Children and the ‘Social Cohesion’ Agenda in Sport: Children's Participation in ‘Ethnically Mixed’ Sports Teams in the North of England

This study is set in the North of England in the context of debates around the integration of communities, after a series of street disturbances in the early 2000s. The debates centred upon ‘social cohesion’ and the social mixing of Pakistani British and White British communities. The current study explores this from the context of 10‐ to 11‐year‐old Asian, Black and White British boys participating in cricket and football clubs. It draws on the sociology of childhood approach that sees children as active participants and co‐creators of their own lives. This more nuanced approach sheds important light on children's own negotiations of home, peers, sports clubs and identities that are key to how cohesion is achieved.     

‘Big Society’ in the UK: A Policy Review

Alongside the UK Coalition Government’s historic public spending cuts, the ‘Big Society’ has become a major narrative in UK political discourse. This article reviews key features of Big Society policies against their aims of rebalancing the economy and mending ‘Broken Britain’, with particular reference to their implications for children and young people, and for the voluntary and community sector working with them. Although many positives are acknowledged, flaws are identified in the lack of attention paid to the unique position of children in society, and in an inconsistent conceptualisation of the voluntary sector on which Big Society policies rely.     

‘Failure to thrive’ revisited

The term ‘non‐organic failure to thrive’ (FTT) has long been used in relation to young children with faltering growth for which no organic cause is found. In this paper, problems arising from dichotomised organic/non‐organic responses to FTT are explored and reasons for the assumption that non‐organic FTT was always due to emotional abuse or neglect are presented. The case is made that, except in a minority of cases, children fail to grow because they consume insufficient calories. Research studies on reasons for poor intake, from factors related to the child and their parents to the wider family and environment, are summarised. Following a brief reference to literature on outcomes, I argue that centile charts should be routinely completed for all young children. If faltering growth is identified, a multi‐factorial assessment should be undertaken. Such an assessment reduces the risk of interventions being based on outdated assumptions about non‐organic FTT and maximises the potential for successful resolution of poor growth. After briefly summarising the literature on interventions, I conclude with suggestions for improving practice in this field, including working in partnership with families and with health and social care professionals already known to them. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Representations of the ‘Damaged’ Child: ‘Child Saving’ in a British Children's Charity ad Campaign

This article discusses the representation of abused children as ‘damaged’, drawing on a series of three advertising campaigns for a British children's charity. The pictures and text of the advertisements seek to elicit readers’ concern for abused children by portraying them (a) as passive agents in their development and (b) as signifiers of the dangers of the world and the safeness of the home. The portrayal of abused children in the advertisements serves to reinforce a perception of the vulnerability of all children and the need for adult supervision and ‘care’. Without seeking to dismiss the seriousness of abuse or of the work done by children's charities, the article questions the implications of these representations of childhood and ‘damage’, and argues that the dominant representation of abused children drawn on in such campaigns oversimplifies many complexities in the worlds and the lives of children who have been abused.     

‘A murderous ‘underclass’? the press reporting of sexually motivated murder

The 'underclass' is widely held by commentators of the Right to be responsible for a host of social problems, including violent crime. This paper shows how in the reporting of sexually motivated murder in a sample of nine British newspapers for one complete year (1992), the image constructed is one where unemployed and other marginalised men are portrayed as the main perpetrators of sexual violence. This, the authors argue, hampers our understanding of sexual violence, for it suggests that it is only men of a 'low' socio-economic background who are a potential threat to women and children. It is also suggested that the 'symbolic environment' of the press reporting of sexual murder provides a context in which a more authoritarian benefit regime and greater control of poor communities can be spuriously justified.     

‘Belonging’ and ‘Otherness’: Sex Equality in Banking in Turkey and Britain

The struggle for sex equality at work has largely been achieved in the developed world, it is claimed. The number of well‐qualified young women entering white‐collar employment and achieving promotion to first‐line and middle management positions now matches or exceeds their male peers. Many young women have high career aspirations and argue that sex discrimination no longer exists. However, this perception is over‐optimistic. Major sex inequalities persist at senior management level in the salaries and benefits offered to female and male staff and in access to certain favoured occupations and sectors of employment. Questionnaires, interviews and documentary evidence from three Turkish and six British banks and high street financial organizations showed that their claimed commitment to equal opportunities by sex was not matched by their practices. Members of managerial elites (who were almost exclusively male) held firm views about the characteristics of ‘the ideal worker’, which informed organizational ideologies, including human resource policies and practices concerning recruitment and promotion. They also permeated organizational cultures, which affected employees’ working practices and experiences. The outcome of these internal negotiation processes was to differentiate between a favoured group of staff seen as fully committed to the companies’ values, who were promoted and rewarded, and an ‘out’ group, whose members were denied these privileges. This distinction between ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ is gendered not only along the traditional lines of class, age, sexual orientation, religion and physical ability, but also along the new dimensions of marriage, networking, safety, mobility and space. Despite local and cross‐cultural differences in the significance of these factors, the cumulative disadvantage suffered by women staff seeking career development in the industry was remarkably similar.     

‘Time Past and Time Future’

What connects family therapists as a discipline is something rarely looked at. It seems our field is obsessed with highlighting difference which often slips into criticism and attacking the work of colleagues. This patriarchal behaviour invades most family therapy forums, and yet at the same time there is a belief that we have moved away from patriarchal ways of operating. Newcomers to the field experience this confusion somewhat like visiting a ‘Mad Tea Party’.     

‘I Eat the Vegetables because I Have Grown them with My Own Hands’: Children's Perspectives on School Gardening and Vegetable Consumption

Inadequate vegetable consumption is a global public health concern related to numerous health risks. A promising intervention to increase children's vegetable consumption is school gardening, although earlier studies have shown mixed results. This study explores how gardening might contribute to changed attitudes towards eating vegetables from a child's perspective. Findings are based on qualitative research with children in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We reflect on how children enact agency regarding their vegetables. Results show that children report that changes occur in their attitudes towards vegetables as they not only eat more vegetables but also advocate the consumption of vegetables at home.     

Everybody’s Business? A Research Review of the Informal Safeguarding of Other People’s Children in the UK

The paper reviews public discourses and research on the safeguarding of other people’s children by adults at the neighbourhood level. There is much empirical evidence pointing to the existence of thriving informal communities of support and informal childcare for parents across the social classes. There appears to be less empirical evidence related to intervening with children and young people who may be at risk. Nonetheless, the limited evidence suggests that many neighbours, acquaintances and strangers do intervene, or say that they would. The paper concludes by considering the potential negative consequences of promoting the notion that safeguarding children is ‘everybody’s business’.     

‘Off school sick’: mothers' accounts of school sickness absence

Interview material, collected as part of a wider ethnographic study of sickness absence in an English primary school, is used to examine how mothers accounted for their decisions to keep children ‘off school sick’. Mothers' accounts suggested a process by which they tested their children's claims on sickness against suspicions of feigning illness. The paper describes, from the mothers' point of view, the process of negotiating sickness with children and how children are categorised as ‘pretending’, ‘upset’ or ‘really ill’. These decisions are set within a wider context comprising: a normative discourse of maternal child health care; contradictory demands placed on mothers by the image of children as simultaneously robust and vulnerable; the surveillance and contradictory demands of schooling; and the use by children of sickness as a means of exercising influence on their social situation. It is suggested that locating child health care in relation to childrens' point in their childhood career (for these children the transition to secondary school) and acknowledging the active role that children play in the construction of illness will facilitate a fuller picture of mothers' unpaid health work within the family.     

Adolescents’ Perspectives on Personal and Societal Responsibility for Childhood Obesity — The Study of Beliefs through ‘Serious’ Game (PlayDecide)

The dominant approaches to public health policy on childhood obesity are based on the neoliberal emphasis of personal choice and individual responsibility. We study adolescents’ (N = 81) beliefs about responsibility for childhood obesity as a public health issue, through an innovative participatory method, PlayDecide, organised in two countries: the UK and Spain. There is no evidence of a blanket rejection of individual responsibility, rather, a call for renegotiation of the values that inform adolescents’ food choices. The findings suggest the need to broaden the framing of obesity‐related policy to go beyond the nutritional paradigm and include other values that signal health.     

‘In the beginning was the work’ Reflections on the genesis of occupations

One of the most curious omissions in the sociology of work and occupations is what would seem to be one of the most basic questions: When is an occupation an occupation? While there have been recent attempts to explore the issue by examining the history of census categories, ¹ these represent the end-point of the process at which new occupations receive official recognition and legitimation. My purpose in this paper is to discuss how occupations form and come to be recognized as such. The creation of health visiting between 1850 and 1919 will be taken as a case study.     

‘Race’-education policy as social control?

This paper focuses on the instrumentalist Marxist model which has been used to explain the policies of the British state in the field of ‘race’-education. After discussing the model's core assumptions and its application in this field the paper explores the model's explanatory adequacy through a case study of the role of the quasi-state agencies of the ‘race’-relations industry in developing ‘race’-education policy in initial teacher education. It ends by considering whether a new conceptual framework is needed to understand ‘race’-education policy.     

Serious business or ‘any other business’? Safeguarding and child protection policy in british rugby league

State‐funded national governing bodies of sports in the UK now have a mandate to produce, disseminate and embed child protection policies. This warrants an analysis of the impact of such policies, particularly in the context of reaching their target audience and having some early influence on the practice of sports clubs' members in their dealings with children. The authors are undertaking a large research project, which aims to fully evaluate the UK Rugby League's child protection policy. This paper reports findings from an evaluation of the initial implementation of the policy and explores its presentation, delivery and impact within UK rugby league clubs. We argue that the Rugby League should be commended for its initial approach to child protection policy and make specific recommendations to enhance this long‐term project. We conclude that if a broader community of interest concerns itself with the safeguarding of children there is likely to be a greater impact on a social problem of this kind. Sport can have a key role to play in this community because it reaches so many people.     

Sense and sensibility: cohabitation in ‘cohabitation land’

In many European countries, cohabitation has become a prevailing practice. Norway is one of the countries leading this trend; cohabitation before marriage is the norm and a majority of couples become parents before they (eventually) marry. This article explores the meaning of cohabitation for Norwegian couples today through a qualitative analysis of interviews with 17 urban, heterosexual couples. As the trend towards increased cohabitation has emerged so strongly in Norway, such analysis may provide important insights into the possible implications of more widespread cohabitation in Europe. Why is cohabitation so attractive to young Norwegians today? Why do most couples postpone marriage until after they have children? The main finding is that cohabitation in this context is understood as acting according to important norms about intimate relationships. Cohabitation is a way of dealing with the complexity of attitudes towards love and relationships in late modernity. The option of living together outside marriage makes it possible for couples to be sensible (not committing themselves ‘too much’) as well as living together when they want to develop a relationship and are ‘in love’.     

Shame and the city – ‘looting’, emotions and social structure

The sociology of violence is an emerging field but one in which there remains a tension between structural explanations and phenomenological‐situational ones that focus on the micro conditions of violence. This article proposes an analytical framework for connecting these levels through a critical appropriation of Scheff's theory of the shame‐rage cycle. It argues that while shame is a significant condition for violent action, Scheff does not have a theory of violence in itself but treats the connections between shame‐rage and violence as largely self‐evident. While emotions such as shame have agental properties, as Scheff and others argue, these need to be situated within structural and cultural conditions that are likely to evoke shame. Moreover, to develop Scheff's approach further, violence needs to be understood as being communicative and invoking normative justifications, which mediate the effects of shame‐rage. This analysis is developed with reference to recent instances of collective disorder, especially the English riots in August 2011, which is based on published research and media accounts from participants. The acquisition of consumer goods through ‘looting’ was public performance in spaces where a ‘moral holiday’ permitted a brief revaluation of the social order. Through this example the article shows how an underlying configuration of inequality, exclusion and shame coalesced into events in which the violence was a form of performative communication. This articulated ‘ugly feelings’ that invoked normative justification for participation, at least at the time of the disturbances. The discussion provides an integrated account of structural‐emotional conditions for violence combined with the dynamics of situated actions within particular spaces. It aims to do two things – to provide a framework for analysing the structural and affective bases for violence and to offer a nuanced understanding of ‘violence’ with reference to public disorder.     

‘Recovery’ after age 7 from ‘externalising’ behaviour problems: the role of risk and protective clusters

This study uses data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) to track behaviourally disturbed children at 7 through to adolescence in order to assess the extent to which clusters of protective factors can offset the negative effects of clusters of risk factors. Behavioural measures at ages 7, 11 and 16 from NCDS were used to identify children with ‘externalising’ behaviour problems. Children whose scores fell into the top 20% of Rutter ‘A’ scores at 7 but not at age 11 and 16 were deemed to have ‘recovered’. Controlling for gender, social class, family structure, parental mental health, domestic tension at age 7 and a cluster of protective factors in childhood (high reading skills at 11, father's interest in child's education at 16, good relations with parents at 16, good school attendance at 16), a cluster of risk factors present as the child grew up (clumsiness, social services involvement, family involvement with police/probation, family mobility at 7) was significantly associated with lack of recovery from behavioural problems. Although individual protective factors were significantly associated with recovery in the bivariate analysis, their power was not strong enough in the multivariate model to overcome the strength of the risk factors.     

A Talent for Living: Exploring Ghana’s ‘New’ Urban Childhood

This paper considers the lives of children living in a large informal settlement in central Accra, Ghana. Its contention is that children remain largely absent from the renewal of interest in slums and that where they do feature it is largely as objects of risk and vulnerability. Such an exclusive focus, it is argued, risks effacing the ways in which children are capable of actively confronting the terrible constraints posed by slum environments and the ‘talent for living’ that this involves. Drawing upon the findings of a small qualitative exploratory research project, the paper examines sources of support and cooperation between children and how their decisions to work are perceived as a strategy to actively support mothers and families struggling for a subsistence.     

Why more ‘quality time’ is not on the top of children's lists: the ‘qualities of time’ for children1

For many years the everyday reality of working parents and their children has been captured in notions of ‘quality time’ versus ‘quantity time’. On the one hand it is suggested that what families need is ‘more time’ for parents to spend together with their children and less time working. On the other hand this has been countered with arguments saying that attention has to be paid to how parents spend their time together with their children. As a result quality time is often presented through idealised images of ‘happy families’. Quality time is seen as parents engaging with their children in particular activities or outdoor excursions that create and maintain family enjoyment, care and togetherness. However, such debates are based on assumptions of what would be ‘good’ for today's children and neglect the perspective of children themselves. This paper draws on field research carried out with 10–11‐year‐old children on their understandings and use of time in an urban and a rural setting in the north of England. The paper points to five ‘qualities of time’ identified by children. These qualities suggest that children's views of time spent with their families cannot be seen as separate from the time they spend with friends, at school and on their own. The paper argues that the quality/quantity time conundrum needs replacing by fuller and more representative accounts of the varied aspects of time that matter for children. These need to be situated in the processes through which family, school and work life take place on a daily basis and in relation to children's life course. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘There Isn't Supposed To Be a Speaker Against!’ Investigating Tensions of ‘Safe Space’ and Intra‐Group Diversity for Trade Union Lesbian and Gay Organization

Trade union engagement with the continuing inequalities facing minority groups has been one of the guiding principles of attempts to re‐energize the labour movement in recent years. This article focuses on attempts by six British trade unions to create and maintain separate organizational ‘spaces’ for their lesbian and gay members. Through consideration of group representation within a union framework, the strategy of separate organizing and the complications of representing a diverse membership, this article considers issues of intra‐group diversity and ‘safe space’ for this particular group of members. It concludes that the recognition and actualization of the internally diverse lesbian and gay constituency will be important in the long term for trade unions seeking to renew their pool of potential activists.