Birth Certificates: Sex and Consent

There is some retrospective absolutism and absent-minded nostalgia in these contrasting but connected stories.

The Guardian has news of condemnation of Max Clifford by 'child protection expert' Paul Roffey who claims "You don't need a birth certificate to realise the age of a girl even if she looks older than her age. People invariably know they are breaking the law and they still know now"

And also in the Guardian this artistic celebration of Groupies and their stories of actively seeking of sex with pop stars.  No mention of birth certificates here.  Not sure I know how old they are.

And since the age of consent varies around the world from: 12-21 (or any age provided married or even none) one cannot be too absolute when the legal concept of under age sex and the psychiatric, let-alone the media, definition of paedophilia all clash with the changing biological capacity for sex.

But the law in the UK is 16 now and was in the '60s and '70s (I write about the time here).  However willing, the fans, groupies and the merely curious were legally incapable of consent and a responsible man should have checked their age.  Just as a responsible man should check for informed consent.  So not only birth certificates but consent forms.

I think the point Clifford was trying to make was the unlikelihood of the young pop stars being that responsible at that age in that age.

Litter: a green issue?

I recently gave a webinar (using Mikogo) for Zilch (slides here from Slideshare) for a number of litter activists.  And then two days later attended an ESRC funded seminar on green criminology which still further sharpened my interest.

The litter activists obviously needed no persuading that we need to do something about litter but did not seem persuaded of my criminological or even green arguments.  Many were punitive (though often involved in interesting educational or citizen action themselves) and seemed intent on cleansing the streets.  In my search for the term litter (see ‘Matter All Over the Place: Litter, Criminology and Criminal Justice’ in the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology) in criminology texts and elsewhere I found the use of litter to mean the excluded and criminalised of society found on the streets. Human detritus.

Green penology is hardly developed but I'd like to suggest that the green take on punishment should be to reduce, reuse and recycle not throw away lives, even of offenders against ‘green’ laws or sensibilities.  It is tempting to be as punitive on the polluter as society, suite and State has been on human detritus; and when we note that litter can be used in that criminalisation we may be more tempted.  But greens need to be better.  Mediation seems to be the more green option.

But and here I agreed strongly with one contributor (Clean Highways) on the power of the law to oblige local authorities and other 'amoral calculators' (or even 'political citizens' see Pearce and Tombs and my discussion of) to clean up.

Troll: Isn’t it good, Norwegian's would

I was at a Westminster Skeptics event - social media panel on 24 September on the Outed, Outers and Outlaws of social media including:

once anonymous police blogger Nightjack outed by the Times;

outers (Peter Ede, @PME2013, revealed ‘Lord Credo’ to be no Downing St insider and here are his views on ‘Trolls’;

and ‘outlaws’ of social media like Paul Chambers of #twitterjoketrial fame.

It was a lively event and I didn’t get my question/point in.  This post is based on the thoughts I would have been trying to encapsulate.

I tend to see things in criminological terms and have published on criminology and ...:

‘green’ issues (car use and litter)

masculinity (not only of criminals, victims, criminal justice agents but also of the majority of criminologists)

‘sexuality’ (what a ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ criminology might look like)

sport (the extent of crime within sport and its criminal justice systems)

but don’t offer criminology as a solution as I’m too skeptic.

A lot of the discussion that evening touched on what I saw as criminological themes of deviance and ethics and who, how and what to control on the internet. Some of this touched on how to deal with trolls.  This, and related matters, is now the topic of earnest discussion in and with the prosecuting authorities and within the academic community.

I had known of and shared on facebook and twitter Clever Pie and Isabel Fay’s  ‘Thank You Hater!’ but am glad to have come across serendipitously (an under-appreciated research method) Leo Traynor (@LeoTraynor) who claims to have a jaundiced eye but in meeting his troll he showed the spirit of Restorative Justice without explicitly mentioning it.

There are many definitions of Restorative Justice, some quite tightly tied to criminal justice or blended with community justice.  Where I incline to it is in the writings of Nils Christie who on the topic of terrorists says:

In the Nordic countries we have our own breed of monsters, not quite as bad as terrorists, not evil all the way, but close to it. We call them Trolls. You do not treat Trolls. Nor do you train them, put them into programs for rehabilitation. It is a condition to be a Troll.

and,

‘The Norwegian Trolls have one peculiar point of vulnerability. They are endangered by sunshine. By the first glimmer of sun that might find them, they crack or turn to stone. That is the explanation of the many strange stone-formations you find if you walk in the Norwegian mountains.’

So from the perspective of Christiesque criminology I hope to encourage the open and community-based ‘policing’ and ‘punishment’ of ‘problematic situations’ (in Hulsman’s term for what other call ‘crime’) that I see as part of the founding (myth) of the internet.

University of the Third Age - some founding history

This blog is called Public Criminology because of my desire to bring criminology to the public.  Partly this stems from my interest in the widest dispersion of knowledge beyond the ivory bunker of academe but also from my father, Brian also an academic and author of Television and the People.  I teach at a conventional University but was an Open University student.  He was involved in the formation of the University of the Air as it was nearly called.

Another open way of learning is the University of the Third Age and Brian was involved with the foundation of this too as he writes below.  This is the full version of a shorter article in Third Age Matters a sort of educational Saga magazine.  I have added some links.  And offer you some reverse nepotism.

2012 marks the 30^th anniversary of the University of the Third Age. Thirty years ago there were two U3As, one in Cambridge, the other in London. The U3A in London is now the only British U3A that is actually 30 years old. In all, there are now 859 U3As in the Britain, with nearly 900,000 members. (Cambridge left a few years later when it rejected a national conference decision). 

I felt honoured to be the speaker at the recent London celebratory event. I was asked to tell members a brief version of how I came to be involved in setting up this pioneering organisation (brief because there were other items in that festive afternoon!). About 150 people came to the celebrations, so the atrium at their headquarters (the former Hampstead Town Hall), was packed. When it was my turn to reminisce I told four short stories about key people in the history - Mary Wane (an unfamiliar name), the late Michael Young and Eric Midwinter (familiar names but not to all the members there), and one of their own members, the late Sidney Jones. In this article I’ll say more about other people and their backgrounds. 

Mary Wane, a member of a U3A in the Lake District, used to be the British Council’s rep. In France. In 1978 she invited me to give lectures about British adult education to three universities in different parts of France. They had all recently set up Universites du Troisieme Age (UTA), and they were already very popular. I was accompanied by Cynthia Wyld, administrator with the influential Beth Johnson Foundation.

In the mid-1970s, there was increasing interest in Britain in expanding educational opportunities for older people. I was the Director of Extra Mural Studies at London University and I belonged to an informal group which included people from charities such as Help the Aged and Age Concern, as well as adult education specialists from several organisations, including universities and local authorities. I reported to them what I’d seen In Nanterre (Paris X University), Grenoble and Lyon. The British adult education organisations had older people who were active students, but the French reckoned that it was worth setting up departments which specialised in providing older people with formally recognised study opportunities. My department and Keele Universiity organised summer schools with Lyon and Grenoble UTA

How then could I turn interesting and useful discussions into effective action?

There was a real limit to what I could do, however. London’s Extra-Mural Department then worked all over the London area. Moreover, not only were my staff and I busy, but there was academic disapproval for backing a rival organisation! One of my staff supporters was even formally chastised by his professional trade union. 

Michael Young came to the rescue. He was already a remarkable innovator, inventing useful organisations which would then run themselves, In 1980 I told him about the U3A over sandwiches at his Bethnal Green office (now the HQ of the Young Foundation). He based his radical approach on medieval universities, which had studied for the sake of studying, without reference to degrees. 

He welcomed the opportunity and started planning the U3A as we know it with the sympathetic academic Peter Laslett at Cambridge University and the socially versatile Eric Midwinter (now well known as a speaker at U3A national conferences and elsewhere). In the Autumn, Unesco, the British Council and the Government Department of Education and Science backed my Extra Mural Department to hold an Anglo-French conference on Learning, Education and Later Life at Wye College. I drafted a resulting statement about principles and policies. It was published in Adult Education by the National Institute of Adult Education (now known as the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education) Professor Michel Philibert (Grenoble) prepared a French translation for the journal Gerontologie.

In July 1981, Philibert was asked to speak at an exploratory meeting at Cambridge when it was decided to start a U3A in the UK. Supporting grants were made by the Nuffield Foundation (credited to Midwinter at the Centre for Policy on Ageing) and to me at London Extra Mural by the Christian and Voluntary Service . 

Later that month, they were ready. Eric Midwinter talked about the new project on the BBC’s weekly radio programme, You and Yours, inviting interested listeners to make contact. About 400 people replied - far more than expected, and seriously curious. Eric arranged for all the London names to be sent to me. 

I urgently needed help. My contacts all over Greater London included Sidney Jones, on the staff of what was then the North London Polytechnic. He was in charge of teacher training, but he’d been an active participant in those informal discussions about older learners We decided to establish ourselves formally as FREE (the Forum for the Right of Elders to Education), to be co-ordinated by Dianne Norton from Age Concern and Jones hosted the first FREE meeting at his Poly. He’d started their course on Learning in Later Life. Would he become an active ally and colleague? 

Sid gladly agreed. He was keen and practical. He found several places to start - the Working Men’s College, for example. We brought together several of his students and some of the people who’d contacted the BBC, so we were well supported and active from the very beginning. I chaired the group that started planning our activities, and later, at a packed meeting at the Polytechnic of Central London (then in Regent Street), I was later formally elected Chairman. By the end of the year we had 887 members. 

These French and British initiatives, very different though they are, led to both countries co-operating in the International Association of U3As. Stanley Miller was recently the first British chairman. His successor is Prof. Francois Vellas, son of Pierre Vellas, who started the very first such department at Toulouse University. 

Brian Groombridge, U3A Founder Member Emeritus