Vanishing innocence

Is there such a thing as an innocent childhood nowadays? Or is it just a relic of the past that no longer exists?

I was an innocent child for most of my childhood. My parents always tried to shield me from the horrors of the outside world. And then as a teenager my boarding school also hid the outside world from me.

It was only when I started work as a journalist that I was rapidly exposed to the outside world and its atrocities - homelessness, poverty, crime, war and everything else. I was profoundly shocked for a while.

It was normal when I was a child to preserve children's innocence, their cheerful outlook, and spare them from the sort of appalling things they weren't psychologically equipped to process.

But now, because of so many news outlets and so much social media, children are coming up against the outside world and all its barbarities at a very early age.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I would say it's a bad thing because young children who haven't yet cultivated the necessary cynicism or detachment or composure to take sickening horrors in their stride can find them extremely disturbing.

I'm sure this premature exposure to the outside world is partly what's causing the epidemic of mental distress among young people. But how to put the genie back in the bottle?

Rush to judgment

I'm always a bit sceptical of court case verdicts. They're generally treated as hard fact, although in reality they're merely the considered opinion of a judge or jury.

The media in particular treat all verdicts as gospel, and deliver screaming headlines on the basis of judgments that may or may not be the ultimate truth.

Many many people who have been found guilty by a court turn out to be innocent years later, often after they've been in prison for lengthy periods.

I'm thinking right now of Lucy Letby, the nurse who was convicted of the murder of seven infants and the attempted murder of seven others. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but many commentators have questioned the verdict and want a retrial on the basis of evidence that wasn't produced at the court. So was she guilty or has this been a miscarriage of justice? The arguments continue.

It seems to me that at the end of the day the soundness of the verdict isn't a question of  whether it was reached by a judge or a jury. The crucial factor is surely the strength of the evidence presented by each side. If the prosecution evidence is strongest, they win. Ditto the defence evidence.

I've been on a jury twice, and it seemed very clear to me that it's the strength of the evidence that counts. My first case was a black guy accused of assaulting a police officer. We started off thinking he was innocent but after a long deliberation decided he was guilty. Of course I've no idea if he was actually guilty or not. Only he knows the answer to that.

The fact is that supposedly solid "final" verdicts are regularly overturned as "unsafe".

Goodbye to innocence

Are children today having a more fraught and difficult childhood than the children of previous decades? Is childhood innocence becoming a thing of the past, with today's children exposed earlier and earlier to adult realities?

Yes, says the charity Action For Children. They spoke to 5,000 children, parents and grandchildren and found a wide consensus that modern childhoods were getting worse amid increasing social pressures.

Youngsters were under pressure to achieve at school, fit in with their peers and cope with wider anxieties such as Brexit, poverty and the climate crisis.

Two-thirds of parents and grandparents felt childhood was getting worse, and a third of children agreed. All said bullying - both online and offline - was the main problem, followed by pressure to fit in socially, now more intense because of social media.

A very sad state of affairs. My own childhood seems like unalloyed bliss compared to what children face today.

Yes, I had a bad-tempered father and I was bullied at school, but now that all seems quite trivial when set beside present-day anxieties.

I glided through my school years with little awareness of the outside world and its problems. I wasn't too worried about passing exams, as I wasn't planning to go to university. I went on wonderful family holidays. I felt very little pressure to fit in with anyone else. At home we all enjoyed the popular radio sitcoms and comedy shows of the time. I spent hours whizzing round the neighbourhood on my scooter. I played in the street with no fear of child-molesters or knife-carriers or drug-dealers.

I truly was in a sealed childhood bubble that was seldom disturbed by the grim reality of things like the Suez Crisis, the cold war or nuclear threats, or by mental health issues like eating disorders, self-harm or body loathing. My cosy little world of pleasure and novelty was rarely punctured.

Childhood today seems more like a battleground.

Innocence

People say innocence is a splendid thing, and isn't it awful when you finally lose it and become a wised-up adult? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could somehow return to that blissful childhood state?

Well, no, I don't agree. Innocence puts you at a huge disadvantage and opens you to all sorts of trickery and exploitation. The sooner you lose it the better, in my opinion. The sooner you get to know the wicked and devious realities of adulthood, the better equipped you'll be to get what you want out of life.

Personally, I lost my innocence very late in the day. I was absurdly naive and blinkered for far too long. Not only did I believe in Father Christmas until I was ten, and probably the tooth fairy as well, it was only in my late teens, after I left school and started work, that I abruptly realised how dumb I was and how much of the world's horrors and injustices - and simple facts of life - had been kept from me by my over-protective parents.

I remember emerging from my totally single-sex schooling into a female-packed workplace and realising I knew virtually nothing about women except that they were shaped differently. It took me a while to stop being intimidated by them and start feeling comfortable in their company.

As a local newspaper reporter, I was rapidly confronted with the more unsavoury aspects of life that were hidden from me for so long. Homelessness, squalid housing, poverty, political corruption, alcoholism, violent crime, suicide - the list was endless. I was shocked at so many ugly truths. But my eyes were opened, I was learning fast, and the bubble of innocence had popped.

For the first time I started thinking seriously about my personal identity and realising it wasn't what I had assumed. I had taken for granted that I was much the same as the other young boys I knew - heterosexual, traditional, obedient, well-behaved. I discovered I wasn't necessarily any of those things but was rebellious, deviant, politically left-wing, eccentric. I had to totally reconstruct my idea of myself and kill off the innocent little boy.

So, no, innocence isn't a splendid thing. It's a liability to be shaken off at the earliest opportunity.