The idea that America is the place to go for tips on how to deal with delinquency is like asking George Galloway to present a course on being demure. For decades it has been the developed nation with the most crime, incarcerating and executing large numbers of its population. From the country that invented bad behaviour (purveying this arrested development through films and TV series), comes its solution, courtesy of Channel 4: new age Brat Camp.
In the series, we meet seven British girls in their mid-teens, whose parents perceive them as vile snakes. Each is shown doing or saying things illustrating this. Most are depicted as having been spoilt or over-indulged; nothing else is mentioned about what has made them like this, such as their parents or the society in which they have grown up.
Off the girls go to the Aspen Achievement Academy in Utah, to be made good. Unlike previous Brat Camps, this one is not only authoritarian, although coercion is the core of the regime: the girls are forced from the beginning to do as they are told. But there is also a Buddhist instructor and a therapist, both of whom are seeking to achieve compliance through non-physical means.
Exactly like convicts, the girls are stripped of their identity through the removal of possessions and clothes, complete with body search to remove drugs and cigarettes. Then they are taken camping in the Utah wilderness. They are informed that they will have to stay for as long as it takes to learn to be “compliant” — the longest has been four months, but the girls should realise that it will be longer than that, if necessary. The producers omit the fact that, were Channel 4 not footing the bill, the Brat Camp would cost their parents $440 (£250) a day, the average stay being 49 days (£12,000).
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Since all the girls were smokers, and since several had been using alcohol and drugs copiously, the first few days are spent detoxing. During this phase they are urged to think of themselves as mice, “learning things from the ground up”, and exhorted to “think small”. Physical force is frequently employed to make them stay in their individual tents and remain silent for 24 hours. All food is uncooked and mouse “rites of passage” are performed.
After a few days, four of the girls are deemed compliant enough to progress to the next phase (coyote). They are separated from the three remaining reprobates and permitted cooked food and other privileges. All are forced to go on lengthy walks around the wilderness.
To cut a long story short, over the next seven weeks, one of the girls is so bad tempered that she is sent off to a stricter regime, where she shovels shit for several weeks. The good girls are reunited with their parents after nine weeks and the bad ones have to endure a bit longer.
Back in Blighty, one month after returning (not nearly long enough for us to know if it really worked), it is debatable whether the outcomes exemplify the success rate, which is said to be 85 per cent. In the case of Julia, her mother says she has not changed. Georgie is still tempted by drugs and her mother’s response is to sell her house to pay for her daughter to spend a whole year at Aspen — which is not an unqualified triumph.
Rosie has taken up marathon running but her ambition to return to Aspen and train as an instructor might suggest that she is merely displacing her demons and hoping to control them in other teenagers. Shit-shovelling Lucy has also identified with her guards — she wants to join the navy or the police; arguably, she is addicted to environments in which she is controlled by strict authority.
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These last two outcomes are in accord with the scientific evidence that predicts that such regimes will fail: physically forcing or blackmailing children to comply will repeat the authoritarian parenting that is often the cause of the misbehaviour in the first place.
An over-controlling pattern of care uses rewards, threats, hectoring words or violence, pressurising children to think, feel and behave in conformity with parental dictates. By contrast, supportive care takes the child’s perspective, minimising pressure and encouraging the child to find out what he or she wants. These two patterns result in very different types of engagement with parental wishes.
The controlled child apes them in a robotic, literal, unimaginative fashion, sometimes verging on the parodic, because the behaviour is not infused with the child’s own choices or approach. Beneath the surface, there is strong resentment towards the parents for having bullied them into being good. In teenage years this can turn into a very aggressive rebellion.
Alongside this, patterns of reward and punishment may be erratic — what was seen as good last time might be deemed bad this time. The parents may be contradicting each other, as well as themselves. Allied to that, children of such parents are liable to have been deprived of love in their early years, making them insecure and angry. In fact, far from having been spoilt by parents when small, the vast majority of delinquent children have been neglected by them. There will be short-term gains from detoxing and from having clear boundaries provided at the camp. But the rage resulting from unmet infantile needs, or chaotic punishment schedules, or demands for unquestioning obedience, remains untouched.
Being trapped in a wilderness with burly guards, where you are told that you will not escape until you comply means that only the most stupid or disturbed will not, sooner or later, realise that compliance is the only way out; but it will not change the core psychology that is causing the problem, only the behaviour, and then only briefly. At best, it results in crude adoption of the values, as in “I want to be one of the jailers” or “I want to become the policeman who is lacking inside my head”.
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Like so many TV programmes about parenting that now infest our screens, Brat Camp is not a bad metaphor for Labour’s failure to reduce delinquency.
First and foremost, how sane is the society that the girls are being forced to conform to? All guzzle drugs and booze, most start having sex in their early teens, and crave expensive clothes and fame. This only mirrors the mixed messages of 21st-century Britain. During his time in charge, our god-fearing Prime Minister has encouraged us to take on record levels of debt (credit card and mortgage), liberalised licensing laws and reclassified cannabis to Class C.
At the same time, he has exhibited authoritarian, rather than rehabilitative, approaches to misbehaviour. The prison population has swelled, and hardly a week has gone by without a coercive gimmick, from ASBOs to the latest serving of tosh, the “Respect” agenda. Just how confusing are those contrasting messages for a 15-year-old girl or her parents? In terms of preventing delinquency, parents who look after small children are the most important citizens in the country. Employers must offer them much more flexible hours and discourage long ones. Instead of turning SureStart (the scheme to help low-income parents) into a giant crèche in which poor mothers dump their babies to go back to work, Blair should have used it to help them look after their babies better.
Over the past couple of months, in which I have been making a parenting strand for This Morning (Through the Eyes of the Child, ITV, Tuesdays), I have witnessed how pervasive the authoritarian rhetoric of politicians and supernanny psychologists has become. All the parents were convinced that they had been too soft and expected me to suggest greater strictness. Yet when I encouraged them to understand, spend special time with, and express love towards, their offspring, the initial problems (eg, hyperactivity, tantrums, insomnia) mysteriously evaporate.
Nothing is known about the kind of care Blair received but I would be willing to bet my house on the proposition that his authoritarianism reflects having had controlling care as a small child. What a shame that we have had to pay the price.
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Oliver James is the author of They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life.
His new book, Beating Affluenza: How to be Successful and Stay Sane is published in September Brat Camp, Channel 4, 9pm
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