Would you put a camera in your daughter’s bedroom? Gordon Ramsay would. Last week, the celebrity chef boasted jokily on Jonathan Ross that he’d done just that to his fifteen-year old to make sure she and her boyfriend aren’t getting up to anything untoward. Barbara Ellen jumped to his defence in the Guardian, explaining that she has installed a webcam to spy on her own teenage daughter just to check that she is always doing her schoolwork when she should be. Parents, it is assumed, are allowed to spy on their children to whatever extent technology allows, particularly if those children are girls. The logic of constant surveillance – already employed in many factories and workplaces, where every minute of an employee’s time is now mechanically accounted for – has been extended to the home in a way that, were it to involve a relationship between adults, would immediately be pegged as abusive.
I was alerted to this disturbing trend by the Telegraph’s Mic Wright. Wright has reported before on the trend of liberal parents using the same tracking technology they would quite like various nation states to stop deploying against citizens to spy on their own children – specifically, on their daughters. It is significant that it is daughters who are subject to this sort of surveillance – being tracked on their parents’ smartphones, having their online activity monitored or, in Barbara Ellen’s case, having to put up with the parental panopticon checking that they’re always working and never fucking.
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