New Report Says Child Obesity In Wales Is The Highest In The UK

Yet more news on child obesity.

A report on childhood obesity published by the National Assembly for Wales in July said the rates of childhood obesity in Wales are the highest in the UK, with about 35% of children aged under 16 being overweight or obese in 2011.

During one week in July, nearly 170 children aged between 11 and 15 attended sessions in Wales run by a weight-loss club. Public Health Wales figures showed over 28% of five-year-olds are overweight, with 12.5% of children obese.

The National Obesity Forum said healthy eating needs to be taught earlier.

Charity Bids To Tackle Child Obesity

The charity Chest Heart & Stroke (NICHS) is expanding its health program in schools after research showed that children in Northern Ireland were among the least active in the UK.

The University College London study found that only 43% of seven-year-olds had the recommended one hour of exercise each day. The research showed that girls fared worse than boys.

Chief executive Andrew Dougal said a time bomb was "being stored up for the future".
"In combination with too little exercise, too many children are eating poor diets which are high in fat, salt and sugar," Mr Dougal said.

"It's particularly worrying that the exercise survey was carried out among seven-year-olds, because children tend to become less, rather than more active as they become older."

He said childhood obesity in Northern Ireland had increased from 27% in 2010-2011 to 31% in 2011-2012 and was likely to rise further.

Photo by Toby Alter

'Reality' OF UK Poverty Capatured In Online BBC Storyville Films

Three eye-opening JRF/BBC documentaries are now available to watch online.

Filmmaker Andy Glynne discusses the Why Poverty? series and explains: 

 

As a filmmaker, I'd travelled a lot, and filmed the images that we still associate with the word 'poverty': malnourished children in sub-Saharan Africa; those with no roofs over their heads or without access to water. Poverty was, I had thought, an absence of the fundamentals to live by, and we filmmakers trooped around the world highlighting the inequalities between the rich North and the poor South, bringing awareness to a problem far away, somewhere on the other side of the world – somewhere that, well, wasn't here.

Because – as the notion goes – inequalities on this scale don't exist here in the UK, do they? Well, yes and no. It was when embarking on this project that the notion of relative poverty – in which poverty can exist for those who are considerably worse off than the majority of the population – became of interest.

As we researched stories about poverty in the UK, we became aware of the ways in which being relatively poor can have a plethora of horrible consequences. And although such consequences may seem to lack the immediacy of being acutely life-threatening, they can nevertheless insidiously create physical, psychological and social inequalities on a hugely significant scale.

The three films are available to watch online on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation website: http://www.jrf.org.uk/blog/2013/01/poverty-captured-bbc-storyville-films 

Social Mobility & Ethnicity in the UK

Dr Neil Smith, Research Fellow at the Wolfson Institute of Preventative Medicine has made a special blog post on the Inequalities blog in which he reviews the evidence, including his own on the links between ethnicity and life chances in the UK and why this matters in the drive to improve social mobility.

He has found:

In March 2012, we heard that over a half of the UK’s Black youths aged between 16 and 24 were unemployed – a finding that is indicative of the persistence of ethnic inequalities in the labour market.

The latest figures highlight the failure of recent attempts at sending equally qualified school leavers into the market to compete at the same levels, regardless of social or ethnic background But one criticism of the crude analysis of the ONS data above is the lack of information surrounding the social and economic backgrounds of the unemployed Black youths. Is it ethnicity that determines the labour market successes, or is it instead education and class background?


You can read the full blog post here: http://inequalitiesblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/social-mobility-and-ethnicity-in-the-uk/

Free Seminar: A Question of Religion: Young People And Identity In Contemporary Multi-faith Britain

The Centre for Child and Youth Research at Brunel University is holding its second seminar day on 'A question of religion: young people and identity in contemporary multi-faith Britain' on Friday 29 June2012. The event is free and open to all. The programme covers:

• Young British Muslims finding their voice: from alienation to engagement. Dr Philip Lewis, Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford.
• Young Sikhs. Jasjit Singh, University of Leeds. 
• The Youth On Religion project: Young people and the negotiation of identity in three diverse urban locations. Professor Nicola Madge, Centre for Child and Youth Research, Brunel University.
• Growing up with disability in Pakistani Muslim families. Dr Debbie Kramer-Roy, Lecturer in Occupational Therapy, Brunel University.   

 A full programme and booking form can be downloaded from here: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/shssc/news-and-events/events/ne_186988

Time For A Revolution In The UK Care Sector

John Kennedy, Director of Care Services for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Housing Trust has commented on last Monday's Panorama which looked at the hidden abuse which can go on in care homes. He argues that it's time for a 'revolution' in the UK care sector. You can read his comments here: Time For A Revolution in the UK Care Sector

Some Useful Readings For Level 1 Sociology & Criminology BA Students

A number of you have been asking me about material on crime statistics in the UK. Below are listed some useful electronic materials which you may find useful. You will need to login with your library account to view them off-campus.

• The Economist (2010) 'How broken is Britain?' The Economist, 394(8668), p. 15.
  
• Emsley, C. (2002) 'Chapter 7: The history of crime and crime control institutions', in Maguire, M. et. al. (eds.) The Oxford handbook of criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 203-230.
• MacDonald, Z. (2002) 'Official crime statistics: their use and interpretation', Economic Journal, 112(477), pp. 85-107.
  
• Maguire, M. (2002) 'Chapter 11: Crime statistics', in Maguire, M. et. al. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 203-230.
• Tseloni, A. et.al. (2010) 'Exploring the international decline in crime rates', European Journal of Criminology, 7(5), pp. 375-394.