A child’s right to privacy
I heard news today of an old friend. She’s married with two kids and living in an outer suburb of Melbourne in one of those enormous houses widely derided as a ‘McMansion.’
Despite significant housing problems in Australia, these ‘suburban castles’ with four or more bedrooms account for 60% of new housing downunder; 48% of them are built by people with only one or two children, while another 42% of McMansion owners have no children at all.
So my friend is not alone in that respect. What I hope is unusual is the infra-red cameras her husband has installed in the children’s bedrooms. Without getting up from the couch, they can switch to channel 4 and check whether the baby is stirring in his cot. Over on channel 5 is a live feed from the toddler’s room. Yes, closed-circuit television has entered the Australian home. And unlike Orwell’s dystopia of children spying on their parents, it’s parents doing the covert surveillance.
That is surely putting it too strongly. Is this just the logical next step from a baby monitor? A necessary convenience for a small family in a huge house? Or has a line been crossed?
It’s great when parents are attentive and responsive to their children’s needs. But children have a right to privacy which may be infringed when a camera is installed in their bedroom.
Dear Olivia,
Yes, I’ve noticed that baby monitors with CCTV seem to be quite common these days.
Surely “privacy” is meaningless to a baby, or even a toddler? Our baby sleeps in our room, mostly in our bed— she gets absolutely no privacy, we hear her every sigh and fart.
I think this is one of those cases where the right is only there to the extent that the person has the capability to enjoy that right.
But it does seem a bit icky— somehow looking at baby on TV seems more voyeuristic than peering around the door, why is that? And I’m sure part of my negative reaction is due to disapproving of someone having such a big house, rather than out of concern for the baby!
Anyway, I hope they get rid of the camera once the kids are past toddlerhood.
Thanks for the interesting post,
Julie.
Thanks for your comment, Julie. The Convention on the Rights of the Child acknowledges that children excercise their human rights in accordance with their ‘evolving capacities’. This will vary from right to right and from child to child. You ask the pertinent question: when is a child capable of exercising their right to privacy? (And when will the camera be removed?)
One argument raised against institutional child-care is the lack of privacy for the children. Here we find multiple meanings of privacy, beyond simply being alone and unobserved: being at home with a family member (the so-called ‘private sphere’), for instance, is more private than being in a room full of peers and child care workers (a public sphere).
Dear Olivia and Julie,
I’m not sure whether the right to privacy is the biggest problem with your story about your friends and their surveillance of their children. My concern would be more about the nature of the relationships and whether these are providing the best for the children. You might be interested in the new Code of Ethics for early childhood professionals which has just be developed by Early Childhood Australia – you can check it out at http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/code_of_ethics/early_childhood_australias_code_of_ethics.html
As an early childhood professional myself, I suspect that concerns about institutional child care should also focus on the quality of the relationships between children and their families, staff, and the community.
The reason I thought the new Code of Ethics might be relevant here is that it reflects new ways of thinking about children and childhood. Quality child care, whether it occurs within a family, a community or within an institution such as a child care centre, is all about relationships.
Dear Susan,
Thank you for your contribution. I readily agree that privacy is not the foremost consideration in the scenario described. I took that focus merely because privacy is a human right and that is the raison d’être of this blog.
I was pleased to note that the Convention on the Rights of the Child has prominence in your new Code of Ethics. Human rights are an ethical guide for human relating, but not perhaps in the way you mean.
It’s clear that babies have a right to breastmilk, for instance, as component of their rights to life and health, but there are other desirable aspects of parenting that are not, and perhaps should not, be the subject of rights claims.
We were discussing the “McMansion” issue at my Mothers Group: now it seems expected that kids have their own room almost from birth when we mothers all shared with our sisters and brothers until we were at least a school, sometimes until we left home. It is crazy because families with three or more kids feel they need a 4+ bedroom house, which is becoming less and less affordable. A related issue is that we are creating bigger houses that provide multiple recreational spaces with TVs and computers etc so kids aren’t taken to the park and other community spaces as much any more.