The number of children
killed by preventable accidents declined in every UK nation between 1980 and 2010. The number of
children killed or seriously injured by a car gets lower by the year; the incidence of severe burns has declined over time across all of Europe and is now very low. Empirically speaking,
children have never been safer.
But this doesn’t seem
to have yielded a generation that feels safe. Instead, we have one that feels so unsafe they
want to use political process to make things better. That, at least, seems to
be the upshot of a new HEPI poll which revealed that (along with broad and
rising support for censorship, trigger warnings, and firing problematic
professors) 79% of undergraduates think students’ demands for “safety” should
always be met. And a look at the factors driving this seismic change suggests a
startling conclusion: that we should take “woke”
claims of “trauma” much more seriously — but also wholly disregard “woke”
claims about their origin.
For it’s
not the universities encouraging young people to make “safety” a political
demand. Rather, such calls seem to originate with students themselves. In the
recent persecution of Kathleen Stock at Sussex University,
for example, administrators may have supported or at least failed to halt her
harassment. But protests were led by undergraduate activists. One placard said “we
were meant to be safe here”.
Nor do
such demands start at university, but erupt in schools as well. In May, a
British sixth-former was hounded
out of her school for questioning consensus views on trans rights, and
instead of defending her, the school apologised to other pupils for not
maintaining a “safe space”.
I asked Andrew, head of sixth form at an
independent girls’ school, what he thought was driving the hunger to be safe.
He told me that some of it is grounded in reality: in his observation many of
his pupils are “genuinely apprehensive about the future”. Their worries vary
from the abstract, such as climate change, to more concrete fears about
economics, the job market and declining prospects for home ownership — worries
that are objectively far from groundless.
In the view of sociologist Matthew Goodwin, a key driver
of the new safety-oriented intolerance is the internet. The deputy head at one
London state school, James, backs this up: in his view, social media makes it
“much easier” to “isolate oneself from opposing (and discomforting) arguments”.
His view resonates with Andrew’s observations of how his pupils behave: “Those
who are most concerned about safety”, Andrew says, “are the ones who are very
‘online’.”
And
indeed, a defining feature of online sociality is filter
bubbles, where we come to think everyone shares our opinions because
algorithms filter out content from anyone who doesn’t. One pupil, Andrew tells
me, goes even beyond the algorithmic hygiene of her filter bubble to create her
own, proactively: she routinely checks an author’s biography for politically
disagreeable views and discards “books written by anyone with whom she
disagrees politically or philosophically”.
It makes sense, too, that a cohort accustomed
to resolving conflict by muting, unfollowing or blocking disagreeable voices
might struggle in real-world conflict. In the view of Anne, an American
professor, “a big part of it is conflict aversion”, which means “any emotional
discomfort they feel from disagreement (whether a peer or a text) is
interpreted as a personal attack and ‘unsafe’”. In response to this poverty of
interpersonal skills, she says, there’s an expectation that “professors are
responsible to create conflict-free and tension-free environments”.
This tallies with a
recent report on American campuses, where Title IX protections
intended to shield women against sex discrimination have become an expansive
means of refereeing interpersonal disputes, one Title IX coordinator tells the author
“she sometimes thought of her job as running ‘The Break Up Office’”. In other
words: instead of resolving an unhappy break-up among themselves, students seek
redress via official sex-discrimination policies.
Another
factor that might contribute to such conflict aversion is well-meaning school
policies designed to protect schoolchildren. My own daughter isn’t a university
student at the other end of her educational journey; and yet her (lovely,
attentive, empathetic) primary-school teachers regularly drum home the message
that intractable conflict is best resolved by telling a teacher. It’s often struck
me that if widespread, over time such policies might well result in more adults
whose first response to interpersonal conflict would be seeking resolution via
an authority figure.
And perhaps this starts before schools, too.
Free Range Kids, a project and book by
American mum Lenore Skenazy, argues that in the name of “safety”, over-protective
parenting — or, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff put
it in 2018, “coddling” — is undermining young people’s agency,
confidence and resilience.
And it’s difficult to
dispute that a fixation on “safety” pervades both products and services aimed
at children and also behavioural norms. This inevitably shapes children’s
experience, even in family cultures that aren’t especially anxious about
safety. I realised how deep this reaches when my own daughter became agitated
because I started the car moving, slowly, on our driveway, before she’d
finished fastening her seatbelt.
This still doesn’t feel
like the root of it though. One of the first student eruptions of this nature
to make the news took place at Yale in 2015, where two faculty members,
Nicholas and Erika Christakis, wrote to students encouraging them to tolerate
even offensive Halloween costumes. In the ensuing uproar one young woman told Christakis that the
college “is no longer a safe space”.
What
shook the world about the 2016 Yale video, and remains startling about the many subsequent similar scenarios at schools, universities and the
wider world is how
radically dysregulated many politically-engaged young people genuinely
seem to be. They actually are that
upset. For many proponents of “wokeness”, political issues genuinely seem to
cause dramatic
emotional highs and lows — so much so in fact that the phrase
“literally shaking and crying” is widely used to parody this kind of
high-pitched activist tone.
But while the fragility in question often
seems to be channeled into political activism, what if it doesn’t originate
there? A 2020 Pew study reported that
the combination of progressivism and youth strongly correlates with mental
health difficulties, a finding gleefully
seized upon to claim that progressivism drives people crazy. But it’s
possible that this has the causality backwards, and it’s more that unhappy
people seize upon what Jason Manning has
called “Victimhood Culture” to justify an already-endemic state of
maladjustment.
Consider this
short article, published by an Australian university, which describes
“coping with a meltdown”. Symptoms of a “meltdown” reportedly include shaking,
terror, poor decision-making, and destructive self-soothing, and overwhelming
emotions such as helplessness, anger and fear. According to the article, we all
experience “meltdowns”. Except actually no, we don’t.
And the “meltdowns”, the emotional
dysregulation and demands for safety — all the behavioural tics characteristic
of militant wokeism — map startlingly closely onto common symptoms of
pre-verbal trauma. That is, they’re consistent with symptoms displayed by
children abused or neglected before they learned to talk.
The child development
theorist Erik Erickson characterised the first stage of infancy as where we
develop a foundational confidence that a caregiver will be there when we need
them. And where this is interrupted by traumatic experiences, the sense of
chronic threat can last forever. As psychotherapist Dorothy Scotten argues, pre-verbal experience of abuse or neglect then
means “the infant loses the sense of safety and begins her/his life in a state
of psychological mistrust and instability”. Long-term effects of such trauma
can then include “a feeling of helplessness, residual fear and lack of safety”
along with self-destructive behaviours such as substance abuse, difficulty
forming relationships, and overwhelming emotions such as “infantile rage”. Not
a million miles, in other words, from the supposed symptoms of “meltdown”.
Another paper describes
a traumatised child who expressed “feelings of being unsafe and inadequately
protected by caregivers and an intense behavioural regression to an infantile
level at home”. This included acting out; the child “would camp outside his
mother’s bedroom door pretending to be a ‘lost puppy’ wanting to be taken in”.
The longing this expresses for a place of absolute safety is echoed in
Christakis’ confrontation with the Yale student body. Here several tearful
young women berate Christakis about how Yale was a “home” for them — but now,
as one puts it: “Somehow this home is broken.”
It seems unlikely that every single one of
these young people has been profoundly physically abused. What about neglected,
though? In the Seventies, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth documented the way
young children form a strong attachment to a single caregiver. They concluded
that attachment took three broad forms: secure, ambivalent or disordered.
Most attachments styles
fell within secure or ambivalent patterns, they found. Children with secure
attachment were confident that their caregivers would respond in an attuned
way; those with an ambivalent attachment pattern could either be anxious and
clingy or avoidant. And disordered attachment was found in neglectful,
frightened or frightening caregiving situations such as addiction or violent
homes.
Are we
looking at a mass outbreak of disordered attachment? Perhaps; for the other
generational change that swept across the West around the same time as the
internet was increased uptake of institutional childcare. In 1980, the year
after I was born, it was estimated that around a third of mothers had jobs. By
2011, though, a UCL study reported that
among the middle class, stay-at-home mums of young children were increasingly a
rarity concentrated among the richest and poorest, while in the middle class
nearly 70% had jobs before their child was one year old.
A great deal of research has been done on the
effect of childcare on attachment. Results vary considerably by geography and
the age of children, but a review of results concluded that there’s likely to be some effect. And, importantly,
especially where care is poor-quality and infants are very young, long
hours in childcare pose a significant risk factor for disordered attachment.
There are, to my
knowledge, no studies on whether any correlations exist between an
institutionalised early infancy and an unhappy young-adult preoccupation with
“safety”. But if there is a correlation, it might also explain the greater
American prevalence and intensity of this type of dysregulated youth politics:
American women have no right to maternity leave, and one in four American mothers is back
at work within two weeks. That’s a lot of tiny babies in institutional childcare.
Something
as seismic as the change in sensibility we’re seeing is unlikely to have a
single cause. But the step change in childcare uptake happened just long enough
ago for those kids to be arriving in adulthood now. It’s possible that genuine
worries for the future, internet filter bubbles, and a culture of safetyism
have landed, for some, on psyches that were fragile almost from birth.
And it’s possible that this subset was
predisposed to fragility, by an early infancy spent in “care” settings long on
stimulation, and short on attuned caregiving and cuddles — a setting inimical
to forming the kind of secure or even ambivalent attachment patterns needed for
healthy functioning as an adult. If this is so, it’s also possible that much of
contemporary student activism isn’t really about race, gender, climate or
whatever so much as it is about young adults desperately trying to elicit the
care from a new institution, that they missed out on in a different
institutional setting long before they even formed conscious memories.
If this so, we should
take student claims of distress and trauma more seriously – even as we dispute
their origins. And we should also be cautious about taking such individuals’
political demands at face value. For it may be that some of our angriest
activists have simply seized upon the opportunity offered by “Victim Culture”
to make a renewed plea for something they craved as a baby, and didn’t receive:
a reliable sense of being held, and loved, and safe.
Fragile
students just need a hug - UnHerd
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