The Story of Childhood (34 page)

Put simply, if all young men wearing hooded tops are treated like violent thugs, they may well start acting that way. The present government's ‘respect' agenda could well amplify divisions instead of healing them. But demonisation of youth has a racial as well as a class context. Cohen was writing when analysis on grounds of race was in its infancy.
But one of the most potent folk devils of our times is surely the young black male – a boy like Ashley. If there is a continuum from GCSEs to the prison cell, black boys are overrepresented at every wrong turn, in school exclusions, in stop-and-search cautions, on remand and in custody.

Ashley's mum's got three operations coming up. She's got polio in her left leg, she's got cancer, and a couple of other sicknesses. She needs a new knee and a new hip. Because his mum's sick, he's got to move with her, look after her. She just got moved to Catford, but Ashley's not from Catford. Catford's classed as ghetto, and he's from Peckham, so the people don't mix. There's a lot of trouble when he goes home on the bus.

His mum doesn't drink. She smokes loads of menthol cigarettes, and she smokes a bit of hash now and again, but that's for the pain. ‘Me, I smoke skunk. I've been smoking skunk since the age of nine, when there was all the family trouble. I'd get pulled by the police, but when I was younger I didn't get a criminal record. They'd usually just tell me off, make me sit on a detention bench in the police station.'

When his dad moved out, his mum found it hard because she didn't have the money, and his dad wasn't giving any. Ashley's got seven brothers, six sisters, and loads of foster brothers and sisters because his mum used to be a foster-carer. He's the youngest. Only him and his two closest-aged brothers are his dad's children; his other brothers have a different father, so they're half Turkish. At the moment it's just four of them living at home. Though he usually sleeps in Catford, Ashley still spends his days in Peckham, but it's getting harder because he's got to check on his mum and he has a lot of appointments to keep. He's a very busy boy.

‘On the estates it's every man for himself but my friends,
they're like my family. You can't be my friend unless I know you've got my back. If I've got trouble or beef, you won't run off.' When his father left, and his mother couldn't support them all, his friends would help him out. ‘I'm not a charity, you get me, but when we'd go out, do whatever we're doing, steal cars, make a bit of money, if they got a bit of money they'd give me some; if I ain't got weed, they'd give me weed. Now I do the same.'

When he found out that some of those friends were smoking crack, he stopped seeing them. Ashley has a strict policy on drugs. Smoking weed, he's not doing anyone wrong. But he always said from when he was little that he would never smoke crack in his life.

If Ashley's on the road he must get pulled by the police six times a day, or more when he's in a group. That's how it is. He's used to it. He's been in trouble so much, the police know him and his brothers.

Race comes into it. ‘If you're in a group and it's a group of four black youths, you're definitely going to get pulled. Say you was with three white boys, you've less chance of getting pulled. But if one white boy was walking down the road with three black boys, the police go up to him, ask him what he's doing, are we trying to rob him.'

Street robberies are always blamed on black people, he says. ‘There's a couple of times I've been arrested and my friends that were also involved were white, and they get treated completely different. Even in the police station.'

Ashley first got properly arrested when he was twelve. But the first time he got pulled over he was eight. To begin with it was mostly stealing cars, driving underage. He learnt to drive watching his big brother, who taught himself from go-karting. Now the police stop him because they know he smokes.

Ashley has a lengthy record, and has been identified by the courts as a persistent young offender. He's been held on remand, but says he's never actually been convicted. ‘I've been in court for burglary, handling weed, assault, robbery, just petty stuff. But they couldn't find me guilty.' Like Macavity, sometimes Ashley wasn't there. ‘Most of them I was there but I didn't do nothing, you get me? I was just part of the group, but they held me responsible for what the other boys did.'

The police aren't there to protect people, trust him. ‘Any time I've got arrested, it's bare abuse. All that police brutality, it's true. When they've got their uniform on they think they're above the law. I takes the piss out of them. “You think you're bulletproof because you've got your uniform on? If you was out of clothes walking in Peckham I'd shoot you, I'd stab you, anything could happen”,' he brags.

Ashley used to carry a Rambo knife – he parts his palms – about that big. He has a replica 9 mm handgun and a starter pistol. ‘I've seen loads of guns. When I was little and people were talking about guns I was like “Yeah, you're on it!” Now it's an everyday thing. I see guns everyday, I see weed every day, I see crack every day.'

His friend Lizzie brings him a cheese and white bread sandwich that she's made in the centre's canteen for lunch. He gets up to eat it at the table. He's thought about how it must be to grow up in a middle-class family in a nice area. But he wouldn't like it. ‘Not now I've grown up seeing almost everything.'

‘I wouldn't like it because of the way they talk, the way they look down at people. Me, I don't look down at people, I don't look up at people. I just see them for who they are. If I think that you could be my friend I will make conversation and when I find out a bit about you I can
choose, will you get me into trouble or are you too posh for me?'

Not now that he's grown up seeing almost everything. Talking to Ashley, the question arises: is he telling the truth? Does that even matter? It's his story, the way he wants to tell it. Some of the things he describes, one would rather he had embellished. But Ashley won't be teased into revelation. When probed, he looks down and his face contorts with a twisty sort of smile. He says, ‘Leave it at that.' When Ashley says he's seen it all, unfortunately, I believe him.

It's a few weeks after our first meeting, and Ashley says that in the interim he's been trying to sort out his education. He needs to get a copy of his birth certificate. He's had a lot of appointments to keep. He's a solicitous creature, opening doors for me first, greeting friends with handshakes and kisses, sitting down at our table last. ‘I got kicked out of my first school in Year 7 [the first year of secondary school] for behaviour and stuff, like fighting, and for other reasons.' He won't be drawn on what those other reasons were. That twisty smile appears.

‘Then I come here to Kids Company and did education, and then they got me a place in a centre. But I lost my placement 'cos I didn't attend too tough, 'cos it was just
shit
. It was a house, and break-times and lunch-times you weren't allowed out and they didn't do hot meals, just sandwiches. And the lessons, they were forty minutes each and they didn't make it interesting, so unless you knew what to do with the work …' The tirade drifts. ‘Like, I had a bit of trouble with the work.'

Kids Company, the centre where we are meeting, and which Ashley visits almost daily, has been caring for the street children of south London since 1995. If the Children's Commissioner is seeking a contemporary Joseph Rowntree or
Elizabeth Fry, he could do worse than look for them here. The charity was set up by Camila Batmanghelidjh, an Iranian-born psychotherapist who previously developed the in-school counselling service The Place2Be. Batmanghelidjh is a charismatic character, fond of turbans and bright scarves, devoted to her kids as they are devoted to her, and remarkable for the immediacy with which she cuts through street swagger to reach the unhappy child. She has been criticised over the years for her unconventional methods, and her refusal to countenance the bureaucratic strictures of state care that can hamper swift intervention. But she knows how to get things done.

Kids Company exists for those children – of whom there are more than adults would imagine, particularly in inner-city areas – who have slipped through the attendant nets like shrimps. Young people refer themselves to the service. The majority have not been parented in any conventional sense, and many are homeless. Ashley started coming here six years ago, after his brother told him about Camila. He says she's like his second mum now.

Batmanghelidjh estimates that as many as 500 children visit each year, the majority of them black, male adolescents, excluded from education and finding their only status or security in gang culture. Open six days a week, the centre offers a mixture of emotional and practical support. The children can get daily meals, clothes and basic necessities, as well as counselling and education, all under one roof.

Following the death of Damilola Taylor, Kids Company was praised by senior government figures as a potential model for dealing with hard-to-reach young people across the country. But despite this, and high-profile supporters like Cherie Booth and Prince Charles, the charity has been threatened with closure a number of times, and only recently received a government grant of half its budget over three years, which
it must match through its own fund-raising initiatives.

Luckily, when it comes to fund-raising Batmanghelidjh has a flair for spectacle – including an art exhibition at the Tate Modern which garnered a heap of publicity for its simulated crack-den, an installation to which Ashley contributed. But the day-to-day running of the centre is far from glitzy. Many of those who attend are extremely volatile, and staff are regularly threatened.

Batmanghelidjh identifies a state of emotional coldness in the children she works with. Their experience of growing up in chaotic or abusive environments has led them to close down. Feeling neither pain nor empathy, they will carry out a violent mugging without compunction. And they are unreachable through traditional methods of sanction because they have nothing to lose.

‘A child who has been terrorised and neglected isn't going to feel threatened by punishment,' she says. ‘Loving care surprises them more and has greater impact on minimising negative behaviour.' But policy makers, she argues, are reluctant to take on the reality of unparented children.

Batmanghelidjh attests to her frustration with the underfunded and over-stretched government agencies she deals with. This was echoed in the finding of the inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbié, which recommended structural reforms of children's services in order to prevent vulnerable children falling through the gaps in the care system. Under the 2004 Children Act, councils and primary care trusts will have to establish children's trusts to co-ordinate local child-welfare services – including health, early-years and careers advice. The consolidation is due to be completed by 2008, but while three quarters of councils continue to report difficulties recruiting children's social workers, standards are unlikely to be raised.

Everyone wants a fairy tale, says Batmanghelidjh. People want to see an out-of-control child transformed by a simple rescue package into a model citizen. ‘It never happens like that. The only power you have over them is the power of love. They want love and for that they will work, and that's the power that people don't understand. They don't know how to manage disturbed children like that because they're so preoccupied with punishing them and taking revenge.'

Ashley left his pupil referral unit two years ago. Camila has tried to get him back into education but is now looking for a private tutorial college place because none of the local authorities have found anywhere that will take him. In the meantime, he's been going to one hour's education a day at Kids Company.

Ashley would like to learn. But the schooling process has left him ambivalent: ‘At the unit, it was more like the kids disciplining the teacher. He was a dickhead. At school, I had one or two good teachers, they would just keep it raw, and instead of sending you home they give you a cooling-off period.'

‘It's hard for teachers,' he grants, ‘because some kids have problems and they ain't got the time to spend with the one student. They've got a class full of students, but the ones that find it hard to work they say they don't want to help because they've got all the other kids.'

Just before Ashley got expelled, at the age of eleven, he had an operation on his ear. ‘I was deaf in my left one, and they got told to speak louder, but none of the teachers did. I was trying to explain you need to talk up, but I got sent out of lessons most of the time 'cos they thought I was taking the piss.'

Of prime concern in the ongoing debate about discipline is
the behaviour of boys. As the world-renowned parenting expert Steve Biddulph observes in his book
Raising Boys
, in the classroom ‘girls ask for help, but boys often just act for help'. Indeed, Biddulph traces this back to the very beginning of boys' schooling, arguing that they should start education a year later than girls, because of their slower cognitive development.

Some researchers have questioned the accuracy of the prognosis that all boys are falling behind, arguing that the majority of middle-class boys continue to do well, while certain groups like working-class boys and those from African Caribbean, Pakistani and Bengali backgrounds have always struggled. It is probably more accurate to say that the progress of boys in all classes has remained stable, while recently girls have surged ahead. Amongst middle-class children, girls have caught up with boys, while in other groups they have surpassed them.

The common problem is that educational achievement is still seen as ‘girly', which prevents working-class boys in particular from progressing. The authors of the Young Masculinities study believe that ‘as educational demands have shifted and increased, boys' ways of expressing masculinities have become less compatible with the gaining of educational qualifications.'