Reading Journal

common in geographical areas where traditional child- hood diseases (polio, diphtheria, etc.) have been eradicated and where there have been improvements in hygiene. The eradication of infectious diseases may have made the modern immune system ‘less fit’ and thus more vulnerable to allergens. Better hygiene has meant that fetuses that used to have to handle parasites present in the maternal blood, now react to other things in the blood such as allergens and are thus predisposed to experience allergies after birth. There is an apparent tendency to conflate allergies and

food intolerances and this has created an impression that there has been a large increase in those affected by allergies. It is possible that some allergies are regarded as ‘life-threatening’ may be less serious; the increased publicity about the potential severity of allergic reac- tions may have resulted in understandable caution to avoid exposure to allergens and may have inflated the number of reported instances. There is no doubt that school administrators and principals encounter many more cases of children with allergies than in the past; hence the fact that allergy regulation has become a widespread feature of school life.

The problem of children’s social bodies in a risk society

A focus on social bodies refers to processes of aggregation that bring together the dispersed circum- stances of children as part of a population of ‘school children’. At the same time, the concept of ‘social bodies’ can also refer to processes of ‘disaggregation’, the dissection of the social in order to diagnose its problems, for example, the distinction made in policy documents between allergic and non-allergic children. The social bodies of school children can be viewed as political and economic surfaces, ready to be inscribed with the telltale marks of projects that seek to regulate, monitor, or otherwise govern their distinctly social bodies. Childhood, it should be noted, is the most intensively governed period of human life (Rose, 1990, p. 121). The insistence that individuals are possessed of social

bodies serves to emphasize that each individual body is influenced by concerns and anxieties that impact upon the aggregated social bodies, for example, over such issues as body images, weight and the like. Issues affecting social bodies can give rise to both solidarities and conflicts; for example, they may act to provoke divisions between the parents of allergic children and those of non-allergic children. Thus the fate of individual bodies is linked to the relations of social bodies (Freund & McGuire, 1995, p. 3). The bodies of children are social and historical constructs in that discourses on the dietary regimes of children give effect to the shifting ways in which the health of children has

been conceived. In broad terms, increased value has been attached to children’s health for reasons connected to declining infant mortality rates. The historical significance of children’s social bodies

as objects of governance has its origins in the fact that the family has long remained at the centre of projects of social intervention aimed at diminishing social anxieties with respect, not only to the health, but the morals, criminal tendencies and educability of children (Donze- lot, 1979). The quest for familial roots to social problems is currently visible in the rhetoric of ‘family values’. The dietary regimes of children are unstable targets of governance since tensions surround the boundaries between parental and public duties and responsibilities; this is particularly the case where some moralizing element is present. Projects of moral regula- tion are rarely systematically organized strategies; their essence is attempts on the behalf of some social group to problematize the conduct or culture of others, and to impose regulation upon them (Hunt, 1999, p. 1). Moral regulation describes a process of moralization in which some social practice is treated as a moral issue; it finds its prospects for success or failure in the capacity to be generalized and disseminated, in the ability to ‘assert some generalized sense of wrongness of some conduct, habit or disposition’ (Hunt, 1999, p. 8). One of the reasons that particular projects of moral

regulation are interesting is that they demonstrate how local social forces can successfully mobilize themselves to articulate policy goals that can be imposed upon policy makers. This is evidence that moral regulation projects are often initiated from below and that the primary initiators are frequently not holders of institu- tional power (Hunt, 1999, pp. 1–2). This is the case with respect to the regulatory response to allergic children in schools. The pressure for regulatory intervention came from parents organized through a network of socio- medical activists linked primarily through the Internet. From the contention that the social bodies of children

are targets of moral regulation, it follows that the risks confronted by children with life-threatening food allergies have come to be viewed as conditions requiring intervention. There are a variety of participants involved in social action aimed at addressing this problem: the children themselves (distinguished as allergic and non- allergic), teachers, school administrators, and parents (again both those of allergic and non-allergic children). The parents of allergic children tend to be strongly committed to the view that what is at stake is the imperative for the regulation of dietary practices within the school. They tend to exhibit a skepticism about the abilities of individual teachers to fulfil properly their expanding responsibilities for the effective governance of the detailed food practices from the monitoring of lunch-sharing practices to the scrubbing down of class- room equipment and desks.

ARTICLE IN PRESS T. Rous, A. Hunt / Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004) 825–836828

The scenario that we find in schools today, to borrow from Bauman (1992), is that the school teachers and those directly involved in the day-to-day care of children, are no longer the legislators of regulatory projects but merely their interpreters. The children themselves, their parents and their teachers are in important respects the authors of these projects along- side the ‘absent experts’ both within and without the educational bureaucracies; and these experts are not only official medical personnel, but also the self-created experts who are, more often than not, the parents of anaphylactic students. Allergic and non-allergic children alike find them-

selves immersed within a ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992a, b; Giddens, 1991). Risks are characteristically modern; they are often hidden, impersonal and unobservable conditions which fuel the uncertainties of the age. They generate attempts to deal systematically with the hazards peculiar to modernity. One of the most prevalent forms of response is actuarial calculation and insurance (Ewald, 1991). ‘Risk is a wayyof ordering reality, of rendering it into a calculable form’ (Dean, 1998, p. 25). The relationship between a culture of risk management and projects of moral regulation is one that is complementary; projects of moral regulation are aimed at problematizing conduct that might other- wise result in the eruption of the unpredictable, making the development of techniques of risk management the preferred response in order to maintain security and order even though results may be difficult to guarantee. Allergies are important exemplars of risk: they are

complex in their etiology, often unknown until they manifest themselves in some catastrophic incident, and they are unequally distributed. Allergies also fit another dimension of Beck’s analysis in being classless. While the language of risk is technical, abstract and scientific, risk is still grounded in moral discourses; for example, the plethora of discourses surrounding AIDS involve com- plex mixes of medical, sexual and moral elements. Further, as Mary Douglas notes risks are social constructs with a close link between ‘risk’ and ‘social justice’ (Douglas, 1992, p. 36). More importantly risks exhibit a paradox of risk and regulation; while we live in societies with more risk and uncertainty; at the same time, everyday life has become more standardized and regulated (Turner, 1995, p. 226, chap. 12). This is precisely the duality that transects the response to allergies. This dualism is captured in O’Malley’s (1992) distinction between two forms of risk principle: ‘pru- dentialism’ which urges individuals to take responsibility for the management of their own interests and ‘socialized risk management’ that is instituted through collectivist policies. The proclivity of administrators to respond to

problems with policy initiatives and regulatory output exhibits a second dimension of risk society. Conscious-

ness of risk induces attempts to ‘colonize the future’, to take steps to make provision for the possibility of risk incidents and to broadcast the attempt to make provision to ensure security in the face of future risks (Giddens, 1991, p. 111). Such attempts exhibit two distinctive varieties. The first is couched in terms of a calculative rationality of liability minimization; this may or may not be linked to attempts at risk reduction. Liability reduction may content itself with a preventa- tive approach that seeks to reduce or deflect possible criticism. In its most extreme and negative form liability minimization may manifests itself in risk aversion where regulations seek to smother every imaginable risk to such an extent that, if adhered to, would result in the near paralysis of social life or, more likely, in the systematic avoidance of the regulatory machinery. A second form has a legal (or, probably more

accurately, quasi-legal) approach in that it seeks to minimize the likelihood of litigation or the extent of any legal liability. Although such liability avoidance played some part in the initiation of the Ottawa Board policy, the substantive contents of the policy documents are, as we seek to show, directed primarily at teachers and school principals; they are significantly practical injunc- tions rather than inclusive legal generalizations. The Canadian School Boards Association Handbook (CSBA, 2001, p. 2) is explicit in its concern to minimize the legal liability of school boards. It notes that ‘the Supreme Court of Canada has recognized that the ‘standard of care’ owed by an educator to a student is that of a ‘careful and prudent parent’’. From this it is deduced that, although as yet not tested, the courts would be likely to require school boards to adapt the school environment to accommodate anaphylactic students. The two approaches to risk handling are illustrated in

the opening paragraph of the Ottawa Board policy documents issued in 1998 (and reissued in 1999):

Objective: To create a safe and healthy environment for students through a co-operative effort by staff, parents, schools, and related agencies, while recog- nizing that there are limits imposed by legislation, school configuration, number of students, and available staff. (O-CDSB, 1998, p. 2)

The Ottawa Board policies return time and time again to the extra precautions needed on excursions and field trips since these events involve an increased unpredict- ability of risk conditions. It is but a short step for the risk aversion associated with such expeditions to lead to impediments being put in place which threaten to smother much extra-curricular activity. Castel (1991, p. 281) describes the process of moral

regulation as one in which the initiators of such projects work to ‘dissolve the notion of a subject or a concrete individual, and put in its place a combinatory of factors,

ARTICLE IN PRESS T. Rous, A. Hunt / Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004) 825–836 829

the factors of risk’ (emphasis in original). The possibility of an allergic child being exposed to the allergic food product constitutes the specific risk situation. Yet, since many allergic reactions are the result of cross-contam- ination rather than being the result of direct ingestion, the risk condition takes on an expanded character. As a result, the strategies of managing this risk will inevitably involve dividing practices that differentiate between allergic children and those who are allergy-free. Care is taken to reduce the overt singling out of the allergic child since this would be incompatible with the prevailing educational thinking against the separation of different categories of students. The Ottawa Board policies reveal considerable tactical

caution with respect to the differentiation between allergic and non-allergic children and their respective parents. The opening lines of the recommended draft letter to parents state:

We have a student in your child’s class who has life- threatening allergies to peanuts and all types of nuts. We want to thank parents for your understanding and co-operation in the past when we have requested that you avoid sending peanuts and nut products to school.

Note how parents are ‘brought on side’ by implying that they have previously cooperated with a ‘no-peanuts’ policy. The next step is that special provisions are identified for the handling and consumption of food. The body of the detailed provisions refer to such matters as where food can and cannot be eaten, what utensils are supplied, how surfaces are to be prepared and cleaned. An interesting feature of the Ottawa Board policy is that, rather than segregating the anaphylactic student, it is the non-allergic student who is separated should they bring peanut item to school. The draft letter to parents states:

Should your child bring a food to school containing peanut or nut products, please ask your child to let the teacher know. We will provide alternative eating arrangements for that day to ensure the safety of the [allergic] child.

Note that the possibility that a child might bring peanuts to school established that there is no prohibi- tory restriction on what food parents may provide for their children. This serves the significant tactic of taking account of parents who might regard the growing list of school ‘Do’s and Don’ts’ as evidence of risk aversion. This avoidance of prohibitory language contrasts with the more traditional list of ‘banned substances’ in elementary schools (gum, candy, etc.). The problem of a risk society is masked by the fact

that the relationship of allergic risks to the social body of a child is at first glance a strangely disembodied one.

It is the allergenic food product that functions as the known life-threatening pathogen, not the child him or herself. Within the reality of a risk society the efforts of schools to manage the risks associated with food allergies will inevitably fail to extricate the child as a human subject from the combinatory of risk factors that diminish the carefully cultivated impression of the school as a well-ordered and secure social space. Similarly, it is a child’s chance of contact with the

allergen that is the risk to be managed by regulatory practices that attempt to secure the reduction of that risk. The Ottawa Board ‘Guidelines’ for safer class- rooms suggest a detailed level of surveillance by teachers that it seems unlikely could realistically be sustained:

Please watch student snacks in case there is anyone with a peanut butter or other nut substance. Those children should finish their snack and wash their hands before they go outside. Please wash all knives, forks, etc. before and after

use to prevent contamination.

Such specific protocols are problematic because they ‘responsibilize’ teachers; it involves not just imposing responsibilities on teachers, but additionally it marks out a form of governing through acting on social agents to change both the imposed responsibilities but also the one’s that agents take on themselves. Not only do these policies expand the responsibilities of teachers, but potentially open them to disciplinary or even legal liability. We suggest it is significant that the policy documents place great weight upon the washing of hands. Not only is this a practical step that might feasibly be implemented by busy teachers, but it also resonates, indeed reproduces, older discourses about the importance of cleanliness that hark back to ideas of ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’. Yet we find, on closer examination, that the social bodies of allergic children are deeply inscribed with the techniques of governance and regulation because of the unitary nature of the risk culture’s construction of the child’s social self. The allergic child is released from the forms of social obligation that interaction with other children in mealtime rituals would otherwise entail; this is most clearly present in the repeated injunctions against food sharing. At the same time, allergic children are required to become active agents in the process of self-regulation of their dietary habits; they are to be trained both at home and in school about the risks associated with sharing food or drinking-straws. However, this is not simply a matter of following rules; there is evidence that allergic children may be prone to ‘bullying’ at school. They are trained to live cautiously and may exhibit signs of timidity. Bullying may be especially serious when the child is threatened with an allergenic food which is likely to produce extreme anxiety. Such bullying is

ARTICLE IN PRESS T. Rous, A. Hunt / Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004) 825–836830

compounded by the fact that the degree of danger is likely to be poorly understood by the bully. Thus the self-regulatory practices to be mastered by the allergic child involve much more than the avoidance of specific food items. Within the broader consideration of the process that

Hacking (1986) describes as ‘making up people’, strategies for managing allergy risks enable the employ- ment of what Petersen (1997) calls ‘the agency of subjects in their own self-regulation’. This serves to normalize the ‘allergic’ role of the child in relation to his or her subjective experience of risk, and results in the recognition of ‘a more complexly structured and intensely governed self’ (1997, p. 203). Thus the Ottawa Board policy places considerable emphasis on the role of the allergic child:

It is strongly recommended that the anaphylactic student (as age appropriate) learn to take responsi- bility for his or her own well-being.

Any system of moral regulation requires the presence of mechanisms of self-discipline. These techniques tend to stimulate an intensive self-regulation that are further legitimated by the creation of codified rules. Thus the Ottawa Board policies set out detailed ‘responsibil- ities’—carefully avoiding the word ‘rule’—for all parti- cipants: parents of allergic children, parents of non- allergic children, allergic children, non-allergic children, class-teachers, and school principals. It is noteworthy that in the ‘General Guidelines for Creating Safe and Healthy Schools for Anaphylactic Students’ prohibi- tions are explicitly avoided:

It is unrealistic and provocative to attempt to ‘ban/ eliminate’ allergensyThe goal is to minimize and control allergens through education. It is recom- mended that the word ‘ban’ not be used in any communication.

It should be noted, however, that in practice there is an unstable boundary between bans and recommenda- tions. To be asked not to send children to school with peanut butter sandwiches can lead to stigmatization of parents who question the need to eliminate an expand- ing range of food items through imposing segregation on their children. It becomes clear that the allergic child, by virtue of the

risks associated with his or her medical condition and the allergic role created is in some measure ‘interpel- lated’ into the role of the anaphylactic. Althusser described interpellation as the process that ‘hails’ individuals into specific role through their recognition of the way in which the are labelled as when children have unflattering nicknames imposed upon them such as ‘Hey, you fatty!’ (Althusser, 1971, pp. 162–163). This hailing of anaphylactic children situates them within a

specific discursive context and thus facilitates their induction into the regulatory regime. At the same time, teachers are also interpellated within the text of the policy that defines their responsibilities. This attention to the interactive character of the link between their medical condition and the subjectivity of the allergic child, and their relations with teachers and classmates, adds credence to our contention that allergic children are inscribed subjects through whom projects of moral regulation operate to regulate the conduct of the wider category of participants (parents, teachers, etc.). The allergic child is an intermediary in the ebb and flow of the moral anxieties of others that develops despite the fact that the degree of risk associated with exposure to food allergens are probably sufficiently low as to defy even the most detailed regulations. In a related way, these anxieties can be seen to grow in relation to the sense of apprehension that the risks to the safety and health of allergic children are somehow not being adequately managed. Nevertheless, the presence of an anaphylactic child in

a school classroom gives rise to a rapidly expanding network of social agents who are responsibilized for the management of the risks that arise from the eating habits of children. It is because the expectations of the ‘allergic’ role can vary across different contexts that the responsibility for the management of risks can be so widely diffused between the child itself, parents, school volunteers, administrators, and teachers (Freund & McGuire, 1995). But if the allergic role can be regarded as one that Turner (1987, p. 55) describes as ‘an exit from social relations for a temporary respite from social obligations’, then it seems reasonable to suggest that the opposite is also true, namely, that healthy or non- allergic roles are criteria for social membership and engagement. Despite this fact, allergic children continue to be isolated or separated through dividing practices or processes of social differentiation like the arrangement for ‘alternate’ mealtime spaces for non-anaphylactic children. Such precautionary practices are part of the modern

organizational ideology of prevention, one that, as Castel (1991, p. 289) says, is

overarched by a grandiose technocratic rationalizing dream of absolute control of the accidental, under- stood as the irruption of the unpredictable. In the name of this myth of absolute eradication of risk, [modern ideologies] construct a mass of new risks which constitute so many new targets for preventive intervention.

Although the Ottawa policy lists the potential risks posed by fish, milk, eggs and wheat, the policies itemized related only to peanuts. It can be presumed that this is because to address the full range of potential allergens

ARTICLE IN PRESS T. Rous, A. Hunt / Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004) 825–836 831

would be so complex as to defy the practicalities of school life. It is worth noting that the range of risks associated with anaphylactic children are disseminated in such a way as to encompass all of those contingent, but largely unpredictable, possibilities (for example, of cross-contamination through shared eating or cutting utensils, desktops) which subsequently expand the scope of the regulatory project in such a way as to govern the conduct of all school staff and students alike. Such expanding conceptions of risks to the safety of

school-aged children inevitably generate expanding demands for further regulation, in the form of official policy documents like those issued by the Ottawa Board. This view is consistent with the point argued by Hermer and Hunt (1996, p. 457) that there exists a widespread assumption that the solution to social problems is through the invocation of more rules, regulations or laws. ‘[W]henever people feel that the fabric of society has been loosened, the law is perceived as the last defense, the last hope for the enforcement of morality and order’. Projects and strategies of moral regulation most often take the form of ongoing sets of practices that persist until their target either undergoes a significant transformation into some reconstructed object, as when homosexuality becomes gay, or alter- natively, is simply abandoned, as was the fact of nineteenth-century anti-masturbation crusades (Hunt, 1998). When looked at in this light, it becomes clear that

efforts to regulate the social bodies and dietary habits of children in schools are components of larger reactive movements toward the regulation of the agents, in particular, school administrators and teachers, who are charged with the responsibility for protecting children. The reactive character of these movements has its origins in the anxieties of parents. Thus most projects aimed at the regulation of the food risks of children are in large measure derived from a particular form of anxiety that expresses what Giddens (1991) has called an ontological insecurity. Late modernity tends to be associated with a destabilization of a previously imagined ontological security, that is the confidence that most humans have in the continuity of the surrounding social and material environment. This expresses itself in an increased awareness of risks that leads to rising anxiety. The older familiar anxieties of modernity (for example, unemployment, bereavement, etc.) remain, but a new world of uncertainty has arisen in which new anxieties arise that vary in their duration; some arise and persist (AIDS, global warming, etc.) while others are more short lived (‘road rage’, satanic child abuse, etc.). Significantly risks are increasingly contested. Particularly prominent among the new insecurities are those that relate to the environment and the increasing anxiety about the risks that it poses to the well-being of late modern subjects.

These ontological insecurities in turn generate ex- istential anxieties about the reliability of knowledge and expertise. The role of experts has changed: professiona- lized and legitimized by the state they used to agree (at least in public); today with the increasing diversity of expertise and a decline in the capacity of official expertise to exclude competition, they now disagree. Increasingly important are the self-made experts who run Web-sites dealing with allergies, which are pre- dominantly promoted by allergic activists and are an example of these proliferating knowledges.

The social anatomy of a moral regulation project

We have argued that children’s social bodies tend to be among the more intensely regulated aspects of their social existence. While the family and the school engage in such governance, we have been concerned to demonstrate that children themselves are implicated in such practices in such a way that an allergic child becomes an active participant in the regulatory project. The variety of practices of food consumption by children are among the most stringently regulated behaviours, both on the part of the child, and his caregivers within and outside the family. Many practices and rituals are engaged in by an allergic child when taking care to avoid particular allergenic food products. The Ottawa Board policies ‘To Create a Safer Class- room’ includes the following detailed recommendations:

* the home-room teacher regularly reminds students to help in minimizing risk by not bringing food allergens to school;

* anaphylactic students are advised that they must eat only the foods they bring from home;

* no one (including staff) trades or shares food with the anaphylactic student;

* students are reminded not to share cups or straws; * desks or other eating surfaces are to be kept clean; * students are encouraged to bring allergen-free foods

for lunch and recess snacks; * it is recommended that staff refrain from eating foods

containing allergens, but if they do, proper steps should be taken to neutralize the effect (for example, hand-washing, brushing teeth, using mouth wash).

These recommendation have a familiar ring that resonates with ‘common sense’ rules of hygiene and are emblematic of ‘proper manners’ in an era in which attention to etiquette has markedly declined. The move away from etiquette does not necessarily involve a normative change; it may simply be that in late modern societies people not only ‘bowl alone,’ but also eat alone, often eating on the move and using fingers (Putnam, 2000).

ARTICLE IN PRESS T. Rous, A. Hunt / Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004) 825–836832

Children as active participants in their social worlds: In her study of power and resistance in parent-child relations through mealtime rituals, Grieshaber (1997, p. 652) notes that ‘children actively challenge and resist parental authority as part of daily domesticity while engaged in the social practice of consuming food’. Yet, the allergic child is reminded early and often of the dangers of laxness in the self-regulation of eating. He or she learns to be complicit in the regulation of consump- tion practices, as well as in the regulation of those around, given the risk of cross-contamination. The dividing practices in schools that differentiate allergic and non-allergic children involve an implicit recognition of the allergic child as a sentient subject cognizant of those aspects of his or her social body that render him or her vulnerable. Constant supervision would not, in principle, be

absolutely essential if children practiced such self- monitoring. This would be the case if repetitive regulation of food consumption habits practiced within the confines of the allergic child’s home was firmly established. Grieshaber (1997, p. 653) notes that ‘super- vision throughout meals is constant so that children eventually learn to consume food in a regulated and disciplined manner, within a particular time frame and in a limited space’. Grieshaber may be somewhat optimistic since ‘eating alone’ becomes established at an early age for many children; this is, a further respect in which the differentiation and individualization of the allergic children renders them subject to the surveillance of eating practices for longer than other children. This developing self-governance extends its reach further once an allergic child reaches elementary school. Social anxieties about the inherent laxness of children in the self-regulation of their mealtime practices when away from the parental gaze, however, easily give rise to anxieties about the behaviours of those charged with the children’s care in public schools. Rose (1990, p. 123) makes the point that

The upsurges of concern over the young—from juvenile delinquency in the nineteenth century to sexual abuse today—were actually moral panics; repetitive and predictable social occurrences in which certain persons or phenomena came to symbolize a range of social anxieties concerning threats to the established order and traditional values, the decline of morality and social discipline, and the need to take firm steps in order to prevent a downward spiral into disorder.

Since school boards, administrators, and classroom teachers alike are the targets of projects of moral regulation aimed at policing and monitoring eating practices, these agents can be viewed as potential offenders against such social discipline wherever the

safety of children is compromised through a real or imagined failure to manage risk. As in so many other fields the major response has been the introduction of practices of credentialization and professionalization. Yet the more extensive professionalization has become the less it provides a sure guarantee and, as a result, professionalization which once guaranteed autonomy today elicits varying levels of suspicion. Nowhere is this more evident than in the declining social status of teachers. Today home-training and self-regulation are not

perceived as adequate responses to the risks confronted by allergic children. Children are deemed to be less than fully capable of their own self-regulation. In part, this is a concomitant of a widespread infantilization of children in developed societies. The social dangers which confront children are perceived as being more numerous and more dangerous and as a result children are subject to a longer and more extensive period of parental surveillance and regulation. Children tend not to be allowed to gradually expand their encounters with the outside world on their own, but rather are bussed to school and transported to recreational activities. This general reluctance to grant autonomy is compounded in the case of the anxieties surrounding allergies because the dangers to the safety of an allergic child stem from unseen and mysterious allergens, ‘hidden’ in otherwise innocent food products. The response of caregivers seeking to alleviate the

social anxieties that are imposed upon them has been to develop ever more elaborate regulations and guidelines for their own conduct, while simultaneously attempting to deflect responsibility back onto children and their parents. The policy recommendations cited above emphasize the responsibilities of both parents and their allergic children. Such reciprocal responsibilization is cast in the fashionable neo-liberal discourse of an implied ‘partnership’ between parent and schools. Yet the relationship between school officials and parents is a peculiarly oppositional one; ‘negligent’ classroom tea- chers and school administrators are often viewed by parents as not taking adequate measures to ensure the systematic management of risk. It is the presence of sentiments that verge on the irrational that lend some measure of legitimacy to notions of moral panic. Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994, p. 3) draw attention to

the limits of rationality in projects of moral regulation.

While much collective action is appropriate to the task, goal, challenge, or threat at hand, not all of it can be characterized as completely rational. Erro- neous beliefs purportedly accounting for the events of the day are often held, and strategy may be pursued, which seem almost designed to defeat self- professed goals. In a crisis, enemies may be desig- nated who pose no concrete threat whatsoever.

ARTICLE IN PRESS T. Rous, A. Hunt / Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004) 825–836 833

This seems to be precisely what is happening in efforts to regulate the caregivers of children in the public realm. Belief in the rational calculability of risks to the safety of children, and in the practical inability of childcare workers to govern the dietary habits of children so as to manage largely incalculable risks are the underpinnings of regulatory projects that are always in danger of foundering upon their inherent limits. The pattern of increasing governance over the care of children’s social bodies in schools constitute a large-scale organization of institutional capacities deployed to temper public anxiety about the undermining of what has previously been viewed as the secure and predictable social order of the school. The increased governance of children in schools undoubtedly involves projects of moralization that aim to enforce an adequate management of a distinctively generated set of risks. Rationality is elusive; it implies a proper reason that is

supported by some form of calculability. As Beck argues, the ‘social pillars of the calculus of risk’ may be said to fail whenever the boundary between ‘predictable risks’ and ‘uncontrolled threats’ is trans- gressed; in such an event, the notion of security degenerates into one of mere technical safety (Beck, 1992b, p. 103). Parents and other concerned adults have done a diligent job in drawing attention to the risks of allergenic food ingestion; but the risks of children ingesting allergenic food is notoriously hard to calculate. The concern to promote the safety of children has

found expression in policies that have had three main consequences. First, the policies structure the relation- ship between ideologies of individualism and community so as to blur the boundaries between public and private dimensions of social life, between personal and institu- tional responsibilities and duties. Second, these efforts ensure that health promotion has been marginalized by new set of discourses centered on prevention of risk. Third, the very locus of responsibility for the security of children’s social bodies has changed from private to public social spaces, while enhancing the further effect of the associated governmentality by encouraging the development of self-governing bodies. This last effect is among the defining characteristics of the duality or double-movement between rules that address the risks confronting allergic children while, on the other hand, stimulating a heightened problematization of ‘normal’ eating habits. We now attend to this issue.

Children as self-governing subjects: Welfarism and governmentality

The responsibilization of children’s public caregivers acquires a powerful symbolic meaning, one that implies ideological assumptions about how children ought to be governed. As the legislative and procedural strategies

that aim to regulate schools and classrooms become more systematically organized, we find that caregivers, allergic and non-allergic children alike, and the social spaces themselves are being deconstructed as agents, and re-assembled as collections of risk factors. Managerial policies aimed at supervising risks become a strategy wider than the objectives of the projects of regulation themselves. Concrete progressive strategies aimed at the restoration of the central idea of self-governing care- givers and children alike, are displaced by an ideological monolith constructed out of prevention, security and hygiene. The complex apparatuses of governance that seek to

monitor and regulate the environmentally sensitive social bodies have increasingly operated within the framework of a new form of welfarism. What had previously been regarded as a parental responsibility for the well-being of their own children, came to be conducted either in partnership with or under the tutelage of, first, the increasingly coordinated system of general practitioners, health visitors and school nurses and then of more general interventions by social workers (Donzelot, 1979). While this model of welfare has been under attack in recent decades, it has by no means been displaced. Rather, it has been supplemented by a new welfarism whose major characteristic is the key role of social activists. The older statist institutions are still present but the centre of gravity has shifted towards an alliance between activist interest groups, and the local managers of the social institutions, in our case school principals and administrators. This generates as one of its most significant political implications the responsibi- lization of classroom teachers. This is particularly evident in the Ottawa Board policy with the injunction that teachers are to be responsible for food monitoring, but this is only one of a plethora of new duties imposed upon them; parallel policy innovations require teachers to respond to such diverse issues as bullying, racism, and sexual harassment. The potential tensions are revealed by the fact while teachers are urged to enter into partnership with parents at the same time they are required to be vigilant about signs of physical abuse of children by their parents. From one perspective, these changes can be viewed as

an expansion of welfarist governmentality that is committed to the all-round care of vulnerable members of the population. Yet, at the same time, it reveals how teachers in the front line of responsibility for the care of school children, are gradually being supplanted in their regulatory role by a community of ‘absent experts’ that Rose (1999, p. 76) refers to as ‘the proliferating scientific experts of the moral order’. It is these experts who formulate the new policies and play a decisive role in the creation of new rules and procedures. The expansionary logic of moral regulation should be noted. Research findings suggesting possible links between maternal

ARTICLE IN PRESS T. Rous, A. Hunt / Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004) 825–836834

dietary practices and child allergies is such that, just as consuming alcohol during pregnancy has figured in medico-moral discourses, so the eating of peanuts has fallen under a veil of disapproval. It is not surprising that pregnant women themselves are active participants in this inflation of self-regulatory projects (Lupton, 1999). This shift in the form of welfarism creates a new

relationship between experts and administrators. Castel (1991, p. 281) describes the process as one in which

displacement completely upsets the existing equili- brium between the respective viewpoints of the specialized professional and the administrator charged with defining and putting into operation the new sanitary policy. The specialists find them- selves cast in a subordinate role, while managerial policy formation is allowed to develop into a completely autonomous force, totally beyond the surveillance of the operative on the ground who is now reduced to a mere executant.

A project of moral regulation with teachers, school administrators and officials as the proclaimed targets is thus born, and class-teachers are called upon to regulate an ever-expanding range of aspects of school life that are either unpredictable or directly contribute to the risk of allergic children being exposed to hazardous allergenic foods. Such a system of regulation might be regarded as a

triumph of the modern welfare state in that the projects of moral regulation that have sought to make public caregivers responsible for the governance of children’s bodies, have thus added new dimensions of the class- room and playground as governable spaces within which public surveillance of children is to be maintained. Yet this picture is far from satisfactory. Classroom teachers have become increasingly subject

to control by the bureaucratic-administrative machine. Classroom and playground alike have become social spaces simply waiting to be filled by official markers of the new sanitary and preventive policies. The strategies of prevention have significantly appropriated the pre- viously occupied discursive place of health promotion. The construction of mealtime rules and dietary guide- lines formerly concerned to endorse ‘healthy eating’, has been supplanted by much more interventionist policies aimed at the avoidance of allergenic foods. Such regulatory ‘markers’ on public spaces have,

perhaps all too predictably, taken the form of the classic prohibitory slashed circle ‘No peanuts’ or ‘Allergen free’. Such signing has become the ‘official graffiti’ of the school that is part of a pervasive transformation in the forms of regulation of social spaces (Hermer & Hunt, 1996, p. 463). These markers have four main features, the first and most telling being that they intervene in the

governance of conduct. Second, they invoke an under- lying discursive framework consisting of an implied reader, and an implied author, namely, the absent experts on risks. Third, such markers have a distinctly public character, mapping out spatial dimensions in which the dietary regimes of children are monitored. Fourth, they have a mobile but nonetheless fixed attachment to entrances, doors, walls, and other spaces of social passage. The overall effect communicated is that such signs of governance have come to acquire the sort of permanence that renders them such a pervasive part of the modern socialscape. There is, as Donzelot (1979, p. 25) reminds us, an

important link between ‘the order of families and the order of the state’. In its most developed form the family state partnership was enshrined in the social-democratic or welfarist ideology of ‘from the cradle to the grave’. The fabrication of a child’s social self involves significant connections with techniques promoted by the new form of liberal welfarism. After a child’s birth and the provision of post-natal services, entry into school is a key moment in the linkage between family and state, one which creates potential tensions in the family state relation. One significant feature is the anxieties and moral panics that arise from charges arising from any laxness on the part of public caregivers as when social workers fail to follow up on evidence of physical abuse. Similar conflicts may arise in the policing of children’s mealtime habits, where teachers or others are accused of being lax in their surveillance. Such concerns are often especially sharp because of the emotional energy invested in parental social anxieties about their chil- dren’s security in a dangerous world. Protective strategies aimed at the management of risks

take the form of both community and individual responsibilization strategies. However, as we have suggested, there exists a double movement between collective and individual responsibility. The ever-extend- ing reach of this new governmental ideology can be both liberating and constraining since it entails both an increased space for individuals to acquire the capacities of self-regulating subjects, and simultaneously legiti- mates the capacity to govern possessed by the liberal democratic state and its agencies. This feature is well captured by Nicholas Fox (1994, p. 33).

Governmentality entails two often conflicting effects: the reinforcement of the community and increasing individualization.

We have shown how allergic children are the objects of specific moralizing practices around the security of their social bodies. So also are public caregivers inscribed with the mark of governmentality through the diligence with which they approach the task of

ARTICLE IN PRESS T. Rous, A. Hunt / Social Science & Medicine 58 (2004) 825–836 835

• Governing peanuts: the regulation of the social bodies of children and the risks of food allergies
• Introduction
• Allergies
• The problem of children’s social bodies in a risk society
• The social anatomy of a moral regulation project
• Children as self-governing subjects: Welfarism and governmentality
• References