Children

One girl in 10 from around the world has been raped or sexually assaulted by the time she is 20. This amounts to 120 million girls worldwide. These horrifying facts come from a new UN report on violence against children, Hidden in plain sight. It also reported that 95,000 children and teenagers were murdered in 2012 alone and six out of 10 children aged between 2-14 are physically punished by their parents or carers. In many countries violence against children and young women is socially accepted or tacitly condoned. In the countries surveyed nearly half of all girls aged 15-19 believed that a...

The Jay Report, which investigated abuse and sexual exploitation of children in the Rotherham area between 1997 and 2014, estimates over 1400 children have been victims. This is appalling. It is also an issue for the left. It is an issue not just because the right-wing press have used it as an opportunity to print racist headlines, or just because the police have systematically blamed victims. Something else, and even more fundamental, is at stake. This case has demonstrated a basic lack of care for and understanding of some of the most vulnerable in society. It has shone a light on a system...

1. Murder in the Blue Jungle Even as capitalism destroys the beneficent green jungles of the earth, it creates a great spreading blue jungle all its own in its cities across the globe. Dog eat dog; man eat man; plunder and exploitation according to the laws of the market and the rites and rights of property: and illegal plunder and robbery outside the indulgent laws of legal exploitation. The blue jungle. Two weeks ago, at one o'clock on a Monday morning, I found an elderly man semi-conscious on the pavement across the road from where I live in South London just after he had been robbed and...

On Monday 14 July, Lady Butler-Sloss resigned as the chair of an inquiry into the sexual abuse of children by MPs and other high-profile, powerful people in the 1980s. It was less than a week since she had been appointed. It is almost unbelievable that she had been appointed in the first place. Her brother, Sir Michael Havers, was attorney general in the same period that is under question. Much has been made by the Home Secretary, Theresa May, Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Keith Vaz, and others, of Butler-Sloss’s “integrity”. It is certainly right that she resigned, and that in...

On 3 July a parliamentary committee reported that “Female genital mutilation is an ongoing national scandal which is likely to have resulted in the preventable mutilation of thousands of girls to whom the state owed a duty of care”. There has long been law against doctors and parents who are party to mutilation of young girls’ genitals. But the committee still found a “growing prevalence of FGM”. Its recommendations include: • Failure to report female genital mutilation should be made a criminal offence if reporting of the practice does not increase in the next 12 months • Headteachers and...

Labour's Shadow Home Secretary, Jack Straw, recently proposed a curfew on children. He opened his heart and mind to Workers Liberty reporter Patrick Avakuum. --- AS Tony Blair's team waits impatiently to cross the floor of the House of Commons and show that they can outdo the Tories, Jack Straw, Labour's Shadow Home Secretary has emerged as an unexpected Front Bench star in this brilliant company. For a long time Straw — "straw in his name, straw in his mouth, straw between his ears" as someone once unkindly said —was regarded as the village idiot of the Front Bench. Not any more. Straw has...

Michael Gove has surpassed himself in proving himself to be a callous disregarder of the needs of children. If we thought his attacks on the democratic accountability of community schools were not enough, his department has now proposed the privatisation of Child Protection services, including the power to remove children from their families. If these plans were to go ahead, the most vulnerable people in society would be reliant on services which are subject to the vagaries of the market. Professor Ray Jones of Kingston University states that G4S and Serco have been trying to get into these...

I would like to respond Esther Townsend’s article “The things we do for love” ( Women’s Fightback , January/February 2014). On becoming a mother at the age of 21 I believed feminism was something that fought for me to have choice, the choice to work like my elder sister, or stay home, like my mum. But I found that SAHMs (stay-at-home mothers) are seen as out-dated and that my rights as a mother revolved solely around my right to return to the workplace; my right to stay home is poorly accounted for and the decision to do so is often viewed negatively. Esther’s article reflects this. Esther...

Reading Frank Furedi’s article ‘Culture War: the narcissism of minor differences’ (Spiked Online) I became aware of the debate in Scandinavia on whether to ban the ritual circumcision of boys. The way Furedi framed this debate alerted me to the need to think through a socialist response. Take his opening paragraph: “On Sunday, a majority of Swiss voters said yes in a referendum on imposing quotas on the arrival of immigrants from EU countries. On the previous weekend, there were mass demonstrations in France, at which protesters chanted slogans in defence of the traditional family and...

It's impossible to discuss women's experiences of work without considering childcare. In England in 2011 78% of families with children under 15 used some form of childcare, ranging from nurseries and pre-schools; childminders; breakfast and after school clubs; to holiday care - we can't live and work without it. But for many families these arrangements aren't working. In the last year childcare costs have soared by 19% in the UK. This is part of a longer term trend upward with The Family and Childcare Trust showing the cost of childcare has increased by 77% over the past decade while wages...