PARENTS WHO SPY ON CHILDREN

Presumably if Carol Brady ever suspected that any of the six Brady
Bunch children were using drugs, she would have behaved like a stoic.
Carol would have warded off all temptation to tear through their
bedroom like a banshee, looking between bunk beds for Rizzla papers or
an ounce of the illicit substance. She would have been calm, sat down
and had a heart-to-heart with them, and hugged the problem away.

These days, however, parents behave distinctly unBradylike when they
suspect their child is in danger. Parents who fear they have a
drug-addicted child often irrationally play Inspector Morse, rummaging
through the house, reading their diaries and personal letters,
listening to phone conversations and hunting for any clue or red flag
along the way. Driven by parental instinct, they compromise their
child’s privacy out of concern for their safety.

Indeed, desperation calls for desperate measures and a store in London
named Spymaster provides solace for these moments of mania. The shop
boasts a large collection of gadgets that resemble those Q dreamed up
for James Bond. Concerned parents can browse, drop a few thousand
pounds and leave with enough surveillance equipment to monitor a small
jewellers. The shop is stocked with cameras in the form of cigarette
lighters and pocket calculators, bugging devices the size of a postage
stamp, and other pieces of complex espionage equipment which can be
used to get all of the dirt on their children. Telephone recording
devices, hidden cameras, and lie detectors that can flush out the
truth were once the perfect weapon for the up-and-coming gumshoe. Now
they are appealing to the mother and father market. Spy products can
easily be ordered through the internet when long talks and
communication fail and parents turn to covert action.

"Parents come in normally when they are worried that their children
are doing drugs. They buy video cameras that are hidden in household
items like heating thermostats, clocks, and stuffed bears. It can cost
anywhere from UKP400 on up," says Jeremy Marks, the manager of
Spymaster, just one of a handful of spy shops in the area.

Perhaps, with all those close-circuit cameras all around us as we walk
round city centres or the security cameras that check us out when we
do our shopping, none of this should be too surprising. We’ve seen
documentaries in which surveillance has been used to monitor new
nannies and potentially unfaithful partners, we’ve watched and learnt
from The Avengers and Mission Impossible. The only difference now is
that parents are turning the hidden cameras on their own flesh and
blood.

In America, snooping has been elevated to an art form when parents are
desperate to find out more about their child. Tools have never been so
easy to find. Home drug test kits, which can detect use of
amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine, marijuana, PCP, benzodiazopines
and opiates, don’t stay on the shelves for long. "Drive Right", a
computerised device, provides details of the speed and any erratic
movements when a teen is behind the wheel of the family car so parents
can keep watch over them when they are out. And a company in Virginia
has even cornered the market with its drug-sniffing services. Dogs are
used to detect drugs that children may have hidden within the family
home. Similar tactics may soon find their way across the Atlantic as
more children fall prey to drugs and more parents feel they have
nowhere else to turn.

Other concerned parents take the traditional approach and hire a
professional to do the job for them. By enlisting the help of a
detective agency, parents can find out a lot more about their child’s
secret life.

"Usually parents call on us if they think their child is involved in
something and it’s almost always drug use that they’re worried about.
It’s not happened an awful lot but we have had occasions where parents
suspected their child was into the drug scene and we did
surveillance," says Stephen Grant, of Grant & McMurtrie Investigators
in Edinburgh, who charges between UKP30 and UKP50 per hour. "We follow
them about and find out whether they are going where they say they are
going. A child might say that they’re going to a friend’s house on a
Friday night and we’ll follow them and find they’re meeting up in a
park to do drugs with undesirables instead. We also have the facility
to install cameras in the home but usually it is not necessary."

But psychologists do not condone such activity. Nancy Thomson, a
chartered psychologist in Aberdeen who works with family and
adolescent counselling, believes that parents who invade their child’s
privacy may do irreparable damage to any trust they have built over
the years. "Spying on your children is never a good thing. One of the
things that children need to be accorded is respect, and respect for
privacy. If one suspects that their children are using restrictive
drugs, the best thing to do is address it with them openly and
respectfully.

"If parents suspect that their children are using drugs but are not
sure, the best source of information is their own children and if
parents have any kind of decent relationship with their children, they
should be able to do that. But oftentimes parents who are likely to
spy on their children don’t have a good relationship with their child
to begin with. That is what they should be addressing first," says
Thomson.

Still, one mother from Levenmouth, who did not want her name revealed,
searched her son’s room and is glad that she did. She first suspected
that her 16-year-old son was using drugs after his things went missing
from their house. "At first he said his friends were borrowing his
things but when they still weren’t back after a couple of weeks, I
began to be suspicious. It wasn’t until I saw his electric guitar
sitting in a shop window that I figured that he was selling his things
to pay for drugs," she says. She talked to him about it but he
adamantly denied using drugs.

It was not until some other parents suggested that she search in his
room that her concerns were validated. "I stripped away the carpets
and found cannabis hidden under the floor-boards. He was never allowed
to have a lock on his door but he kept things hidden. I talked to him
about it but he was still in denial." She says that she found other
drugs paraphernalia inside cassette tape cases, behind wall posters,
and inside the pull toggles of jackets and fleece jumpers.

On a second search through his room she took apart his cupboard to
find he had constructed an elaborate holding box using the hardboard
backing of the cupboard and a stack of old shoe boxes. She found that
the storage hold held his collection of syringes. "I would recommend
to other parents to check their child’s room," she says.

She suspected her child was using drugs for six months before her
fears were confirmed by a room search. If she had never looked, she
emphasises that he might not have received the help he needed because
the drug addiction put him in a severe state of denial. Her son has
since been on methadone for a year and after attending a drug
counselling group, has finally admitted that he has a drug problem.

Still drug counsellors believe that the best way for a parent to react
in this difficult situation is to calmly talk it out with their child.
When they have the urge to spy, representatives from the Drug
Prevention Group in Edinburgh, the Youth Counselling Services Agency
in Pollokshields and the Glasgow Family Support Groups Association all
agree that parents should respect their child’s privacy and forge some
lines of communication.

"The tragedy is that the trust that should exist between parent and
child often gets compromised in this very emotional issue. I had a
parent who called up a few days ago and asked about a bottle of pills
he found in his son’s bedroom. I asked him what he was doing in his
son’s bedroom and he just stopped and then said he was looking for a
pen," says Alistair Ramsay, executive director of Scotland Against
Drugs. "See, parents are desperate when they come across this kind of
thing and they want to know what to do and how to handle it. There’s
the need within them of wanting to do something and being very
suspicious. Where parents have a relationship with their youngsters,
then they have the opportunity to make sure a cool and calm atmosphere
prevails. Where emotions take over, it becomes a more difficult issue
to deal with it."