with objects like these, and took part in other ancient pastimes such as hide and seek, tag, hopscotch, and leapfrog, games passed down the centuries by childhood oral traditions. In the 21^st century, however, there is growing debate and concern surrounding the survivability of these millennia-old entertainments, the very concept of childhood itself has been said to be under threat. Calls arise for a ‘much needed child-saving movement’, but from where have they sprung? What threatens these time-honoured traditions?

  ‘kids used to play all day outside, ride bicycles, play sports, and build forts’, so affirms the opening lines of Digital Childhood: The Impact of Using Digital Technology on Children’s Health, a 2019 report written for the International Journal of Pharmaceutical Research & Allied Science (IJPRAS). The idea of what kids ‘used’ to do is operative in this context, a framing that places all young people under the roof of the same broad church. Another article for an educational advice group, Consequences of the New Digital Childhood, reads: ‘Think back on your childhood, and you probably remember hours spent in active, imaginative, and outdoor play. It’s likely that you rough-housed with friends or neighbours, engaged with nature, and built entire worlds from sheer imagination’. Sentiments such as these are frequently expressed in both contemporary academic and journalistic writing, often accompanied with an argument that “kids these days”, as Pamela Riney-Kehrberg’s The Nature of Childhood asserts, waste their energy ‘watching television, or looking at their computers, cell phones and video games’. ‘Whatever happened to ‘go outside and play’?’, decries a 2017 CNN article. In reading contemporary writing on children and their environments there is one inescapable and united conclusion, that today’s young spend too much time in the digital world and too little time outdoors engaging with nature and physical play. However, division quickly surfaces when it comes to questions about the origins of this situation, and how it is best addressed.

  Applying predominantly to what can loosely be called “western childhoods” several academics have sought to put a name to this phenomenon. Ian Rotherham called it ‘Cultural Severance’, the sectioning of an essential natural element of humanity, James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler coined ‘Plant Blindness’, however it has been Richard Louv’s ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ (NDD) that has proved the commonly adopted term. Though not recognised as an official psychological ‘disorder’, NDD has gained traction with a wide variety of UK groups such as The National Trust and The Council For Learning Outside the Classroom as well as being a foundational principle behind The Children and Nature Network. During the 2010s it was also picked up by the majority of the country’s major news distributors from across the political spectrum including the BBC, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and The Sunday Times. NDD has been associated with increases in ‘obesity, diabetes, autism, coordination disorder, developmental abnormalities, speech, learning difficulties, sensory disorder, anxiety, depression, and sleep disorders’ as well as ‘risky sexual behaviours, drug use, poor academic performance, and aggression’. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows takes an even more serious view, arguing that prolonged time spent in the digital world, particularly for youthful minds, is degrading the very quality of human thought itself. As Carr puts it: ‘What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization… we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting’. The issue unsurprisingly plays into common parental fears over safety, health, and freedom and its resolution is regarded by many not only as a practical but moral imperative; the solution of course being, as Louv defined it, for children to be ‘reunited with the rest of nature’.

  

  Figure 1. A satirical cartoon illustrating parental fears over NDD.

  In Britain, as digital technologies continue to pervade aspects of childhood from the classroom to the living room, so too has scepticism and criticism arisen of the ways in which these new virtual environments are influencing the culture and quality of youth. Across the press, academia, and popular non-fiction writing there is a growing literature, some of it more declarative than others, that warns of digital dangers, particularly for the ‘malleable’ minds of children. From historical, educational, biological, psychological, geographical, and anthropological perspectives such works are making parents and educators more aware than they have ever been of the relationship between environmental factors and the happiness and healthiness of their children. However, popular conceptions of where digital cultures of childhood originated, what they constitute of as virtual environments, and how they have evolved over time, are generally dualistic notions that portray childhood as a “now versus then” phenomenon. Far too often a conclusion is reached that only reflects one aspect of the reality behind the development of late-20^th and early-21^st century childhoods in Britain in the search for something to blame as the cause of NDD, cultural severance, plant blindness, or whichever term is favoured for the separation of Britain’s children from its landscapes.

  Technology itself is often assigned the blame for cajoling children away from nature, designed to be addictive and to constantly require attention;the finger is also pointed at unnecessarily protective parents who confine their children indoors, and at children themselves who choose the virtual over the physical. On the opposite end of the scale a form of technocratic utopianism, the ‘silicon valley way’, is a less common but still influentially adopted stance that hails a digital panacea for childhood’s ills; this approach conceptualises of a problem like NDD as ‘merely a physical Earth problem, and not an ethical one’. Either way, both perspectives take the view that modern childhood needs a “fix”. As David Buckingham observed in 2015, the discussion has become ‘marked by a kind of schizophrenia that often accompanies the advent of new cultural forms. If we look back to the early days of the cinema, or indeed to the invention of the printing press, it is possible to identify a similar mixture of hopes and fears’. Indeed looking much further back, as Carr notes, Socrates voiced fears that reliance on the written word as a substitute for personal memory would reduce the ability of the human mind. Anti-digital rhetoric often leans toward the nostalgic and romantic, with quotes such as Roald Dahl’s plea from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory still adorning many a café-bookshop wall:

  ‘So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

  Go throw your TV set away,

  And in its place you can install

  A lovely bookshelf on the wall.’

  Discussions and analysis of the ways in which the technological advances of the modern era have impacted children in Britain are certainly valuable, but the present discourse in large part lacks a nuance founded on a complex understanding of the multiplicity of childhoods, children as ‘dynamically configured, diverse and entangled assemblages of natural, cultural and technological elements’.²⁸ The digital world does not stand apart from factors of gender, race, class, region, and ability; when we speak of what children “used” to do, should we not be asking which children? Furthermore, virtual environments themselves must be understood in multiplicity and analysed for their specific qualities, not only as general “devices” and “screens” so often explored only in concept, merely antitheses to popular conceptions of what constituted pre-digital childhoods.

  Methodology and Historiography

  The focus of this study is consequently upon the transitionary period during which digital technologies became adopted and then prevalent facets of childhood in Britain, beginning its analysis in 1977CE, with the widespread availability of personal computers, and finishing in 2010CE, with the introduction of the Digital Economy Act. The primary route of analysis will be through documents produced throughout this period from academic and government sources that undertook to study and report upon childhood and the digital environment. From an environmental and child-focussed perspective these sources will be used to explore the changing face of childhoods during this period as well as to study how those changes were implemented and interpreted by wider British society in a rapidly evolving environment. Part 1 will contextualise the discussion and explain the already contentious debates that were surrounding the nature of children’s play and education before the introduction of technological factors. Part 2 will continue chronologically, assessing the environments surrounding British childhoods in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries that pushed them towards digitisation, and how those technologies both facilitated and impeded that transition. Finally, this study will conclude that the stereotype of children choosing to spend their time indoors, inveigled by flashing screens, does not take into account wider structural and societal changes taking place in Britain at the time and characterises a very diverse category of people as a monolith. Even more so than their elders, a child’s individual life is subject to a set of intricate, interconnected systems of economy, culture, and environment over which they have little influence. Particular attention will be paid therefore to conceptualising the digital development of childhoods as a continuum in which there are no straightforward states of “before” and “after”.

  This study provides an alternative narrative to many of the existing histories of childhood and the digital environment during this period which predominantly fall into two categories, histories of childhood than do not consider the digital, and digital histories that do not consider children. Nerds 2.0.1, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, On the Way to the Web, and Spam are all examples of prominent cyber histories in which childhood presence and influence is affectively considered naught, their furthest mention in relation to the development of technologies that can help children with disabilities or illness. That is not to say that these are not good publications which competently examine many aspects of digital history, and all were certainly useful in the writing of this study, but it must also be said that they neglect to consider children as the prominent users of new technologies which they are.

  From within the existing historiography on the history of childhood there have been a number of works that have examined children’s lives during this period such as Children and Their Urban Environment: Changing Worlds, A History of Children’s Play and Play Environments, and Children in the Anthropocene. These texts offer some excellent insights into many of the contemporary factors behind the movement of children indoors and some of the consequences of that movement. Particularly beneficial for this study has been the multitude of research projects on youth undertaken throughout the period that they point to and evaluate, offering valuable insight into the changing nature and aims of these studies over time. However, a general omission in these texts is the digital space. And one dangerous pitfall that much of this writing falls into is the vagueness so often applied in arguments that evoke the “before times”, construed as periods of de facto childhood liberty, happiness, and quality without being critically engaged with. These declensionist narratives of degradation and corruption are particularly prevalent when authors in the existing historiography frame their assessments around experiences of their own childhoods and ‘the freedom we had as kids’. Louv’s Last Child in the Woods puts that ‘baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems… like a quaint artifact’. Analysis directs itself towards the processes of change with the implicit understanding that this change is moving away from something that was previously good and little attention is paid towards identifying children as a diverse group whose lives have differed greatly across this period based on factors such as class, gender, and region. Furthermore, this contrivance assumes a past intimacy with nature that runs counter to ‘a long history of environmental degradation and disconnectedness’ starting well before the childhood of anybody alive today.

  The question must be asked: to what extent are our historical conceptions of childhood moulded by the experiences of middle-class academics whose criticisms of modern childhoods fall most pertinently on working class households who historically and contemporarily have had more obstacles between themselves and access to nature? Such a comment may appear wantonly critical but is only to ask us to deepen our conceptions of what digital childhoods can mean. Indeed, as Jennifer Ladino identifies, we cannot miss that the forms of eco-nostalgia presented in many texts are intentionally designed to be a ‘mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice’. The intersection between digital environments and digital environmentalism. Whilst it is undoubtable that concerns should be raised over the changing nature of youth in Britain since the emergence of digital childhoods, and indeed this study raises many, it is also important to recognise and challenge arguments that present common notions of a timeless “golden” period of early life which only in the 21^st century has come under threat. This is a trend also common outside of academia, what Peter Kahn named ‘environmental generational amnesia’.

  As William Neuman identified in 1991, research in this field must tread a fine line between a technologically determinist narratives that disregard social and cultural change and construct such ‘mythical objects of anxiety as the computer addict, the screen-zombie… the Nintendo-generation, the violent video fan, etc.’ and culturally determinist narratives that romantically assume, at least implicitly, that “our” children are too intelligent to be duped by the messaging of ‘consumer-culture capitalist economies’. A multiplicity of childhoods approach is a good method to avoid falling into either of these traps as it does not assume any individual outside force to be deterministic over a category of people’s lives. In future research however, it will be useful to employ new interdisciplinary methods that engage with the computational social sciences as well as explore emerging fields such as digital ethnography and other forms of digital social research. This will allow scholars to better interrogate relationships between children and the specificities of the programmed architectures of digital devices and environments.

  Two foundational texts on which this study has been built and seeks to build on are Matthew Thomson’s Lost Freedomand Sian Edwards’ Youth Movements, Citizenship and the English Countryside, both of which are important historical studies of the relationship between child and environment. Susan Danby’s Digital Childhoods: Technologies and Children’s Everyday Lives and Sonia Livingstone’s Young People and New Media have also been instrumental texts from outside of the historical field in their examinations of cyberspace on its own terms and their attempts to look beyond, as Danby says, ‘simplistic descriptions of digital technology somehow having inherent ‘effects’ or ‘impacts’’. Affrica Taylor’s article “Reconceptualising the ‘nature’ of childhood” was also very helpful in warning against portraying an ‘essentialised’ view of children and environment that has been used in the past as a means to oppress or exclude certain children from a society by branding them as “natural” creatures, apart from the rest of humanity. Still however, these texts offer little consideration of digital factors as a part of the ecosystems of children’s environments. Not all digital histories can or should take child-focussed or environmental approaches, and not all histories of childhood environments must consider the digital, but the extent to which the history of childhood cyberspace has been overlooked in favour of physical space, to this day, is surprising.

  As the history of the relationships between children, their environments, and the way the adult world has sought to shape them in Britain receives increasing attention as contemporary cultures struggle to come to terms with new digital normalities, ideas of a golden past are invoked frequently as models to which Britain should be returning. However, there are also strong arguments made to the contrary, as Lloyd DeMause provocatively wrote in 1974: ‘The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused’. Is a loss of nature and freedom in childhood a necessary cost of increased protection and quality of life? Contemporary debates surrounding these issues are not inventions of the modern world and indeed are surprisingly reflective of far more pedigreed discussions; their development is the most recent stage in a long historical tradition of interrogating the relationship between environment and childhood. It is crucial, and interesting, therefore that we appreciate the longer view of the pre-digital history of British childhoods as both comparison and context within which to assess the changes they would start to face in the late 20^th century which so fundamentally shifted the environmental landscape.

  Part 1

  KIDS THOSE DAYS

  The Longue Durée of Work and Play

  The British and wider European tradition of play and education is commonly traced to Classical Greece which produced a number of foundational theories on the relationship between these two activities. Plato wrote extensively on the topic of childhood pursuits, both in regard to advising parents on practical advice for child rearing, and in pushing for legislative changes surrounding children’s games. Plato taught that child’s play could moulded and diverted into ‘productive channels’, where games and toys could be used to identify in which skills children were most apt and then to prepare them for an adult occupation that utilised those skills. A child who played with blocks, for example, would be encouraged to become a builder and another who played with dolls to become a teacher. Aristotle also believed that what a child did in play was important to their growth, and that a person would become lazy and unproductive if they did not have an active childhood. Indeed, he argued that children should receive no formal education until they were at least 5 years old, as inhibiting play during early years would be detrimental their development. Many Greek children’s games are still recognisable today such as Heads or Tails, Blind Man’s Buff, and Kiss in the Ring. Quintilian, a famed Roman educator, continued this legacy, insisting that it was essential for parents and teachers to observe pupils’ play in order to recognize individuality in their temperaments and intellects.

  Study of medieval children has been characterised since 1962 by the French historian Philippe Ariès’ now infamous work Centuries of Childhood which studied paintings and diaries of the period across a span of 400 years. Controversially, Ariès concluded that during the medieval era in Europe the category of “child” did not exist as could be understood for periods prior and hence, youngsters being seen as ‘small-scale adults’. He argued that parents lost too many children to attach any form of unique significance to them and furthermore that they raised their children to believe that play led to idleness, truancy, and inattentiveness. However, several scholars have since criticised this approach, with the research of Nicholas Orme, Shulamith Shahar, and Sally Crawford rebuking the majority of Ariès’ arguments. Orme demonstrated evidence of adults providing tailored items of culture for their children such as toys, games, and books, also noting children’s tendency to rebel and spend time by themselves away from adult supervision creating their own games and cultures. Shahar pointed out that the medieval and renaissance periods equally enjoyed a proliferation of play with small objects such as marbles, balls, and dice and references to equipment to help with jumping, swinging, and balancing known as “merry totters” being not uncommon. Crawford, mirroring Plato, explained how girls and boys ‘extended their skills’ through play in relation to tasks they would later be required to perform when they were older; girls learning household tasks and boys the trades of their elders.

  In the 16^th century Martin Luther espoused extensively for the reformation of education as well as religion, describing schools as ‘a hell and purgatory… in which with much flogging, trembling, anguish, and wretchedness, they learn nothing’. He proposed a universal state school system that would be compulsory for every child but would also be part of a wider education structure that would also include time for work at home, learning trades, and, of course, play. A century later the Czech theologian John Amos Comenius built upon Luther’s work and proposed the idea of the educational ladder for both boys and girls, a staged set of schools to cater for children as they grew, beginning with a ‘mother school’ (or nursery) for young children and progressing all the way through to university. He also advocated for using outdoor play as a technique for fostering the healthy development of mind and body, saying that ‘it is necessary to put the body in motion and allow the mind to rest’. Comenius’ teachings were exemplary of a strange consistency across the history of childhood theory and philosophy throughout the European tradition where there has been a tension between intellectuals arguing for greater emphasis to be placed on outdoor activity and play against educational systems that leant toward more sedentary pursuits. It was with the enlightenment however, particularly in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, that many of the specific educational dichotomies that are characteristic of contemporary discussion over digital childhoods today came into being.

  

  Figure 2. Ancient Greek statuette of girls playing knucklebones.

  Enlightenment Thought

  Rationalism and romanticism were two intellectual movements of the enlightenment that had a significant impact upon the development of approaches to children and environment. The rationalist perspective, characterised by the works of thinkers such as René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, and John Locke, is still very much influential on the official structures and regulations of modern British childhood. This stance framed the natural world as a force of reason, in some ways the very foundation of order and reason. On this basis, rationalists understood nature as fundamentally logical, and as such could be understood and controlled with the application of appropriate reason. This same approach was adopted towards children who, as natural creatures, were seen to be intrinsically governable. John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is famous and exemplary in this regard as he describes the child as being ‘tabula rasa’, a “blank slate” which need only be impressed upon. Locke’s observations of children at play led him to the concept of ‘educative play’, using playtime as a space for semi-structured tuition. He described how, in his experience, the children of wealthy families were done great harm by being showered with toys and gifts which only taught them ‘pride, vanity, and covetousness’; they did not learn to value what they had. In Locke’s view a child was much like any other natural organism in that they had to be carefully managed otherwise they would become wild. With the correct instruction, however, they could be formed into an instrument of reason.

  Where rationalists such as Locke sought to control a nature that was logical, romanticists sought to learn from a nature they saw as inscrutable. In large part the romantic phenomenon arose in response to the increasingly rationalist-informed industrialised landscapes of Europe that authors such as William Blake, Mary Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau found themselves surrounded by. Predominantly an artistic movement, romanticists forwarded emotional countercultural arguments in which children and the natural world were often construed as intertwined joint symbols of innocence and purity. Children were a part of the natural world in a way that adults were not and could not be. As Rousseau argued in On Education (1763), childhood should be defined by teaching that is ‘beyond our control’ and follows ‘the goal of nature’. Indeed, Rousseau saw no distinction between work and play for children. Games were the work of the young, and in them ‘the child brings everything: the cheerful interest, the charm of freedom, the bent of his mind, the extent of his knowledge’. He saw the work of rationalist tutors such as Locke as pedantic and damaging, filling children’s head with facts rather than skills.

  This romanticist connection is well demonstrated in the lines William Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up”, published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807.Therein Wordsworth marvels at the beauty of a rainbow, considering how it takes him back to a state of child-like joy, before concluding with this reflection:

  ‘The Child is father of the Man;

  And I could wish my days to be

  Bound each to each by natural piety’

  Johann Pestalozzi and Friedrich Fröbel were heavily influenced by Rousseau’s writings and built much of his theoretical work into their practices. Like Rousseau, the core concept of their position was that the key to a good childhood education was in creating an environment, both physical and social, that fostered creativity and development. Pestalozzi also emphasized an aspect of Comenius’ teachings which said that true learning must take place through actions; that you ‘thought by thinking, not by appropriating the thoughts of others’. Fröbel, creator of the kindergarten, believed that educative programs should be moulded around the natural interests of the child and, once again, that constructive, enjoyable play was the best method by which to determine what an individual was intuitively inclined towards. He highlighted the keeping and cultivation of allotments and gardens as a particularly helpful pursuit, as these were spaces in which children could watch the fruits of their labour develop over time, and eventually harvest a reward that would be appropriate to the quality of their efforts. This idea that young children learn most effectively from being able to interact with and actively manipulate the materials of their environments was explored further in the 20^th century with the works of Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget.

  As with rationalism, romanticist ideas still inform greatly on contemporary British childhoods, although in a less structural format. Aside for children of kindergarten age where it can be reasonably argued that romanticism is a guiding structural principle, romantic notions of childhood exist outside of official practices and educative systems and more in the realm of popular conceptions and representations of childhood; in children’s books, television, and in the kinds of outdoor activities parents are encouraged to nurture their children with. However, whilst the two philosophies can appear at first blush to be opposed in a “nature versus nurture” form, they are ultimately two sides of the same coin. Both emerged during a period of European history where confidence in the traditional role of religion to act as a moral compass, spiritual guide, and force of reason, was being eroded. The natural world, and the child by association, was able to act as a unifying, present force that both movements drew upon as motivation and justification for their actions and beliefs. As Sara Maitland writes in Gossip from the Forest: ‘wilderness finds its complement and counterpart either in conceptions of childhood moral innocence or the child as tabula rasa’. Indeed, the founding theoretical framework at the heart of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century child saving movement was a fusion of both philosophies.

  Play Manufactured

  ‘Life without play is a grinding, mechanical existence organized around doing the things necessary for survival’.

  In 1859 the very first purpose-built playground in the world was opened in Manchester, a prototype for a model that would see mass adoption in Britain in years to come. The rise of the motor car in the early 20^th century accelerated this trend as city streets shifted in purpose away from acting as areas of public domain and towards avenues of mass transport. The provision of specialist playground environments and equipment for children was an urban creation, a key point of principle being to move children out of the streets (and other public areas) and into specialised environments of safety. During this same period Britain saw a boom in the commercial mass production of toys, and the birth of the toy shop as a common feature on British high streets. Where previously crafted toys had been the provision of the upper and middle classes, over the century they steadily “democratised”, becoming available to working class households, but also becoming more standardised and controlled. In majority and increasingly toys of the democratised market were designed for yard and indoor play. This would lead to the phenomenon of toy “trends”, and an ever-expanding library of choice for children and parents. However, as Natalie Canning explains in Play and Practice in the Early Years Foundation Stage, and as this study will go on to further demonstrate, there are many developmental benefits that unpredictable, unstructured, informal environments of play can offer a child over domesticated ones.

  This shift towards pushing British youth towards more “guarded” forms of play was campaigned for by a number of organisations, namely the various Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCCs) that were set up throughout the country’s cities during this period, the first being in Liverpool in 1883 before the national organisation coalesced in 1889. This was the birth of the child saving movement, primarily designed as Anthony Platt describes, as a romanticist conservativemovementthat cherished children but also controlled them. It was during this period that aspects of youth that had previously been dealt with informally became categorised and increasingly thought of as distinct identifiable phenomena; phenomena that could be addressed, controlled, and even eliminated. To name something is to ascribe it identifiable characteristics and members of the child saving movement were, in a sense, in the business of “inventing” new categories of youth behaviour, particularly misbehaviour, as exemplified with the creation of the juvenile court system during this time.

  

  Figure 3. Print of an early 20^thcentury toy shop.

  This increased attention paid to children and childhood came with substantial benefits for many young people who previously had been overlooked by powers of authority. Those neglected, bullied, and beaten, those with dependencies, and those considered “delinquent” were now more likely to receive official support. In America, where the child saving movement was developing roughly in parallel with Britain, Baronet Charles Chute called the juvenile court system ‘one of the greatest advances in child welfare that has ever occurred’. At the same time however, the same system necessarily resulted in expanded restrictions surrounding where all children were allowed or supposed to go and what they should do as safety became a mainstream political concern. Exemplary of this new attitude sweeping Europe and North America was a precedent-setting 1915 legal case in Tacoma City, Washington where the parents of a boy who was injured falling from a swing successfully sued the school board for financial compensation. Following that lawsuit, playgrounds across Washington state and indeed America were taken down in fear of prosecution.

  After the first world war there was a brief flourishing of progressivist, even utopian, writing that argued for increased freedoms for children, particularly in Britain; the collective trauma of that conflict bolstered new approaches to childhood, alongside the changing court system and a falling birth rate. However, after the second world war utopian freedom-oriented thought reverted to a ‘child-centred’ pedagogy which placed more emphasis on protecting children, creating purpose-built environments for them separate from the adult world. In A Progressive Education? Laura Tidsall sums up the logic of child-centred education and parenting as seeing children as ‘fundamentally separate from adults, distinguished by their developmental immaturity’. Tidsall argues that this pedagogy took a half-hold over Britain and that it still exists today in tension with movements that want to do away with specially manufactured environments and supervision in favour of more informal methods of childhood management. When technology entered the scene it was not doing so to a previously stable understanding of childhood; the social upheavals of the 20^th century had already created a volatile environment wherein the older generation was bringing up the younger in a significantly different world to the one they themselves had been raised.

  Part 2

  KIDS THESE DAYS

  ‘This is an era when ultrasound scans are routinely shared on social media by expectant parents… Thus, the cliché of millennial children being ‘born digital’ might perhaps be updated to ‘preborn digital’’.

  The Modern Child

  After 1977, as home computers, games consoles, and later mobile phones in the 1990s became available, British children were among their most early adopters. In Young People and New Media Sonia Livingstone forwards that these children were ‘a distinctive and significant cultural grouping’ which pioneered the use of new technologies, due to existing in a stage of life characterised by learning and experimentation. ‘Cyber playgrounds’ were an environment of play unlike any that had come before them. However, whilst “children” may have been prominent adopters of new technologies in 20^th century Britain, that conclusion does not satisfy the need to consider a multiplicity of childhoods. Multiple studies have demonstrated that ‘boys, older children and middle class children all benefited from more and better quality access’ to digital devices and then later the internet than girls, working class, and younger children. Helsper and Livingstone describe this in terms of ‘digital opportunity’, whilst a child may have access to a computer, they may also have poor quality hardware, connection, or be ill equipped with the knowledge and skills required to fully utilise the tool. The largest determining factor as to whether someone is an active web user has been found to be confidence, not age. In Olin-Scheller and Roos’ 2015 study they found that rural Swedish children only peripherally engaged with digital activities at both school and home, problematising the view that young people were ever a ‘homogeneous group of digital natives’. Indeed, today’s children generally, even those of privileged backgrounds, have been found to spend the vast majority of their time online on only a few websites, their lack of “travel” mirroring those with low opportunity in the physical world.

  Existing research such as that of Kidron and Rudkin has thus shown that young people, being ‘firmly on the lowest rung of the digital opportunity ladder’, are advocates for more management and control of digital environments. The authors of a 2017 report, The Internet on Our Own Terms, also found that British children wanted more regulation of online content and more control they could exert themselves over what they encountered online. In some respects these reports fly in the face of popular conceptions of children as natural-born inhabitants of the digital wilderness. To be clear however, these reports did not conclude children to favour restriction to freedom, but rather a greater balance between the two. Childhood is a process of development, a key element of which is moving from a state of high dependency during your first 5 years of life, through a state of semi-independence and self-care from 6 to 11, and towards increasing autonomy and growing reliance on peers over carers from 12 to 18. Therefore, children prefer an environment that can evolve with them, and be flexible in terms of the degrees of independence it allows.

  The 1970s and 1980s

  It is well known that play is among the most fundamental behaviours human beings engage in, and indeed is a signifier of intelligence in multiple species. Important to play itself is the environment it takes place in, as different environments allow for different kinds of play, and furthermore different people experience those spaces in different ways. Digital environments such as computers and games consoles, for example, can allow for a great deal of intellectual and social play, but evidently less physical sporting play. Since the late 1970s a loss of physical play for children was an area of keen interest to educators, commentators, and academics who feared a loss of tactility and healthy activity in play alongside a sense of a ‘centuries-old freedom’ being eroded. Indeed, these fears were not unfounded, a National Trust survey in 2016 found that today’s children spend half as much time outdoors as their parents did in 1970s and 1980s. A lack of outdoor play has been linked to a number of physical and emotional illnesses, depression, low educational achievement, and social abnormalities, so establishing the role of digital childhoods within this trend is important.

  In the late 1970s and early 1980s home-computing became accessible to an increasingly expanding audience with the release of models such as the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, and Commodore 64. During this period however, whilst research into environments of childhood was prevalent, little was made of the role that digital technologies might be playing. Instead, the dominant theme of the literature was the urban child, and the ways in which the modern world restricted childhood freedoms more structurally, in both the sense of physical and social structures. Studies increasingly focussed on the positive effects of “getting out into nature” for city kids, with a particular interest in those living with poverty or learning disabilities. A 1973 report for the Department of Environment found that 75% of children, when asked to describe their favourite places, talked about spaces where they could play outdoors. However Peter Townsend’s Poverty In the United Kingdom (1979) found that working class children were four times less likely to have access to an outdoor space of size or quality enough sit outside in than middle class children. Rachel Kaplan’s Patterns of Environmental Preference (1977) focussed on longitudinal measures and found that her suburban-child participants reported beneficial outcomes up to several years after being sent on an extended nature-camp expedition. Similarly Behar and Stevens’ Wilderness Camping (1978) placed city children on a ‘residential treatment programme’ centred around outdoor activities, and found that the majority of their subjects demonstrated ‘improved interpersonal skills and school performance’ after the activity. Both of these reports chose children with learning disabilities and conditions such as ADD (today called ADHD) to study.

  

  Figure 4. A Prize Gold-Plated BBC Micro for the accompanying magazine, 1985.

  Kevin Lynch’s Growing up in cities (1977), funded by UNESCO, was also concerned with rising urbanism around the world, particularly the ways cities were designed to cater increasingly for adults in cars rather than children on foot. This affected all children but was acutely felt by girls who, being seen as more vulnerable to such dangers, were more likely to be restricted from street activity. Howard Gadlin’s Child Discipline and the Pursuit of Self (1978) connected urban environments to a new ‘modern ideology… in which the goal of individual self-realisation overshadows community solidarity and stability’. Gadlin argued that the enclosed environments of the city both mirrored and encouraged enclosed internal cultures that were based on a desire to ‘control the personality of children’. Colin Ward’s The Child in the City (1978) was a popular text of the period that similarly challenged the adult centric-ness of the city environment, arguing for ‘a city where children live in the same world as I do’. Ward highlighted “micro-places” such as footpaths, greens, and kerbsides that were important spaces of play and refuge for children. Matthews and Limb’s later study Defining an agenda for the geography of children (1999) also found that small informal spaces which could be manipulated by children were the most valued; these included trees, ponds, dens, lanes, and climbing and hiding spaces generally.

  The Child in the City, alongside texts like Urie Bronfenbrenner’s The Ecology of Human Development (1979) attempted to adopt an ‘ecologically valid psychology of development’, looking to study children in their “natural” environments as a direct response to the perception that children were losing them. During this period it is certainly true that city planners held simplistic notions of children characterized by a concept of a “universal child” which of course excluded lower-income, non-white, and female childhoods that typically had less access to the cars and technologies that facilitated their concepts of late 20^th century life. The overwhelming academic cause of the period was an attempt to understand how cities could be designed differently to better accommodate young people, however this too skewed towards the types of childhoods that the academics writing the studies had had.

  One contrary voice of the period however was Alasdair Roberts, whose Out to Play: The Middle Years of Childhood (1980) argued that childhood games and play were just as lively as they had ever been in Britain. He popularised the idea of the “middle childhood”, from ages 8 to 13, as a time he had observed during the 1970s as one ‘of secret societies and clubs with many rules… the age of collecting (sea-shells, football cards, stamps), of jokes and riddles and odd customs’. Roberts’ research was specifically focussed upon Aberdeen however, so his conclusions drawn across the whole country stretch thin, but his work is a strong piece of evidence to support regional differences in childhood trends. In provincial cities such as Aberdeen, it is logical that urbanism was less pronounced. Digital environments were thus not considered drivers of the “decline” of childhood during this period that so many publications lamented, instead the city and adjacent factors such as cars and insularism were singled out. Cars in particular were a force that enhanced social polarization, as those children who did not have access to a car or a parent available to drive them had less access to activities and nature. Busy roads and pollution also tended to centre around poorer areas, reducing independent mobility. As can be seen in Newson and Newson’s Seven Years Old in the Home Environment (1976) however, whilst the language of the time always discussed a loss of “childhood” play, in majority the play that was under threat was boys’ play, as girls were already more restricted to indoor activities by the expectations of parents and society at large.

  During the 1980sthe field of research began to widen to include children more generally, as supposed to just those living in poverty or with learning disabilities, and indeed adults were increasingly included in studies looking at the negative impacts of urban environments. Gary Evans’ Environmental Stress (1982) pulled together much of the disparate research of the 1970s into one volume that attempted to systematically explain the impacts of ‘noise, heat, air pollution, crowding, and architectural dysfunction’ on city dwellers generally. Similar studies were those such as Altman and Wohlwill’s Behaviour and the Natural Environment (1983)and Roger Ulrich’s Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment (1983). Research projects into the positive impacts of nature on children continued with broader bases of participants, like Kaplan and Talbot’s Psychological benefits of a wilderness experience (1983) that found time in “wilderness” to give children ‘self-confidence and an improved sense of self-identity’. The founding of the Children, Youth and Environments academic journal in 1984 was proof that research interest in this field had become substantial, however one of the central concerns that had given rise this interest was proving to be only a concern. Robin Moore’s Childhood’s domain (1986) reported that 96% of urban children (aged 9 to 12) told researchers that outdoor places were their favourite places, children were not abandoning the outdoors. Moore coined the term ‘terra ludens’, the idea of a child’s personal play spaces being a crucial developmental support mechanism that gave them an ‘intuitive sense of how the world is by playing with it’. This was a recognition that environments are the necessary nexus where concepts of place and society converge in a child’s life.

  Whilst research proved over and over again the benefits of outdoor natural activity for young people and adults, (see: Mary Ann Kirkby’s Nature as refuge in children’s environment, Rachel Kaplan’s The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective) and that urban children, particularly the working class had diminishing access to it, there was no indication that children were “going off” the outdoors, even though this was a fear that prompted much of the research to begin with. What the concerned academics of the 1970s and 1980s revealed and detailed were the forces of the period that were pushing children towards the indoors and digital environments such as newly released games consoles like the NES and Atari 7800. The losses of childhood freedoms in the real world left a slack that digital freedoms could pick up.

  The 1990s

  The theme of “children and the city” continued in the 1990s literature, this time in extensive monographs that utilised all the research of the previous two decades. This included Boyden and Holden’s Children of the Cities, Lave and Wenger’s Communities of Practice, and Sheridan Bartlett et al.’s Cities for Children. This was now well understood and accepted theory, but new areas of academic interest were arising, most significantly around the role of digital devices in children’s lives, the fragmentation of traditional family and community structures, and the idea of a person’s “independent mobility”. Mayer Hillman et al.’s One False Move (1990) found that whereas in the 1970s nearly all British 9-year olds were allowed to cross the street independently, now only half were.

  Nikolas Rose’s Governing the soul (1990) suggested that childhood was undergoing a ‘process of bureaucratisation’, by this meaning that their participation in public spaces and activities was being constrained as focus increasingly rested on ideas of forwarding individual identity and agency in children. Ulrich Beck in Risk Society (1992) put that technology, by facilitating increasingly diverse individualised ways to consume media, was accelerating a ‘western trend towards individualisation’. Communal spaces such as parks, streets, and plazas which catered to a generalist user base were falling out of favour compared to individualised places such as private gardens and living rooms. Family formations had also been changing throughout this period as children increasingly moved away from their hometowns once reaching adulthood, isolating their own children from traditional familial networks such as cousins and grandparents. This left a time vacuum in children’s lives that technology was able to fill, home and mobile phones picking up the slack of a lost physical connection and enabling children to keep in contact with distant family and friends.

  Thinking solidified around theories of the restorative qualities of natural environments to city dwellers, as both social science and medical studies continually affirmed the concept to be true. A 1997 study even found that a chronic lack of play and physical touch during childhood could result in developing a brain ‘20 percent to 30 percent smaller than normal’. Linked to this, academics, educators, and commentators turned their eye upon home technologies like televisions, mobile phones, games consoles, and personal computers as they continued to increase in prevalence, and upon the world wide web after it launched in Britain in 1991. Ray Lorenzo’s Too Little Time and Space for Childhood (1992) and Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood (1994) both identified the television in particular as part of a wider problem of “lost childhoods”, Postman writing that ‘children today are captive in their homes… They are institutionalized, over programmed, information stuffed, TV dependent, ‘zoned in’ and age segregated’. It was during this period of writing that attitudes started to shift on technology, which previously had not been considered an influential factor over children’s lives of learning and play, and was now starting to be seriously considered.

  Not all interest in technology for children was pessimistic however, indeed there was a great deal of optimism during the 1990s over the role that technology would play in children’s lives in the present and close future. The creation of the internet in particular brought with it a wave of utopian ideals, one such being that online, all users were equal. The idea of a connected, intelligent, globalised world resurrected some of the visions of the inter-war years. Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word (1993) argued that digital technologies, with the particular aid of the internet, would enable a mass form of democratic literacy that would allow countries to ‘enfranchise the public imagination in genuinely new ways’. Likewise Jon Katz in Media Rants: Post Politics in the Digital Nation (1997) saw the digital as a means of children’s liberation from the increasingly restrictive adult physical world. The online space, seemingly an infinite space of possibility, tempted grand claims of hope or despair on the behalf of commentators of the time. However, because the internet was designed as a universal tool this necessarily meant that no special concessions were made to make it an accessible tool for certain groups. As Kidron and Rudkin point out in their Digital Childhood report, in the early days there were ‘not any design concessions for child users’, and that legacy continues today despite the fact that children make up over a third of the internet’s 3 billion users. A study in the Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood journal in 2003 concluded that children found the internet a more interesting and useful tool when presented with a ‘child-friendly interface’. At the time the New York Times disagreed with Jon Katz’s assessment of technology as “liberating”, writing that ‘The computer teaches a child to expect to be entertained; the lump of clay teaches the child to entertain herself’.

  

  Figure 5. A child watches TV in a TV Shop, 1993.

  Peter Buchner’s Growing up in Three European Regions (1995) explained how the rapid development of technologies had invalidated many parents’ frames of reference for childhood and as such they were forced to become ‘involved in a process of negotiation with their children over mutual identities, rights and responsibilities’. The 1950s model of the nuclear family was giving way at the end of the century to what Sonia Livingstone called the ‘democratic family’, wherein traditional parental and child roles of the authority and the subordinate were replaced by a mutual expectation of love, respect, and intimacy. This was also linked to ‘explicit discourses of identity construction’ in a neoliberal individualist society where children were encouraged to develop identities based on personal preferences over a sense of belonging to a particular community.

  The long-term implications of technologically saturated childhoods were as of yet unknown, giving rise to many hopes and fears but also contributing to individualist perspectives on childhood that favoured the use of home technologies. Marco Hüttenmoser’s Children and their living surroundings (1995) showed the downward spiral a neighbourhood enters in to when children are restricted from outside play, deteriorating social cohesion and a ‘society capable of mutual help’, thus making it less likely for children to be allowed out. Rebekah Coley et al.’s findings in Where Does Community Grow? (1997)supported this thesis and furthered that natural spaces in an area which allowed child’s play were particularly beneficial to fostering communities. Representations of nature via technology were tackled by Edward Reed in Encountering the World (1996), finding that television and computer screens could contribute to learning processes, but were poor replacements for direct experiences that facilitated a ‘dynamic, dense, multisensory flow of diversely structured information’.

  Linking broader social issues to discussions of childhood environments became increasingly popular in the late 1990s, particularly criticism of neoliberal ideology that had already come under significant attack from the field in the form of criticisms of “individualism”. The dawn of the personal computer ‘coincided with the widespread deregulation of the financial services industries in the United States and UK’ and the computing industry was moulded by that environmental context in its early years. Wheway and Millward’s Facilitating play on housing estates (1997) criticised the practice of putting children’s spaces such as playgrounds and skateparks “out of the way” behind buildings and on unwanted bits of land because it cut children off from the rest of society when ‘they want to be where it’s at, to see what is going on, to engage with the world beyond’. Children’s access to transport, social spaces, and shops was framed as key to maintaining them as integral participants of society. Access to natural spaces was again identified as beneficial in giving children an ‘increased sense of personal autonomy, improved self-concept, a greater capacity for taking action and being decisive’. Digital environments were thus eschewed as pale imitations of “the real thing” when it came to education and play, Lieberman and Hoody’s Closing the Achievement Gap advocating for outdoor classroom environments physically separated from digital devices as the best way to improve academic achievement. Likewise Sorrayut Ratanapojnard’s Community-Oriented Biodiversity Environmental Education (2001) also demonstrated that children learnt more in ‘hands-on’ outdoor classrooms than on a standard indoor curriculum.

  Sandra Calvert’s Children’s Journeys through the Information Age (1999), encapsulated many of the arguments that would follow in the first decade of the 21^st century, construingchildren as innocent participants in a process of their own decline, pushed towards embracing a technological ‘media environment’ that was damaging for their healthy development. Kirsten Drotner’s Dangerous Media? (1999) similarly described mass media as a ‘moral threat’ to young people. Somewhat ironically, the media of the period’s obsession with the dangers of street play encouraged parents to instruct their children to stay indoors, and thus set off a new paranoia about the media itself. Whilst technology like mobile phones meant some parents gave their children more time and space to play this did not necessarily translate into more “freedom” because, as Freeman and Tranter contend, whilst children may have been physically alone they were still within the parental ‘gaze’, always on call. This was a trend that would only continue in the following years as the advent of smart phones and GPS tracking allowed parents even greater remote control over their children, what Lenore Skenazy in Free Range Kids (2009) called ‘anxiety on speed dial’.

  In the absence of time and space for “free play”, British children’s activities became increasingly structured, scheduled, and organized during the 1990s, centred around pre-booked sessions of sports, hobbies, and lessons. This came hand-in-hand with an increased commercialisation of play whereby opportunities for free play, in both senses of the word, were reduced and considered lower status than those with an associated cost. This disadvantaged poorer families who could not afford to take their children on as many activities, and as such were pushed more towards the use of digital play. Furthermore, the cars being used to take children to these activities contributed to the problem of unsafe outdoor space for free play in working class neighbourhoods. Timetabled physical activities, whilst being physically healthy, have also been proven not to provide the same mental benefits for children as self-directed play, including a comparative lack of stimulation of cognitive development, social and language development, independent learning, and ability to cope with stress and trauma. The loss of children’s independent mobility to adult-dependent mobility was beginning to be linked to rising problems of ‘obesity, diabetes and other diseases associated with more sedentary lifestyles’. The literature’s narratives over the role of digital devices in this process, however, was ambivalent in a technological environment that was evolving faster than academic studies and research.

  The 2000s

  ‘Children will always be children and will always find a way to play’.

  The first decade of the 21^st century saw the real emergence of what became a defining argument surrounding the role of technology in children’s lives, a declensionist narrative of childhood degradation based around the rise a ‘media-saturated environment’ and the fall of “natural” outdoor activity. As is evident from looking at research from the previous three decades however, Britain’s ‘screen entertainment culture’ was more of a symptom than a cause of the loss of childhood freedoms, and children particularly of disadvantaged backgrounds were pushed towards technology by outside factors. Exemplary of this, Wigley and Clark’s survey Kids.net (2000) found that working class children were significantly more likely to have a television, games console, or video recorder in their rooms than middle class children. Digital spaces offered play and freedoms to children that they could no longer enjoy as easily outside, but as the Digital Education Act of 2003 proved, the digital world too was becoming a more highly regulated and less “wild” place.

  

  Figure 6. A child recharges their mobile phone credit on a street machine, 2009.

  Academic research increasingly reflected the domesticity of British children’s lives, Nancy Wells’ At Home with Nature (2000) looking at children who moved house to an area with greener views out the window and finding marked improvements in peacefulness and ability to concentrate. Similarly Wells and Evans’ Nearby Nature (2003) found that children with more natural space near home were less prone to anxiety, depression, and behavioural problems; the same children also rated themselves higher than their peers on measures of self-worth. Andrea Faber Taylor et al.’s Views of nature and self-discipline (2002) randomly assigned a group of girls to architecturally identical apartments in the same building and discovered that the greener a girl’s view from her window, the higher she scored on concentration tests. The “child in the city” literature such as Louise Chawla’s Growing Up in an Urbanizing World (2002) and David Driskell’s Creating Better Cities with Children and Youth (2002) took on a more reformist bent, lamenting the decline of ‘street culture’ and even the shift from family television time to ‘bedroom culture’. Such works moved from simply the study of the issues of urban childhoods to advocacy for ways in which change could be enacted. Freeman and Aitken-Rose’s Future Shapers (2005) cross-examined urban planners to find that children were only considered in the planning of ‘recreation spaces’, but ignored in the planning streets, houses, shops, leisure facilities, and infrastructure.

  Technology became a key facilitator of childhood sociability in 21^st century Britain. A study from the Journal of Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties (2002) found that British children who did not own a mobile phone, those of working class backgrounds in majority, were especially vulnerable to social isolation, as the phone had become a key device around which friendships and communities were built. The digital divide also exacerbated pre-existing social divergences as highly social children more readily adopted digital devices as a means for deepening and expanding relations whereas less social children showed the opposite pattern. These children were thus not just socially excluded, but also denied an opportunity to develop digital skills. Those children who did have mobiles were also more likely to be able to cross ‘hitherto distinct social boundaries’. The problem was not always access to devices like mobile phones however, but also the skills necessary to operate them as Dominique Pasquier highlighted in Media at home (2002); both girls and working class households demonstrated a ‘problematic skills gap’ in the use of digital devices, as providing an opportunity for access to technology was easier than providing knowledge for use.

  Digital devices that allowed young people to “travel”, either physically or online, had mixed impacts upon their freedoms. One the one hand as Williams and Williams’ article Space Invaders (2005) suggested, the expectation of parents to be able to communicate with their children at all times, and the children’s constant awareness of being under surveillance, created an environment where children felt they had no private space which can be damaging to mental health. On the other hand Marilyn Campbell’s The Impact of the Mobile Phone on Young People’s Social Life (2005) demonstrated the negotiating power that a mobile phone could grant children when discussing curfews and boundaries for roaming with their parents, allowing more freedom than peers who did not have phones. On a more structural level familiarity with technology was rightly assumed to be a key skill for children in a future that would see a job market progressively more reliant on digital literacy; so whilst many areas of adult society and much of the academic literature encouraged children to get outdoors, Britain at large was forging an environment where the skills associated with outdoor activity were less valued than those of the digital and indoors. Todd Oppenheimer’sThe Flickering Mind (2003) reflected this duality of the moment, whereby children were on a boundary, as he saw it, between sensibly harnessing technology to help them become ‘creative problem solvers’ or falling victim to ‘computerisation and commercialization careening out of control’.

  Contrarily, whilst time spent in digital environments was often framed as a detracting from time spent in physical outdoor play, Holloway and Valentines’ study Cyberkids (2003) found the opposite. Echoing earlier studies such as the Department of Environment’s 1973 report and Robin Moore’s Childhood’s domain (1986), they found that children overwhelmingly preferred to be outside if the weather and light allowed. Time spent in front of a TV, phone, or monitor tended to replace ‘doing nothing’ time where they weren’t allowed outside or their peers weren’t. Later studies have also shown technology use to promote social interaction and allow children of differing abilities to become a part of everyday social practice. Furthermore, their research highlighted how computer use was highly controlled and negotiated in homes, and that parents were not at all powerless to prevent children being “drawn in” to screen-use if they wanted to stop them. The crux of the problem lay neither with children, parents, or the technology, but with the reality, or the perception of the reality, of a dangerous outside domain.

  Building on a now well-established literature of the benefits of nature, an increasing body of work was produced in the 2000s focussing simply on the benefits of play itself, under a fear of regimented children’s’ lives leading to depression and stress. Garry Landreth’s Play Therapy (2002), Joe Frost’s The Developmental Benefits of Playgrounds (2004), and Louise Chawla’s Growing Up in an Urbanizing World (2002) all advocated for the therapeutic powers of play that yielded ‘positions of cognitive clarity, power, and primacy to the player’. Chawla and Malone’s Neighbourhood Quality from Children’s Eyes (2003) gave insight into the ways play in natural environments created confidence in children as they were more able to physically affect them, conversely urban environments over which children could exert little control often instilled feelings of powerlessness. As Karen Malone pithily identified in her study of children in suburban Sydney: ‘places shape children and children shape places’. The safety of play in the digital world was also coming under question, Rachel Pain’s Paranoid Parenting? (2006) describing online bullying and harassment as ‘far from a parental bogeyman’. David Cohen’s The Development of Play (2006) saw the play crisis as one that also included the adult world, asking: ‘If the purpose of play is to prepare the child in various ways for adult life, what is the motive for adult play?’. As Cohen and many other academics and commentators saw it, the child was a useful tool through which to understand and criticise wider society, as children were seen as some of that society’s most vulnerable members.

  A particularly prevalent criticism of the period was popularly put by the influential British sociologist Frank Furedi in Therapy Culture (2004). Furedi was primarily concerned with the number of safety regulations being erected around children as part of what he called the ‘new security state’. This proliferation of regulation, he argued, was eliminating any possibility for learning, excitement, play, or risk, and shifting perspective away from the real dangers of modern childhood, the restrictions themselves. Marianna Papastephanou in Education, Risk and Ethics made the parallel point that western structures of education based around a ‘discourse of control’ were unhelpful in that they did not reflect the reality of risky uncertain human lives. Her observational studies led her to the conclusion that both children and adults had a ‘longing for the risks that make life meaningful’ but were being consistently denied them. The ‘billion-dollar industries’ in technology surrounding children were making increasingly enviable profits from the sale of both security and safety devices as well as indoor education and play devices.

  Whether these restrictions, often bolstered by the use of technology, were even making people safer was also on the agenda, or whether as Tim Gill’s No Fear (2007) put it, the risks of play in modern city streets had been ‘blown out of all proportion’. Torin Monahan’s Questioning Surveillance and Security (2006) pointed out that whilst surveillance technologies like CCTV cameras had been shown to be effective in tracking down criminals after a crime, ‘they do not actually prevent or reduce crime in any significant way’. Cindi Katz in Power, Space and Terror (2006) wrote that in relative terms the dangers of cars or strangers were nowhere near as pressing as those of poverty and inequality between children, and that street crime had been falling since the 1970s and 1980s, meaning parents generally played in more dangerous streets than those they denied their children.

  Restricting children to the indoors and digital environments created its own dangers a 2006 report for the NSPCC found, citing rising levels of obesity, diabetes, depression and other health problems that proportionally were more dangerous to children than what mostly concerned policy makers and parents. Technology’s role in this was multifaceted: through television and online media it propagated not wholly unjust fears over children’s outdoor safety, through CCTV, mobile phones, and GPS trackers it facilitated restrictions over childhood freedoms, and through computer games and television it offered an escape to children from those restrictions. A longitudinal study in 2010 found that long periods of time spent playing video games gave children difficulties with their attention spans, however a separate study from 2012 found exactly the opposite, so the health impacts of this too was ambivalent.

  Idolising Children (2007) by Daniel Donahoo ascribed issues of lost childhood freedoms to a the slightly contrary problem of parents wanting too much for their children. He argued that the promise of technology helped to foster ideas of impossibly “ideal” childhoods that neither the children or the parents could realistically achieve. As such in the attempt to create perfect personalised childhoods parents, educators, and policy makers were inadvertently making them worse. This trend extended far beyond Britain or “the west”, Pergrams and Zaradic’s Is love of nature becoming love of electronic media? (2008) found a fundamental shift away from ‘nature-based recreation’ globally over a period of 50 years by looking at visits to national parks. Along similar lines Dorothy Singer’s Children’s pastimes and play in sixteen Nations (2009) found a universal erosion of childhood across continents due to a lack of ‘experiential learning opportunities’. Furthermore parents’ ideas around what outdoor “play” was were also beginning to change, Kelly Fischer’s article Conceptual Split? (2008) finding that unstructured play was increasingly seen as a waste of time by parents who were also more likely to regard structured activities and sports as play. This was partly due to neoliberal competitive conceptions of children centred around personal narratives of success, that “messing around” was not productive.

  Physical city environments were also still changing in the 21^st century in ways that disadvantaged children. Whilst roads were sometimes being built more considerately, new housing developments in particular were constructed to child-unfriendly specifications. The housing stock generally since the 1980s grew larger on the internal footprint but smaller on the external, so people’s indoor living space grew at the expense of yards and gardens. Furthermore, modern housing façades were increasingly built with smaller windows in the front, garages, and smaller front porch areas. This meant that children had less physical outdoor space to play in modern developments and also, due to the houses being built more insularly, parents and neighbours had less ability to keep a passive watch on their children in the lane. The demographics of families also changed during this period, as parents tended towards having fewer children and guarding the ones they had more carefully, thus creating the phenomenon of “helicopter parenting”. One of the promises of technologically interwoven childhoods for the adult world was the possibility of persistent monitoring and thereby controlling and safekeeping of children in what Tonya Rooney called as a ‘just in case’ model in Trusting Children (2010). However, as she warns: ‘Rather than simply “playing it safe”, parents and carers may be depriving children of the opportunity to be trusted and to learn about trusting others, and the opportunity for growing competence and capacity that can result from this’. Indeed, little evidence has been presented to show that people in the 21^st century are more untrustworthy than in prior decades, but there is increasing evidence of a culture of suspicion.

  By 2010 academic research was beginning to assess digital environments of childhood holistically, incorporating them into understandings of environment more generally, and as such recognising the complications that arise by thinking of digital devices as simply either “good” or “bad” for children; some were even advocating for a blended use of technology in order to help children get outdoors, advice that would have raised many academic eyebrows only a few years prior. In terms of education whilst the internet and other digital tools, providing the world at their fingertips, discouraged the use of a child’s memory for the memorising of specific facts, they encouraged an ability to scan information rapidly and efficiently. As Jim Taylor wrote in How Technology Is Changing the Way Children Think, not having to retain this sort of information in the brain allows it to ‘engage in more “higher-order” processing such as contemplation, critical thinking, and problem-solving’. Digital technologies certainly comprised an element of the story of the loss of freedom in British childhoods, but that element was more liminal than much of the literature examined individually suggests. Taken together over time, however, an image emerges of digital childhoods not as piteous sources of degradation but as an element enmeshed in a much wider diverse narrative of shifting social dynamics of power, control, and freedom in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

  CONCLUSION

  An apparent cultural paradox lies at the heart of British digital childhoods today, and indeed our digital lives more broadly: a culture of individualism that operates inseparably withina culture of connectivity. Technology is ever-more tailored to the individual in terms of personalised “smart delivery” of recommendations, advertisements, news, and voice-activated digital assistants, however at the same time it is also ever-more universal with the majority of this individualised content being served by a minority of companies, devices, and services. The mobile phone, television, and computer have acted as facilitators for a new spontaneity and flexibility in young people’s lives, being able to arrange and rearrange social events with the rapidity of a ‘more fluid culture of information social interaction’. However this option has been historically more open to some more privileged children than others, and at the same time technology has been a facilitator of increasing restriction upon children’s lives. Yet the spectres of the “screen zombie” and occasionally the “nature nymph” still hang over the debate, encouraging a polarisation of opinion over whether children have been “taken in” by technology or the belief that they never could be. Either way the idea that ‘children have won the battle, they are exactly where they want to be’ does not capture the complexity of the situation.

  The impacts of digital technologies are not inevitabilities that form changes beyond human control or understanding, they are socially shaped elements of both childhood and adulthood. Adopting this perspective allows the reader to see these devices as within a space of continual negotiations in shifting economic, social, and political circumstances. As children’s lives become ever more digital it is important that historians begin to grapple with the digital environment and conceive of it as a “space” where children have existed, a space that both moulds children, is moulded by them and other factors, and is experienced differently by different people. Future research could pursue multiple avenues, but particularly helpful would be interdisciplinary research alongside computer scientists who could investigate specific design qualities of technologies and how they have influenced behaviours over time. Oral histories of digital childhoods would also constitute an important archival resource for the future when academics want to consider the crucial transitionary generation between the pre and post digital worlds.

  Author/Publisher: Louis Lorenzo

  Date of Publication: 22nd of January 2026

  2026.01.22