Learning to live in the unforced rhythms of grace
I might have missed them
had not the lingering morning storm left me
head-bowed, eyes-down
as I walked the dog.
.
A little row of crocuses in the gutter:
tiny,
fragile,
reminding me
that even in the cast-off debris of our world
hope can spring forth.
Beauty,
simplicity,
life.
.
The call for abstracts for the BASPCAN 2018 International Child Protection Congress is now open.
The congress theme of Thinking outside the box reflects our desire to learn and develop, encouraging all participants to be creative and reflexive, and to interact with each other. A large part of this is the programme of free papers, posters, workshops, symposia, and training events presented by congress participants. We are looking forward to a great programme with lots of engaging presentations by practitioners, researchers, experts by experience and others.
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If you have a good idea, some original research or innovative practice that you can present, or if you are able to draw on your own experience as a survivor of abuse or someone who has been involved with family support services, we invite you to submit an outline (abstract) of your presentation.
Click here to find out more and submit your abstract.
Our second confirmed keynote speaker for the BASPCAN child protection congress, 2018 is Dr Irene Stevens, independent consultant and expert in complexity theory.
The protection of children takes place in a dynamic and, at times, fast moving environments. Yet many of the models which are used in risk management and decision making are based on linear assumptions. While this has been challenged, particularly in the Munro Review, there may be resistance to thinking outside the usual linear box. I will present some key ideas from complexity theory and explore how the development of a ‘Complexity Imagination’ among those who work with children can contribute to better outcomes for children and staff. The key concepts among others to be explored and related to child protection are bifurcation, emergence, self-organising criticality, dissipative structures and non-linear conceptualisation of issues.
Complexity theory, by its very nature addresses life at ‘the edge of chaos’ in dynamic systems. This is at the very crux of decision making in practice. In order to protect children, we need to think outside the box. Concepts from Complexity theory can add to the toolkit used by practitioners by raising questions about the nature of risk and how we, as human beings, deal with this. By developing some of the concepts from Complexity theory and exploring how they can be put into practice, staff and organisations may be much better prepared to contribute to the protection of children.
Dr Irene Stevens was a residential child care worker and manager, and a social care educator from 1984-2000. She then worked at the Scottish Centre of Excellence for Residential Child Care based at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, from 2000-2011, where she carried out training, research and evaluations in residential child care. Since 2011, she has been an independent child care consultant carrying out research and training both nationally and internationally. She has published on the topic of Complexity Theory since 2007 and has presented on the topic of risk and complexity at national and international conferences.
This major Congress will bring together experts by experience – survivors of abuse and users of services – practitioners, researchers and trainers, commissioners and policy makers from around the UK, Europe and beyond, to learn from each other, reflect and consider how we can improve services to support families and protect children and young people.
The theme of Thinking Outside the Box reflects our desire to learn and develop, encouraging participants to be creative and reflexive, and to interact with each other.
The call for abstracts and registration opens soon. Keep an eye on the website for further details, for the full programme and details of other keynote speakers.
To register your interest and receive the latest updates as they become available, please email conferences@baspcan.org.uk with your email address and the header ‘Congress 2018 Updates’.
I am really excited that Anne Fine, celebrated children’s laureate will be a keynote speaker at our BASPCAN 10th International Congress to be held at the University of Warwick in April 2018. Anne is the author of such books as Madame Doubtfire, Flour Babies, and The Tulip Touch. Her keynote talk, Pebbles in the fairy tale will explore what we can learn from children’s literature about protecting children.
The theme of the congress is ‘Thinking outside the box: innovative perspectives on protecting children and young people.’ The theme reflects our desire to learn and develop, encouraging participants to be creative and reflexive and to learn from each other.
The congress will bring together practitioners, survivors of abuse, researchers, trainers and policy makers. We will learn from each other, reflect, and consider how we can improve services to support families and protect children and young people.
Literature has always been the most accessible instrument we have for ethical enquiry and the clearest way to answer Socrates’ great question, “How ought we to live?” But all too often the child’s need for a means to interpret their own experience of childhood is ignored. A young person who cannot bear even to begin to think about his or her own unhappy and stressed situation can often begin, safely, to explore the problems they face through fiction – somebody else’s problem.
In her talk, Anne Fine will show how books can offer shafts of light and comfort to the troubled child. She will show how they can foster self-scrutiny – not just in the young reader him or herself, but also in the (often overly self-protective) adults who deal with them. Anne will show what these fictional avenues of vicarious experience can mean to young readers, what insights they can bring, and what a comfort they can be. She will try to show how the tolerance and understanding offered by particular novels can offer the twenty first century equivalent of the pebbles in the fairy tale, gleaming in the moonlight and showing the way out of the dark forest.
Anne is a distinguished writer for both adults and children. She has twice won both of Britain’s most coveted awards for children’s literature, the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread (now Costa) Award, along with a Guardian Award, two Smarties/Nestle Awards, and many other national, regional and international prizes.
Anne is known for writing, with sensitivity and often with humour, on many serious subjects that affect the lives of young readers. Madame Doubtfire tackles the topic of access and custody after divorce. Both Goggle-Eyes and Step by Wicked Step delve into the special strains and complications of stepfamily relationships. Flour Babies is a comedy that illuminates for its readers both the joys and the sheer effort and commitment necessary for successful parenting. The Tulip Touch is a novel about a seriously disturbed child from an unsupportive home. The Book of the Banshee delineates teenage upheavals. Blood Family deals with the topic of family brutality and addiction. Up On Cloud Nine is a masterful portrait of an eccentric child’s progress through education. Charm School has been described as ‘Germaine Greer for Juniors’, and Bill’s New Frock unpacks unthinking gender stereotypes.
Anne Fine has also published eight black comedies for adults. She was Children’s Laureate from 2001-3. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been awarded an OBE. Her work has been translated into forty five languages.
Registration for the congress will open soon. There are special rates for BASPCAN members and for students, the unemployed, those on low incomes and those from low-income countries.
A call for abstracts will open soon. We are looking for presentations from practitioners, researchers and experts by experience (both survivors of abuse and users of family services). So watch this space, or register your interest on the BASPCAN congress website.
Click here to find out about the other exciting keynote speakers, to see the programme, and for more information about the congress.
Dear Mr Cunningham,
I have recently signed a petition calling on Parliament to consider withdrawing the invitation to President Donald Trump to make a state visit to the United Kingdom. I understand this petition, which to date has over 1.8 million signatures, will be debated in Parliament on 20 February. I would urge you to support this petition.
Since coming to office in January, President Trump has shown himself to be totally unsuitable as a world leader. The policies he has sought to implement through executive actions have been damaging to his own citizens as well as more globally threatening to world security, justice and human rights. In my view these executive actions betray deep-seated attitudes in the President which pay little regard to human rights, respect for all peoples, or care for our global environment.
In particular, his executive order of 27 January temporarily barring people from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the USA, along with an indefinite ban on Syrians from entering, appears ill-conceived and inflammatory, and his response to a judicial ruling on the order betrays an attitude of disrespect for due processes of law. Similarly, his executive orders on building a wall along the border with Mexico, and withdrawing funding for sanctuary cities could seriously contravene the basic rights to free movement of many people.
His presidential memoranda approving the construction of two oil pipelines shows a disrespect for the rights of his own indigenous populations, along with his recognised denial of the impact on the environment of the continued use of fossil fuels.
Furthermore, his statement that he considers the use of torture acceptable is a blatant contradiction of the Geneva Conventions and a serious threat to human rights.
It seems to me that these and other executive actions are not isolated aberrations, but betray deep-seated attitudes that were apparent both during the election campaign and since taking office: attitudes of disrespect for women, foreign nationals, those of other religions, and indigenous peoples. I, along with many other people in this country and around the world – including his own citizens in the USA – find such attitudes deeply offensive, divisive and potentially dangerous in a world leader.
While I recognise that, as Head of State of the USA, it is important that our government works with President Trump and with his government, I am deeply concerned that he is being invited to visit the UK on a state visit. Such a visit, hosted by our Queen, who has been a true world leader for human rights and respect for all peoples, would in my view be totally inappropriate. It would place Her Majesty in a compromising position, and would appear to endorse and lend approval to President Trump’s policies and to the underlying discriminatory attitudes.
I hope therefore that you will lend your support to this petition and urge the Prime Minister to withdraw the invitation.
Yours sincerely
Dr Peter Sidebotham
Imagine a world where each child has the right to live in a happy family that is full of hope, where children can play in clean playgrounds, where no child is beaten or hit with a piece of wood, belt or hanger, or is cursed, pinched, slapped, or made to kneel on mung beans.
That was the dream of a non-violent and non-discriminatory family and community expressed by a group of street youth in Manila (1).
Such a dream is something we strive for in our work to combat child maltreatment worldwide. It is not something that will be easily achieved, but we need to do all we can to promote it through education, family support and early intervention, services for abused children, legislation, and research. It is fitting, therefore, that our final issue in the 25th anniversary volume of Child Abuse Review, now available online, should focus on research from different countries, bringing a global perspective on different aspects of safeguarding children.
The research being reported by Daniel Wartenweiler and Roseann Mansukhani in this issue is a powerful example of what can be achieved through participatory work with young people in a resource-poor setting. The 11 young people who took part in the research reported often quite disturbing examples of both physical and verbal abuse within the guise of discipline. The young people reported feelings of rejection, anger and resentment, rifts in the parent-child relationship, and defiant behaviours as a result. However, their participation in the research project truly empowered them and enabled them to effect change in their relationships and their community.
‘From the safety of their storytelling, [the young people] had made the transition to the bigger world, and from being hidden and disempowered, they had become actors on social transformation. Because they had been empowered themselves, they now wanted other children to become empowered too.’
As part of the research project, the young people themselves decided to produce a short video, communicating what they wanted to say about corporal punishment, and to show the video to parents from their community. An abbreviated version of the video with English subtitles is available online (https://youtu.be/dP5nFhj_9O4) and is well worth watching.
Most impressive, however, were the reported changes following the parents’ meeting, with most participants reporting changes in parental discipline and parent-child relationships, summed up in the experience of one young person who had previously reported that:
‘Sometimes […] she [mother] shamed me in front of my friends and she took my clothes off in front of many people. Sometimes she tied me to a pedicab with a chain. Sometimes she beat me and she banged my head on the steel bars.’
Following the project, this young person reported that she had returned to live with her mother, and that their relationship had improved:
‘I am not scared anymore because I know my mother is now listening to my problems and to my feelings’
As well as Wartenweiler and Mansukhani’s inspiring work from the Philippines, this issue of Child Abuse Review also features research from Kenya, Nigeria, Ukraine, Romania, Lithuania and the USA.
Olusesan Ayodeji Makinde’s paper on infant trafficking and baby factories in Nigeria makes disturbing reading, but brings to light a crucial issue and presents a challenge to the international community in relation to infant trafficking for adoption and exploitation.
There are some equally challenging issues in relation to institutional care and international adoption flagged up in papers by Lavinia Barone and her colleagues, and by Shihning Chou and Kevin Browne.
You can read my editorial (free open access) and see the other papers (BASPCAN members and subscription only – sorry) by clicking on the links below. I hope you will take the time to read these, and that you, like me, will be both challenged and inspired.
Child Abuse Review Volume 25, Issue 6
Table of Contents
Editorial
Peter Sidebotham Kneeling on Mung Beans (pages 405–409)
Original Papers
Daniel Wartenweiler and Roseann Mansukhani Participatory Action Research with Filipino Street Youth: Their Voice and Action against Corporal Punishment (pages 410–423)
Toby Candler, Hannah Gannon and John Wachira Child Protection in a Low-Resource Setting: Experiences From Paediatric Professionals in Kenya (pages 424–432)
Olusesan Ayodeji Makinde Infant Trafficking and Baby Factories: A New Tale of Child Abuse in Nigeria (pages 433–443)
Shihning Chou and Kevin D. Browne The Relationship over Time between International Adoption and Institutional Care in Romania and Lithuania (pages 444–453)
Lavinia Barone, Antonio Dellagiulia and Francesca Lionetti When the Primary Caregiver is Missing: Investigating Proximal and Distal Variables Involved in Institutionalised Children’s Adjustment (pages 454–468)
Marina Lalayants and Jonathan D. Prince Child Neglect and Onset of Substance Use Disorders among Child Welfare-Involved Adolescents (pages 469–478)
Training Update
Book Reviews
Redressing Institutional Abuse of Children by Kathleen Daly, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2014.
Last week a reporter on the BBC news referred to the President of the United States as ‘the leader of the free world.’ The phrase was used somewhat derisively, but nevertheless, to my mind, betrays some fundamentally flawed assumptions that date back to its first use in the years following World War II, and, I suspect, remain quite widely held assumptions in many democratic, capitalist societies.
I accept that the president of the United States, by virtue of his position, holds some leadership responsibilities within the United States. There are some things which only the incumbent of the White House can do. However, holding such responsibilities does not necessarily make that person a leader, and it certainly does not confer any leadership status beyond the United States. True leadership is earned, not conferred.
A leader is only a leader if others follow. And to achieve that the leader needs to be a person of integrity, vision, courage, compassion, and humility. To the extent that the president of the United States demonstrates any of those qualities, I would be prepared to attribute some leadership to them. Without such qualities, no matter what he, or anyone else, claims, he is not my leader nor a leader beyond those in his own country who have chosen to follow him.
Not the cry, but the flight of a wild duck, leads the flock to fly and follow. —Chinese Proverb
The same would apply to whoever sits in the Oval Office, as indeed to any other head of state or other prominent person. Unless and until other nations, heads of state and individual citizens of the so called free world choose to follow the US president, he is not, and never can be, ‘the leader of the free world.’
While the issues around assumption 1 have been thrown into sharp relief by the character of the current incumbent of the White House, this assumption is far more subtle, and I suspect more widespread.
According to the World Bank, the United States of America has a population of just over 320 million, exceeded only, but quite substantially, by China and India. Its Gross Domestic Product is 18 trillion US dollars, over 60% larger than the next highest country (China), and greater than the whole of the European Union put together. In terms of military strength, the USA has 1,381,250 military personnel, again only exceeded by China and India, but closely followed by North Korea and the Russian Federation. According to the Arms Control Association (www.armscontrol.org) the USA has 6,800 nuclear warheads, 45% of the world total and only exceeded by Russia.
So on population, wealth and military strength, the United States ranks within the top 3 countries of the world, and far exceeds all other countries in terms of its GDP.
But does that make it the leader of the free world?
Are size, wealth and military might really the values to which we look for our leadership?
Or, to put it another way, domination, greed and brutality?
It seems to me that, without even recognising it, we have bought into a mentality that assumes that might is right, whether that is in size, wealth or strength. And in doing so, we legitimize bullying and a disregard for the rights of others.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth – Jesus Christ
As far as I can tell, the concept of ‘the free world’ was introduced during the Second World War to refer to those countries fighting against the fascist ‘Axis’ powers (Germany, Italy and Japan). During the Cold War, the term shifted to refer to non-communist countries. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the free world refers to ‘those countries whose governments have been chosen in free and fair elections and whose people have full human rights.’
But who are we to determine which countries truly are or are not part of that ‘free’ world? Would that include a country with a democratically-elected communist government? Does it exclude countries where religious prerogatives determine the course of government?
Perhaps, though, one of the biggest difficulties with this assumption is the implication that all peoples living in our self-determined ‘free world’ are free and enjoy full human rights.
I wonder how many of those now to be denied health insurance would say they enjoy free and full human rights, or those 2 million or more incarcerated in US prisons, or the residents of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation?
And perhaps there is an even deeper, more subtle assumption here. Even without flagrant disregard for human rights, am I, in my country, surrounded by advertising, my choices controlled by corporate giants, constrained by a culture that values wealth and aggressive ambition, also truly free?
In an interesting twist of words in different contexts, the BBC made a policy decision to refer to the group that calls itself Islamic State as ‘So called Islamic State’. In a similar vein, perhaps the president of the United States could be referred to as the ‘so called leader of the so called free world.’
But rather than acquiesce even that far to these flawed assumptions, I would much rather see all of us thinking in terms of the whole world and all humanity, not just our own little, self-defined corner of it. And I want to be someone who helps create an alternative view of leadership: one that respects all those who truly embody values of integrity, compassion, justice and humility.
So how about a movement to identify those values we truly want to promote that will lead to all people being free? And how about starting with recognising and affirming those people in whom we do see those values?
Art is not
just an expression of beauty:
soft, green pastels
watercolour meadows on misty hills
leading me to lie down by peaceful waters
and rest.
It is an expression of truth
in its brutal reality,
cruel brutality.
The darkness that surrounds
the anguished cry of a mother separated
from her child;
the screams of a young man on a waterboard;
the groans of our mother
earth ravished, exploited.
My pen and my brush
longing for justice
when there is none.
