Select Committee on Home Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 471 - 479)

TUESDAY 6 FEBRUARY 2007

MR MELVYN DAVIS AND MR NEIL SOLO

  Q471  Chairman: Good afternoon. I think you both heard the previous session so you have some idea of how we operate. Could I ask each of you to introduce yourselves and then we will move straight to the questions.

  Mr Solo: My name is Neil Solo. I am Project Manager of the Babyfather initiative at Barnardo's. We have been working in the African Caribbean community exploring fathering issues.

  Mr Davis: My name is Melvyn Davis. I am the Manager of a project called boys2Men which works with boys, young men and fathers.

  Q472  Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. As you have gathered, in trying to understand why there is an overrepresentation of young black people in the criminal justice system we have already established that there is a very complex set of factors involved, and you have just heard us wrestling with one small part of that, music and so on. I would like both of you to start with what role you think family and relationship factors may have in explaining why there is this overrepresentation of young black people in the criminal justice system.

  Mr Solo: From the work that we have been conducting over the last three years in the African Caribbean community speaking with fathers themselves, both in the community and in custody, we think there is a very clear link between parents and young people and their activities. Specifically our work has centred on the involvement and importance and input of fathers. What we have found out there is that fathers are extremely important in many areas, such as raising self-esteem, building self-worth in children that can help to make them more resilient against the more destructive aspects of youth culture.

  Q473  Chairman: Mr Davis, do you want to add to that?

  Mr Davis: Yes. I think what I would say is that in a real sense the families provide the training ground for life. Where those families are vulnerable, where those families are isolated, where those families exist in conflicting or disadvantaged environments, children suffer as a consequence. We have too many negative examples where black families in particular are perceived to exist, or do exist, in environments that do not promote or present themselves in a positive light, so what you have is a trickle down effect where too many both from within and outside the community see black families in a very negative way and it becomes very difficult to support those isolated and vulnerable families in changing that dynamic for themselves and their children.

  Q474  Chairman: Can you shed light on why there should be such a high proportion of lone parent families within the African Caribbean community? We have had a number of different explanations, some rooting back to the history of slavery and the disruption of family patterns that involved, and other more modern factors, migration and so on. Do you have a sense of why this pattern of family break down appears to have become so deeply established?

  Mr Solo: I think the issue is complex and I take on board what you have just said, the disruption in the evolution of the black family due to slavery. You have to be cautious in possibly trying to impose a Eurocentric 2.5 model on another ethnic grouping. The danger of that is that we could miss some of the important strengths that exist in that alternative model. In the African Caribbean community we hear of visiting fathers, so we do not have a broken down one parent family, we have an intact family structure where the father visits from outside the home. Also there are social factors involved. Linking on to what Melvyn said previously, the social conditions in which the majority of the African Caribbean community find themselves give rise to frustrations and tensions and that can lead to break down. Given the high proportion of African Caribbean families in those conditions I think you will find a higher number of one parent families.

  Mr Davis: It is a very complex state of affairs that brings this about. If you look at slavery there are very strong arguments to be made about the generational impact on black communities. There has often been a long-held belief that black families existed with extended families and when our parents came over here—my parents came over here—they lost a lot of those links with their families, they lost a lot of the values and support structures they had, so they had to work very hard both to support the family and transmit the values they had from Jamaica into a culture that within themselves they were not necessarily welcomed into or felt a part of. I think what happened as a consequence of that was they did not have the support structures and as a result my generation did not have many of the things that they had. It was very late in my grandparents' lives that I met them for the first time. I did not have a very good, what I would call, moral upbringing. What I had was I had to work very hard and I had to be as good as other people in order to succeed and survive, which would not have been the case had I grown up in a different environment. The realities of growing up in an environment where you were made to feel different meant that you did not necessarily have some of those protective factors that go a long way to holding families together. Just going back to the previous discussion, where you have a culture which has materialised for lots of different reasons that promotes through music and lots of other mediums sex and violence and glamorises it, as in the previous conversation, there are consequences to that and some of those consequences we are seeing in children, in promiscuity, not just related to the black community but more closely related to poverty and deprivation where vulnerable communities have to find other ways of affirming themselves. In those harsh environments we have all had to bring ourselves up and as a result of that there has been a tendency to have a truncated childhood, a childhood that is often characterised by efforts to aspire to material wealth and adulthood far too quickly.

  Chairman: Thank you.

  Q475  Mr Streeter: Mr Solo, if I can just go back to something you said just now, you seemed to indicate that might be a different model for some families from the black community where perhaps the father does not live in the house but visits from time to time. Can you just say a bit more about that. Is that because the mother or the woman in the relationship wants it that way or would that be a choice by the father? Could you say a little bit more about that, I did not fully follow that one.

  Mr Solo: Yes, sure. What we do is run the risk of maligning and demonising the family structure that does not conform to the 2.5 model. The reasons for this are complex and many. It works for that community. There are the deprivation and pressures I mentioned before that are moving partners away from each other. I would direct you to some research that was done by Robert Beckford from Birmingham University and whilst I have not got that study here today I will make sure that it gets to you.[1]

  Q476  Mr Streeter: Thank you very much. I think we all agree, however, that fatherlessness in any community is an issue and has consequences, and you have both said that. In your experience where there has been a family break down with the kinds of families you are working with, what kind of proportion of fathers stay in touch with their children compared to those who have no real contact with their children as they grow up?

  Mr Solo: In our experience, talking with African Caribbean fathers, overwhelmingly the majority want contact and are frustrated in that generally by the operation of the law which would imply that mothers and women are the primary caregivers and also understanding that difficulties post-relationship will make the father visiting and building a relationship with the child somewhat more difficult. I would say that by and large in our experience, talking with fathers, the majority want that contact. In terms of percentages, it is hard to say.

  Q477  Mr Streeter: Just ball park.

  Mr Solo: Ball park, 40% I would say are not having contact and overwhelmingly the majority of African Caribbean fathers have contact at some level.

  Mr Davis: I would support that. I think the vast majority of fathers do have some contact but the perception is because they are not resident they are absent.

  Q478  Mr Streeter: Yes.

  Mr Davis: There are lots of reasons for this. One Neil mentioned was economic. In a lot of the cases in the families that we work with if the father was to become resident the family would be penalised because the benefits are reduced, so unless he is working and has enough money to compensate for that loss of benefit they are financially better off living apart. A lot of those fathers do provide financial support to their partners without being resident with the family.

  Q479  Mr Streeter: So they would have a flat somewhere else?

  Mr Davis: Yes.


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