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  After Outrage Must Come Positive Change for Children

The Irish Times
January 2, 2010

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0102/1224261524877.html

CELEBRATING THE new year is a testament to the human capacity for hope. A new millennium is even more of a turning point, but the last decade knocked a great deal of human optimism out of us, writes BREDA O’BRIEN

We saw the impact of global terrorism, natural disasters and human greed. Over it all was the dawning realisation that we were endangering even the possibility of survival on our own planet, due to runaway consumption of fossil fuels and rapacious plundering of finite resources.

Here at home, certainly we felt the impact of major international events, but for many of us it was a particular source of shame that our own country was embroiled in scandal after scandal involving the abuse of children, with most media attention focused on children damaged while in the care of the religious orders or the Catholic Church.

Others highlighted the fact that 20 children died in care during that decade, and hundreds of children seeking refuge in Ireland simply disappeared from our system.

Even the most jaded of adults finds it hard to be immune to the wonder of the potential that a baby or a child represents, paradoxically heightened by the sheer vulnerability and dependency of these small scraps of humanity. When that innocence and vulnerability is betrayed, we are rightly outraged. My hopes for the next decade are that we would go beyond the politics of outrage to really make positive changes for all children. We cannot do that without looking at all the influences on children, beginning with families, the most important people in a child’s life.

It is fascinating to see that New Labour in Britain finally recognises the importance of family form for children. According to the Sunday Times, Labour will introduce compulsory relationship and sexuality education from 2011 where children from age seven will be taught about the “nature and importance of marriage and stable family relationships for family life and bringing up children”.

As Geoffrey Shannon, family law expert, declared at the 2008 Ceifin conference, “marriage is the gold standard and the best predictor of the durability of a relationship”. Of course, all families, no matter what their form, deserve our support, but we should try to maximise the possibility that children will be successfully reared by the man and woman responsible for bringing them into the world.

For that reason, too, the assisted human reproduction industry urgently needs regulation. It is of course important to restore protection to embryos, but there are other issues. The desire for a child is deeply embedded in human beings, but it cannot happen at the expense of the right of a child to their own family, identity and vital information.

At the very least, anonymity for egg and sperm donors should end, and all children conceived through egg, sperm or embryo donation must be entitled to full information about their origins.

Looking at social policies through the lens of the impact they have on families should become the norm. It was viewing things this way which meant that initiatives were taken to begin to end poverty traps that make people better off if they live separately and do not marry.

We have seen serious cuts in social welfare and other family supports during recent budgets. Let us hope that we have seen the end of such tactics, as grinding poverty wears down the resilience of even the strongest families.

Educational investment must resume, with particular focus on children with special needs. Special needs assistants were introduced with the best of intentions, but much, much more is needed. Introducing children to mainstream schooling has been a positive development, but it must also be recognised that for certain children, mainstreaming does not meet the needs of the child. For this reason, small, child-focused units outside the mainstream must continue to be provided. Some children thrive best with intensive one-to-one work, others by spending time in small group environments that take account of their easily overwhelmed sensory systems.

Perhaps the next decade might also see us really tackling our national obsession with alcohol. Irish social life revolves around occasions to get drunk, and children are often the collateral damage. Frankly, it is more than hypocritical for adults to criticise young people for drinking excessively, when they are simply replicating adult behaviour.

Similarly, we need to stop shrugging our shoulders and insisting that it is impossible to discourage sexual experimentation among the young. Teenagers, especially girls, find themselves under increasing pressure to be sexually active, often in circumstances that are far from ideal.

Getting blind drunk and sleeping with someone you scarcely know is hardly a recipe for self-esteem and fulfilment. Adults whose only advice is to use a condom betray a generation who deserve better. If the Twilight novels can make abstinence sexy and romantic, why can’t adults reinforce that message?

On a different note, it would be wonderful if the church could provide more examples of the kind of luminous faith that Sharon Commins and Hilda Kawuki displayed as kidnap victims in Darfur, praying to St Jude and their guardian angels. Or perhaps if we saw more in the church of the kind of the self-effacing service shown by Fr Michael Sinnott, it might help many young people grown utterly cynical about faith, not least due to growing up at a time when every few months seemed to bring another sexual abuse scandal.

Maybe, too, if the church finally gets its act together on child protection, we can begin to acknowledge the pervasiveness of child abuse in our society. Reducing the church to rubble and removing it from all public affairs would only change the location of some child abuse, not eradicate it.

There is much that needs to be done in this area, not least tackling the backlog of allegations of child neglect and abuse, and reforming the HSE so that instead of causing social workers to burn out and despair, it really helps them to support families.

Let’s hope that 2010 will signal an era when those who are allegedly grown-ups start taking seriously their responsibility to the next generation, and most importantly, the responsibility to hand on to them a habitable planet. Happy new year.

 
 

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