Guest Post #1: Jo Salmon - 3 comments

A little while ago we called for guest posters/editors to offer their own take on issues, or evaluate the differing sides of a debate, etc. Well, episode 1 is here, courtesy of Jo Salmon.

I ought to point out that Jo wrote the article nearly a week and a half ago but it got "lost in the post" on its way to us (the virtual Postie is probably reading it in his tea break, having already picked the tenner out of the envelope), but while the media furore has mercifully past, the issues are still relevant...

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Everybody is talking about... teenage pregnancy

Ever since sisters Jemma, Natasha and Jade Williams were "exposed" by the tabloids, issues relating to teenage pregnancy have been hitting everyone's radar. Papers like the Mirror have done their best to ignore the real issues and have instead focused on demonising the sisters:

Jemma Williams, who conceived at 12, Jade, pregnant at 14 and Natasha, expecting at 16, live with jobless mum Julie Atkins and the family rakes in £31,000 of benefits a year. The family pays no rent or council tax on their three-bedroom semi in Derby. However, Julie wants a bigger one while Natasha is waiting to be given a home of her own. The sisters, like their mother, rely on state handouts. The family receives £19,240 a year in benefit payments. Unemployed Julie gets £250 a week, made up of £57 income support, £51 family allowance and the rest in family tax credit. She also picks up child benefit for Jade, Jemma and her grandchildren. Natasha, who does not work either, receives £120 a week in family credit. But the fact they do not pay for their home brings the total value of their welfare payments to about £31,000 a year. Julie claimed: "We do struggle to survive on benefits.

But unlike the tabloids, the government seems to be taking the issues seriously. Beverley Hughes, the new children and families minister, has been honest enough to admit that the government is failing to make enough progress to meet its target of halving teenage conceptions by 201 - though let's not forget that the under-18 conception rate for England declined by 9.8% between 1998 and 2003, and the 2002 figures for the under-16 conception rate show an 11.2% reduction since the start of the government campaign.

In the face of unrelenting criticism and pressure from the right-wing papers and so-called family groups, the government could have caved in and dealt with it through abstinence-only schemes. But let's be grateful that they are a Labour government and not tory.

Ms Hughes said that parents had to take the initiative by putting aside any embarrassment and starting a dialogue about sex with their children... Ms Hughes said that she thought parents were "absolutely critical to this agenda" and could make a difference. She added: "The move to put parents at the heart of the teenage pregnancy strategy was not an effective admission that the government had lost control of teenage pregnancy."

So what have bloggers been saying?

As you might expect, those on the right have been scathing - but without suggesting anything helpful.

TheRightIdea says:

Our schools are generating teenage girls whose under-age pregnancy figures are the worst in Europe. Is this the government who targeted a 50% reduction by 2010 and who saw yet another increase this year? Can this be the education system whose legions of "special advisors" send by the education establishment to combat this matter (another example of where our tax funded increases in education actually goes) has found that those areas with the greatest amount spent on special advisors had the greatest INCREASE in teenage pregnancy? Is this the year that three sisters aged 12, 14 and 16 all had babies? Did our "special advisor" who is paid for by our taxes say in response; "The age is not what is relevant, it's the quality of the parenting and the support given to enable them to be effective parents."

Are we Alice? Are we in Wonderland? Can I have my taxes back please.

The ConservativeHome.com blog believes that whilst:

[Tony Blair's] condom compassionate government has thrown more and more resources into safe-sex education, the latest data show that teen pregnancies are actually up. The proliferation of safe sex education and contraception has also done nothing to stop the explosion of sexually-transmitted disease. But this does nothing to stop New Labour ... from recommending even more of the same at an earlier and earlier age. Why don't these people ever ask if the sexualisation of children - encouraged by ever more sex education - is part of the problem, rather than the solution?

A despairing Labour government has now asked parents to get involved... But this is the same government that last year agreed that parents should not necessarily know if their underage daughter is having an abortion. Government policy can't easily diss parents and then demand their co-operation. Whatever happened to joined-up government?

On the other hand, those on the left are supportive of young women like the Williams sisters - and offer suggestions about how to change the situation whilst refraining from throwing teenage parents onto the scrapheap.

Antonia Bance has blogged several times on the subject (you can read her posts here, here, here and here.)

90% of teenage mums aged 16-17 are on benefits (as you would expect, as continuing a pregnancy as a teenager is overwhelmingly something that happens to young women from deprived or disadvantaged areas), but young mums aged 16-17 are entitled to between £10 and £22 less per week than older mums on benefits. Anecdotally, young mums experience real discrimination at school, with many being informally excluded, despite government guidance that says that pregnancy isn't grounds for exclusion. They also get it in the neck from healthcare professionals - one young mum that I've met had the midwife's hand held over her mouth through her labour to "stop her making so much noise" - and from the general public, who think they have a perfect right to comment on them and disapprove of them.

Fair enough, parents do need to do far more. But, given that you can't legislate to make them talk to their kids and given that you know that teenage mums are more likely to have no qualifications and a lower-paying job in later life, are you just going to give up, Bev? Are you sure you're doing everything you can? How about making sex and relationships education compulsory in every school - no opt-outs for governors or parents? How about opening a sexual health clinic in every secondary school in every hotspot area? And how about sending a clear message to schools that they have a role to play in preventing teenage pregnancy - because the girls most likely to get pregnant are those who are disaffected from school, not achieving, maybe not attending - and effective schools are about more than A-C at GCSE.

Volsunga takes on the Daily Mail:

Abstinence-only is a pathetically unrealistic approach; it is natural, normal and acceptable to want to have sex as a teenager. Pretty much everyone is going to have sex at some point in their lives (I would say everyone, but you never know...) and this kind of "education" leaves you ridiculously unprepared for a time when you're going to have to take responsibility for your own reproductive choices.

I have problems with abstinence being taught as a positive choice even along a comprehensive education about contraception and protection from STDs. Bel Mooney today asks in the Mail "Why Can't We Teach Kids to Just Say No?"; she proposes that a campaign to make abstinence "cool" would reduce the teen pregnancy rate. This chills me; promoting abstinence as a cure-all choice for everyone stigmatises teens who make a positive and informed choice to have sex. Sex isn't evil, it isn't the enemy, immoral or, for the most part, hurting our children; it is bad choices that hurt teenagers. We don't need an American-style system that values young women for their virginity and "purity". We need to start being honest with children, and with ourselves.

Finally, Dan Paskins talks about the reality of living on benefits:

It's hard to know where to begin with drivel like this (Does he really think that their children should starve because they have no money? Does he realise what a pathetic and sad thing it is for him to use his national newspaper column to pick on three girls?), but perhaps the quickest way to cut through the rank hypocrisy of this is as follows. This £31,000 of benefits is going to support seven people, by my reckoning - the three new mothers, their children and their own mother. That works out at just under £4,500 per person. How long do you think that millionaire journalist Tony Parsons, or any of the other people who have been whingeing about handouts to young mothers, would be able to survive on that much money? It is probably considerably less than he got paid for his newspaper column, come to think of it, and having read both his newspaper column and his books, I don't think he'd be able to claim that his 'work' is more worthwhile than that of being a parent.

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Thanks to Jo for that. Who fancies doing next week's?