Skip past now if you can’t take any more teen pregnancy discussion!

Watched the episode of BBC 3’s Desperate Midwives that has given birth to all this furore about teenage pregnancy last night, and I feel I have to apologise to Jade, Natasha and Jemma, and to their mum Julie. I under-estimated them, their family and their ability to cope.

So the papers are still at it this week, and Germaine Greer has given us her tuppenceworth in the Sunday Telegraph - here’s a link, but it does require registration. Thanks for the namecheck, Germaine, didn’t know you were a Five Live listener!

What is so very terrible about young women having babies?
By Germaine Greer

The phones rang hot, as honest law-abiding folk relieved themselves of torrents of bile, sneering at the young women, at their mother, and at Antonia Bance of the YWCA, who has set up an organisation called “Respect Young Mums”. The girls, we were given over and over again to understand, were stupid slags, who were allowed by their twice-divorced mother to have sex with all and sundry, and Bance was a naive do-gooder who was encouraging them to exploit the benefit system.

I think she’s done a great job of pricking the hypocrisies of the tabloid position on this. Here’s an idea, tabloid features editors - if you want to cut teenage pregnancy, go and talk to Brook or Parentline Plus or fpa and do a double page spread to help parents talk to their kids about sex. You can put the SEX word in big letters on the front page, will help your sales no end, and you might actually encourage a few parents to have the conversation they need to with their kids.

Bumming around the internet and found this fascinating article by Benjamin Katz about distributed campaigning - basically, using IT to get the work of campaigning in elections out to your staff and volunteers. Love the idea of being able to farm out call lists, making calls *and* data entry to volunteers on their own computers working from home, though I do see the problems with quality-controlling the messages they’re giving out that he raises.

Can’t imagine that the horrible database we Labour people use would be able to cope with this level of activity any time soon, though!

You may know about my slight obsession with US politics, which has been just a bit in abeyance recently for the UK political season. Am very tempted to put my CV in the post to the junior senator for New York state, just in case she needs any extra help over the next couple of years, so was heartened to see this earlier, with 53% of the US public very or somewhat likely to vote for her were she to run in 2008.

At the same time, the Dem bloggers and blog-readers (what’s the noun for a reader of and commenter on blogs, btw?) are having another argument about their positioning and lack of uniting ideology, played out in great fashion here, here and here, at the Daily Kos. Seems to have disintegrated into an argument about whether the Dems should be hardline on abortion or not, though.

So, I went to look for the statement of belief of the Democratic Party, and found this (PDF):
“We, the Democrats of the United States of America, united in common purpose, hereby rededicate ourselves to the principles which have historically sustained our Party. Recognizing that the vitality of the Nation’s political institutions has been the foundation of its enduring strength, we acknowledge that a political party which wishes to lead must listen to those it would lead, a party which asks for the people’s trust must prove that it trusts the people and a party which hopes to call forth the best the Nation can achieve must embody the best of the Nation’s heritage and traditions. What we seek for our Nation, we hope for all people: individual freedom in the framework of a just society, political freedom in the framework of meaningful participation by all citizens. Bound by the United States Constitution, aware that a party must be responsive to be worthy of responsibility, we pledge ourselves to open, honest endeavor and to the conduct of public affairs in a manner worthy of a society of free people.”

Horrible and meaningless, isn’t it? No wonder the Dems are having trouble coming back, if they’ve never set down what they believe in, but instead just adopt a platform every four years prior to the presidential elections (and rereading it, last year’s seems a little banal, too, though at the time the obvious political compromises were clearly justified).

Thank goodness for Clause IV then - at least it’s there, on the back of our membership cards, reasonably succint and clear, something most of the party can unite around, even if it’s not exactly prose to set the world alight. Mind you, those pesky Fabians were discussing changing it again last autumn. Cos that’s a can of worms we need to open.

Sorry - I, alongside most of the national press, seem mildly obsessed about this topic at the moment. Will try to blog about something else over the weekend, but for the time being, this is all you’re getting.

Madeleine Bunting has a fascinating article over at the Guardian ( well, I would say that, as we filled in some of the details for the article, but the spin is all her own!) Basically, her pov is that young women who have babies as teenagers have poorer life chances, but that as they’d been growing up in areas where their chances wouldn’t have been all that great anyway, the answer is not to treat teenage pregnancy as a tragedy, but to try to sort out disadvantage. It’s a thought-provoking article, and should be required reading for new ministers.

A few other bloggers are talking about this - makes a change from Iraq, ID cards and PR, I suppose! - Tim Worstall and Volsunga, in a fabulous blog about why abstinence education has precisely the wrong effect, in that it doesn’t stop kids having sex, it stops them having PROTECTED sex.

If you don’t believe me or her, look at the summary of “Teenage Pregnancy and Parenthood: a Review of Reviews” put otgether by the Health Development Agency. This evidence briefing pulls together learning from review-level data about effective interventions to reduce the rates of teenage pregnancy, and it’s properly thorough. I would link directly to it here if the TPU’s website weren’t so fucking useless - as it is, I can’t even open it currently, probably because the site can’t deal with Firefox, so you’ll have to put up with a link to the page it’s on here.

… of teenage pregnancy in this country. Rather than taking your information from the Daily Mail, you might actually like to look at the facts, available here from National Statistics (opens a large pdf file, the tables of relevance are 3.1 and 4.1)

The tables shows that eight girls in 1000 under 16 get pregnant, which has fallen from a peak of 9.5 per thousand in 1996, and that 42.3 girls per thousand under 18 get pregnant every year, fallen from 47.1 in 1998.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d prefer that no young women were getting pregnant under 16 and fewer under 18, but the answers to that problem aren’t just about sex education, as some of my fellow bloggers seem to think. It’s about ensuring that our young women have a sense of their potential future, aspirations for a career and a family, and opportunities to develop an adult identity in ways other than by becoming a mother, so they actively take steps to prevent themselves becoming pregnant.

The government has reached the limits of its ability to contain the UK’s high rate of teenage pregnancy and can go no further without the help of parents
said Bev Hughes in an interview in today’s Guardian.

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 teeange pregnancy - becasue 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.

A few days ago I promised a blog about how I think the left (as distinct from the Labour party) have failed to understand the political importance of getting to grips with fear of crime and with anti-social behaviour, seeing the point of being tough on the causes of crime but not understanding the bit before it - tough on crime. We seem to have failed to grasp that it is often precisely those poorer Labour areas that are at the sharp end, and that the problem is not just something that no-one can ever do anything about.

Anyway, the lovely Councillor Dan has a new blog, and has addressed just this point in one of the inaugural posts.

I just don’t know what on earth Jemma, Natasha and Jade were thinking of to go on telly and let the tabloids take photos of them and interview them. It was never going to be pretty.

SISTERS Jemma, Natasha and Jade Williams proudly pose with their tots — after getting pregnant aged 12, 16 and 14. The three girls and their children share a council home in Derby with their twice-divorced mum Julie, 38. None of the toddlers’ dads is supporting their children — so the Williams family rakes in £31,000-a-year benefits.

Newspaper pieces like these really get my goat (and it’s not just The Sun – everyone’s at it today, see here and here). Every time we put another teenage mum on the front cover of the paper, we legitimise the prejudice she faces from other people. And it is prejudice. 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.

Now, what I’m not saying is that what these young women have done is to be applauded. I’m saying that if we want them to get off benefits and one day get a career and provide for their families, we shouldn’t demonise them. Fewer than 8 young women aged under 16 in a thousand give birth every year, so this case is quite unusual.

I’m encouraged that two of the young women are still in school – less than one in three teenage mums stay in education – and the “free nursery care” that they get absolutely indispensable in making this happen – it’s a small scale government scheme called “Care to Learn”, which is paid directly to the childcare provider if the teenage mum goes back to school or college, up to £5k per year. So that’s £10k of that notorious £31k they get accounted for, leaving £21k p.a. to support two adults, two teenagers and three toddlers. Doesn’t seem exactly the lap of luxury does it? And what’s the alternative, anyway? Is the Sun’s argument that, instead of “raking it in”, these young women shouldn’t get any benefits so that their kids starve? Is that really what they’re calling for here? And would that be anyway for a civilised society to behave?

Of course the dads should contribute to their children (and I hope the CSA gets their act together); I love the way that the Sun and the rest conveniently ignore that it takes two to tango – clearly the young women are entirely to blame for this situation, with the menfolk, who have taken no responsibility at all, getting off scot-free. Double standards that the women can’t escape – because if they’d had an abortion, that would have been wrong too, of course.

Of course young women shouldn’t be getting pregnant at 12, 14 and 16, and their mum has it partly right – school should have taught them better. Too much sex and relationships education is too biological and far far too late. I strongly believe that SRE must be about feelings, relationships and emotions, confidence- and self esteem-building, about teaching young people the skills to negotiate with their partners about condom use, contraception, about when they’re ready and when they’re not. It has to be about biology too, of course, and it has to start early – key stage 1 is my preference – not conversations about anal sex with five year olds, but conversations about relationships and friendships, leading to body changes and where babies come from as they get older, and so on.

But despite all this, young people still say they want their sex education to come from their parents, not from school and not from playground gossip. If you’ve got kids – talk to them, talk to them tonight. If you’re not sure where to start, Parentline Plus have got an amazing set of resources here. And the other way to prevent teenage pregnancy? Ensure that your daughter is confident and has aspirations for a career. Young women with a future and a means of asserting their independence and adult status don’t need to become a mother in their teens, and will in most cases make sure they don’t.

PS - if you want to know the real facts about teenage mums, there’s a little bit of information just here.

Well, Jo’s told you her’s, Norm told you his, and now even Harry’s getting in on the act, so here goes for my tuppenceworth:

I’ve never:

1. Chosen a college to attend because Margaret Thatcher went there
2. Changed my surname, dropping a middle “de” - though I do quite like the sound of Antonia de Bance
3. Met Gordon Brown
4. Eaten a cheesesteak in the city of brotherly love
5. Ridden on a motorbike, even though I owned one for a while
6. Been a trot (despite what some, mainly employed by the LP, think)
7. Painted a room
8. Jumped off Magdalen Bridge
9. Been arrested (that’ll make Mum and Dad happy!)
10. Been bungee-jumping

So I’m a day or two behind everyone else in posting my thoughts about the QS, well so what. When it’s your job to produce a digest inside three hours for your boss, doing it at home too (not that, given the time, I’m actually at home!) seems a bit of a drag.

I guess I was sparked by the Honorable Fiend’s post about his disappointment with the QS. I was just struck by his analysis of the things that were wrong with it. While the rest of the leftish-blog-world seems to be having agonies about ID cards (about which, for the record, I don’t really give a 4X either way, to my girlfriend’s fury), his vitriol is reserved for the proposed commission on equality and human rights and the changes to the Welsh Assembly.

For my part, I’m really pleased about the equality bill, which will make public authorities have a duty to promote equality between women and men in all their functions - sounds bureaucratic, but it’s one more tool to ensure that all public bodies do an effective gender analysis of their workforce and policies (now that sounds even more bureaucratic!) - it means that local authorities, universities, quangos, the police, all sorts of public bodies will have to look at the impact on women and men of what they do, how they do it and who they employ to do it. CEHR is great too - first statutory support for LGB people and might even give effective support to people who experience multiple discrimination.

Pleased to see Government of Wales bill in there. Had the pleasure of living in the valleys for a year, and got pretty involved with the local party. It was bloody obvious to us all that the stupid regional list system disadvantaged the Labour Party and let sub-standard politicians who were kicked out by the voters of their own constituencies in through the regional back door. We lived a few doors down from Jane Davidson, who when I’m having moments of disillusionment with Ms Kelly (understandably quite frequent) I imagine is the education minister not just for Wales but for England too.

So, what else is right with it? Parental rights and childcare bills, to start with. Labour keeping its promises from the manifesto always a good thing, particularly when they’re the nice progressive policies that will actually help poorer people and make a difference to their lives. Smoking ban, reintroduction of criminalising incitement to religious hatred, violent crime bill to sort out alcohol-related crime and young people buying knives - all good.

I was glad to see a commitment - however vague - to sorting out my generation’s pensions after the Turner review. It appears that we’re all going to have to find out a lot more about pensions policy in the coming years.

I’m pretty indifferent about most of the rest of it, though for the life of me I don’t get why we need another law on asylum.

My big worry is about Incapacity Benefit, and exactly what DB has up his sleeve. I think we can all agree that the numbers on incapacity benefit would appear to indicate that not everyone receiveing that benefit will neccessarily be unable to work again at some point. We also know that thousands of heavy industrial workers were thrown on the scrapheap under the Tories, and that many were encouraged onto IB as a means of getting them off the unemployment lists.

I don’t think IB and IB claimants are “scroungers”, but nor do I think that IB has to be some sort of sacred cow which you don’t dare discuss. The plans we have in outline look okay - moving those who are unlikely ever to be able to return to work onto a higher guaranteed allowance, and encouraging everyone else to attempt to find work, with plenty of support to do so. But with all of these things, the devil is in the detail - specifically, the decision about which person with which condition is entitled to which allowance, and the nature of the support to retrain and look for work. It’ll have to be good, in a society where disabled people are five times more likely not to be working than non-disabled people.

So there we are: glad to have got that down. There’s a post brewing in my brain about the left’s response to crime, prevention, rehabilitation and the fear of crime, but I think it’ll wait a day or so.

So, as I’m no longer a PPC - and am, in fact, having returned to work today, a worker - small things amuse me. Like this, from the Guardian style guide:

political correctness: a term to be avoided on the grounds that it is, in Polly Toynbee’s words, ‘an empty rightwing smear designed only to elevate its user’