ABSTRACT
During the 1980s and 1990s debates in Britain about social, political and economic affairs have been heavily circumscribed by the discourses of the New Right, which has made for a heightened public discussion of children and childhood. This discussion has taken place against a backdrop of important social and economic changes, which have been in train since the Second World War. For Alanen (1992, p. 6), these changes have brought a decreased significance of the traditional agencies of childhood (the nuclear family and the school) in relation to other agencies: child and youth services, the mass media and peer groups. It is the anxiety wrought by these changes that has found its most forcible and public expression in the discourses of the New Right. Indeed, children have often seemed to be at the heart of contemporary ideological wrangles. After all, in the most memorable political enunciation of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher declared: ‘There is no such thing as “society”. There are men. And there are women. And there are families.’ The assumed children of these ‘families’ have often appeared in the rhetoric of the New Right to hover between Heaven and Hell. In Heaven, the male head of their nuclear family, doubtless an entrepreneur now liberated from state control and trade union interference, provides them with love, discipline and selective education. In Hell, children are menaced by a gallery of social demons: single mothers, absent fathers, muddleheaded social workers failing to detect abuse, drug pushers, paedophiles, ‘dogooders’ reluctant to punish young offenders, ‘trendy’ teachers, doctors prescribing contraceptives for young girls, media executives purveying violent and sexually explicit material, and so on. Most of the chapters in this book are intended to go beyond these often lurid and melodramatic representations.
