on estates, drunken violence and property destruction. Many of these stories concerned younger and younger children. There were twelve-yearolds who had killed children when their stolen car veered out of control; there were lawless youngsters intimidating estates; there were thirteen-year-olds accused of rape. Kenneth Clarke, then Home Secretary, vowed that his government would deal with ‘nasty persistent, juvenile little offenders’. This violence among children seemed to symbolize a rot which had spread from adults into the very core of society. In February 1993 came the ultimate tragedy – the murder of two-year-old James Bulger, abducted, tortured and sadistically killed by two ten-year-old boys.
Jamie Bulger’s murder was set against the background of the changing economy and the changes in domestic life. For many it was the apotheosis of a time out of joint. It signified the ruin of old communities, of poverty and increasingly harsh conditions. Above all, it was seen as a crisis of morality, a moment when we were invited to ask whether we were rearing monsters. ‘The case fills us’, said A. N. Wilson in the Evening Standard, ‘with the uneasy dread that this horrifying crime is somehow symptomatic of something which has happened to our society at large.’ The Bulger murder came to symbolize what happens in a society of divorced parents, single mothers, unemployed fathers, drunkenness, and no authority or discipline. ‘Few can doubt the family is in trouble,’ pronounced the Sunday Times in March 1993. ‘Parliament and the people are now casting around for solutions to what is seen as a problem of epidemic disorder – rising crime, intrusive squalor, spreading welfare dependency, collapsed community.’ This anxiety about the family would frame all further discussion of gender roles.
Of course, ever since the first stirrings of feminism there had been a vocal minority who warned of the dire consequences of women’s push for greater economic and legal autonomy from the family. But even in the heyday of Thatcher this remained a relatively marginal, backward-looking position. If one dares use old Marxist terms, libertarian and feminist views were still ‘hegemonic’, meaning that the emphasis was still on the obstacles to women’s full independence, and crime and social disorder were still seen as stemming from poverty and hardship not from the disintegration of the traditional family.
Increasingly, however, politicians of both Left and Right began to express concern that many social problems had their source in the demise of the traditional family and men’s displacement within that. ‘Across the political, moral, intellectual and religious spectrum there is today agreement that small, warm, caring families are the one way of virtually guaranteeing that children do not end up as criminals, but they seem to be a dying breed. The abnormal family seems now to be the norm’ (Sunday Times 1993). As Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair said in 1992: ‘There is something very wrong with our society …criminals of 10 or 11 don’t just happen. Broken homes, bad housing, poor education, no job or training, lack of hope or opportunity – affect the way a child develops.’
Clearly, optimism about the liberalizing changes of the 1960s and ‘70s – including the vast improvements in women’s position – had unravelled. The ‘enhanced role’ of women in the economy was not seen in isolation but alongside everything else. Some feminists continued to focus on further obstacles to their advancement, their freedoms, but this old story of the male oppressor no longer resonated in the same way, no longer ‘galvanised the imagination’ as Liam Hudson has put it (TLS
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