According to the BBC, the government has spent £260,000,000 of our money over the past decade failing to make much of a dent in the number of teenage pregnancies. I think the figure quoted for 15-year olds was a fall of half of one percent during the past year (trebles all round?)
The BBC sees this as a failure, especially given the government’s pledge to halve the rate by 2010. The airwaves were immediately full of idiotic suggestions that the only way to really bring the figures down would be to spend a lot more money to stop families splitting up. (God, how other people love spending my money to support yet other people’s life choices.)
But, after listening to News 24, I turned to the BBC News website, where the report on the story reads like a government hand-out. “Teenage pregnancy rate falls” announces the “move along, nothing to see here” headline. During the previous year, the rate actually rose, so the pump was primed with an extra £20.6m of our taxes (you’re welcome, don’t mention it), leading to an overall year-on-year fall for all teenagers of 4% this time around. Or something. After a while, this blizzard of statistics short-circuits the brain – which is what it’s designed to do, one presumes. The BBC’s report even has a sub-heading, “Back on track”, to signify that things are going brilliantly again after last year’s unfortunate brief blip. Thank goodness, we can all relax!
So, same news organization, two different outlets, totally different emphasis. How very peculiar. (Maybe online journalists are just more “caring”.)
What the two stories being told by two parts of the BBC share in common, of course, is the blithe assumption that the way to stop teens getting up the duff (or “falling pregnant” as the web report so quaintly puts it – as if having sex is an unfortunate accident rather than a willed act) is by increasing “education” and handing out a rubber plantation’s worth of prophylactics to anyone harbouring impure thoughts (i.e. practically every teen in Britain.) And of course, the other shared underlying assumption is that, yes, this is yet another type of human behaviour which can somehow be altered by more spending and oodles of “help” - in other words, the “Carrot and Carrot” approached so beloved of left-wingers.
But would teenage pregnancy really be halved by wall-to-wall “education” (in what, precisely?) or by blanket-bombing every school and council estate in the country with condoms?
The “education” approach might have borne fruit (or, rather, stopped fruit being borne) thirty or forty years ago, but now? If ministers were to venture outside the safe confines of news websites and TV channels (or if they simply consulted Jacqui Smith’s husband) they’d discover that sex is the basic staple of mainstream media. When the British Broadcasting Corporation allows its highest-paid employee to ask the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition whether he ever masturbated over images of Mrs. Thatcher, and and as long as our society accords shacking up with someone for a while the same status as marriage, and where the national religion seems to have become a branch of the social services, which representative of authority is going to tell children that having sex at the earliest available opportunity isn’t necessarily the right thing? Premier League footballers?
If I were a low-achieving teenage girl living on a crappy estate with crappy parents (or, more usually, parent) , why would I turn down the chance of inflated benefits and the prospect of my own council flat, plus getting off school, not having to look for work, being the centre of attention for a bit, and having help thrust upon me by an army of huge-hearted social workers? And if I were some spotty, priapic adolescent sperm-donor who knew nothing whatsoever would happen to me if I got my end away (obviously, my teachers have been endlessly telling me it’s all society’s fault, and the school can’t punish me for anything in any case), where exactly is the disincentive?
Unless the rest of us accept our responsibility as adults by reintroducing the concepts of shame, decorum, punishment, right and wrong - either to the girl or the drooling dimwit who knocked her up in the first place - nothing will change. As long our enfeebled society refuses to condemn such behaviour, and as long as we allow teenage mothers to use their babies as human shields against suffering the consequences of their actions, it’ll keep happening - and you and I will keep paying for the whole sordid mess.
As for the BBC, is it really that hard to agree an editorial line on a story like this, and stick to it?
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