Paul Barker: Shame on how Britain treats its children

Just how good a country is Britain for a child to live in? We have a long tradition of thinking we come top of that league. But we regularly seem confused about the right line to draw between childhood and adulthood. We treat children, all too often, as if they were adults.

They can be taken to court, for example, from the age of 10. (Below 10, as we saw in Bristol last week, they can desecrate the graves of even younger children with impunity.) In most European countries the age of criminal responsibility is 13 (in Spain it is 16 and in Belgium 18). In Britain, three private prisons for 12- to 15-year-olds have been built and another four are planned. Corporal punishment has been outlawed in all schools. "But now protection stops at the door of the home," says Peter Newell, chairman of the Children's Rights Alliance for England. "Where they are hit most, they are least protected. Even child minders can use 'reasonable chastisement'."

This week the Government will be put in the dock again over the way our children are treated. In 1991, under the Major government, Parliament ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. On Thursday, in Geneva, a UN committee which monitors this treaty will cross-examine a government delegation led by Althea Efunshile, the recently appointed head of the Department for Education and Skills' children and young people's unit. The last such scrutiny created a flurry of angry headlines in the British press.

Then, the UN committee criticised a lack of progress on keeping children out of prison and out of poverty, and on protecting them from violence, especially in their own homes. The domestic reaction was, more or less: Who are these tinpot countries that pour scorn on the British way of handling our children? And it's true that the 191 states who have ratified the treaty include many whose signature is not worth the ink it was written with. But should we be so defensive when even the notoriously disciplined Germans, who live in a far from tinpot nation-state, have now banned all corporal punishment of children, wherever they happen to be?

The Children's Rights Alliance is steeling itself for another outcry along the same lines. The alliance brings together more than 180 statutory and voluntary bodies, including all the major children's charities. In June it submitted its own critical report to the UN committee, whose conclusions are to be published next month.

Mr Newell, the founder of the alliance, is a long-standing campaigner on all these issues, and especially on corporal punishment. He is not easily put off, as can be testified by those who opposed his crusade, down the years, to take the cane and the tawse out of all schools, both public and private. He won.

If we didn't expect to take the UN treaty seriously, we shouldn't have signed it. After all, the United States didn't sign up. It took the view that this was none of the UN's business. Also, arguably, these commitments would be almost impossible to enforce in such a vigorously federal state. Britain, however, did sign. We have a government that often speaks about its concerns for children. Tony Blair can hardly ever say no to a child-based photo-opportunity, whether it's with his own children or somebody else's. The concerns seldom get much further than talk. The Government has rejected the idea of a powerful Children's Rights Commissioner. Instead, we have Ms Efunshile's worthy but weak new unit. She has asked all departments to come up with procedures for listening to what children say. But the record of such inter-ministry efforts is not good. The Chancellor of the Exchequer chairs a ministerial committee on children and young people. In Gordon Brown's own opinion, he has already lifted many children out of poverty. Others, including the Children's Rights Alliance, are far from convinced.

Now, we should give credit where credit is due. The launch of the Criminal Records Bureau, complicated by the Education Secretary's knee-jerk response to the Soham murders, has been a disaster – but at least the protective intention was good. Despite his waverings, Mr Blair has pursued his creed of "education, education, education" more devoutly than any other Prime Minister of recent years. All children gain. And both he and Mr Brown are jointly devoted to the idea that the best way to combat poverty – or what passes for poverty in today's Britain, as opposed to in, say, Kosovo, Afghanistan or Sudan – is to get as many people as possible into work. Hence the Government's adherence to Conservative measures such as the withdrawal of benefits from 16- and 17-year-olds: intended to undermine welfare dependency, and much attacked by Labour at the time.

Yet what about those locked-up children, 14 of whom have killed themselves in their place of confinement since 1995? Chief inspectors of prisons routinely condemn the conditions in which they are kept. To no avail. Each week, at least one baby or young child dies at home from violence or neglect.

The tragic case of Victoria Climbié, tortured to death by her aunt and the aunt's boyfriend at their home in north London, is at the extreme end of this spectrum of horror. But it is surely worth asking ourselves this: by permitting physical coercion in some cases, may we help to tilt the balance of social approval in the minds of those who are all too ready to seize any chance to punish a child?

Foreign commentators love to point out that we have a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, while the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has to get by without any regal endorsement. Animal-rights campaigners ambush research labs. There are no children's rights campaigners dancing around child lock-ups with gory posters and loud-hailers. Do caged monkeys come ahead of caged children? And if so, why?

English literature has produced writing for children that is second to none, from Lear and Carroll in the 19th century to J K Rowling today. Occasionally, cruelty intrudes, as with Harry Potter's gruesome Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon or Alice in Wonderland's tyrannical Queen of Hearts. In the stories, cruelty is always defeated. Not so in real life. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. This applies to power over children, also. As this week's UN hearings will confirm, we need urgently to sharpen up our vigilance.

Paul Barker is Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Community Studies. Alan Watkins is away