Jeremy Forrest and the Faustian Pact

Back in the high-and-far-off-times when I first approached the chalkface, there was an unwritten code.

A new teacher is an anomaly; placed in a position of unquestionable authority, in loco parentis, he or she requires obedience and respect from pupils who may be only three or four years younger.

The trade-off for this and for the benefits of the profession - long holidays, a good starting salary and several dozen intelligent and articulate colleagues - was once clear; whatever you chose to do outside the classroom, you never socialised with pupils outside the school setting or allowed them information about your private life. After the heady freedom of your student years, it was time for teaching to claim your soul.

In a small town like the one where I first worked, this had clear implications; most teachers avoided certain places or types of recreation as a matter of course. The consequence of a keen-eyed sixth-former regaling his classmates with accounts of your extra-curricular activities was too much of a risk, however innocent your conduct.

To avoid being mistaken for pupils - a common occupational hazard for recent graduates when academic gowns ceased to be the norm - many young teachers adopted the mannerisms, dress and conduct of their elders while at work. In effect, in many ways, we stepped straight into middle age, as befitted adults expected to set an example of good behaviour to the young people under our literal tutelage.

It was a pact entered into willingly by many who chose the profession - a sacrifice, but also a valuable way to reinforce the pupil-teacher divide as much for our own protection as for that of the pupils. While a few teachers flaunted their grasp of youth culture and their close relationship with pupils, the majority realised that they had to be as far above suspicion as Caesar's wife.

The intervening years, however, have brought temptation in the form of electronic media and thus far greater sacrifices. The same constraints that cause me to hide behind a pseudonym here render it highly inadvisable for me to appear anywhere online under my own name - and, as for facebook, the case is best summed up in the words of JuliaM (who has written several interesting posts on the subject): 'Facebook and teachers - like matter and anti-matter'.

It's not exactly an overwhelming temptation for grizzled veterans like me, I must admit, but I find something worrying in the way a new generation of teachers seems to have abandoned the idea of sacrificing certain aspects of social life as a result of their choice of profession.

When somewhere between 15% and 30% of teachers claim to have been subject to cyberbullying (depending on your source), you have to ask what they are they doing leaving themselves open to it in the first place. In the same way, one has to wonder about the level of commitment of teachers who allow their drunken holiday snaps to appear in facebook.

Teaching, like monasticism (or, perhaps more pertinently, the Roman Catholic priesthood), once had a dual intake - those with a clear vocation and those who drifted into it for want of something better; the latter were often weeded out within a few years unless they could develop the sense of purpose necessary to cope with the demands of what can be a highly stressful job. It is not unreasonable, I think, to suggest that they would also be more likely than highly committed staff to engage in inappropriate relationships with girls or boys in their care.

Take a closer look now, though, and the waters are somewhat muddier. The DfE is currently advertising bursaries of up to £20,000 for graduates who train as maths teachers - a sore temptation to a debt-laden twenty-something finding today's job market a challenge, even if he or she is temperamentally unsuited and ill-equipped to cope with the unique pressures and demands of a life in secondary education.

The sad truth of the matter is that, even allowing for media exaggeration, a man who tweets pictures of his latest flowery tattoos and expresses himself in overblown song lyrics, with his guitar-playing alter ego and his 'fairytale wedding', 'dream holidays' and romantic gestures, sounds as if he was neither ready nor willing to sign away the trappings of his youthful lifestyle in exchange for a successful career.

'Be good, sweet child, and let who will be clever'

Hot on the heels of recent musings on the insult to adult consumers offered by products in primary colours comes an infuriating unsolicited mailshot from an insurance company.

"Want a sweeter deal?" it enquires, as it describes yet another financial product I don't need, "Sound tempting?"

It's not just the siren words that are irritating in the extreme, it's the accompanying illustrations; three card inserts featuring photographs of brightly coloured jelly sweets.

I'm over 40 years old and - last time I checked - in full possession of my faculties; why should I be attracted by pictures of a pile of fruit gums?

I admit I'm partial to the odd square bar of chocolate in moments of stress - which is, I supppose, quite understandable if there is any vestige of truth in the recent 'scientific findings' summarily debunked by the supremely rational Leg-Iron (in a post with the inspired title 'Chocolate - the opium of the massive'). 

I do not, however, find anything remotely appealing in the sight of a pile of possibly e-number-ridden jelly bears.

And why should I? What has persuaded a company dealing exclusively in money to go to the trouble and expense of sending me pictures of confectionery in the hope it will induce me to sign up for - of all things - health insurance?

The only answer I can come up with is the spreading infantilisation of our society. The default expectation, universally spread and promoted by the media, is that women like pretty, colourful things and men like toys and games and other reminders of their younger selves - the mailshot presumably hopes to catch both.

From the cartoon characters in television adverts to catchy slogans in bank windows, the financial sector has followed the retail one and dumbed down to a frightening extent, just as customers need more knowledge and understanding than ever before to negotiate the complicated range of products and services on offer.

And need we ask who benefits from a populace fixated on trivia and self-indulgence? The obvious answer is that the economy needs us to see life in terms of consumer treats. Mature adults plan ahead, they save money rather than spending it - or borrowing - which doesn't help at all if you see economic growth as a necessity. 'Carpe diem', chorus the media; 'it's for the common good'.

But more to the point - and more sinister - is the inevitable conclusion that an infantile population is easier to control. As long as the people concentrate on the pursuit of pleasure or the latest playground craze, our political and financial masters can carry on deceiving and exploiting us and living it up at our expense.

Mind that child!

(image: BBC News)

The price of child safety is - or should be - ceaseless vigilance.

Sadly, it's not always possible. Accidents happen; this month has seen calls for something to be done about children accidentally biting into or bursting liquitabs of detergent and suffering chemical burns as a result.

Parents have called for child-proof boxes, although many manufacturers (or, to be accurate, the handful of multinationals behind myriad brands) claim their packaging is already too difficult for young children to open. In any case, this seems to be evading the issue of the child having access to the box at all.

Constant supervision, of course, should prevent such occurrences but even the most vigilant parent looks away sometimes. The elephant in the room - and an important one - is that the risk is greatly reduced if the supervising parent has the intelligence, maturity and common sense to predict and anticipate hazardous situations before they occur.

Having raised a hyperactive child with the climbing skills of a marmoset and the levels of self-preservation once wrongly attributed to the lemming (not to mention his older brother, an infant Houdini who escaped onto a main road on his first day at playgroup and could extricate himself from any harness or car seat in 20 seconds flat), I am only too aware of the astonishing potential of toddlers to get themselves into trouble and of the precautions necessary to protect them.

Out and about today, I am constantly amazed at the sight of small children running loose in town centres; what happened to the reins that were - briefly - everywhere after the abduction of James Bulger? Cursory research tells me that they are now seen as unwanted restraint, an attitude perhaps imported via media coverage of 'celebrity mums' in the freedom-loving USA, where a woman once threatened to report my sister to the authorities for having her child 'on a leash like a dog'.

Meanwhile, the wooden playpen - that staple of the 50s and 60s nursery - seems to have vanished, leaving in its wake the occasional mesh-sided modified travel cot. This may have been a result of accidents caused by limbs caught between bars - though that doesn't seem to have stopped ordinary cots - or because parents were leaving children unsupervised in them for hours.

Though any such device is open to abuse, there is surely far more risk to the child in the lack of a safe place to put it while you answer the door/phone/call of nature. It may be a good joke in 'Back to the Future' when the hero realises that the infant in the playpen is his future jailbird uncle - "Better get used to those bars, kid!" - but I wonder whether its demise genuinely is in part due to cultural disapproval of an archaic form of restraint.

However, if we are to dispense with these aids to child safety, they need to be replaced with constant attention and, more than that, the ability to foresee what a child is likely to do. There have been plenty of cynical comments about Darwinism to accompany the stories of children eating detergent, but it can't be denied that the child of an immature or careless mother is more likely to encounter such a hazard.

There is another dimension to this particular story; the qualities that attract the children to the liquitabs in the first place. They are certainly eye-catching - brightly coloured, translucent and squeezable; just the sort of thing that small children want to put in their mouths - but these unnecessary bright colours are aimed fairly and squarely at the target consumers - adults.

It is, frankly, an insult to the consumer's intelligence. We are looking at a market so infantilised that manufacturers turn out products based purely on visual appeal, even when selling detergent. There's no need for it to be bright pink, or purple or yellow for it to do its job; the signals these products send out are aimed straight for the shopper's inner child.

They aren't the only ones; we are bombarded on all sides by advertisers encouraging us to indulge ourselves in chocolate, ice-cream or prettily-coloured shampoo (not so far removed chemically from the liquitabs, I'd guess) or treat ourselves to new gadgets and CDs - a world of entitlement to pursue childish tastes and pleasures with no place for adult responsibilities.

The trouble with this culture - however much it may delight those seeking to encourage economic growth - is that it leaves little room for such important matters as bringing up the next generation safely.

"Too Much Too Young"

A few days ago, A K Haart wrote about the sudden mental twinge caused by a momentary glimpse of the human condition:

It’s very brief and not a reasoned reaction or coherent thought.[...] Something just clicks into place then life goes on. It’s not a flash of anger at how things are, but more like a peep into a well of infinite disembodied sadness. But it's not sadness either - just recognition. After all, many sad things aren't worth being sad about.

 

There were three of them standing outside Topshop, dressed much like the window mannequins - typical young teenagers. An experienced teacher's eye would put them at 14 or 15 years old, no more. And one of them was proudly displaying to the other two a pushchair occupied by a very new baby.

I don't know if it was actually hers, but my local town is a notorious teenage pregnancy hotspot and her demeanour was distinctly proprietorial. Though it may not have been 'worth being sad about', it was enough to give that shock and momentary pause for thought.

With the average age for a first-time mother in the UK hovering around 29,  the high number of court cases involving teenage mothers and their offspring suggests a strong correlation between early pregnancy and involvement - direct or indirect - in crime (see my post 'Underclass Arithmetic').

This may well be because the early pregnancy itself implies a chaotic or unstructured home life, in which case the new baby is likely to be starting out in life at a significant disadvantage with a young mother struggling to manage the difficult task of bringing up a child without the help of a supportive and well-organised family.

Even in families where there is support, it's likely that the priorities of a girl in her teens are very different from those of a mature woman. True, babies don't come with instruction manuals and every first-time mother has to learn from experience, but when the mother's biggest challenge to date has been a mock GCSE, she is surely less likely to be able to cope with the demands of a crying baby or toddler tantrums.

And if the comments of those girls outside Topshop are anything to go by, the baby is likely to be seen more as a fashion accessory than the manifestation of an overwhelming moral and social responsibility. Oddly enough, this is apparently something to be encouraged, at least as far as the government is concerned; Britain's tottering retail edifice is being propped up by the self-indulgent spending of literal and metaphorical adolescents.

Like F Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age generation, who grew up to find 'all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken' and lapsed into decadence as a result, today's Britain is full of people who have failed to progress beyond infantile self-gratification and dependency because they have never been expected to behave as adults - good news for retailers in the youth and leisure sector* but not for society as a whole.

The end result of children brought up by parents who are hopelessly immature themselves is a culture where trivial and infantile priorities in spending and activity are matched by childish conduct even on the part of those supposedly exercising parental authority; added to a deliberate erosion on the part of the media of what were once seen as 'respectable working class' values, the end result is appallingly chaotic.

Small wonder, then, that today's media treat us to an unending parade of court cases dealing with what are, in effect, overblown tantrums and crimes of childish carelessness and indifference; lashing out at the slightest provocation, overindulgence in alcohol or drugs, mindless property damage or pets and babies mistreated and neglected once the novelty has worn off.

And, while some of those involved are clearly old enough to know better, a disturbingly high proportion of perpetrators and victims are either teenage parents or the offspring of such. There seems to be no obvious way to break the cycle of early pregnancy and emotional immaturity that fuels this endless pattern of selfishness, ignorance and crime.

It seems ironic that, back in my feminist activist days, there were campaigns to increase early and effective access to birth control in third world countries to enable young women to complete their education or training and restrict the size of the family they had to feed and support. If Save the Children wanted to do some real good here rather than playing politics, that would surely be the place to start.

I could, of course, be wrong. That new baby I saw in the shopping centre may be raised in a secure and loving home with responsible adults ready to encourage the developing child to reach his or her full potential. I sincerely hope it will be, but I can't escape that fleeting moment of sadness at the thought that, statistically, the odds are against it.


*Last night's Dragons' Den (BBC2) showed the usually cynical 'dragons' competing with each other to invest in a fledgling company selling decorated phone covers and headphones; a telling indication of where the smart money expects future spending to be concentrated in 'Austerity Britain'.

(Inspiration for the title is courtesy of James Higham's recent post on Ska, where the Specials video can be found.)

(Update: Nourishing Obscurity (again) has a thought-provoking post on a similar topic by shrewd observer Seaside Sourpuss.)

Knits on a scandal

Light posting for a few days as I'm soaking up the sun  dodging the showers in Northern France and watching the French news instead.

The oh-so-republican French dearly love a Royal story, so it's no surprise that their media have gone to town over the global coverage of the antics of Prince Harry. Le Figaro rather charmingly describes the Prince as being photographed 'en tenue d'Adam' - in the garb of Adam - and the general feeling here seems to be that it's all something of a storm in an English teacup 

Luckily for us, the genius behind Delit Maille is there to give the yarn her own particular twist...

Another day, another syndrome...

This time, it's 'Psychogenic Abnormal Feeding Behaviour' complicated by 'excessive solicitation of interspecific interactions'.

But we won't be hearing counsel for the defence producing it in mitigation for juvenile misdemeanours or parental neglect any time soon; this affliction is, so far at least, confined to the feline species.

Cats that pester for food could be suffering from psychological condition.

 Cat owners see it as a sign of hunger and affection — their pet miaowing and rubbing against their ankles as dinner time approaches. But according to a group of vets, it is a sign of a creature whose obsession with food has driven it to the edge of insanity. 

Well I never! To think that all this time, advertisers have been shamelessly exploiting cats suffering from mental illness, from the tabbies 'making haste' for a well-known brand of biscuits to the immaculately-groomed Burmese shamelessly trading overt displays of affection in exchange for a small but perfectly-formed terrine.

According to the researchers, who set out their findings in the Journal of Veterinary Behaviour, other symptoms can include “food-related aggressiveness” — taking food from other cats’ bowls — and “context-specific excessive appetite” — jumping on the table to eat from the owner’s plate.

Now, I'm no expert - and I'd certainly welcome comments from cat-owners on this - but isn't that what you'd expect from what is, after all, a predatory mammal, unless it had been trained otherwise? Small wonder, then, that researchers found no physical reason for the behaviour and concluded the cause must be psychological.

They improved the cat’s behaviour by feeding and stroking it only at certain times of day, and ignoring it at other times.

Well that should have thoroughly confused the poor thing! But the whole thing really boils down to a bit of common sense: if you occasionally feed your cat from your plate, it will come to expect that pestering will bring a reward. It's not exactly rocket science but it's a principle some pet-owners presumably fail to grasp - and parents, for that matter.

Now, I can't claim to be an expert - the only cats I know well are nice-but-dim twins whose parents were brother and sister (owned by kindly but innocent God-fearing folk who were more than a little surprised and shocked to find a litter on their hands) and are possibly not the best examples of feline normality - but all this looks alarmingly like something we've seen at work with humans.

So will the traffic run the other way too, I wonder? Will some child psychologist pick this study up and run with it, slap on a snappy collection of initials and rush it into the armoury of the apologists for inadequate human parenting? Given the industry that has sprung up around ADHD and the way childhood obesity dominates the news, I'd say it's a dead cert.

Any bets on how long it is before Ambush Predator is quoting a mother's belligerent protest: "It's not my fault he weighs fourteen stone; he's got PAFB"?

Paradigm shift

You know how you look at something you've seen a thousand times before and suddenly it strikes you, out of the blue; "So that's what's going on here!"

And, after a moment's consideration; "How did we ever let things get this bad?"

It's just over fifty years since Kurt Vonnegut published his dystopian satire 'Harrison Bergeron'.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. 

If you don't know it, please don't read on yet - go and look for yourself; it's not very long (the rest of you can carry straight on).
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OK?
Now consider the sneakiest device at the disposal of the United States Handicapper General: 

And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

and take a look at all the the teenagers - and people old enough to know better - walking around with headphones playing so loud that, even though the business-end is buried in the recesses of their ears, those  immediately next to them are treated to, in the delightful phrase of cartoonist Posy Simmons, "A faint noise rather like mice tap-dancing on a biscuit tin".

So intelligence-sapping are these devices that, as Bucko reports, a campaign has been launched to stop earphone-wearers ambling into the path of oncoming trains at level crossings. Researchers say headphones block out ambient noise; I'm more inclined - particularly since we've had the Urchin and his 'music' at home for some weeks now - to think that Vonnegut had it right and that being blasted with noise blocks out rational thought.

It seems ironic that, while we've been well aware of the attempts of various educational theorists to engineer a spurious equality among the young, they themselves have embraced a device that could have been expressly designed to impair their ability to reason.

Hold the front page!

Sometimes I think the offices of local newspapers must be filled with aspiring newshounds fervently hoping for some kind of grand disaster.

The Clacton gazette is certainly no exception, if this week's paper edition is anything to go by. When news came in of a roller-coaster accident on the town's pier, it must have seemed like journalistic manna from heaven, even though the reality was less than sensational:

All seven casualties were assessed by paramedics and did not require hospitalisation. A number of the casualties were shaken-up and a few suffered neck pains.

But why let the truth get in the way of a good headline? Ladies and gentlemen, from the people who brought you last year's sensational 'TODDLER INCHES AWAY FROM FALLING OFF PIER', it's....

Ah, bless!

Darwinism in action

No, it's not the hordes allegedly flocking to immerse themselves in the corrosively alkaline waters of a disused Derbyshire quarry (I wonder whether numbers have increased since the story hit the news), nor is it the paterfamilias insisting on his Yooman Right to walk with his children beneath an unstable cliff-face, but this edifying tale from yesterday's Guardian:

Hill walkers have been warned not to use smartphone apps to navigate in the Scottish mountains after the police had to rescue 16 people who got lost in the Cairngorms.

Now, I have to admit that, not owning a smartphone, I don't have much idea of their capabilities, but I can't imagine any circumstances in which I would be prepared to undertake a risky activity relying entirely on the say-so of a mobile phone, particularly given the difficulty of getting a signal in remote mountain areas.

There seems to be a lot of it about - the police say there have been four cases of this type since Friday, and, according to the deputy leader of Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team:

"Last night alone, we were involved in two separate incidents, involving a total of 16 people, who had relied on smartphone apps to navigate on the high tops, were very poorly equipped for the conditions, and become lost." 

I've long despaired at teenagers who use their phone as a sort of external hard drive for their brains, a device to save them the trouble of ever having to commit anything to memory or, in some cases, bothering to think at all; though the ages aren't given (this being the Guardian), it seems that outsourcing intellectual function is even more widespread than I thought.

About the only thing the phones seem to have been useful for was calling in the emergency services when the walkers realised they were hopelessly lost - which is rather like Stephenson's new-fangled railway helpfully rushing William Huskisson to hospital after he was hit by the inaugural train.

One group of 14 walkers was eventually rescued in the early hours of Tuesday morning in an operation involving police, two mountain rescue teams and a Royal Navy helicopter. Fuel costs aside, that's an awful lot of people to be deprived of a night's sleep just because some twit thinks his smartphone's a better bet than a compass, a map and proper equipment.

Olympic quote of the day - 6; closing ceremony

Blogger, I realise, is rather slow for this kind of thing, but as I don't do twitter here are some of my favourites, to be updated through the evening:

 Laurie Penny:
 If the Olympics is a giant party, the closing ceremony is everyone's embarrassing drunk uncle doing the hip-swivelly pointy-finger dance.

Giles Coren:
Ah, wait. I know what's going on. They've deliberately made it shit so the Spice Girls aren't nervous about coming on and ruining it.

Paul Stephenson, on Emeli Sande's second appearance:
This closing ceremony was brought to you by Emeli Sande's publicist.
(Too right; who does this Sande woman know? Once was bad enough!)

Giles Coren again:
It's like in the car when you're stuck on the motorway with only one cd, and round about Coventry you're back at the beginning of it...

Sue Perkins, as the white blocks are piled up:
Kate Bush Tetris Festival is underway

(Aaaaaaagh! Bohemian Rhapsody..... violated! By 'Imagine'! And little kids!)

Dave Steele:
Wait no! Everybody stop. This is the exact ritual required to bring back Tony Blair! We've been tricked! Ruuuuuun! 

(Giant billboards? Kate Moss? Don't tell me this whole thing has just been a giant advert for all the designer outlets in that new shopping centre down the road in Stratford!)


And JuliaM, with what may be the Leitmotif of the evening:
Jeeeeeesus! Need....more....WHISKY
(You and me both, Julia! )

Oh no - Boris and Dave grooving along to the Spice Girls. Right; that's it - I'm off to find some mind bleach and bed! I'm too tired to stick around for the scouring of the Shire.

And best tweet of the evening? Surely it's got to be this exchange:

Clarissa:
What are the odds on Liam being stoned?

JuliaM:
The audience'd happily do it.Would supply their own stones too...

Quote of the day - the Mail does its bit for marital harmony

The Mail reports today that families are taking their children to swim in a disused quarry in Derbyshire even though signs warn that the water has a potentially irritating pH of 11.3 and contains 'dead animals, excrement, car wrecks and rubbish', a phrase in which you can almost hear the steel guitars...

"Day-ud animals, excrement, car-wrecks and rubbish
Are all I have left to remind me of you-oo"

The reporter - with rather unseemly journalistic relish - describes a mother watching approvingly and taking photos as her young children swim in this 'toxic soup'. Then he moves on to another group with three young boys, all of whom can be clearly seen playing in the water in the accompanying photos.

I hope the Mail's reporter is prepared for the consequences, since he gives verbatim this charming summing-up of 21st-century parenting from the father of one of them:

'I don't care about the boys going in the water but if my f****** wife sees pictures of my boy in the paper I'll be trouble. [sic]' 

(Update, the quote has since disappeared from the article, though the pictures of the boys are still there. Meanwhile, for more details of this salubrious location and its discerning visitors, see Leg-Iron's excellent post on the subject).

'Underclass arithmetic'

Without wishing to comment on current news stories - except to say that it seems to me the height of folly for online newspapers to give copious amounts of detail about the family of a missing person and then allow speculative comments from readers - I have a genuine question.

The inclusion of the ages of the people involved in legal cases, a standard feature of local papers and the grubbier end of the national press, allows the reader to spot some noticeably recurring patterns which give considerable food for thought.

The vast majority of recent criminal cases involving the lowest socio-economic groups (a difficult one to phrase, that - I can see the Urchin hovering, ready to blow his 'elitist whistle'; good job he hasn't seen the title yet), can be seen, with the use of some simple arithmetic, to involve at least one of the following:

• a mother whose first child was conceived before she reached the age of 18 (or, in some cases, 16)
• a man who, in his late thirties or forties, fathered a child with a woman under 20
• a woman in her late thirties or forties living with a man at least ten years younger than she is

Now, what I should like to know is whether this is an accurate reflection of society as a whole, and if not, what causal factors are at work.

The mean age for first-time mothers in the UK is currently 29, yet the majority of criminal cases feature, directly or tangentially, a woman less than nineteen years older than her eldest child; does this mean that the chances of a teenage mother or her children being involved in a crime at some stage - as either perpetrator or victim -  are significantly higher than for the rest of the population?

And while we're familiar with the stereotype of a teenage pregnancy where both parents are barely out of childhood themselves, what attracts teenage girls to much older men? For a recent example, take the offensive tweets to Tom Daley; their author was the product of a liaison between a girl in her mid teens and a man in his forties.

That's an extreme example, admittedly, but there are plenty of cases where a quick calculation implies a woman under 20 moving in with a man over twice her age - or two women, in the case of the house fire in Derby. Why do these girls move on from relationships with their peers to live with men as old as their fathers?

It's not easy to imagine a social context in which a full-time mother barely past school age could build an equitable and stable relationship with a man so much older, though another feature of many criminal cases - and late-night road accidents - involving young mothers is the freedom given by relatives taking care of the child for extended periods.

Given that some of the youngest child-mothers, at least as portrayed in the press, display a startlingly casual attitude to cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, could these relationships be initially founded on the supply of one or more of these commodities? (In the context of court cases, it's worth considering here that maternal drug and alcohol abuse have been repeatedly linked with behavioural disorders in young people.)

Or is it a case of access to housing? In such cases, where the detail is given, it is almost always the man who is the householder, while the opposite seems to be true in the cases where an older woman is living with a younger man.

I appreciate that all this only seems odd through 21st-century Western eyes - up until the beginning of the last century, none of these situations would have seemed particularly unusual. However, with the changing role of women in society, freely available birth control and the higher expectations of compatibility and equality within a relationship, it seems odd that they persist.

Since much of our society now regards as normal a married or cohabiting couple of similar ages with interests in common, I wonder whether the controlling factor here is the benefits system, which allocates housing and financial support in ways that may well encourage certain types of behaviour.

There seems to be a life-cycle emerging from the statistics; a teenage girl goes out with boys her own age until she gets pregnant. Then as a single mother, she hooks up with a string of older men until, often because she now has a large number of children, she gets her own house and finds a younger partner to move in with her.

Meanwhile, her eldest daughters are already beginning the whole cycle again and her adult sons - well, they seem to be left out of the picture completely, liable for child support if they work, doomed to a life of benefits if they don't and, in any case, unable to provide suitable homes for potential partners so they can't settle down. 

So they hang around, battening onto a succession of single mothers on benefits or minimum wage in state housing until they, in their turn, get places of their own and become dominant males - it's pure Desmond Morris. It's not a situation that is going to bring out the best in anyone, let alone a young man with too much time and testosterone on his hands.

Perhaps, thinking about it, that's the answer to why families like this, however unrepresentative of the population as a whole, seem to make up the bulk of cases in Britain's criminal courts.