Interesting Links for 28-07-2016

[andrewducker]

Remember the ice bucket challenge? It just funded an ALS breakthrough (tags: charity research genes meme ) Vitamin D levels predict risk of brain decline in Chinese elderly (tags: vitaminD china brain age ) Bill Clinton wore a fetching navy pantsuit to honor Hillary Clinton's nomination for US president (tags: fashion politics usa funny viaElfy

Comments

[drdoug]

But what is the CI's big beef with this anyway? Why do they feel it affects them?

They give a fairly reasoned account here: http://www.christian.org.uk/wp-content/downloads/named-person-briefing-2016.pdf [PDF]

I have to say that, while I am coming from a very different place to them (being an atheist and that), I do share some of the concerns. A system that gives a single point of contact between the state and children and the people responsible for them is a really good idea. I'm not sure I quite buy that this will magically make all the different bits work together, of course, but as a route for giving people a clear starting point it seems entirely unobjectionable. And I can imagine the rationale for a more systematic approach to child protection, and this looks like it might do that.

But that seems a million miles away from a scheme where someone is appointed to check, for every child, whether they get "a say in things like how their room is decorated and what to watch on TV” and whether they "can be part of a group like Scouts, Brownies or a football group if they want to” (which No2NP quote as guidance materials from the scheme; if that's incorrect I would be very pleased to hear it). The football example is one they've picked on specifically: lots of football happens on Sunday mornings, and CI parents would presumably want their kids to go to church instead. As an atheist, I'd disagree with their judgement there, but I'm very worried about implementing a system where the state is getting involved in this level of detail in those decisions. Do we really want Headteachers monitoring the TV choices of all kids? Mine don't watch any (apart from live rugby and Eurovision), and I'm very not keen to have a discussion about that with a Government-appointed monitor. I'm very much up the autonomy for kids end of the spectrum of opinion (such that if my kids were in Scotland I would worry about this being a problem under the proposed version of NP, because I know I differ from mainstream child-rearing opinion on that one), but as with Christianity, I don't want the state to be interfering directly on my side of that argument.

On a completely separate track, as a privacy campaigner I'm extremely worried about a general system for gathering this sort of information. Even if there were a clear set of rules and guidance about how this information should be managed, and a robust system for ensuring that happened (which there doesn't seem to be), I am pretty confident that it would not work perfectly, and some stuff that really shouldn't get in to the public domain would do. The more you gather, the greater the chance of inappropriate disclosure.

For the avoidance of any doubt, I am very, very strongly in favour of the state intervening when there is a serious risk to the life and health of a child. Stuff that is about safety: fine. Stuff that is about wellbeing more broadly, particularly defined as "happiness": much more problematic. For one thing, I disagree that "happiness" is what we should all be striving for our children and ourselves: all things equal, being happy is better than being sad, but in my moral universe it's more important to do the right thing than to do the thing that makes you happy. Fundamentally, you can't mandate the state to ensure that all children have a good life unless you have consensus on what the good life is. Despite millennia of work on that problem, there remains a diversity of opinion on that pressing human question. To my mind it's really, really important that we leave people very free to work on that for themselves - with the limit on how bad they can get it wrong drawn pretty high, but obviously short of death or life-altering injury and abuse.

I'm hopeful that this ruling will mean the legislation gets tightened up and the scope of the scheme is reduced significantly, and the fundamental good idea underneath it can happen without the collateral damage.

[cartesiandaemon]

That makes a lot of sense, thank you.

It does feel like maybe a less-intrusive thing where society at least offers helpful advice about what might be useful child rearing strategies might be useful -- it's easy to get stuck choosing between either "full time daycare" or "no help, just figure it out". Especially if it were only offered, not imposed. But it should be a very very different sort of thing to existing "are you doing something wrong" services. I also thought "single point of contact" sounded good. But I'm very cynical about it smuggling in so much detail. Like you, I can easily imagine a check-box approach that ignores "does it seem to be working" in favour of "you departed from the orthodoxy on more than 3 points, we will begin a formal investigation"

[skington]

Here's a thing about Named Person that I'd like to hear an answer to.

As far as I can tell, one of the potentially good things about Named Person (if my vague impressions are right) is that it's been trialled in a number of places across Scotland, with different rural/urban balances and demographics. And after a few years the general consensus has been "yes, it works" (albeit with some caveats from time to time), which is why it was introduced country-wide.

Objections I see to Named Person are typically e.g. "teachers and/or social workers were already doing this stuff themselves, so all this does is expand bureaucracy into places where it didn't need to be and encourages finger-pointing by ill-trained named persons". All of which are a priori objections and don't mention the places where the policy was trialled on a regional level.

(I do remember some objections explicitly based on the trials, which I think were complaints that there weren't enough resources available to handle named person properly? But those are fairly rare.)

So what's going on? Am I right in thinking that the objectors are ignoring the places where named person was trialled? Or have I just not been listening to the right people?

[drdoug]

It may be the latter. The No2NP site is certainly full of tales from the pilots that are pretty much "see, it's as terrible as we said it would be", e.g.:
http://no2np.org/dad-speaks-aspergers-sons-named-person-ordeal/
http://no2np.org/slick-article-fails-convince-parents/
and there's a trickle of this sort of story:
http://www.scotsman.com/news/revealed-what-can-happen-when-a-named-person-reports-on-your-children-1-4089077

I think it's true that the Scottish Government is convinced that "yes, it works" but I don't think it's fair to say that's a consensus. I genuinely don't know what the evaluation process for the pilots has been, but it would be an extraordinarily thorough and independent evaluation that was able to explore whether these sorts of concerns outweighed the benefits when the whole premise of the scheme is that they are indeed outweighed. And the fact that there is no clear guidance about data protection practice (again, SFAICT, I could be wrong) suggests that this was not an issue the evaluation explored particularly deeply.

[momentsmusicaux]

That does sound like far too much detail -- colour of their room, football and so on. It's a bit alarming how the idea of this legislation has gone from the idea of how to fix the problem of children 'falling between the cracks', where different agencies and professionals each have only part of the whole picture, and so miss the problems with a child until it's too late, to monitoring the minutiae of kids' lives!

(As an aside, it seems to me that this sort of thing needs a similar term to bikeshedding and scope creep. It's slightly related to scope creep, but it's piling on way too much detail to a plan.)

> my moral universe it's more important to do the right thing than to do the thing that makes you happy

Well quite. Beer and crisps make me happy. Endless trips to McDonalds make kids happy.

[naath]

Yesterday's TV news contained both this court case and the case of a child murdered by his mother's boyfriend (aided and abetted by his mother).

Some people are VILE to their children. I don't know how much privacy-intruding we have to do to catch all the vile people before their vileness kills or seriously injures their children, but I'm willing to put up with quite a lot.

I don't think the "named person" will magically make the system work, but they are likely to have some idea about how to prod the system, and what the system OUGHT be doing. Poorly educated/informed parents with no time or tuits might not know where to turn for help they desperately need or even what help there might be and having a specific person they know to go and talk to plausibly helps with that.

I don't know what "what colour paint they have" has to do with child welfare. Maybe "gives helpful advice when asked about random things" is a key aspect in being seen as a useful and trusted helper for parents-in-need-of-help?

[drdoug]

I don't know how much privacy-intruding we have to do to catch all the vile people before their vileness kills or seriously injures their children, but I'm willing to put up with quite a lot.

I would be too, but I'm not at all sure that it's a tradeoff. I fear we may end up with ever-increasing amounts of privacy intrusion and parental distress *and* no material improvement in the number of serious abuse and murder cases.

I hesitate to mention the terrible case of Liam Fee (two-year-old abused and murdered by his mother and her partner), but it is already a political football, with opponents of Named Persons arguing that if it missed a situation that egregious it's failing badly on one of its key purposes, and the SNP insisting that the Named Persons scheme wasn't fully working in that situation, it's appalling to use a tragedy like that to score political points, and anyway there's no way we can stop this sort of thing from happening sometimes.

It does leave me thinking that getting people to worry more about kids' bedroom decoration and football clubs is a recipe for getting bogged down in fine details and missing the big picture.