Entangled Alliances

“It’s just disgusting,” wailed the girl at the checkout to her neighbour.  ”Did you hear that she didn’t even know what financially meant?” came the reply.  So began Week Two of Britain’s collective tut-tutting at the ongoing drama of the 13-year-old dad.  We are, without a doubt, well into the second phase of modern media outrage: the ‘respectable’ press now feels permitted (nay, compelled) to comment on the controversy generated by the initial exposé.  An exposé provided, of course, by that bastion of morality The Sun (whose critique of an overly sexualised society might have carried more weight if the fifteen year old mother wasn’t overleaf from some nineteen year old sporting but a thong and a cheeky smile).  The Mail, The Express and Cameron’s Conservatives leapt at the chance to decry “Broken Britain” and, according to Melanie Phillips, the consequences of ’sex education without boundaries‘ (Mel’s in tight competition with The Sun for this year’s Cognitive Dissonance awards).

But my irritation with this reactive hypocrisy is leading me to do exactly what I wanted to avoid: join the cacophony of the self-righteous commenting on commentary.  Rather than using this sad incident to decry sex education, social services, the Labour Party or the loss of the cast iron Watershed, what is truly enlightening is the way that the press today has lost all sense of its responsibilities towards children.  

Our voyeuristic fascination with this case should not let us forget the fact that the privacy of the boy involved has been wholly cast aside.  The tabloids will move along once his voice breaks, but this child will have to deal with the stigma of being “the 13-year-old dad” for the rest of his life.  I say ‘the rest of his life’, because whatever chance he had to be a normal kid in school and in his community, regardless of having had a child, is now surely lost forever.  I don’t deny that The Sun obviously paid the family a pretty penny for their exclusive (unsurprisingly, Max Clifford has been seen lurking around the scene) and perversely, the child, Alfie Patten, is well on his way to high-paying media stardom.  But this is as much of a parental failure as was the evident abrogation of responsibility that led to the pregnancy and, as such, sheer exploitation on the part of Murdoch’s minions.  The papers are now treating the question of paternity as they would some celebrity scandal; a documentary is apparently in the pipeline.  And it’s not just Alfie’s childhood anonymity that’s vanishing into the ether:

Phil Hall, the former editor of the News of the World, who now runs his own public relations company, said that the young couple could expect to earn up to half a million pounds in the next few years. “There would be a documentary, pictures of the child’s first birthday, her first day at school when her father will possibly still be in school,” he said. “Nobody wants to set up Alfie as a role model, or to celebrate what’s happened. At the same time, people have a lot of sympathy with him. It’s a moral dilemma, but this is a story that is worthy of national debate.

So that’s two generations the tabloids are appropriating for our delectation.  Indeed, in a paparazzi age where privacy has been substituted to the necessity to sell papers, anyone becomes fair game.  How can it be that when a minor commits a crime, their identity is hidden from the public to avoid harming the life chances of someone who might not have known better, but when a thirteen year old fathers a child, he can become the subject of national debate?

The case is reminiscent of the recent “Octuplet Mom” scandal in the US, which quickly turned from fascination to outrage.  Here again, a nation revelled in psychologically deconstructing a parent.  Evidently, Ms Suleman is not a minor, but as a result of the media furore, her children, like Alfie Patten’s daughter, will inevitably grow up branded.  They will forever be “the octuplets”, robbed  from infancy of a certain chance to craft their own identities.  In the US too, we see a mock outrage, an opportunity to look down on a flawed member of society, feel better about ourselves, and then move on after the feeding frenzy.

One final point.  What is particularly tragic, it seems to me, is that we are failing children doubly.  Not only does the media see fit to rob them of their privacy in the manner discussed, but we also eschew an honest debate about teenage pregnancy, which in no small part accounts for Britain remaining at the ‘top’ of the European league tables.  Our national conversation is reactive, personalised and small-minded.  Won’t somebody please think of the children?