A questionable morality

In this post, I'm going to talk about someone I know. Someone who has done something that society considers very wrong. and has felt (and still feels) the consequences of what he has done. And yet....is what he did actually as bad as other things that people do to each other, that are not crimes but that are immensely damaging to innocent people and destructive to society as a whole?

It may shock you to discover that I count among my friends someone who has been convicted of a sex offence against a child. I'm not going to go into details of exactly what he did: suffice it to say that it was a minor offence against an adolescent boy. But my friend was his teacher.....not his school teacher, but a private music teacher. Lessons were held at my friend's house on a one-to-one basis. It is there that the offence took place - though it was not reported for another 4 years.

I teach singing privately myself - indeed I was my friend's teacher for a long time, and I also briefly taught the child concerned. So I know both of them. Private music teachers like me are vulnerable to accusations of abuse: we work one-to-one with students in small rooms, usually in the absence of parents or responsible adults. Distressed teenagers can make up stories to conceal other problems: angry teenagers can spread harmful lies by way of revenge for perceived unjust criticisms. And singing teachers are particularly vulnerable because of the nature of our job: with singing the entire body is the instrument and vocal support comes primarily from deep core muscles. It has been my experience that teenage boys, in particular, have absolutely no idea where those are or what they do, and on a couple of occasions I have physically had to show them - which involves fairly intimate touch. I am under no illusions about the risks of doing this, so I ALWAYS make sure someone else is present if I have to resort to physical contact to make a teaching point. It distresses me to say this, but even hugs are not acceptable in a one-to-one teacher-student relationship unless other adults are present.

But my friend was not a singing teacher. There should have been no physical contact between him and his student. And once he realised he found boys of that age attractive, he should have stopped teaching them. The same is true of ANY teacher who finds a student sexually attractive, regardless of their age or the situation. Even if it is perfectly legal (which obviously in my friend's case it was not), you are just not an effective teacher for someone to whom you are sexually attracted or who is making it clear regards you in that way. There are too many confusing emotions, too many mixed messages....  I speak from experience. I once referred an adult student of mine to another singing teacher because there was a growing sexual attraction between us which was making lessons very complicated. I couldn't teach properly, and he couldn't learn. The teacher I referred him to was my own singing teacher, who was completely bemused by the fact that I had referred to him someone with an exceptional voice and musical talent. He said to me, "I don't understand why you are doing this. That must be the best voice you teach!". I invented some story about communication difficulties and just not getting on.... I didn't tell him the truth for quite some time. Maybe I should have done, though: when I finally told him, he didn't turn a hair, just commented that he had always wondered what was really going on. I think I must be a bad liar.

My friend's conviction resulted in a suspended sentence (see, I told you it was a minor offence) and he is now on the sex offenders' register. And it is this last that is the real punishment. The suspended sentence is mild by comparison. You see, he cannot work in any capacity that means he might even accidentally come into contact with children. That rules out just about everything he has ever done in his life. Effectively, he has had to start again from scratch, retraining for new jobs completely unrelated to anything that went before and for which he has no experience, and with the stigma of a sex offence on his CV. He was not sent to  prison, but his life was destroyed. And there was very little support. He actually would have had more counselling support and - bizarrely - more support from the Christian church of which he is a member had he committed a worse offence and been sent down. In fact the Christian church chose to place tougher restrictions on his movements and associations than the court did: he was not allowed to attend worship in his church, in fact he was not even allowed to ENTER a church, unless he was attended by someone who could vouch for his conduct. To enable him to worship at all, we created a group of people for him to call upon as chaperones, who were approved by the diocese as people who could vouch for him. Had this not been done, he would effectively have been rejected by the church, despite his considerable remorse and valiant efforts to change his ways, including attending voluntary psychotherapy even before his conviction. How is this consistent with the Christian message of repentance, reform of life and restoration of relationships with God and man? In its zeal to protect the innocent, the church in this case was in serious danger of creating a lost soul.

I do not in any way defend what my friend did. But I can't help feeling that the punishment that destroyed his life was more severe than the crime.....I do not know what happened to the child, though I am sure he too has paid a personal price for this. Two ruined lives.....

And yet it could have been much, much worse. Every day people do things that are much worse but are not crimes. Indeed I have done something much worse, for a self-proclaimed Christian. I broke no civil law, but I broke one of the Ten Commandments. Adultery is not a crime in the UK, but the damage to people's lives far exceeds anything that my friend did. My husband and I lived separate lives for months before we separated, with me sneaking out at night to meet my lover: although my children were small at the time, they knew something was very wrong, and it disturbed them both - my son in particular, whose school work and behaviour deteriorated considerably at this time. I finally left three days before my son's seventh birthday: even now, that memory is what he associates with his birthday. My affair, leading as it did to the breakup of two marriages, destroyed the homes of three children (two of mine and one of his): they became migrants shuffling between their mother's house and their father's house. And the emotional warfare and recriminations as divorce terms were sorted out and assets divided bounced back to them. Financially, too, they are much poorer than they would have been had our families stayed together: where there were two households there are now three, and that is a considerable cost. My children were as badly damaged by my behaviour as the child abused by my friend - but there is no redress for them in the criminal courts. Even though it happened a long time ago, I still live with this on my conscience. I'm telling my story now in the hope that others will avoid the same mistake.

Adultery is a socially harmful behaviour. It is every bit as bad as paedophilia - in fact arguably it causes even more damage. It is a fundamental betrayal of trust, and trust is the bedrock of our society. Yet we justify unfaithfulness on the grounds of "love": we glorify sexual attraction, using "it's only natural" to justify bad behaviour: we downplay the importance of security and stability in children's lives and assign greater importance to self-fulfilment and self-gratification. All of this carries no criminal penalty, and increasingly not much of a social stigma either. Yet when a paedophile does exactly the same thing, we throw the book at them. These are double standards: this is our questionable morality.

A Woman of Our Time

Originally posted at Coppola Comment on 27/5/2011.


In the last fifty years, the lives of British women have been transformed beyond recognition. Many of these changes are beneficial, such as anti-discrimination legislation and improvements to childcare. But there is a hidden cost. In this post I describe a woman of our time...is she typical? I fear she may be.....

She is divorced, with two children. She married late, at 30, and had her children in her mid-30s. Maybe because of late pregnancy she didn't have too good an experience of childbirth, and still has the scars to prove it.  But the effect of having children on her lifestyle was far worse.

She used to do a demanding but well-paid job. But when the children came along she quickly discovered that long hours and overseas travel aren't compatible with small children unless someone else cares for them, and she didn't want to be an "absent mother". She struggled along for a while, juggling childcare, schools, trains and aeroplanes.  But eventually she decided to give up the well-paid job and look for something that could be organised around the needs of her children.

Shocked by how poorly-paid part-time work in child-friendly hours can be, she set up her own business. It takes time to get a small business going, and she couldn't work 24 hours a day as many entrepreneurs do because of her children, so she lived off her savings with some assistance from state benefits (tax credits).  Eventually the savings ran out, and she started to run up debts - but the business was reaching viability and interest rates were low, so the debts weren't hard to service. 

Just as things were starting to improve, she became ill. She struggled on for a while but eventually had to have a major operation and several months off work. Because she is self-employed she received no sick pay and was therefore forced to start working again when she was not really fit to do so. The time off work left her even deeper in debt, and when she started work again business was slow to start with so debts increased even more.

Now her children are older and need her time less.  The business is doing well - it increased turnover even during the recession.  But because of the debts she is working more than full-time hours just to stay afloat. She works all the time the children are at school, then she cooks dinner, helps with homework, acts as a taxi service, attends school meetings, and all the other thousand and one things that mothers try to do for their children. Then when the children are in bed (or, often, when they are not) she does yet more work - emails, phone calls, accounts, correspondence.  She is working harder now than she did in her full-time job before she had the children, and for much less money.  And every day she checks her bank balances and tries to work out how she will pay the bills that come in tomorrow. She is an expert on cheap shopping - a regular visitor to the "reduced" counter in the supermarket - and the kids have learned not to ask her for treats.

Now and then she toys with the idea of returning to her previous job. After all, it was no harder really and much better paid. But she's been away from that industry for so long that returning would be very hard - after all, what does she have to offer now except an out-of-date skill set and considerable experience of cost-cutting and micro-management?

She used to dream that she would meet someone - a man - who would support her and her children and take this awful burden off her.  But the man she lives with earns less than she does, and is apparently happy to be supported by an overworked woman while he sits around surfing the net and watching TV.  He won't help her with the children, because they aren't his.  Nor will he help with the housework, because the children make the mess so should clear it up, shouldn't they?  He doesn't do shopping because he doesn't know what to buy, and he doesn't do washing because he doesn't know how to sort washing into different colours. He's quick to criticise her for working too hard, usually when he has had to do something like cooking the dinner because she is working.  He won't help her, but at least he pays half the mortgage and bills. Without that contribution she would lose her home. 

Interestingly, the reason she ended her marriage was because her husband sat around all day doing not very much while she worked long hours to support them both.  She wonders if the price of feminism is that some men are only too happy to be supported by strong competent women....

Is this woman typical of 21st century British women? Do you know women like her? I do....

....this woman is me.

Breaking the mould - a personal reflection on corporal punishment

Originally posted at Coppola Comment on 30/01/12.


This post is prompted by David Lammy's call for parents to be allowed to smack children, but it isn't in any way intended as an argument for or against physical discipline. Instead I have chosen to reflect on my own experience of corporal punishment as a child, and my quest as a parent to find a better way - to break the mould.

Both my parents used smacking routinely as their primary method of discipline. I know from comments made by my mother that I was first smacked when I was well under a year old, and by the time I remember being smacked, probably at about two or three, she had already moved on to using a slipper. The same was true for my three brothers. My father also smacked us, but at that age only with his hand. I would say that by the time we went to school all four of us were being smacked probably several times a day.  I now know such extensive use of physical chastisement was unusual in the 1960s, but it was by no means unique and no-one at the time would have thought it unreasonable. And I know that some families today still act this way: recently I watched an episode of Supernanny US in which undoubtedly well-intentioned (and desperate) parents used constant smacking with hands and wooden spoons to discipline three- and five-year-olds.

The effect on us was perhaps not quite what my parents intended. We were not well-behaved children. We fought constantly: my eldest brother and I beat up our younger brothers and were in turn beaten for it.  We also bullied other children, repeating with them what we were receiving at home and then being beaten for that as well. Photographs at the time show four scared and angry children: we smile, but the smile is tense and doesn't reach the eyes. My parents never made any connection between our violent and disruptive behaviour and the way in which they disciplined us: to them, we deserved the punishment we received and they did it with the best intentions.

The primary school that my eldest brother and I went to used corporal punishment. The head of the infants school used to smack us round the legs or on the hand with a ruler as an informal punishment. Formal punishment for boys was the cane and for girls the slipper, and only with parental permission. In practice hardly anyone was ever caned or slippered, and anyone who was instantly became something of a hero. My brother's street cred went up hugely when he was caned at the age of seven after the school had exhausted all other means of controlling his behaviour. I can't help thinking that this entirely defeated the purpose of the punishment, and it certainly had no effect on my brother's behaviour. He carried on behaving as badly as before.  But the caning meant little to him anyway. He was already getting more severe punishment at home.

You see, when we became too big (or too hardened) for a smack on the bottom to bother us much, our parents moved on to using weapons. I've already mentioned that my mother used a slipper on us. By the time we were six, my father had taken to using sticks, and from that time on increasingly my mother handed over responsibility for punishment to him. If we misbehaved during the day we would receive a beating when he got home from work.  And the crimes for which we received beatings became more and more trivial: I remember being beaten with a cricket stump at the age of 12 because I had taken strawberries from the garden.

Whether or not this was an effective way to discipline children is a matter of debate. My parents were convinced they were doing the right thing. But I believe it did not work. My eldest brother and I remained disruptive bullies for most of our school careers, and consequently continued to receive frequent and severe physical punishment well into our teens. My middle brother became ever more withdrawn, which deflected much of the punishment towards his more overt elder siblings. And my youngest brother became ill, thus more-or-less avoiding punishment completely. This did not go down well with his eldest brother, who tormented him.  We were dysfunctional children, and we became dysfunctional adults. My working life was dogged by difficulties with interpersonal relationships and problems controlling my temper. For a long time I thought this was just me, because throughout my life I had been frequently told that I couldn't get on with people - until one day my youngest brother commented that his problem was that he didn't know how to behave. At that point the penny dropped, and I started to see that the punishment that we had received as children had deterred us through fear, but taught us nothing. Like my brother, I had no idea how to behave.

Punishment alone does not teach children the right way to behave: for that, teaching and modelling of good behaviour is needed. Punishing children without explaining what they have done wrong and how they should have behaved instead is pointless, yet that happened all too frequently: I can still remember occasions where to this day I do not know what I did wrong.  Punishing children for crimes that you have not taught them about beforehand simply makes them angry. Punishing children for making honest mistakes makes it impossible for them to learn. But these principles apply WHATEVER form of punishment is used - they are not limited to physical chastisement.

The problem with my parents' discipline was not so much the violence as the inconsistency (my brothers could get away with things that I could not), the mixed messages (being punished for copying parents' behaviour) and the lack of good teaching and modelling. And above all, the injustice. Most people I know who were beaten as kids are philosophical about the occasions when they consider it was a "fair cop". What rankles is the occasions when they were punished unreasonably, whether because they didn't actually commit the crime, they didn't know it was a crime or the punishment was out of proportion.  For me, being punished for things my brothers had done on the grounds that I should have stopped them was the greatest injustice. I am only 14 months older than my eldest brother. How on earth was I supposed to stop him? And if I had succeeded, I would then have got into trouble for bullying. It was impossible to win.

The big problem with such dysfunctional families is that the pattern repeats. Most of us model our parenting on our own childhoods, because it is what we know. However unpleasant it was, and however angry we feel about it, it is familiar. When we are desperately trying to manage two toddlers throwing simultaneous tantrums in the supermarket, it is all too easy to do what our parents did, because we don't have to think about it. Finding another way takes imagination, information and emotional control - all of which are in short supply when a parent is stressed. And when we are angry, hitting makes us feel better, even if it doesn't solve anything. So when I realised that the problem was that I had never learned how to behave, I understood why my parents behaved as they did. They were repeating (more mildly, actually, in the case of my father) what they had received from their parents. They had never learned how to behave, either.

When my son was born, I decided that I did not wish to repeat that pattern again. I did not want to be a heavy-handed parent. I wanted my children to love and trust me, not be scared of me. But I did not know any other way. I had to learn how to be a parent "from scratch".

Fortunately I had help. I went spectacularly to pieces after my son was born and ended up spending eight years in therapy, during which time I did a significant amount of reparenting work. From that I learned what a "better way" might look like, and I have tried to the best of my ability to put it into practice. My children have not experienced anything like the level of physical violence that I did. I did smack both my children when they were small, though never with anything other than my open hand. But looking back now, even that was too much for someone whose background contained so much violence, and I should have found other ways. The pull to escalate smacking into something much nastier was very strong and I don't doubt my children were aware of it, even though I never acted on that impulse. I still remember the first time I smacked my son, and I realise now that it fundamentally changed my relationship with him: after that, the unconditional trust was gone, and he was always a little bit wary. Mummy could hurt him....And smacking my daughter made her angry and rebellious: the close relationship that we had previously had changed to something slightly more distant and strained. I bitterly regret this. If I could turn back time, replace those smacks with other forms of discipline, I would do so.

I don't believe that anyone who has experienced serious violence in their childhood should smack their children. They are like reformed alcoholics - one drink is too many. Other people, whose childhoods were more balanced, perhaps could safely use occasional smacking within the general context of a loving, consistent and above all educational approach to discipline. But is it really necessary? David Lammy clearly thinks it is, and I know many people agree with him. I don't know, and I am not a safe judge. All I know is that to this day I feel sick when I see and hear children being smacked and I would rather no child ever experienced that pain.

There is a happy ending to this story, though. My parents may have struggled as parents, but they are wonderful grandparents and my children love them dearly. And as my children grow into adults, I see them able to manage their emotions and deal with people far, far better than I ever could. They squabble from time to time, as siblings do, but they care deeply about each other. And they have good, solid friendships with people their own age. So maybe I have done enough. Maybe, despite the mistakes I have undoubtedly made in my parenting, I have succeeded in breaking the mould.