Schools are fitted with more CCTV cameras than ever. Although their ability to deter bullying and reduce misbehaviour in lessons is a subject for scrutiny, much less is known about the social impact of surveillance on children.
Academics from the University of Hull have done a study to find about school children’s experience and response to surveillance, both in and out of the classroom. The research, published in Surveillance and Society highlights some fascinating concerns. Three schools in a UK city were researched; a council estate comprehensive, a private school and girls comprehensive.
The Council Estate Comprehensive has a 62 CCTV cameras. The main entrance and exits are gated and locked and teachers patrol with radios, leading one pupil to say the school was “like a prison”. Outside school, most of the pupils had direct encounters with the police on a regular basis and were subject to harder forms of surveillance such as having drinks confiscated or tested for alcohol and being taken home by the police. These pupils were also well aware that they were more likely than other social groups to be singled out for surveillance monitoring because of their appearance. As one pupil put it: “the Queen could wear a pair of trackies and she’d get arrested”.
In contrast, none of the pupils at the private school said they had direct encounters with the police or had CCTV cameras in their neighbourhood. While they were aware of public space cameras in shopping centres for example, they did not consider themselves to be under surveillance, they considered the monitoring practices to be directed at the ‘chavs in tracksuits and baseball caps’.
The private school has no CCTVs or automated registers. As one pupil explained: “There is a lot of trust here, you could easily walk out the gates at the front but no one does… because they don’t want to go.” The surveillance they were most aware of, however, was computer monitoring.
Pupils said they were subject to real-time computer monitoring and they were concerned that the ‘blocking’ of websites had an impact on their schoolwork. As one year 11 teenage boy says: “Just by the touch of a button, they can shut down your computer. So your work could disappear and everything… it’s just a cause of worry that you’re going to get a message and he’s just going to shut your computer down and you’re going to lose your work.”
Pupils at the girls comprehensive school had very different concerns. They were worried about the potential for ‘voyeuristic’ use of CCTV surveillance by male operators. One girl said that in her previous school there was a camera looking into the girls toilets but there was no camera looking into the boys toilets. Another girl wondered if they had a CCTV camera in the changing rooms.
As well as concerns over the voyeuristic use of surveillance, some expressed their desire to have a ‘backstage’ area where they can make themselves presentable before being watched. Others thought that surveillance was bound up with wider media representations of women and their bodies. As one girl explained: “CCTV just encourages – you know – beauty, and everyone wanting to be perfect… like everybody wanting to be a size 8 or really skinny and really, really beautiful”. Another girl added: “The cameras are trying to control us and make us perfect”.
Encounters with the police were not prominent in the girls’ talk of surveillance, although some had been approached by security guards in one the city’s shopping centres. A year nine girl explains: “In the shopping centre it was raining, so we had our hoods up and they made us take off our hoods and walk back in the rain again, and then walk back in again so the camera could see our faces.”
Dr Mike McCahill who led the research says: “Although the children at the three different schools experience surveillance in different ways, it is clear that they all have degrees of concern about its usage. The consequences of controls such as computerised registers, automated text messages, cashless dinner programmes and blocking systems on the computers can have negative effects on relationships: children found there was no negotiation with the teacher for later arrivals, pupils could no longer buy dinner for their friends and automated text messages could really worry parents unnecessarily.
Dr McCahill concludes by saying: “The social impact that surveillance may have on children’s lives is highly dependent upon existing social relations, identities and cultural traditions. At the same time, however, this research has found that children are not passive subjects of social structures and technological processes. By evading, negotiating and resisting surveillance regimes, children also shape surveillance practices and technologies in novel and unanticipated ways.
Dr McCahill has previously studied CCTV control rooms.
