Listen to thisMy own experience this week has got me thinking about how we as a society (and I suspect most societies across the Western world) respond to children. There is a house on our street that is home to a Focolare community. Focolare is a Christian movement with its roots in the Catholic Church, although it now has a broader appeal across faiths. The word “focolare” apparently is Italian for hearth, symbolizing community. Groups of men and women come together to live in community. They pool their resources and spend time when they’re not working engaging in good works.
There are three men in the Focolare community in our street. They are an active presence in the neighbourhood, often helping with gardening or other tasks. They were particularly active during the “Make Poverty History” campaign in response to the meeting of the G8 at Gleneagles here in Scotland last summer.
Over the past few years we have got to know the Focolare guys reasonably well. One of the things they do is to organize clubs for local kids across different age groups. My eight year old goes along. This weekend, his club has gone off on the train for a national gathering of the different Focolare communities from across the UK held near London.
What prompts me to write about this is the response when we tell people that we have allowed our eight year old to go off with unmarried men, who aren’t relatives, who choose to live together and who actively seek out local youngsters. It has got to the stage where my wife is embarrassed and defensive in trying to explain where Aidan is this weekend. For me his weekend away offers the prospect of a break from the interminable fights over where he left his football boots just before we head out for a match. For others it assumes a far more sinister aspect. Are we sure he should be going? How well do we really know these guys? Are we mad? The questions are posed with an air of superior awareness that seemingly cannot fathom why we are letting this happen.
It’s a sad reflection on society and the assumptions we make about adults and children. In fact neither my wife nor I are mad. It’s rather that we choose to see the good in people and in situations. And personally, as one who worked for eight years for the De La Salle Brothers, a group of men who live together in community, who pool their resources and who commit their lives to the education and care of children, I have few qualms about men who choose such a path.
The different perspectives on Aidan's weekend reflect I think some disturbing trends in society, a society it seems that is increasingly characterized by a state of misanthropy, a tendency to mistrust our fellow human beings and to fear the worst of them. It’s a state of mind that has colonized child care services, which have now, to all intents and purposes become child protection services.
Child protection for me represents an essentially fearful way of interfacing with children. One that perhaps says more about adults than it does about the real extent of any threat children face. Very often, those who are most vocal about protecting children are those who don’t actually dirty their hands in caring for them. The children they want to protect are an abstraction; I sometimes wonder if they are children at all, so idealized and sanitized is their representation. In fact it’s not really children who are represented in this discourse at all but the fears of adults. Rather than accepting and engaging with kids as they are in the here and now, they are vested within a child protection frame of mind with the status of redemptive agent, a secularist reincarnation of the Christ child. What this discourse says is that our adult lives are so unfulfilled and lacking in meaning that we need to invest everything in the image of the redemptive child “they become the future that we ourselves are so unsure of.
When we start with such a dysfunctional view of children and childhood we are inclined to strike out at everything that might threaten them, real or imagined. We see dark forces surrounding them (or is it us?); we think apocalyptic thoughts. And of course when our starting point is to see badness all around us, then sure enough we’ll find it. This state of mind is scary, especially so for those who work directly with kids “for the line between normal everyday care and what can be construed within a child protection mindset as abuse is a particularly fine one and each of us who engage directly with kids might find ourselves on either side of it at different times.
This tendency to identify badness or evil isn’t a new thing. It’s the periodic resurgence of historical witch-hunts, which occur when societies are unsure where they’re heading. Anyone familiar with what happens in witch-hunts will identify uncanny and uncomfortable parallels between them and what is happening now in relation to child protection.
I’m conscious in recent writing that I risk coming over as a grumpy old man, tilting at windmills. I think I do so because I retain a belief in goodness, in notions of altruism and of service. I saw it on a daily basis as a practitioner. I still see it in different places and in different ways “like when guys choose to give of their time to take my son away for the weekend. However, I hang on to this belief in goodness in a world that is increasingly fearful and distrustful. We need to confront such misanthropy “it’s not good for the kids, nor indeed for those adults caught up in it. Oh and by the way, I’ve just picked Aidan up from the train station and he is back home safe and well and already doing my head in – should I be worried?
