Protecting the kids…or terrifying them?

It’s strange being away from the UK in the present turbulent times, particularly this week. We returned from holiday on Wednesday evening to the anti-racism demonstrations, including the massive one in Walthamstow where most of the kids were born.

We’d been tracking what was happening from abroad. Daughter three especially. While I’ve been reading about NHS workers worried about getting to work, she has been glued to social media and watching in horror what has been happening. She was due to go out to London on her return and was worried about staying late. It’s not just the threat of physical violence that worries her. “What if someone tells me to go home?” she asked. Her sister had said similar during the Brexit campaign when people were being berated on public transport for not being white or speaking a different language.

She is due to go to another big city at the weekend to meet her boyfriend. “I’ll go to the supermarket which is three minutes from his flat and then we won’t go out all weekend,” she said. She is terrified and no amount of us saying that the thugs are small in number and should not dictate her life is helping. The rioters say they are defending women and children. Which women and children? Not mine.

Daughter three’s life has been deeply marked by racism. At primary school she was subjected to regular bullying. I used to sit holding her hand every night as she was crying and try to calm her so she could sleep. Her school was not much use and basically blamed the parents. The idea of there being a two-tier system somehow favouring minorities is just a sign of the ignorance many people still have about racism and the way it works. It’s incremental. Day after day after day of slights, racist comments, insults about her intelligence, of making her feel shunned or different…That impact followed her through to secondary school where she suffered regular panic attacks and faced similar treatment by some of the students until she moved to another school.

I read an article the other day about how many older men have been involved in the riots – many of them dads, no doubt. I read that one who was convicted now says he is ashamed of himself, as well he should be. The article said that older people may be more susceptible to misinformation on social media – and in much of the mainstream media who live on clickbait – than the young who have grown up with it. I recall going to a school play that only son was in that had a song saying ‘I heard it on the Internet it must be so’. It was all about misinformation. I remember thinking then that the kids were possibly more questioning of the information they were reading than their parents.

In my other job I have worked with a professor who created a game for children to teach them how to spot misinformation. He calls it pre-bunking. We probably all need a crash course in information literacy and in how algorithms work, particularly as misinformation is becoming more sophisticated. But, for adults, that begins with admitting that we need it.

*Photo credit of Southport riot courtesy of Wikipedia.

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