News

Parental support of young people should continue well past the age of 16, when children in care are told to face the world on their own. It’s no wonder so many fall at the first hurdle, writes Alison Taylor.

Surviving adolescence is a major achievement. The exit route from childhood, a proving ground without parallel, is lethal with tripwires, pitfalls and bolts from the blue. Adults turn hostile and impossible to satisfy, friends mutate into rivals and enemies, the opposite sex become predators. There is enormous pressure to perform - academically, socially, sexually, economically - and to conform, to the expectations of parents, teachers, peers and society. Everyone wants something different, shifts their goalposts on a whim, has different rules to impose, and not least the legislators; our laws on sexual consent, drinking, driving and voting are deeply inconsistent. As the relative certainties and simplicities of earlier years vanish in an instant, teenagers - confused, anxious, demoralised, damned whatever they do - seek refuge in truculence, drink, drugs, sex, crime and suicide.

We British, beguiled still by the notion that children should be seen but not heard, are not child-friendly, but once the little pests cross the Rubicon into adolescence, we regard them as the great enemy of society. And that hostility persuades us to withdraw, at one fell swoop, the protection we offered to them as children, leaving them without adult rights or status but at the mercy of the worst the world has to offer, burdened with demands that would tax the most capable adult. Then, when the teenager’s world goes pear-shaped, we put the blame entirely on their shoulders.

French philosopher René Descartes famously said: “I think, therefore, I am,” but remained conscious of the essential dualism of mind and matter. Modern society has arguably lost sight of the latter, and therefore, fails to appreciate the inherent conflict between the rational and physical self, or to understand the power of the driving force of biology. Perhaps our hostility towards teenagers arises from the biological threat they pose; on the cusp of full fertility, they are a walking time bomb that will soon render redundant the older generations, and as long as we continue to procreate, there will always be another group waiting in the wings. That is the paradox of our continued existence.

Animal charities put over the message that a puppy or kitten is for life, not just for Christmas. Children’s charities could follow suit - a child is for life, not just for the few short years when he or she is cute and small enough to smack into submission. Some lucky children remain thus as long as their parents live, leaving home only when they feel ready, knowing they have parental support should their maiden flights come to grief. Many young adults, predominantly males, live at home for economic reasons, while others return when relationships fail. For them, the family door is never shut, let alone bolted behind them, yet the state, with its cavalier attitude toward parenting, thinks nothing of booting out 16 year olds into the big, dangerous world, despite the blatantly obvious fact that the youngsters in its care are the most needy, the most troubled and the most vulnerable.

Care can reduce teenagers almost to a sub-species; rootless, uneducated, unwanted, desperately lonely, they are warehoused and left to rot. Young asylum seekers fare even worse; shunted into bed-and-breakfast accommodation without any meaningful support, they are not only exposed to the worst kinds of exploitation.  In the new climate of paranoid xenophobia where a terrorist lurks around every corner, their lives are in real peril.

My notorious rank-breaking in North Wales was actually triggered by a teenager’s death. The boy, ejected from care when clearly in need of considerable support, died shortly afterwards from neglect and an overdose. His fate - the end result of our social work interventions - was avoidable, even predictable, and haunts me still.

New legislation to improve the lot of care leavers can only work for those youngsters not among the “lost”, who number thousands. Week In Week Out (BBC Wales, 3 October) revealed the allegedly dire situation of children in Cardiff - high abscondings, paucity of proper placements, unacceptable levels of risk - and the senior social worker behind the disclosures was suspended the following day. Sir Ronald Waterhouse, cautioning against complacency, stated that problems in child care are far from being history, and although lack of will or insight continues to characterise state policy, scarcely a day passes without further proof of the present system’s limitations. Children in care, he commented, are important members of future society, whose lives are being put at risk.

Alison Taylor is a novelist, a former senior child care worker and the winner of the 1996 Community Care Readers’ Award.