Given the stigma attached to ‘scrounging teenage mums’ (even if the question is asked?) a survey is unlikely to identify women who will make a direct admission that they did it for housing and benefit. However, a survey from the Rowntree Foundation reports

“For most, pregnancy was seen as a means to change their lifecourse for the better, by escaping family problems, erasing the memories of a hard and unsettled
upbringing and a desire for independence.”

Without housing and benefits, pregnancy wouldn’t deliver the above. Elsewhere in the report, it was stated that for many teenage mums improvements in housing and finance did occur.

http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/9781861348753.pdf

I thought all this was rubbish back in the day until I taught in Bracknell and heard children fantasising about the sorts of flats they could get if they got pregnant. I do not know how many of them went through with it but it was certainly a popular topic of conversation.

I agree there needs to be research into the reasons into why poor teenaged girls in Britain are having babies with no means of support. (and I bet it is a lot more complicated than they were making out in their conversations in my lessons.)

@2

Sometimes pregnancy can solve the problem in families where young girls feel ignored and unloved. A baby provides unconditional love and dependence to the mother, which is another reason that some girls choose to get pregnant. “I wanted someone to love me” is quite commonly heard.

The question posed is not whether housing and finance improvements occur. The question is whether those improvements act as an incentive to get pregnant.

Hold on a minute! Surely we find unmarried teenage in most Westernised ghettoes, irrespective of what benefits are available? Don’t they have huge cadres of children born outside of marriage in South America and Africa too, where teenage mothers don’t get council housing?

What about the USA? They have higher rate of unmarried mothers than we have, yet they have little in the way of a welfare State. Could it possibly be that the ‘Daily Hate’ et al are trivalising a complex issue with populist nonsense, just to sell papers?

What are the actual European welfare comparrisions?

@2

Here’s an interesting little tidbit from that JRF report:

“Many interviewees did not want to do a ‘boring’ or mundane job with no direction, meaning or room to progress. This led them to choose to have a baby instead, possibly to give them a real sense of purpose in life and some future direction.”

Now no doubt the average Tory’s response would be “well, they should have stayed in school and, y’know, tried to behave in a more middle-class way”, or some such nonsense, then rag on the welfare and benefits system for creating the “trap”.

But the “trap” was set up much earlier and from a far more diverse set of social mores, to read that article. You’ve got the media saying that standards are slipping, yet for whatever reason these girls are struggling. You’ve got parents who seem far more wrapped up in their own lives than thinking about what’s best for their kids. And you’ve got educational policy that forces a “one-size-fits-all” methodology on every child affected by it – and while New Labour haven’t helped, the National Curriculum and those horrible league tables were all Tory ideas and policies. The biggest problem is that the educational setup at the moment makes absolutely no provision for those whose gifts are not necessarily academic past a certain point, and even when they do make provision they focus purely on trying to make them perform better academically. The only future they can see is in a dead-end job which will pay peanuts and being treated forever with disdain by customers and employers. Being a mum and getting unconditional love sounds a lot better than that, doesn’t it? But then to right-wingers everything’s about money.

These girls have got a society which treats them like dirt, parents who ignore them and an educational system which fails them. *These* are the things that need to be looked into. But hey, let’s just cut benefits because it’s cheaper and allows for more Tory harrumphing about the awfulness of the proles.

6 – you’re doing a good job of blaming everything on the Tories. How much longer do you think you can get away that?

Of course the article does make interesting reading. I think a party of opportunity offers more to young people who grow up in poverty.

I haven’t got the time to do all Tom’s work, but there is one charity which springs to mind as one of Tom’s five.

http://www.mygeneration.org.uk/

Its founder is reported as saying ‘Gals getting knocked up to get housing? It’s a cottage industry where I come from’

@7

But the Tories aren’t a party of opportunity for anyone other than their own kind (narcissistic, selfish and rapacious – preferably born to the upper-middle classes or higher) and those that seek to, or are willing to emulate them.

Every “opportunity” offered to kids in the 80s involved the expectation that they’d pull the ladder up after them. I want *everyone* to be afforded opportunity to give of their best, regardless of birth or ability.

And I can blame them till kingdom come if necessary, because far too few of their policies were reversed by Blairism (and I hold the right-wing of the Labour Party wholly responsible for that, don’t you worry).

@7 – But the Tories aren’t a party of opportunity for anyone other than their own kind (narcissistic, selfish and rapacious – preferably born to the upper-middle classes or higher) and those that seek to, or are willing to emulate them.

This characterisation borders on lunatic. What part of the UK are you from? I’ll be at a Tory beer and skittles fund-raiser this Friday. Not a fop in sight.

@9 – Lest we take this offtopic, where did I say foppish? And I’m from the Kent/SE London hinterlands originally – Bromley and Bexley, so to say I have no experience of modern Tories (Ted Heath was an anomaly, bless him) is a tad inaccurate.

Its founder is reported as saying ‘Gals getting knocked up to get housing? It’s a cottage industry where I come from’

And the plural of anecdote isn’t data, let alone evidence.

Does seeing it in one’s own extended family count as knowledge or again merely anecdote ?

The security of knowing a flat or house is on its way shortly after giving birth can definitely make the young girl less determined to avoid pregnancy. At one time they would have been given the shittiest council flat and that might have been a bit more of a deterrent but now council properties barely exist so they are able to look for an area that suits as long as there is a rented house available. Oh, also the social services don’t even check if the premises are suitable for a newborn or toddler – e.g. a staircase without a bannister.

Fuck off Praguetory- Blair and Brown are both Tories, and I say this because they haven’t reversed the damage Thatcher did to this country, but have encouraged it further.

Where were the single mothers on benefits before 1979?
Where were the street gangs and drug addicts before 1979?

That’s right, they barely existed because working-class people could make a decent living in honest jobs. And if we had a socialist government that invested in employment rather than giving 5 billion pounds to your scum pals in the City of London, these social problems would disappear.

No Tory has ever given a convincing answer of why the things they claim to be against, such as crime and welfare dependency, soared during the 1980s and no Tory ever will.

You have invested in a giant fucking lie, every one of Thatcher’s “policies” has been proven to be utter bollocks, short-termist shite that couldn’t deliver lasting prosperity. North Sea oil, the right to buy, service “industries”- all dust now.

Time to admit you were wrong and fuck off and let people with untainted hands sort out the problems.

Don – all Tom Harris will do is refer you to what he has written before – somewhere.

Why would he want to find the truth? He, like so many in parliament like to demonize the poor – it is, after all, all their fault!

I hope that Scotland ends the right to buy – and start building social housing to boot. New born’s should not be subjected to virtual slum conditions and council tax payers/income tax payers should not be subsidising such living conditions.

No 13 has it!

How dare anyone suggest that many teenagers have children just to escape their lot.

Next, they’ll be denying that teenagers only rob stores because they had no youth club in their area.

Or denying that they join gangs and carry knives only because uncaring teachers suspended them from school.

Or denying that they deal drugs only because the school they never attended refused to teach them to read and write.

It’s typical of right wing extremists like Tom Harris.

He should definitely be banned.

Well perhaps a good place to start looking for data, Don, would be Lambeth – an area with the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Western Europe.
http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/28/4/304

I think there is a companion question that goes hand in hand with the one put to Tom Harris – what % of teenagers with a child seek Local Authority housing.

Whatever the motives – or availability of housing stock the portents are generally not good.

For example, NICE has published some rather worrying data, “Teenage pregnancy: an overview of the research evidence” – not least because, “Out of 26 trials reviewed only one showed a positive impact on teenage pregnancies. The paper concludes that there is no evidence that existing prevention interventions are effective in changing behaviour or reducing conceptions”.
http://www.nice.org.uk/niceMedia/documents/teenpreg_evidence_overview.pdf

But in response to your direct question – an official report has recognised that the large numbers of young parents in the United Kingdom are not motivated to become parents by the promise of benefits or council flats.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/pmc/articles/PMC1116066/

@ Praguetory
The study you cite “‘Planned’ Teenage Pregnancy” is just about… well I’ll let the first words of the report speak for themselves: “This study explored the motivations for
‘planned’ teenage pregnancy.”

It’s hardly representative therefore, especially given that most other sources identify most teenage pregnancies as unplanned. Most black swans live in Australia, but that tells us nothing about where swans tend to live…

In any case you could say “pregnancy was seen as a means to change their lifecourse for the better, by escaping family problems, erasing the memories of… upbringing and a desire for independence” of many materially well-off parents, benefits need have nothing to do with it.

As for the causes of – or risk factors associated with – teenage pregnancy, how about these sources?

“The UK has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Western Europe as well as one of the highest levels of alcohol use among teenagers in Europe.”
http://www.alcoholconcern.org.uk/files/20030818_160907_Teen%20Pregnancy%20Briefing.pdf

Quote:

• Each year around 39,000 under 18 year olds become pregnant in England
• Half of under-18 conceptions occur in the 20% most disadvantaged wards
• These pregnancies occur throughout the country, but are much more likely in deprived neighbourhoods. Nearly every LA has at least one ‘hotspot’ neighbourhood, where every year more than 6% of young women aged 15-17 become pregnant
• The overwhelming majority of under-18 conceptions are unintended; about half lead to abortion.

Risk factor: Among young women leaving school at 16 with no qualifications, 29% will have a birth under 18, and 12% an abortion under 18, compared with 1% and 4% respectively for young women leaving at 17 or over.

Multiple risk factors
• Young women experiencing five risk factors (daughter of a teenage mother; father’s partly or unskilled social class; conduct disorder; social housing at 10 and poor reading ability at 10) have a 31% probability of becoming a mother under-20, compared with a 1% probability for someone experiencing none of these risk factors
• Young men with the same five risk factors had a 23% probability of becoming a young father (under age 23), compared to 2% for those not experiencing any of these risk factors.
http://www.alcoholpolicy.net/files/clg_teenage_pregnancy_07.pdf

This report dated August 2009 about the NEETs (not in education, employment or training) under 24 looks most inauspicious:
http://education.icnetwork.co.uk/national-student-news/2009/08/18/record-numbers-of-18-24-year-olds-not-in-education-or-work-111036-24468899/

“The statistics also show a surge in the numbers of 16-18-year-olds considered Neet. There are now 233,000 Neets in this age group, 13,000 more than the first quarter of 2009, when the figure stood at 220,000. In the second quarter of 2008, 209,000 16-18-year-olds were Neet, 24,000 fewer than the same quarter this year.”

There is a fundamental hole in the idea that teenage girls are going out and having babies in their thousands to get council flats. In London (and a number of other parts of the UK) the shortage of council housing is so intense that they don’t realistically stand a cats chance in hell of getting any kind of council flat.

But are teenage pregnancy rates any lower in London? Well, surprise – it seems London Boroughs have many of the highest rates in the country.