Listen to thisViolence in teen fiction goes in the dock
Do authors of YA novels glamorise crime, or help readers to avoid it? In the wake of the murder of teacher Ann Maguire, authors answer charges of glamorising violence
Ten days before 15-year-old schoolboy Will Cornick stabbed his Spanish teacher Ann Maguire to death in front of his classmates, one of her former students, teen novelist Anthony McGowan, celebrated the launch of a film based on his novel The Knife that Killed Me. Cornick, who had planned a murder spree, told psychiatrists afterwards that he “couldn’t give a shit … everything I’ve done is fine and dandy”. And in a chilling case of art anticipating life, McGowan’s novel, which was nominated for numerous awards including the Guardian children’s fiction prize, tells the story of a fatal stabbing in a school based on Corpus Christi College in Leeds where he, too, had once been taught by Ann Maguire.
Meanwhile another teen author, Alan Gibbons, also hit the headlines appearing alongside the mother of Sophie Lancaster, in a launch event at the murdered woman’s Lancashire school. Gibbons’s novel Hate, which is based on Sophie’s murder, offers an unflinching portrait of hate crime amongst young people.
Figures released recently by the charity Citizens Report UK reveal that 163 young people have been lost to violent crime since 2005 in London alone – so can books like these make any difference or are authors just cashing in on headline-grabbing issues? This was one of the topics that was debated in the summer at the inaugural YA Literature Convention, chaired by children’s laureate Malorie Blackman.
Far from glamorising violence, Gibbons believes fiction can play a role in combating it. “Young people respond to a narrative and I hope this book will help tackle hatred.”
But not everyone agrees. Some critics believe that teen fiction is to blame – along with films and computer games – for promoting youth violence. Novels such as The Hunger Games, with its dystopian fights to the death have been criticised for desensitising young people to acts of brutality. The third film in the series opens in UK cinemas on 20 November, reigniting a debate that came to a head recently when Elliot Rodger, son of one of the movie’s directors, killed six people in a gun rampage in California. This led to renewed calls for tighter censorship of what young people are reading, targeting YA fiction in particular.
I have a dual perspective on this issue: my latest teen novel, I Predict a Riot, explores gang culture, knives and gun crime, but I’m also a secondary school English teacher. I’ve worked with kids from many different backgrounds – from gang members in south London to street kids in South Africa, and the families of politicians and pop stars – and I passionately believe that fiction has a responsibility to address the most difficult issues teens are facing. I’ve seen how books can open up dialogue and challenge dangerous stereotypes in a way that no other medium can.
“An important difference between film/TV and books is the immersion experienced by the reader,” says Helen Thompson, chair of the Youth Libraries Group national committee, and head judge of the CILIP Carnegie medal, the UK’s oldest and most prestigious children’s book award. “This is essential to build empathy, and we know that people who read (fiction in particular) when they are young are more likely to develop empathy. This translates into a society that is emotionally intelligent.”
The Carnegie ran into its own storm in the summer with the award of its medal to Kevin Brooks’s The Bunker Diary, a story of six people held captive in a cellar, which was described by one critic as “a uniquely sickening read”. Thompson is in no doubt that young readers need to be allowed to engage with difficult material. “By protecting young people from unpleasantness, we make it more dangerous for them to enter the real world,” she explains. “It is important that they see a reflection of themselves and the society they live in, and that means looking at the problems as well as the good stuff.”
“I never enter a dark room unless I think I can light the way out,” explains Gibbons. He was inspired to write Hate after meeting the mother of Sophie Lancaster, who was attacked while walking through a park with her boyfriend in 2007. Five teenage boys were later arrested and charged with her murder. The police said the attack may have been linked to goth clothes the the couple were wearing.
“Meeting Sophie’s mother graphically spelled out to me that when a human life is lost in such brutal circumstances, there is a tear in the fabric of human life,” says Gibbons. “When violence is ubiquitous in film and on TV and we routinely see tens, hundreds of people mown down in computer game-style, it is easy to become desensitised. By focusing on a single family and a single destroyed life, I wanted to contribute to a process of re-sensitising.”
Gibbons believes that fictional depictions of violence need to be, “revelatory rather than exploitative”. But how is this achieved on the page? “I detest the vogue for resurrection in fiction,” Gibbons says. “Young people constantly encounter choreographed fights in which people suffer repeated blows and yet turn up fully recovered within minutes.
“If writers describe violence, it must be responsibly. By this, I mean that there should be clear and realistic consequences. Even in works of fantasy, violence should incur a recognisable cost. If writers and artists fail to demonstrate the results of human actions, they are lying to their audiences.”
Do those who have experienced at first hand the effects of youth violence agree? Mark Prince is an ex-professional boxer whose 15-year-old son, Kiyan, was fatally stabbed outside his school gates in Edgware as he tried to prevent another boy picking on his friend. “I believe that anything that brings the discussion of knife/gun crime to the forefront is a good thing,” says Mark, who now runs the Kiyan Prince Foundation, which aims to educate young people about the consequences of knife crime. “However, I am uncomfortable with the titles of some of the teen books out there – The Knife that Killed Me, I Predict a Riot – there’s a danger of buying into the glamorisation of crime.”
One might also question what experience of youth violence most authors have. Anthony McGowan admits that the difference between the school he attended 30 years ago, and the one in which Ann Maguire was stabbed is that “no one ever carried knives in my day”. He wrote the book to illustrate the consequences of teens getting “tooled up”, on the grounds that “if kids are carrying knives, any violent altercation is now potentially deadly”.
Faced with the horror of recent events, does McGowan believe that fiction can do anything to combat teen violence and knife crime?
“Art can certainly reflect society; at times it may influence it, but not in ways that can be easily controlled or predicted,” says McGowan. “What I can’t do – what no book can do – is to fix the fundamental ills in our society – the poverty, the inequality, the coldness, the lack of love. The best I can hope for is that the book will become part of a conversation, part of a wider movement, nudging us in a more humane and enlightened direction. But I’m not holding my breath.”
McGowan is concerned that books simply don’t reach the kids most affected. ‘”I don’t doubt that reading novels increases empathy. Novels make us live in other minds … However the kind of young people who get involved with street violence and knife crime aren’t, on the whole, big readers.”
So how do we ensure this kind of eye-opening fiction reaches a wider audience? I wrote I Predict a Riot in response to a discussion in a GCSE lesson about Lord of the Flies and the UK riots of 2011. Alarmed and saddened by some of their assumptions, I wrote a book to make my Year 10s think, make them ask questions about the world they live in and the choices they make.
So why doesn’t the UK government put titles like Hate and The Knife that Killed Me on the new GCSE syllabus rather than obsessing over Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy? As Helen Thompson points out: “No one who reads The Knife that Killed Me is ever going to carry a knife – ever. In fact, they’ll probably eat with a spoon for the rest of their lives.”
Catherine Bruton
13 November 2014
