CHILD-CENTRED SOCIETY
On 30 July Michael John-Charles was sentenced to three years imprisonment for the manslaughter of Vipula Prasanna, whom he beat violently for stepping on his five-year old son's foot. On 6 August the General Medical Council found Paediatrician David Southall guilty of professional misconduct for his insistence to police that David Clark had murdered his babies: Southall based his clinical judgement on no more evidence than a television interview. Parents and especially Dads were ticked off in the press after a poll organised by the Children's Society for National Playday found that most children find their parents poor playmates.
The more extreme of these cases strike people as disturbing, the less so, merely predictable and even amusing. Few would suggest a pattern but there is one, nonetheless. In 1991 Britain adopted a Children Act (passed in 1989) that put the interests of the child paramount in custody, and other cases involving children. This proposition is today taken for granted, and seems unexceptional in fact it has become a principle that governs much wider arenas than custody alone. The rights of children are seen to trump all other interests in all kinds of circumstances.
Professor Southall dogmatically believed that parents were harming their children to gain attention, a myth that he elevated into a syndrome, Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy. Casting himself as the protector of children, Southall could accept no limitations on his actions, and rode roughshod over the rights of parents. Michael John-Charles' frustration at the shoving on the underground, and his self-righteous defence of his son are emotions that many parents would understand. But it is the elevation of children into sacred people that makes it possible to attack someone who steps on a child's foot. In another age the child would be at fault for getting under people's feet.
And though press commentators gloated at competitive dad's inability to relate to his kids, few would say the obvious - that charming as they are, children are not the most intellectually demanding company, and even an indulgent parent's patience can be worn thin. The Children Society thought the poll was telling them that parents should be more playful' but there is nothing wrong with the children's judgement that friends are more fun. Friends are who they should be playing with. The child-centred society envisaged by the 1989 Children Act looks like a recipe for reducing everyone to the level of children: stubborn, self-righteous, unable to control their tempers, and elevating play over work.
BIG FREAK SHOW
The fourth series of reality television series Big Brother ended on Channel Four on Friday night. Portuguese transsexual Nadia might have been voted winner in a collective endorsement of her femininity - more likely the public was transfixed by the utter weirdness of her performance. Inside the house, Nadia set herself the task of passing for a woman, of being accepted, and succeeded. But given the show's popularity, she was also making it impossible to ever pass for a woman 'by birth' again. Instead, she affirmed the right to be seen as a woman by choice. Nadia later told reporters at a press conference that she went on to the show to make people believe she was a woman. 'I am now accepted by the public as a woman and I feel much more comfortable about myself,' she said. Successive contestants voted out of the house were confronted with the concealment, but were unable to complain, feeling obliged to applaud Nadia's performance. It was a subject fit for a doctorate in combined Gender and Media studies - Baudrillard's theory of hyper-reality and Judith Butler's of gender as the copy for which there is no original, all rolled into one.
The climax was suitably hysterical. As her face convulsed Nadia's mask of femininity looked like it would slip, but was there anything underneath? A cathartic spasm embraced the audience and their chosen victor at the release of the secret - though Nadia denied having deceived anyone. For the record, she had told the camera, 'I am not a man'. Nadia's exit from the house was reminiscent of Gloria Swanson's from Sunset Boulevard, where the aged star, led down the stairs by the police, confuses her arrest for murder with a press reception; or perhaps it was Carrie, where the ugly duckling is made Prom Queen by her classmates for a joke.