If you have a negative number and you want to make it into a positive one you need to add a larger positive number to do so: -10 needs +11 to make it =1

I wonder if the same applies to other aspects of life. For example if you have a negative image of young people do you need a larger positive image to redress the balance? If so I wonder then on the wisdom of the Barnardo’s Children in Trouble Campaign.

The campaign includes a very well produced film showing hunters hunting down children while narrating comments that adults have apparently actually said about children. They’ve had a brilliant publicity launch - I heard Barnardo’s Chief Executive discussing the campaign on Radio 4 this morning, and even this lowly blog was sent pre-publicity well in advance with links to the survey findings, film and so on.

So a very impressive and well put together campaign - and one with a message I very much agree with. But somehow it doesn’t feel comfortable. Obviously its not designed to make you feel comfortable - you should feel uncomfortable thinking that adults speak so negatively about children and young people, but that’s not the cause of my unease. Instead I wonder whether actually this kind of negativity can reinforce further negative attitudes, hence my maths lesson at the start! -10 + -5 = -15, not good!

A more practical example can be heard in the short Radio 4 interview with children from Birmingham about their reaction to how adults view them having seen the film. You start to get the sense of a battle between children and adults. Undoubtedly there is a battle, and always will be, but how do you best go about bridging the divide - positive activities to bring people together? or hard hitting campaigns showing how bad the other side is?

What I think is really sad about this isn’t that some adults do feel this way (and it is only some if you consider that the 2021 people that took part in the survey accounts for 0.003% of the actual adult population in the UK), but that because of the way the media drives our society a large charity acting in the best interests of children feels the only way they can get good publicity for their cause is to try and shock.

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edit: Thanks to Debbie Long for pointing to this film to redress the balance a little…

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Tags: child rights, prejudice, Society & Issues

I posted up a load of these a year ago but never realised a load more were released a month later. You can see the full list of short animations about the various articles for the UN Rights of the Child here

There’s a simplified version of what the articles are in this post. There’s the odd one I don’t really get (if not for the title!) as the message is a bit vague (like the one with the donkeys!!?!) or its been badly produced, but the majority are brilliant. I’m not sure ‘favourites’ seems appropriate given the topic but here’s a select few that I think are well produced.

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Tags: age, campaign, child rights, Films & Social Media, Participation & Citizenship, prejudice, social media

(Guest Post by Hugh Doyle, outgoing Project Manager for the Youth Participation Project (YPP) in Donegal)

In the early days of YPP, from our base in a small office in Drumany Old Church in Letterkenny, Bill Vaughan and I, ably supported by Project Coordinator Gerry McGeady, set about our task of “Capacity-Building for participation the population of young people and service providers in the North West” or so the Action Plan said anyway!  We first set about developing reference groups of young people all across the North West.  In this way young people looked at specific themes (mainly Alcohol and Drugs, Mental Health and Sexual Health) and presented their ideas to service planners, managers and providers at our first conference, Right to Be, in the Everglades Hotel in Derry on the 2nd December 2005.  The planners and managers were highly impressed with the insight and knowledge those young people showed that day and why wouldn’t young people show (more…)

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Tags: child rights, youth work

I hadn’t heard of ‘Beatbullying’ before but had a look at their new website which you can find here

Slightly annoyingly on most pages on the site a video automatically plays of some person or another talking about bullying (especially irritating when you see the same film several times as you navigate through!)

What I couldn’t find on the site was a definition of what bullying actually is. There are descriptions of things to look out for that may indicate if a child is being bullied or is a bully but I couldn’t find anything to define bullying.

I’m interested because it seems like one of those terms that gets thrown around that we all know is a bad thing - but what is it?! I do wonder too where the line is between unnaceptable ‘bullying’, and behaviour that actually its quite important for children & young people to learn to deal with?

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Tags: age, child rights, Resources, Society & Issues

Tristan Donovan wrote an interesting Opinion piece that you can see here. His original question was

• Are we getting older sooner or staying young longer?

I thought it interesting anyway because I think maybe the answer is both. Often I’ve wondered whether children “grow up” too fast, I also sometimes question if youth work may even hasten this with so much emphasis on ‘empowering’ young people.

In the rest of Tristans article he discusses how proposed restrictions on under 18 year olds seemingly contradict the campaign for 16 year olds to be able to vote. I’d agree that it would…… that is if you agree with the premise that you should reach a magic age and then all the entitlements of adulthood are yours. On the otherhand you may argue there should be a gradual transition of responsibilities - in fact perhaps there already is if you look at this post showing the different ages at which young people gain legal responsibilities.

Although reading through that list doesn’t give the impression that it was planned to be a system to support young people to take on increasing responsibility until becoming a ‘full adult’ - instead it looks more like people randomly deciding ages they think may be suitable for certain things.

Arguably this is also whats happening right now - on the one hand theres the camp that argue young people should be able to vote at 16, and then there are those saying 18 year olds are not yet capable of drinking alcohol responsibly or purchasing knives etc. Nobody though seems to have taken an overall view and said what is the best process through which we can support young people to take on all of these responsibilities, and in what order or priority are they handed over to them?

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Tags: age, child rights, politics, prejudice, Society & Issues, youth work

I wrote a few weeks ago about the Grace Orphan Project in Zomba, Malawi and that we had offered to sponsor some of the children so that they can go to School. Well I’m very pleased that today we’ve agreed to support 10 children to go to school including covering the costs of their school uniforms, text books and extra tuition.

I’ll post updates on how this progresses later in the year.

The cost for each childs school fee is an average of £21 a year! Not a lot to us but if you consider that the average wage in Malawi is about 80 pence a day (£24 month) then relatively thats a very large amount and for children without parents there may be nobody to provide any kind of financial assistance.

We’d like to support more children in the future so we’re on the look out for any kinds of donations towards this. All money donated will be used directly for the work of the Grace Project - if you’d like to make a donation send us an email to enquiries@yomofoundation.co.uk

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Tags: Africa & Overseas, child rights, poverty, ya

 

Some more interviews with children involved with the Grace Orphan Project in Zomba, Malawi. Mussa (12) and Simple (13) are two of the nicest young people I’ve ever met - if they were in this country we’d have jumped at the chance to get them volunteering with us. As it is its probably more worthwhile that they’re talents are put to use to help the Grace project develop - lets hope they get the opportunities they will need to develop their education and stay involved….

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Tags: Africa & Overseas, child rights, film, poverty, ya

I caught this on BBC the other morning:

“I think children act like adults at an alarmingly early age,” said Dame Jacqueline Wilson, who has sold more than 30 million books. Her remarks came as a poll by her publisher suggested that more than half of parents believe childhood is now over by 11.

Which is of course a clever bit of publicity to launch her book. But it’s an interesting topic and my first thought was that its true - childhood and something I’ve long had a problem with is the tendency for work done with young people to put them in positions of adult responsibility (rather than allowing them to participate as children/young people).

Once I got off my high horse though I thought back to the children we work with in Malawi - their education finishes at primary level and then they may have to fend for themselves or even support their siblings. Then I thought its not so long ago children in this country could have been in a similar situation - the school leaving age was younger, think of the workhouses and what about the age of (more…)

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