When asked what he thought of Western Civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied: ‘I think it would be an excellent idea’. The wisdom of his words came to me the other week when I read that in 2008 the Metropolitan Police had used new anti-terror laws to stop and search 58 children aged 9 or under – 10 girls and 48 boys. How can this be justified, even under the guise of fighting terrorism?

Scotland Yard
[image © copyright Mr Ush, some rights reserved]

These police officers had obviously not heard of other contributions on the theme of what constitutes a ‘civilised society’. Louis Pasteur once said that whenever he approached a child he was always inspired by two sentiments: tenderness for what the child is, and respect for what the child may become.

What could have provoked 58 separate suspicions that a child under 10 years of age could be a terror threat? If we do not stand up for children in our society, what does it say about the society in which we live? To what depths we have sunk when we resort to apprehending in London alone so many children under the age of criminal responsibility in a single year. None of the children were subsequently found to be linked to terror offences.

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 gives police wide powers to stop and search without the need for officers to have reasonable suspicion. Further examination of the data reveals that in 2008 a massive 2,331 children aged 15 and under were apprehended under the Act, suggesting perhaps that the Metropolitan Police have been using these powers as an instrument of general policing rather than for the special purposes for which they were devised.

It can hardly foster community relations when any police force abuses its powers through stop and search measures. In 2008 alone the Metropolitan Police carried out 170,000 stop and searches using Section 44. Alas, I could not find any national data for 2008 under Section 44 of the Act, but Hansard of 10th March 2008 proved more fruitful: interestingly, in the first 6 years since the Act was introduced, only six arrests resulted from over 168,000 stop and searches. The more recent data suggests that since 2005-6 the use of Section 44 powers have escalated hugely.

New Scotland Yard argue that the searches of children aged 9 or under is justified. Indeed many people would argue that this is the price we have to pay for combating terrorism, and that children who were apprehended are more likely to have been accompanying an adult who may have aroused police suspicions. However, no child under 10 has so far been associated with terrorist activity, and none of the children apprehended -or even their relatives - have so far been charged under the Act.

This trend mirrors several practices our so-called ‘civilised society’ imposes on the rights and welfare of children. A related issue of concern is the increasing number of asylum-seeking children now detained. Again in August disturbing figures were published which revealed that in the first 6 months of 2009, 470 children were detained indefinitely without charge. Their only crime appears to have been to try and escape war, torture, violence and persecution.

In August it was revealed that over one third of these children were locked up for over one month (The Guardian, 31 August 2009). It came as a shock to discover that the United Kingdom now boasts one of the worst records in Europe for the detention of children. So, in a real way, I am no longer surprised to discover that the Metropolitan Police are using whatever legislation they can to stop and search children under the age of criminal responsibility.

It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who in his Inaugural Presidential Address in 1933 asserted his firm belief that his people had ‘nothing to fear except fear itself’. Fear is a cancer that slowly eats away at civilisation. These disturbing figures on the way we are treating children in the UK should shame us all. Sadly our society seems to be losing its capacity for compassion. We seem to be drifting remorselessly towards more brutal and racist solutions to problems that deserve a ‘civilised’ response. Looking around the political scene in the UK several months prior to the formation of a new Government it is disturbing to find that few politicians seem to either be aware of the problem or care much for the implications. Children are the best resource we have. We must stop abusing them.

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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Each year after Notting Hill Carnival there is debate in media columns and talkback radio about whether the Carnival has outgrown its current site. ‘The streets of gentrifying Notting Hill can no longer accommodate Europe’s largest street party’, is one argument. ‘The Caribbean community has moved on and so should the carnival’ is another. On reflection, there are two deep-seated fears being presented here: first, fear of the crowd, its sheer size and unpredictability; and second, the fear of the stranger and his/her ambiguity.

Notting Hill crowd.
[image © copyright scottroberts, some rights reserved]

The popular belief is that crowds are volatile and can equal trouble. Such impressions have ultimately led to crowd control tactics such as ‘kettling’. However, psychologists at St Andrews University, researching how people behave at demonstrations, large sporting or music events, have found that there is wisdom embedded in crowds which nearly always act in highly rational ways, and are more likely to cooperate than panic in an emergency. The findings pointed to an ‘identity shift’ which drives people in a crowd to act in the best interests of themselves and those around them. Decades earlier, Elias Canetti wrote of similar sensations when he described the individual’s transcendence when subsumed into a crowd, now free of the burden of distance from others.

Trying to make my way up Ladbroke Grove during Carnival it is hard to feel this transcendence. At first there is a sense only of discomfort; then a feeling of suffocation as my 5’ 2” frame is squeezed on all sides, pulled back, loses sight of my partner, and becomes surrounded by strangers.

According to Canetti, ‘there is nothing that man (sic) fears more than the touch of the unknown … It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched’. Not just any crowd though. A crowd in which we lose our fear of being touched by the unknown is a crowd that is already dense with familiarity. This is a closed crowd; a crowd that sets its boundaries and desires permanence at the expense of disorderly growth.

The open crowd, a Notting Hill crowd, is another experience altogether. It is potentially limitless and exists so long as it grows, pulling people, barbeque smoke and sequins into its wake as it roils its way through the neighbourhood, disintegrating as quickly as it began when it reaches sunset.

Perhaps then the tensions that infiltrate Notting Hill Carnival are not generated in the diversity of people per se, but in the dynamics of closed and open crowds, order and spontaneity. Their meeting can be fraught as incursion into each other’s territory is unwittingly made. The closed crowd may not even appear on the streets. Its adherents appear silent, invisible in cultural frameworks dominated by established social hierarchies (for example, men, capital, Englishness). Its boundaries are of course always contested (for example, by women, youth, or other cultural frames of reference) and sometimes breached by the open crowd. But the open crowd’s impermanent nature may not provide any lasting infrastructure on which to build equality and can block a thoroughfare as easily as any gated community.

On a daily basis then we must negotiate with either crowd, sometimes going with the flow, sometimes stepping to the side to avoid collision; watching, always watching. These negotiations are inflected by personal dispositions of, as Bauman puts it, mixophilia and mixophobia: the love of the city and all its crowds, and its inverse proposition, the fear of the city with all its strangers.

Adding to our repertoire of skills that as individuals we deploy to navigate the city, we find a means to move. Holding hands, forming a human chain, and like water, sliding between the cracks of space that mysteriously open up once some unseen pressure of presence is applied to the crowd, we make our way up Ladbroke Grove.

About the author

Melissa Butcher is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Open University. Her research and teaching focuses on managing change in culturally diverse urban spaces.

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Sex and gender are in the news again. While in the academy boundaries are blurred and sex as well as gender can be seen as socially constructed and subject to social and cultural inscriptions that shape classification, in sport there remain very clear definitions of female and male with competitions being for women or for men. Things may not be quite so clear, however as is evident in the enormous coverage given to the 800m gold medallist Caster Semenya. She is fast, so fast that other athletes questioned whether she was a woman, leading the IAAF to instigate gender verification tests, albeit in a procedure that, quite wrongly was leaked before the final at the World Athletics Championships in August.

Caster Semenya
[image © copyright José Goulão, some rights reserved]

As a sociologist who writes about bodies in sport, I feel fortunate to have been asked to comment, if depressed that many of the media interviews have been prefaced by some reference to Semenya’s ‘masculine’ appearance. It is hardly surprising that the athlete has a lean body with muscles; most athletes do. Bodies are shaped by sporting practices and these practices shape sport, but bodies are gendered and women in sport have to negotiate racialised, heterosexist stereotypes. Semenya’s raised levels of testosterone may tell us more about what happens to the body of an elite athlete than establishing any certainty about gender categories.

The debate, especially as manifest in media coverage, has invoked expert scientific and medical commentary in its path from claims of unfair practice and a body variously described as ‘manly’ and with a ‘strikingly musculature physique’ to sympathy for defiant resistance to the humiliation of gender verification testing and the claims that this very fast woman, must be a man.

Gender testing has a long history in sport, even though compulsory tests were abandoned at the Olympics in 1992. Tests have changed from those based on the embodied features which ‘experts’ can see to DNA and chromosomal tests to the current more complex panoply of procedures that include psychological testing. Perhaps there is some acknowledgement of the complexity of gender identities and the weakness of a distinction based on the categorisation of human beings into two sexes; intersex and a range of different forms of development mean that many people than we imagine do not conform neatly to the clear genetic and physical criteria that the regulatory bodies of sport deploy.

The very term 'gender verification' suggests that we could get at the truth. A team of experts will find out, but gender is more complex. The current coverage of Semenya's case illustrates how troubling gender is in sport. Images draw upon stereotypes of what constitutes masculinity and femininity in the current case, as in so many in the past. Women athletes have to reassure us of their femininity, through comportment and appearance, even when they, through the body practices of their sport, necessarily have very different bodies from their female non-sporting counterparts.

Public debate is always framed by a moral discourse of 'fair play' that invokes the unfair advantage that men who pass a women might gain in sport, but what is most alarming and distressing about these cases is the humiliation that women undergo in being subjected to 'verification' and the public and expert scrutiny that is reserved for women. The drug testing which has largely replaced the genetic testing in the Olympics could be carried out without a specifically gendered emphasis. Then maybe we could celebrate the achievements of a woman who can run very fast.

About the author

Kath Woodward is Profesor of Sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

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It hasn’t been easy adjusting to life with people so much older than me. I couldn’t rush around in the same way that I normally do, it worries most older people. I would have to spend more time speaking to people, as they do love to talk. One stereotype, then, in which my opinion has not changed.

I also had to learn not talk about too "modern" things and certainly not presume everyone understood even the most basic things my basic generation takes for granted, like websites and text messages. I also had to learn not to express my opinion too much on certain subjects as I needed to maintain relationships with them.

People like Diana and the Royal Family and societal beliefs like religion, environmental issues and racism have different standings in people of my age, compared to the residents of Lovat Fields. I had to remember that they have grown up in a different world, and their teachings and way they deal with life comes from a different time. Of course viewpoints are going to be different - as life was different for them.

And then there is music and films. Essentially these were no go conversation barriers as my likes and tastes are of a much more modern nature to theirs, where I rarely found any common ground. I will get one resident to like listening to Aphex Twin and enjoy watching the finer points of Sokurov’s Russian Ark if it kills me!

Food is another area where the majority of residents and I differ greatly. I could rarely cook dinner for them and in return rarely eat in their apartments or in the village restaurant with them. For them a great dinner involves eating at lunch time; for a start this is alien to me and I have no real appetite at this time. The meal would consist of something like cottage pie or fish and chips. For me these are basic foodstuffs, and a little bland. I guess much of the younger generations have a more continental palette with a greater diversity of flavours. Once again though this all comes down to what you grow up with and what you are used to. If you are not exposed to it how do you know any different?

As my time in the village comes to an end, I feel sad to be leaving my friends and fellow residents behind, despite the wide gulfs that exist between our lives. What will I miss? I will miss the advice I can get from their vast experience, I will miss learning about what life used to be like, I will miss having a cup of tea or a pint and just chewing the fat, I will miss seeing how their lives develop on a day to day basis; ultimately I will miss their company.

I often wonder who has grown up in the best time, them or me. I don’t think there is an answer really; both have their benefits and negatives. You just make the most of what you have been given but maybe my generation has been given more. Unfortunately, if you are given greater opportunities, what comes with them are higher expectations and demands on your life.

When I go back to visit from now on I know the changes in them will be great. Even though they do not lead massively busy lives, old age doesn’t wait for anybody and so much can change in just one week, let alone a month. Some I won’t get to see again as they will have passed away. Although sad, it is an inevitable fact of life. My time here has certainly hardened me to death. Health is such a factor of life in old age.

I hope I have brought something to their lives. I think having someone more youthful around them to interact with is a good thing and maybe I have taught them something of life for my generation. I owe them a massive thank you for allowing me into their lives, as it has been a great experience. All that is left to say is farewell Lovat Fields - maybe I will see you again in 28 years!

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As The Open University programme Open Minds suggested, it's hard to generalise about older people's approach to technology - some embrace it enthusiastically. It's all part of communication in a digital age.

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About the author

Bart grew up on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent. After studying film at University he joined BBC Bristol in 2004. Since then he has been a researcher on a number of prime time documentaries. In this series of blogs, Bart is sharing his personal experiences. His views do not necessarily reflect those of The Open University or the BBC.

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