Abigail Frymann Rouch is a religious and social affairs journalist. She has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Independent, Channel4.com and Deutsche Welle. As a commentator she has appeared on Sky News, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service, BBC World News, and regional radio. For nine years she was foreign editor, then online editor, of The Tablet.
As a parent I face a dilemma: should I keep up with the latest tech trends and risk exposing my son to online harm, or take a conscious step back 20 years?
Six years is a very good innings for a guinea pig; it is a poor one for a badger. The bell is tolling for my trusty old Samsung phone, which after six years is slowing down. With a certain heaviness, I know I need to look for a replacement.
For me, choosing a new phone is not an opportunity to clasp within my hands the most recent years’ technological leaps and bounds; it feels more like a pointed shove to force me to get the hang of the changes the phone companies have made to their models since I was last forced to switch.
In its day, my phone was perfect for live news reporting from the scenes of terrorist attacks such as the Westminster Bridge and Parsons Green attacks, for the German state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. My phone was ready and well-equipped, with a nice big Qwerty keyboard for writing copy at speed, and a good-quality camera that could record video and audio. Off went my photos to Bonn and up went web pages with my byline on them. I even invested in a DSLR camera so I could add better quality pictures to my copy – though that proved cumbersome and has largely stayed in the cupboard.
I am more desk-based now, and the sheen of ever fancier smartphones has for me been eroded by two reality checks: first, the number of local reports about phone thefts by muggers speeding by on e-scooters or e-bikes, and second, the effect my phone habits could have on my son. Perhaps my concern should extend to all the children who might see me using my phone, but I’m not sure I can put myself through the pain of smartphone-loss for children who don’t often see my habit.
The sheen of ever fancier smartphones has for me been eroded by two reality checks: first, the number of local reports about phone thefts by muggers speeding by on e-scooters or e-bikes, and second, the effect my phone habits could have on my son.
And a habit it is – checking the weather, travel times, email, the headlines if I have a couple of minutes’ dead time. To me this seems harmless: I am not exposing myself to either the harmful or illegal content covered in the newly passed Online Safety Act. But I am demonstrating that free minutes here and there can be absorbed by taking your phone out and staring at its screen, rather than by reading a newspaper or a book or engaging with the people or sights and sounds around you. And by leaving my phone around the house for the odd photo or video, I’m giving the message that this tiny omni-wizard is a harmless, benevolent part of the furniture. And my big fear is that my son or his friends replicate these habits when handed a smartphone, and stumble across online nasties. Or that he becomes addicted to the stream of endless content offered to users.
What would I lose in saying no to a smartphone? I can do without the things I haven’t yet got used to, such as a games, AI editing technology (err, what?), a NASA-grade camera, and a sharper screen for watching films I don’t want to watch on something the size of a large matchbox.
But when it comes to saying goodbye to the things I have got used to, that’s a challenge. A quick look for dumb phones brings up designs for as little as £65 with big buttons and little else. Several are aimed at older people, presumably with poorer eyesight and less dexterity. No Qwerty keyboard; back to slow-texting as we did in the noughties, and no email. A few come with apps, or limited versions of them, such as WhatsApp messaging but no video or audio calling. So then, how would my son chat to his grandparents? We’d have to Zoom from a laptop over the home Wi-Fi. And out and about recently, I needed to scan a QR code to book a medical appointment, which would have been beyond the wit of such a device. I’m sure there are ways to manage without of the fast-fixes we’ve got used to, but they’re less convenient.
Simpler times: dumb phones courtesy of Doro (left and centre) and Nokia
A dumb phone would require a conscious getting out of the tech habits I’ve got into, saving more online tasks for a home computer and leaving the home with lots of reading material, plus pen and paper to keep a note of all those tasks. All of which takes effort.
What I’d like is two phones – one smart and one dumb, with paired SIM cards, so I can use the dumb handset publicly and keep the other for specific occasions. But I’m trying to swim against the tide and feeling like a very small minnow indeed.
Smartphone boycotters can learn from the match girl strike and other historical protests.
Meta’s assets totalled nearly US$230 billion last year; Pinterest’s were over $3.5 billion and Beijing-based ByteDance, parent company of Tik Tok, was valued at $220 billion. Between them they have attracted billions of users, and, enabled by the spread of smartphones, transformed the way that young people especially communicate, spend time alone and carry out friendships.
But parents’ concern at the impact of what their children are viewing, and the tech companies’ slow responses to a drip-drip-drip of teenage deaths linked to harmful online content, have pushed parents’ patience to the limit. In the last month an estimated 20,000 have joined a grassroots protest group – Parents United for a Smartphone-Free Childhood – whose founders are hastily developing a campaign strategy.
This pushback against the march of big tech cannot come soon enough, and if well co-ordinated it could finally give parents a weapon: their numbers.
The stats are becoming all too familiar – half of nine-year-olds own a smartphone and 68 per cent of children as young as three use it to get online. Drill down and it gets more startling: according to a Statista survey of 13-17-year-olds, 30 per cent of TikTok users had seen sexualised images or been trolled anonymously on the platform in the previous month; 14 per cent of respondents who visited YouTube had recently seen “violent or gory” content, and 10 per cent of respondents “had seen images of diet restriction on Instagram”.
But these aren’t the only forms of online harm. I attended a meeting recently in the Palace of Westminster where one speaker argued that just as bad, especially for teenagers, are the algorithms that promote content that leads to peer comparison and discontent, which niggles away at contentment and self-confidence.
The age checks on which they rely will be brought in by the tech companies, who thus far haven’t proven the most trustworthy partners on child safeguarding.
Some of these hi-tech problems will require hi-tech solutions and new laws. But might there also be some far older wisdom that could help us a society chart a course to a safer online experience for young people?
The Government’s finally passed Online Safety Bill marks a pushback, making the tech companies legally responsible for keeping children and young people safe online. It mandates platforms to protect children from “harmful or age-inappropriate” content such as porn, depictions of violence, bullying, and sites promoting anorexia, and platforms will face tougher scrutiny of the measures they take to ensure under-13s can’t have social media accounts.
However, these changes won’t take effect until partway through 2025 at the earliest; the age checks on which they rely will be brought in by the tech companies, who thus far haven’t proven the most trustworthy partners on child safeguarding.
What are parents to do? And increasingly, employers and economists? After all, youth mental health experts were quick to point the finger at social media following the Resolution Foundation research that found five per cent of 20 to 24-year-olds were economically inactive due to ill health last year and 34 per cent of 18 to 24s reported symptoms of mental health conditions such as depression or anxiety – a reversal from two decades ago, when they had the lowest incidence of such disorders at only 24 per cent.
Sat indoors, not interacting and liable to stumble across harmful content. Photo: Freepik
The Department for Education wants heads to ban mobiles in school, which some already do. But what about outside school hours? As one participant and parent at the meeting asked, “Isn’t the genie already out of the bottle?”
A couple of voices suggested young people needed an engaging real-life alternative to their screens that involved learning to take risks, such as rock-climbing. Another added that young people are too protected in the real world and not protected enough online.
One woman who has felt the sharpest cost of this inadequate protection is Esther Ghey. I would have hoped that the tech companies would be quick to change the ways their platforms work once they knew about the harmful material that her teenager Brianna was able to view online and the violent material her killers were able to discuss online.
But then I hoped the same after 14-year-old Molly Russell took her own life in 2017 having viewed content promoting self-harm and suicide on Instagram. Instead, her family were made to wait two years for Meta, parent company of Instagram, to provide evidence for her inquest. Representatives from Meta and Pinterest apologised at the inquest, five years after her death. Big deal.
Molly and Brianna were not just vulnerable teenagers – they were victims of the powerful machinery of Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions.
Parents can – in theory – enact all parental controls offered by their internet provider, limit screen time and ban phones from their children’s bedrooms at night, although setting and reinforcing boundaries can be exhausting. Esther Ghey said Brianna’s phone usage “was a constant battle between me and her”. Other parents may lack the capacity to, or just not feel the need to, carry out such measures. And it only takes one child to share material for it to become a problem for a whole peer group.
It’s a good step that phones are entering the market that are designed to be safe for children, with parental controls and minimal access to the internet. But they don’t get kids rock-climbing (or your wholesome outdoor team activity of choice), they still normalise children’s phone use, and they require parents to spend more time monitoring their own phones to check their children’s usage.
So what’s to be done?
Molly and Brianna were not just vulnerable teenagers – they were victims of the powerful machinery of Third and Fourth Industrial Revolutions, the rapid advances in tech that have taken computers from the office to the pocket and loaded them up with the capability of dozens of devices combined.
Molly’s father Ian has teamed up with Esther Ghey to work together on holding the tech companies to account. And thanks to Parents United for a Smartphone Free Childhood, other parents now have a way of voicing their fears in a co-ordinated way, to try to prevent the next disaster. Organisers Clare Fernyhough and Daisy Greenwell estimate that already some 20,000 people have joined, from every county across Britain. This is an online campaign for an online age: it was sparked by a post by Greenwell in the fertile soil of Instagram, and communities are organised into WhatsApp groups. Nonetheless, the pair are encouraging parents not to give children smartphones until 14 and social media access until 16, and they have put together resources to help members urge headteachers to restrict, and other parents to delay, smartphone usage.
Examples like William Booth are a reminder that, when it comes to systemic challenges, individuals are not without agency.
But what if these steps aren’t enough? History recalls some impressive David-vs-Goliath campaign victories that could be of use here. In the first Industrial Revolution, exhausted and overworked women and children lost limbs and even lives in the newly invented machinery. According to a landmark report commissioned by the House of Commons in 1832, these workers were often “abandoned from the moment that an accident occurs; their wages are stopped, no medical attendance is provided, and whatever the extent of the injury, no compensation is afforded.” Years passed from the creation of these voracious machines to reformers such as Lord Shaftesbury, a politician driven by his Evangelical Christian faith, passing laws to cap children’s hours at 58 hours a week and introduce other safeguards.
A few decades later, the Bryant and May match company was employing hundreds of East End women to make matches using white phosphorus, which can cause phosphorus necrosis of the jaw or Phossy Jaw. The employees formed a union and went on strike; the Salvation Army, led by William Booth, another social reformer inspired by his Christian beliefs to help people in poverty, set up their own factory in 1891 offering better working conditions including the use of less toxic red phosphorus. Although their factory only ran for 10 years, the episode spelt bad publicity for Bryant and May and a ban on the use of white phosphorus in matches followed shortly after.
A Salvation Army matchbox. Image courtesy of The Salvation Army International Heritage Centre
Examples like William Booth are a reminder that, when it comes to systemic challenges, individuals are not without agency. But other chapters in history underline that one person’s vision or persistence may need to be amplified by scale to be taken seriously. Had the civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, boycotted the buses alone, the authorities in Montgomery would have shrugged their shoulders. But when 40,000 other Black passengers, led by Rev Martin Luther King, joined her, the authorities could not afford to ignore them.
So how do these three stories relate to young people’s social media use?
The harmful effects of social media are a global issue, and if tech companies boast revenues greater than the GDP of several countries, governments may need to work together to get them to listen. And any calls from governments for better regulation and self-policing will be amplified if backed up by millions of parents.
Perhaps we’re seeing the start of this: if the thousands of Parents United for a Smartphone Free Childhood can grow in number and start conversations with schools and other parents, then the demand for smartphones and their dominance of some young people’s lives can be challenged. Such conversations can’t come soon enough. But how can parents make themselves heard? And what do nineteenth-century industrialists, East End match girls or 1950s African Americans have to do with it?
The parallel, in Christian jargon, is the undervaluing of the human person. The tech companies do not just exist to help us stay in touch with our friends or look cooler. So bear with me, if you will, for a thought exercise.
In short, and I wince: adults’ relationship with smartphones needs to be rethought just as much as children’s.
The Shaftesburies of our day need to ensure existing laws are applied, that the tech companies’ promised age controls are water-tight, and harsh penalties are applied for platforms that fail to take down harmful or illegal content. The William Booths need to provide alternatives to dopamine-inducing social media, that affirm the value of each young person and teach them to manage real-world, appropriate levels of risk. Hence the suggestion of rock-climbing or similar. And could we also imagine social network being conceived, funded and constructed on European soil which takes the wellbeing of its users seriously? And some form of online policing?
In the meantime, the Rosa Parks of our age – which is all of us social media users, and Parents United for a Smartphone Free Childhood could lead the way – must consider investing in a dumb phone and enacting a smartphone boycott, at least outside our professional lives. The half of nine-year-olds who reportedly own smartphones can’t buy or fund them themselves; therefore, pretty much half of parents of nine-year-olds have passed theirs on or bought new ones and kept paying the bills. That gives them leverage.
Young people may do better to log off and learn to manage real-world risk. Photo: David Bortnyk
Leading by example would also mean parents swapping their own smartphones for dumbphones – at least in front of their children. An old laptop could be kept in the kitchen for searches that then become public, functional and brief – just like twentieth-century dips into the Phone Book or Yellow Pages. Smartphone ownership could be seen as a privilege of maturity like drinking, learning to drive and (previously) smoking, and doom-scrolling in front of children blacklisted. In short, and I wince: adults’ relationship with smartphones needs to be rethought just as much as children’s.
The reforms of Shaftesbury and others and the ban on white phosphorus helped lay the foundation for today’s health and safety laws. The bus boycott was a key step in the Civil Rights Movement’s long and hard-fought journey towards equality.
The tragic, needless loss of the lives of Brianna and Molly (and, sadly, others) must lead to laws and a wider social rethink that lay the foundations for a safer, more grown-up, properly regulated, internet age. We need to set ourselves on a course from where future generations will look back aghast, just as we do on child labour or white phosphorus or racial segregation, and ask, ‘What were they thinking?’
This article first appeared on Seen & Unseen. Top image: Sarah Chapman and the match girls strike committee. Wellcome Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
My extended family are meeting up in central Italy this summer. “Aha,” I thought, after reading one too many reports about the contribution of air travel to an environmental apocalypse, “let’s see if we can avoid flying. It might be a challenge with a small child, but what a great way to see Europe.” Surely it couldn’t be that hard? Could it?
Perhaps it has left the sidings and is chuntering towards us, but there is little sign of it yet. I am not a train nerd, but I am trying to avoid flying after reading one too many reports about the contribution of air travel to an environmental apocalypse.
My extended family are meeting up in central Italy this summer. “Aha,” I thought, “let’s see if we can avoid flying. It might be a challenge with a small child, but what a great way to see Europe,” and, I modestly said to myself, “And what an example we’ll set!”
In April I started with the ever-mysterious-sounding Seat61.com, but the routes highlighted were already selling for 15 times the €29 the site publicised. And the timings would have sliced through our little one’s daily routine, with the risk of causing pain to all of us.
I searched online for “no-fly travel” and found carefully curated tours of European idylls, accommodation included, but the photos were of wine glasses and sunsets, not swings and miniature trains.
I contacted a no-fly travel agent (there is such a thing), and spoke to the helpful Catherine Livesley, founder and director of the No-Fly Travel Club. For her to get us off the starting block, she required a one-year membership fee of £79 for an individual or £149 for a family which “includes up to 2 hours of support on the itineraries of your choice”. If we wanted her to book the tickets, that would cost extra.
This came as a shock after the ease of airline and domestic rail websites. But we were dealing with a business model that required work by a human rather than a search engine, and paid up. And it would be worth it – the aviation industry is responsible foraround 5 per cent of global warming, after all. And what an achievement if we could steam in to our holiday destination flight-free and brimming with tales of rewarding French stopovers!
Livesley quickly came back to us with two routes: one via Paris and Milan, back on a sleeper train from Nice, and a second via the ever-picturesque Swiss countryside. A sleeper train from Paris to Nice was already booked up, so we could only take it on the way home. She had thoughtfully broken the journey up into short-ish chunks to suit a young child, but these would require more hotel stays than if we were prepared to travel at any hour for any length of time.
So we turned to the possibility of driving. Around 1,000 miles. We looked up tips for long distance driving with little ones and asked friends and family and the internet. We found exciting looking car-trains that had ceased running in the pandemic. We found a car train that for some reason offered to transport your car – a day or so after transporting the passengers. Then we found a Motorail service that reached Italy via Düsseldorf and would have transported our car as well. My husband called out as he scrolled through the timetable, “What does ‘Nicht verfügbar’ mean?” “Not available,” I replied with an increasing sense of resignation. There were technical problems on the line.
What if we did the drive by ourselves – surely it couldn’t be that hard? Au contraire: it would mean 19 hours’ (at least) driving on the unfamiliar right, with the risk of Little One getting fidgety or uttering the words, “I need a wee.” After we had begun our investigations and many evenings of discussions, we did a four-hour drive that was twice punctuated by those peace-shattering words. Both times, into action we flew, eyes peeled for the first sign of a service station, cartoonishly skidding in to race towards the facilities. The thought of executing this manoeuvre in a foreign country was not appealing.
Exhausted, we gave up. Reader, I apologise. We have booked air tickets. We are already paying for our weakness – a lack of weekend flights means that our already expensive tickets (more expensive than the train) will require several nights in a hotel. We had an option to carbon offset when we paid for them and I confess, I felt so sore to be paying more that I declined. (I’ve since made a donation to Friends of the Earth.) And yet any peace of mind about our journey was quickly swept away: the airline with which we booked has been cancelling flights.
So what to conclude? That for all our efforts we are – this year – contributing to the problem, and that our spending habits are no different from those of people who don’t care about the environment.
But also that the age of sleepers can’t come soon enough, and that car trains need to get up and running in sufficient volume; that governments may need to offer subsidies to help companies to scale up quickly so that even those with little concern for the environment are persuaded to avoid the airport. And that one way to reduce the carbon footprint of a holiday is to reduce the journey distance so that no-fly options are more feasible. In the mean time I wish Livesley and her ilk all the very best in weaning us off fast, child-friendly, easy-to-book, cheap-if-you-get-in-early, air travel.
My three-year-old has developed a passion for wind turbines. Where better to show him one than London’s Science Museum, alongside all the other technologies that are helping to solve the climate crisis, I reasoned? I was wrong. And rather alarmed.
Who can predict what catches the imagination of small children? For my three-year-old, a lengthy trip up the M1 has ignited a passion for wind turbines. Otherwise endless grey miles were punctuated by cries of, “I want to see a windmill,” followed by squeals of excitement when the piercing blades became visible from the back of the car.
I sought to capitalise on his new focus by taking him to the Science Museum. Where better to see a wind turbine if you live in a built-up city? And what a great age to start caring for the environment: I’ve heard plenty of parents say they have been nagged into better recycling habits by their conscientious children.
So, I thought, surely there would be a wind turbine on display at the Science Museum – full size, hopefully, alongside solar panels and all the other impressive ways scientific innovation is helping us out of the climate crisis. After all, the UN says we have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 45 per cent by 2030, so the clock is ticking. And maybe, I thought, we’d see a model of a windmill.
But no. The same steam engines and beam engines greet visitors that have done so for years, still churning out the narrative that scientific progress has saved us from hard manual labour and slow productivity. This is course true, and we live in their debt every day. But there was no word of the problems caused by those engines’ unruly heirs. When I asked where I could find a wind turbine or a windmill, one member of staff asked around and eventually recommended I take my son to London’s last working windmill, in Brixton.
Only one part of the museum really focused on climate change: at one end of one floor, is a modest temporary exhibition called Our Future Planet that looks at technologies being developed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and includes such quirky exhibits as “air vodka”. The museum’s Kids’ Handbook contained two pages on green energy, and photos of what were absent from the displays – a wind turbine, a solar panel and a hydroelectric dam.
Oddly, the handbook also devoted two pages to the jet engine and two to various single-use plastics, without any mention of the colossal environmental damage they are known to cause.
Photo: Blue Planet 2/BBC
Had the authors not watched those heart-breaking 2017 documentaries Blue Planet2, in which Sir David Attenborough revealed the extent of marine plastic pollution? Had they not read the many news stories linking popularised air travel to dangerous levels of global heating? A government survey last autumn found that three-quarters of adults in Britain were worried about the impact of climate change.
Curious, I read around. I found that the sponsors of the museum, much of which is free to enter, include oil companies BP and Shell, and the coal conglomerate Adani. According to the Guardian, its contract with Shell included a clause committing the museum not to “damage the goodwill or reputation” of the oil company. And last autumn a member of the museum’s advisory board resigned over the museum’s “ongoing policy of accepting sponsorship from oil and gas companies”.
Today I have resigned from the Science Museum’s Advisory Board.I disagree with the Museum's ongoing policy of accepting sponsorship from oil and gas companies. I remain a strong supporter of the Museum, and especially of its work in engaging the public on the subject.
At the time, the head of the Science Museum Group, Ian Blatchford, said: “We respect his decision to step down from his advisory role and he will remain a critical friend, his view much valued in our assessments.”
More positively, I found the website to contain more of the messaging I would have expected from scientific expert, including a thorough treatment of the problem of plastic pollution, and videos of talks about climate change from last year.
Yet it still felt too little, too piecemeal. The climate disaster is the biggest science story, the biggest story, in a century – especially if it as allowed to burgeon into the catastrophic proportions we are told inaction and denial will lead to. What is going on?
The museum told me a new climate change gallery focusing on “energy transition” is planned for next year, and a temporary exhibition in the autumn celebrating technicians “includes a to-scale wind turbine tower” and was designed with input from local teenagers. It added that the Kids’ Handbook had been published in 2013 whereas the online article on plastics appeared in 2019, and that films, talks and blogs on the website demonstrate the museum’s commitment “to engaging people in this vital issue”. It added that the contract clause “appears in most sponsorship agreements the museum … drafts”, adding: “In all of our work we maintain editorial control.”
So, mystery solved: if you want to learn about climate change through the Science Museum this summer, you’ll have to wait a few more months or stay at home and switch on your computer. By the time the new gallery opens, one-eighth of the time left to reach the climate target will have passed. I hope the new gallery will report the ignored warnings honestly and outline the reimaginings and breakthroughs inspiringly, even if it is decades too late to be ahead of the curve of public opinion. If not, they risk losing credibility in the eyes of the generation whose lives will be most affected by the climate crisis. As for my son and me, we’re off to Brixton.
As a child of the Eighties I was introduced to the horrors of two world wars with the promise “never again”. Never again would a single despotic leader be able to invade another sovereign country with impunity; never again would an entire people face annihilation. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has shown these safeguards to be hollow.
As a child of the Eighties I was introduced to the horrors of two world wars with the promise “never again”. Never again would a single despotic leader be able to invade another sovereign country with impunity; never again would an entire people face annihilation. No – now we had structural safeguards to curtail malign power and protect peace: the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction that argued that surely no leader would actually fire a nuclear weapon, given that Armageddon would quickly ensue.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has shown these safeguards to be hollow. He has invaded another sovereign country claiming to “deNazify” it; an entire population is left vastly under-defended in the face of his relentless shelling and air raids. And yet, like the villain holding the heroine at gunpoint before her rescuer, he has warned Nato not to involve itself unless it wants to see consequences “you have never seen in your history”.
Effectively, his warning suggests, we are all being held at gunpoint, and looking on in horror as his forces – sluggish as they may have been – bomb endless military and civilian targets: residences, hospitals, a shopping centre, even the humanitarian corridors created to get unarmed Ukrainians to safety.
What of the UN Security Council? Where are its condemnations? Its hands are tied because Russia is a permanent member and currently holds presidency of it. Could Russia be kicked off it, or even out of the UN? No. According to the UN Charter, “A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” But Russia would never vote to be expelled.
Instead, Russia has obfuscated and misinformed, claiming at Security Council meetings that the US has biological warfare laboratories in Ukraine and denying it is targeting civilians.
Some people would say the impotence of the UN institutions was already evident in earlier crises. Efforts to hold Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad responsible for crimes against humanity in 2012, early in his country’s civil war, failed because security council members Russia and China refused to back such efforts. (When an international chemical weapons watchdog found that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, the US accused Russia of blocking an investigation into their use.) And what sanctions did Britain and the US face for invading Iraq in 2003 without the backing of the UN Security Council?
Sadly the worst damage inflicted by the Iraq invasion was not that done to the hundreds of thousands of displaced or ended lives, or the destroyed homes, infrastructure and cultural symbols that nurtured those lives. No, the most serious damage was that by ignoring the Security Council, the US and UK inadvertently opened the way for other nations to replicate such destruction in other contexts.
With Ukraine, clearly it is vital that other routes to a ceasefire are found. Targeted sanctions are welcome and must be strengthened; European nations must somehow, quickly, find alternatives to buying Russian fossil fuels. Lord Alton, a human rights lawyer, also suggests blacklisting Russia as a terrorist state and suspending it from the World Trade Organisation, and getting the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog involved. However, sanctions that punish the Russian people as a whole are risky – while they could turn their anger against Putin, he could instead goad them to turn it against the West.
Worthy discussions about how to hold Putin to account are also under way: Gordon Brown favours a Nuremberg-style trial; the International Criminal Court is investigating possible war crimes in Ukraine. These are all very well, but feel rather academic when the death toll climbs daily. Short of a coup, how would you persuade a man such as Putin to pop down to the Hague to attend a trial? All these steps might spare the next country in Putin’s sights – but what is there to stop the onslaught now?
It is clear that the UN Charter – passionately and altruistically crafted to prevent another world war – did not envisage that a powerful, nuclear-armed member would actually want to return to the sort of destruction we are now seeing daily on our screens. It aimed “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, advocating “tolerance and liv[ing] together in peace with one another as good neighbours”. But as Putin has already ripped up the rules on what UN members can get away with, other member states need to rapidly recraft the safeguards that were supposed to ensure that violence on such a scale never happened again.
Above: The port city of Mariupol, which the BBC has described as ‘the most heavily bombed and damaged city in Ukraine’s war with Russia’. Photo: Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine
The confrontational military imagery leaves me cold; St Paul’s legal arguments for the reasoning of the Gospel likewise. Women have had to shoehorn their experiences of God into men’s descriptions of Him for too long
O Lord, let me not be overwhelmed.
Fromwithout and within I am surrounded.
Mocking men belittle me, they judge me by standards they do not keep.
In their hearts are only lust and vanity.
Day after day I have tried to make peace. I seek no glory for myself; boasting is never on my lips.
My thoughts swirl around me like a storm, and fear overtakes me.
My hormones crush me to the point of sorrow.
“Your God is good?,” they laugh. “Has he really prospered you?”
Silence them, O God.
My body is weakened but my hope is in you. Restore my strength, O God.
Have you read this Psalm lately? Me neither. My pastiche may be humble but my point is that anyone reading the Bible is handed a book 100 per cent written by men. Not one single Biblical author is a woman. Not even the books named after women – Esther, Ruth (all two of them).
We know the reasons why: until the last century or so, women were less likely to write anything, or even to be taught to write. And Judeo-Christian traditions are historically built on male priesthoods. Female spiritual writers crop up by the Middle Ages, mystics such as Hildegard von Bingen, St Julian of Norwich, St Bridget of Sweden, later St Teresa of Avila. But they are still a tiny minority.
So what? Because over the centuries Christians have gone to the ends of the earth to ensure that believers can access the Scriptures in their own language, in order to demonstrate that the Messiah is for all and is close to all. And yet sometimes when I open my Bible its maleness sometimes feels like a foreign language to me. The confrontational military imagery leaves me cold; St Paul’s legal arguments for the reasoning of the Gospel likewise.
The Song of Solomon, which includes lines for the female lead (described in the passive as “the Beloved”), was not, as far as we know, written by Solomon and one of his hundreds of wives – nope, it was just by him. Would the “friends” of poor Job have been quite so lacking in empathy if they had been women? Even the Psalms, which I find more accessible than many of the books in the Bible – not a single one is written by a woman, so they all reflect the worldviews or faith-views of men. God is a Father, God is a rock, God is a shield, God is a horn – big, strong things. (They remind me of the imagery plastered all over my toddler son’s clothing: diggers and dinosaurs unlike the fairies and unicorns in the girls’ section.)
A few years ago there was a grave concern in that the charismatics were “feminising” the Church. There was a genre of contemporary song jokingly described as “Jesus is my girlfriend”. I’m not a fan of songs so vacuous that the word “Jesus” can be switched for the word “baby”, and would look at home in the charts. But if you are talking about songs that might speak to over half the congregation (and women usually make up way over half in churches) then why be so dismissive? Women have had to shoehorn their experiences of God into men’s descriptions of Him for centuries. Isn’t it time men did the same for a bit, without moaning?
Many people now read their Bible in inclusive language, so the most obvious instances of excluding women have been addressed. But these are small changes that don’t address the substance of what is written. If the Bible more accurately described the faith-experience of women, perhaps there would also be a better understanding of what a woman is. She is not simply a man with different bits. She has her own way of seeing the world and processing it, based on experiences unique to her. Therefore the Church cannot simply put male-written bits of Scripture into her mouth and assume they adequately express how she wants to relate to God.
I am not saying I don’t believe Scripture is divinely inspired. But I do wonder how it would read if those God had inspired had been women rather than men: female Psalmists, female chroniclers, female wisdom, an account by one of the educated women in Jesus’ or Paul’s circle in the first-century Roman Empire? Instead of Psalms to be sung on the eve of battle, how about a Psalm that described the fear around giving birth? That would at once be historically illuminating, spiritually honest, and would right a tragic historical wrong by showing women’s bodies to be incredible but frail, rather than sinful or intimidating and not to be talked about. (Giving birth is, of course, just one experience that’s more about woman than man.)
I would like to hear more from Miriam, Ruth and Esther; from Mary, the mother of Jesus; from Mary and Martha; from Mary Magdalene; from Pilate’s wife (whatever her name is); from Phoebe. It is too late, but let us at least hear from female authors and theologians today imagining what they might have said, or interpreting biblical authors such as David and Paul. A touching example I recall comes from Bridget Plass. In her book Dear Paul, am I the only one? she imagined a social worker of a teenage girl writing to the Apostle. The girl had destroyed effects to do with her birth family on the advice of the enthusiastic church she had joined, that had advised her to “forget what is behind and strain towards what is ahead” (Phil 3). I had always found that passage impossible, even irresponsible. Plass imagined Paul replying that he was writing only what he as a man on death row had found helpful.
Such contextualisation I had never heard from a male preacher. Plass’s pastoral touch made Paul more palatable and allowed compassion to be read between the lines. We need more of these voices today.
This week the statue of Lord Nelson was taken down in a dignified ceremony to be taken to a museum. The monument to the naval leader who had defended slavery had been a symbol of pain and humiliation, and its removal was described by culture minister John King as “a step towards the healing of the nation”.
Despite the efforts of Black Lives Matter protestors, the statue wasn’t atop Nelson’s Column in London; it had been standing in the Barbadian capital Bridgetown for more than two centuries.
Throughout the Anglophone world, calls are growing for the re-examination of the slave era. In Britain there is more public interest in Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and the industries that relied on slave labour now than at any other time in recent decades. This is partly because staggeringly little is known about it among certain generations and partly because attitudes have shifted away from the assumption that the Empire was simply a force for good, towards wanting to hear the experiences of the black and brown people who now call Britain home.
And as historian James Walvin said in Enslaved, the recent BBC Two series with Samuel L Jackson, the reason that the British public tolerated involvement in slavery persisted so long was: “out of sight, out of mind”.
Yet the newly rediscovered interest in Britain’s deep involvement with slavery has the power to disgust and revolt as it did 200 years ago, when abolitionists were travelling the country revealing to incredulous audiences the British-made iron shackles and torture implements being used in and en route to the Caribbean.
After the statue of benefactor Edward Colston was dragged through the streets of Bristol and tipped into the city’s harbour in June, journalists reported that his employer, the Royal African Company, branded the West Africans it sold as slaves – men, women and children – with the initials of their owners. This detail was, to many people, news.
Portraits of the Georgian aspiring middle classes depict respectability. The Vigor Family by Joseph Highmore, 1744, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Just as Colston had a hidden side, so do many other figures and events we haven’t tended to associate with slavery. It was King Charles II who expanded British slavery into West Africa; it was the Industrial Revolution that enabled the mass production of restraints that were to be used on African slaves and the “manila” bracelets (often in factories in Birmingham) with which slaves could be bought. Our images of wigged noblemen dashing from stately homes to Georgian townhouses in pursuit of Jane Austen heroines all need serious updating. How did those noblemen make their money? What funded those mansions? The British economy was increasingly built around slavery, so even people not involved in human trade or forced labour may well have only been one step removed.
Manilas such as these made in Birmingham were used as currency to buy slaves. Credit: Coincoin.com
The process of writing slavery back into our history is gaining pace. Last month the Financial Times told its readers about an “uncomfortable” walking tour of the City of London, a “financier of slave industries and a hotbed of abolitionism”. Institutions such as the Church of England and the Bank of England have apologised for their links to slavery. Other institutions’ links have been brought to light by recent academic work, while still others are hastily and nervously peering into their own archives.
Of course, for this to become an academic exercise, or, worse still, just a reputation-saving one – would be a great shame. There is something deeply right, and therapeutic, about opening the door to reckoning when it comes knocking. Britain’s reputation here has not been good. Whenever someone (usually a black person) suggests reparations should be paid, some people (usually whites) roll their eyes and say history has moved on, and how would you know whom to pay and so on.
Yet on the other side of the ocean, several institutions are just getting on with working it out. Let’s start with the Churches, whose historic involvement in slavery is particularly morally jarring. In the US, a number of Episcopalian (Anglican) and Presbyterian institutions have earmarked or collected funds for reparations. The diocese of Maryland has so far raised US$100,000 of a sought $1,000,000 and Long Island has pledged $500,000 to invest in education and training for local African-Americans. Georgetown (Catholic) University in Washington has undertaken a host of measures, partly under pressure from students, including raising tuition fees to support healthcare and education programmes in Maryland and Louisiana, which are home to many descendants of 272 slaves the university sold in 1838.
These actions are striking because they reflect a heartfelt willingness to undo some of the long-lasting social and structural injustices erected by the slave era. What would the altruism seen at Georgetown achieve if it were replicated by banks, that have far more money than Churches, or governments? And what about the trade that continues today – how wealthy would the Caribbean be if every tonne of sugar or coffee it produces were traded at fair rates?
A fuller understanding of the black experience of slavery, along with the payment of reparations, could be an uncomfortable and costly process, but the result will be a more honest acknowledgement of possibly the most shameful chapter in Britain’s history, and an opportunity to affirm the rights of those who were so badly wronged.
Above: Nelson’s statue is driven away through the streets of Bridgetown. Via Sky News.
The pulling down of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol by Black Lives Matter protestors has reignited the debate around Britain’s historic involvement in slavery as well as sparking fears of hasty revisionismand lawlessness. Here Barbadian blogger Safiya Robinson offers a different approach, calling for a deeper public understanding of the story at the heart of the controversy
I had so many feelings when I heard that the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol had been torn down and thrown into the harbour.
When I moved from Barbados to the UK in the 1990s, Bristol was the first place I lived, studied and worked. It was there I learned that my new university friends knew nothing of the enslavement and transportation of Africans to the Caribbean and Americas. Instead they had learned a whitewashed view of history.
As someone who studied Caribbean history in secondary school, I was puzzled. Isn’t history just facts of what happened when? Given the fact that so much of the history of former colonies is British history, I wondered how the historians had managed to gloss over this – especially given how much of the wealth in the UK was built from profits generated through the trading of enslaved Africans and their labour.
It seems instead the focus was on the generosity of figures such as Colston, without mention of the source of his wealth.
I have heard the arguments that slavery was legal, and that is why the economic and philanthropic contributions of figures like Colston were celebrated. However, not mentioning connections to the slave trade sounds more like shame than acceptance of their involvement.
The Trans-Atlantic slave trade is now an optional part of the British curriculum for 11-13 year olds, so I hope that the younger generation will consign the ignorance I encountered to the past. There is much that I hope is included, and much that I want anyone older to understand.
Teaching should include what took the Europeans to the Americas – a search for an alternative route to Asia, a search for riches and undiscovered lands, and how the people native to the Caribbean – the Lokono, Taino and Caribs – were enslaved to work in agriculture and largely eradicated by European diseases and firearms. It should include the use of indentured servants in the seventeenth century, often from Ireland, which was a precursor to slavery, and the sanctioning of the slave trade by the Church and government. It should include the triangle slave trade, the deaths of thousands of enslaved Africans en route, their bodies thrown overboard, and survivors traded as chattel.
I would want people to understand that the measures used to maintain power and supremacy in the Americas were psychology and brute force, and that abolition campaigns were only one factor in the ending of slavery, alongside economic ones (a decline in sugar trade, the Industrial Revolution increasing cotton production in the UK) and resistance by the enslaved people throughout the Caribbean. The inequity that existed after slavery between the White Europeans, who still held the majority of power in the Americas, and the freed people of African descent who had fewer rights – this inequity continues. And the post-colonial legacy on the Caribbean islands left them largely dependent on the countries that previously ruled them.
This should be basic learning for all Brits, not just an optional inclusion for children – an understanding that the wealth and power of an empire was built on the backs and work of enslaved peoples, who still fight to this day for equality with their White counterparts in the Americas, and in the UK, centuries after the end of slavery.
If we are unaware of our history, then we run the risk of it repeating itself, and speaking as a Black Caribbean woman, I have no interest in that. Instead, I hope for a greater understanding of the shared histories of the UK and the Americas, and the toppling of the structures that represent the whitewashing of history. I want more respect and honour for those whose lives were sacrificed through slavery and the slave trade, and for the descendants who play such a vital role in British society and are your neighbours, colleagues and friends.
Safiya Robinson is an author and blogger who lives, works and writes in Barbados. You will find her blog at www.39andcounting.com. She is also a dentist and a keen world traveller. You can find her book “Everything is a thing – my journey to living a truly authentic life” on Amazon.
Above: The Parliament Buildings in Bridgetown, Barbados, were fashioned after those in London. The square opposite used to be called Trafalgar Square but in 1999 was renamed National Heroes Square.
Colston’s wealth came from trade, including in slaves. It is estimated that while he worked for the Royal African Company around 84,000 men, women and children were forcibly transported to the Americans and the Caribbean as slaves on tobacco and sugar plantations, although around 19,000 perished en route, their bodies tossed overboard.
During his lifetime (1636-1721) Colston was known as a generous philanthropist, supporting and founding schools. Yet his generosity extended only to those who shared his views.
Only in the last two decades has the city begun to discuss its part in the slave trade and disentangle itself from bizarre array of traditions and church services that took place to maintain his honour. Councillors had got as far as to suggest adding a second plaque to the statue, addressing his slave links, but could not agree on what it should say.
They have missed their chance. The Grade II-listed monument now lies at the bottom of Bristol Harbour following the actions of protestors of various ethnicities. Speaking yesterday, TV historian David Olusoga told the BBC: “Today should never have happened, because this statue should have been taken down. And it should have been a great collective day for Britain and Bristol when the statue was peacefully taken down and put in a museum, which is where, after all, we remember history properly.” Indeed – by all means display the statue in the city museum along with photographs and footage from yesterday, which are all part of Colston’s and slavery’s uneasy legacy.
Disappointingly, Home Secretary Priti Patel viewed the incident only through a law and order lens, linking it unfairly with the few violent acts at otherwise peaceful protests in London. She descried the toppling of the statue as “utterly disgraceful”, adding that “it speaks to the acts of public disorder that have become a distraction from the cause people are protesting about”.
Does it? The protestors yesterday didn’t go on a looting spree through the city centre, they didn’t hit out at anyone. No arrests were made. They didn’t injure 27 police officers, throw glass bottles or light flares – that was in London. As for the statue, Bristol’s Labour Mayor Marvin Rees, who is of Jamaican descent, told Channel 4 News he “couldn’t support criminal damage or social disorder,” but he added: “We have a statue up to someone who made their money by sometimes throwing the bodies of his commodities, our people, into water. There’s a piece of almost historical poetry here.”
And perhaps a sense of homecoming: after centuries of the most horrific forms of abuse of Africans, the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota arrived in the city from where some of the earliest British slave ships docked from Africa and set sail for the Americas and the Caribbean.
Colston’s fall needs to be followed by dialogue and constructive action, and Bristol could serve as a model for the country and beyond. It is vital that black citizens explain the way they would like to see wrongs righted, rather than having non-black leaders decide what’s needed. Which structures and institutions reinforce and legitimise a worldview that puts whites firmly on top? Which street names? What else needs to be moved to a museum before it gets ripped down in frustration?
What has become clear in the two short weeks since the Black Lives Matter protests began is that us white people don’t even realise how we perpetuate racial inequalities. So let’s learn.
We are often told that in times of need or distress, people turn to religion. The nation, pretty much the whole world, has been stilled and quieted by lockdowns to prevent the further spread of the Coronavirus. As the Queen pointed out, people have time to “slow down, pause and reflect”. One might expect the Church to pipe up with a message of hope. But what exactly is it saying?
Quite a lot, it turns out, but you have to know where to look. It is not, as Jonathan Clark argued recently in these pages, “the dog that failed to bark in the night”. But anyone expecting an archbishop or senior theologian to be regularly on the news offering consolation and wisdom will have been disappointed. So far we’ve seen a handful of appearances by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on Newsnight. His successor Justin Welby and the head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, Cardinal Vincent Nichols have both appeared on ITV news.
BBC local radio are broadcasting “from-the-living-room” services by senior bishops, which the CofE is live-streaming on its website and Facebook pages. The Church says these have attracted some 2m viewers, not counting those listening via local radio. Unsurprisingly the most polished services come from the well resourced, well organised churches such as Holy Trinity Brompton. Other churches’ online offerings can be hard to find, variable in quality or both.
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