Description:
What is wrong with kids today? Gang culture, knife crime, casual sex, alcohol, drugs – press and television are full of these. Modern childhood, it seems, is a bad business. But are the lives of children today so very different from in the past?

This event brings together historians of childhood with politicians, educational and legal experts, psychotherapists, teachers and school students to talk about British childhood, past and present.

Speakers include Abigail Wills (historian, Oxford), Adam Phillips (psychotherapist), Kate Bradley (historian, University of Kent), Christina Enright (Kids Company), Deborah Thom (historian, Cambridge), Pamela Ormerod (Magistrates’ Association Youth Courts Committee), Gus John (Institute of Education), and Nicola Sheldon (historian, Oxford).

There will be presentations by students from three London schools.

This event is organised by the Raphael Samuel History Centre (University of East London/Birkbeck College/Bishopsgate Institute), in partnership with ‘History & Policy’ (Cambridge/ Institute of Historical Research/London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine).