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Last night, I was drawing away at my desk with Radio 4 on in the background and idly chatting to my boyfriend, who is in Poland at the moment.

A Moral Maze came on the radio, aiming to address the moral challenges around the government’s Troubled Families initiative, in the wake of the government’s ‘Broken Britain Tsar’, Louise Casey, suggesting that women in these families should be financially discouraged from having more children if they are struggling to cope at present. This comes off the back of Eric Pickles saying we’re too politically correct to lay blame where it belongs, which is with the troubled families where recidivistic criminality and truancy endures across several generations.

It is, they suggest, a moral failure of the families who languish on benefits that they do not lift themselves out of antisocial behaviour and state dependency.

In this Moral Maze, it was said more than once “we all know who these families are” when panel members asked for clarification on whether they were discussing troubled or troublesome families.

The criteria for being regarded as a Troubled Family are that a family has five or more of the following seven traits:

• Having a low income
• No one in the family who is working
• Poor housing
• Parents who have no qualifications
• The mother has a mental health problem
• One parent has a longstanding illness or disability
• The family is unable to afford basics, including food and clothes

Source: they’re outlined in this Independent piece.

However, the Moral Maze‘s panel also discussed some very loaded terms like “serial fatherlessness” which seemed to point quite firmly to where they apportion the blame for this supposed crisis.

Of course, like most government statistics, the figure of 120,000 families in the UK meeting this definition is disputed, with most attempts to replicate the research finding far, far fewer families than in the initial research.

The panel didn’t seem to pick up on what seems to be glaringly obvious to me as a major issue with the defining traits, focusing instead on whether poverty caused families to struggle to the point where adhering to social norms was difficult or whether the families themselves were essentially lazy or immoral enough to drive themselves into this situation. There are obvious echoes to the description of “feral youths” we had a year ago when the country was ablaze with rioting.

To me, the most pernicious aspect of the definition is the bias against disabled people, particularly against disabled women. Since it’s far harder for disabled people to find decent education or well-paid employment, and since depression and other mental health challenges are incredibly common among disabled people (perhaps because we’re being told that our problems are our own moral inadequacies?), it seems like a given that most families where one or both parents are disabled are automatically well on the way to being labelled as problematic.

In fact, if you examine a family where neither parent is ill, disabled or has mental health problems, they must meet all five of the remaining criteria, but a disabled family where the mother has mental health issues need only meet three of the five non-health-related factors to be labelled as problematic.

If you then add in the idea that the mothers in troubled families should be discouraged, perhaps financially, from having more children than they can afford or cope with, we’re worryingly close to a programme of eugenics that disproportionately targets disabled and mentally ill women.

The discussion on Moral Maze didn’t pick up on this point, seemingly assuming that it should be taken as read that ill-health and impairment, whether physical or mental, constitutes a problem for society.

It’s a disturbingly regressive idea that in order to end poverty, you end the poor, and one that should be challenged with passion at every turn.

Reading through earlier government documents relating to this, however, paints a different picture to the one now being presented by ministers. The definition there ran:

• First, examine families where either there is proof of the child having committed a crime or where a member of the family has an ASBO or similar charge around social conduct.
• Secondly, identify families where a child has been regularly excluded from school, has 15% or higher unauthorised absence or where the child is regularly truanting.
• If families meet one of the two, then examine if no-one in the family works or is in post-compulsory education (one of those NEETs – Not in Employment, Education or Training).
• After examining these identifying factors, local considerations may be applied where families meet two or three of the above factors exist and there is cause for concern.

These local considerations can include:

• Where a family member has been in prison in the last year, where the police have been called out regularly, where the family is involved in a gang or where they are prolific offenders.
• Where a child is on the child protection register or where the local authority is considering taking the child into care.
• Where a family member has long-term health problems, particularly:

  Emotional and mental health problems
  Drug and alcohol misuse
  Long term health conditions
  Health problems caused by domestic abuse
  Under 18 conceptions

Now, this list of issues seems problematic, but less so when you take into account the idea that these should only be considered once it’s established that there are problems with criminality or where the child is not attending school often enough. Worklessness is given less priority than these and health problems such as alchoholism are even less relevant.

Source: this Troubled Families Programme PDF from March 2012.

I think that the shift from what this document describes to the seven traits of unsuccessful people defined above and communicated by ministers more recently is incredibly telling in determining the underlying ideology at play here. Rather than say that criminality and absence from school or the structure of employment, education or training are the main challenges facing families and requiring intervention, we’re left with the impression that there are wickedly immoral, lazy people, primarily the poor, disabled people and single mothers, who are tearing apart the fabric of the country.

The original notion – that families who are troubled and troubling through antisocial or criminal behaviour, where children are being denied the life chances that education provides, could do with additional support and intervention to assist them in re-introducing structure to what can often be a chaotic and fraught existence – seems sound. To turn this into yet another attack on poor people, disabled people and women just seems like a moral failure of government, and that, I think, is far more likely to tear the country apart.

• Described as ‘suave’ by Simply Knitting Magazine, Howard Hardiman is a writer and artist who makes comic books about lonely badgers, dog-headed escorts and disabled superheroines. He lives on the Isle of Wight and collects jigsaw puzzle pieces he finds in the street.

www.howardhardiman.com
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www.thepeckhaminvalids.com

Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.

– Wilma Rudolph

The 1960 Summer Olympics, the first to be broadcast internationally (the 1948 games had been aired by the BBC, but only in London), helped launch the fame of one of the world’s best known athletes, Cassius Clay. But this post is about someone else who competed that year: the woman who would become known as “the Tornado” and “La Gazella Negra”, Wilma Glodean Rudolph (June 23, 1940 – November 12 1994).

Rudolph was not the most likely choice to become one of the best runners of her generation. The 20th in a family of 22 children, she was a premature birth, weighing only 4.5lbs. Racial segregation in the US at the time prevented Wilma from being treated at the local hospital, and the poverty caused by the Great Depression made it financially difficult for her family to take her elsewhere. Throughout her childhood her mother had to nurse her through measles, mumps, scarlet fever, whooping cough, chickenpox, and pneumonia.

The disease that had the most impact on her chances of athletic stardom, however, was polio, which left her partially paralysed and with a twisted left leg. It seemed unlikely that she would be able to walk again, let alone run. Wilma, however, was far too tenacious to be slowed down by a little thing like polio and childhood paralysis. Through a combination of intense physical therapy, corrective shoes, and a metal leg brace, Wilma regained the ability to walk unaided by the age of twelve.

My doctor told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.

– Wilma Rudolph

No stranger to physical training by this point, Wilma decided to follow in the path of one of her older sisters and take up basketball. She excelled at the sport, setting state records for scoring, and catching the attention of Edward Temple – the track and field coach for Tennessee State University. She had some track experience already from high school athletics classes, and by 1956, aged 16, she was running to a high enough standard to have a spot on the US Olympic team for the 1956 games in Melbourne, where she picked up a bronze medal.

Four years beforehand she’d been unable to walk unaided, and four years before that she was being told by doctors that she’d never walk at all. Now she was an Olympic medallist. Of course, someone who overcomes polio through sheer determination isn’t the sort of person who settles for a mere bronze medal. In 1960 Wilma returned to the Olympics for the Rome games and landed no less than three gold medals, the first American woman to do so. She set a world record for the 200m sprint at 23.2 seconds, and one for the 400m relay with her teammates Martha Hudson, Lucinda Williams, and Barbara Jones.

What made Wilma’s Olympic victory go from a regular badass achievement to a triple-decker pile of brilliance, however, was what she did afterwards. Upon returning to Clarksville, Tennessee, with her medals, a homecoming parade was arranged in her honour. She insisted the parade be an integrated event, where previous such occasions had always been segregated. Her banquet was the first time in the city’s history that a large meal was held without segregation. After this, Wilma joined the protests that took place in the city until segregation laws were struck down.

You want to hear about more awesomeness? Hopefully you do, because Wilma Rudolph still had plenty more of it to deliver. Her athletic excellence had earned her a full scholarship at Tennessee State University, you see, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in education. She taught for a while at her own former high school, followed by schools in Maine and Indiana. In 1967 she was asked by the then Vice President of the US, Hubert Humphrey, to take part in an athletic outreach programme aimed at underprivileged children living in housing projects in several major cities. When the programme ended she established her own non-profit organisation, the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, to continue the work. The foundation provided free coaching, academic assistance and personal support to kids in deprived areas.

The triumph can’t be had without the struggle. And I know what struggle is. I have spent a lifetime trying to share what it has meant to be a woman first in the world of sports so that other young women have a chance to reach their dreams.

– Wilma Rudolph

For more detailed discussion on Wilma Rudolph’s athletic achievements and work as an educator and civil rights campaigner, check out Wilma Rudolph: Athlete and Educator by Alice Flanagan, and the good but somewhat short Wilma Unlimited by Kathleen Krull. Wilma’s 1977 autobiography, Wilma, is also good, but a bit tricky to find.

• Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!

Mine was pretty similar (aside from one teacher telling us that an orgasm was like a really good sneeze… no, I don’t know either). Relationships and feelings and other relevant things weren’t discussed, and neither was abortion, despite the girl I sat next to in design tech having had one just the year before.

The A Word

In a way, I am relieved. Because I have seen some of the materials used to discuss abortion in schools all over the country, and they make my blood run cold. Most of it is little better than anti-choice propaganda, and much of it is simply untrue. Abortion makes you infertile, abortion gives you breast cancer… These lies are imparted to young people at the hands of abortion ‘experts’ who are invited into schools, often by well-meaning teachers desperate for guidance on how best to handle ‘the A word’. Young people deserve better than this.

The problem goes far deeper than the curriculum, of course. Abortion happens, whether it is legal or not, safe or not, all over the world. Globally, about 1 in 5 pregnancies end in abortion (some global and local stats). Reluctance to discuss abortion openly and truthfully in the media and in popular culture is doing untold damage to individuals and to women’s precious right to choose. How are teachers and youth workers meant to offer unbiased information and support if they themselves have never had the chance to have an open discussion? To hear the facts?

Secrets and lies

Refusing to tackle the subject of abortion allows stigma to flourish, putting young people facing unplanned pregnancy in a position where they may not even feel able to ask for help. Scaring young women into carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term benefits no one.

But no matter, right? There’s plenty of information freely available, and countless support and counselling services. So here’s a fun game: why not google ‘pregnancy counselling’ and let me know how many of those first page results you reckon are really offering unbiased information? If you find any really choice quotes please comment and share!

Freedom to choose

I’m not assuming all BadRep’s readers are pro-choice, but I’m sure there are some of you. Perhaps, like me, you’ve waved a placard or shouted into a megaphone for a woman’s right to choose and to control her own body.

Standing up for safe, legal abortion is vital, as there are plenty of people who will take any opportunity they can to turn the clock back on reproductive freedom. Some of them are sitting in Westminster right now, deciding your future. (That’s a nice thought, isn’t it?)

But the war is also being waged quietly and efficiently on another front, in our classrooms and in a host of so-called counselling clinics. It’s up to us to expose the propagandists and arm young people with the facts so that they can make their own decisions.

Yes! But how?

Well… *puts on charity trustee hat* Education for Choice are the first line of defence. They are the only UK-based educational charity dedicated to enabling young people to make informed choices about pregnancy and abortion.

With their mighty army of four staff they do heroic battle against the forces of misinformation on a shoestring budget. Times are hard for everyone right now, but in order for EFC to continue working in schools, with youth workers and health professionals, they urgently need your help.

Please:

• Donate £5, £10, or whatever you can spare to their emergency fund
• Pledge your support for the A Word campaign

Help EFC put abortion in the spotlight and make sure that young people’s right to unbiased information is at the top of the agenda.

What else can I do?

• Teach PSHE or know someone who does? Check out these resources.

• Have some time to spare? Become a Champion for Choice.

• Under 21? Have your say on the Youth Advisory Group.

• Have children of your own? Talk to them.