The Story of Childhood (36 page)

He doesn't spend time at friends' houses, though he might drop in to pick up some clothes, because he hasn't got a lot and they're everywhere. But he's the kind of person that doesn't like to be in one place. There's only certain houses he can stay where he feels safe, like his mum's. ‘When I'm there I've got my manners. I'm not saying when I go out I ain't got manners, but when I'm on road I've got different manners. If people look at you the wrong way you've got a different attitude.'

Ashley says that nobody's safe. If he's in his area then he's all right. Nobody troubles him, because everybody knows him. But if he goes into other areas there might be trouble,
like fighting, or someone might try to rob you because you're not from there. He's never been knocked out. One time, he got chased by a gang of twenty white kids, with sticks. ‘All I'm hearing is, “Come here you black bastard, we're gonna fucking cut your balls off, you this and that”; pure racism.' He just ran.

He stopped carrying his knife because he kept on getting arrested, and if you've got a knife it's worse. He thinks there's a big gun problem in Britain. It's not mostly street gangs, it's people in their twenties. Street gangs are made up of people his age, up to eighteen or nineteen. They're 80 per cent black kids, and the rest are the roughest white kids, the ones that won't have it from nobody. Gangs are just about where you grow up. When those teenagers get older, it depends what happens next. ‘They either move on or they move up in the game. They get bigger, the money starts rolling for what they're doing, shotting [drug dealing], or whatever.'

There remains a lack of authoritative research to indicate whether youth crime is rising or falling. While it is true that adolescents do commit a disproportionate number of crimes compared with adults, the trend is for them to grow out of it as they get older. And it is still the case that most young people do not get involved with the criminal justice system, while the majority of those that do commit non-violent offences.

But a glance through the newspapers any given morning would suggest otherwise. Children, in particular adolescent males, have faced growing demonisation since the beginning of the 1990s. Young people's appearances in the media are now almost entirely related to criminality – be it deliberate commission, or ‘status offences', like underage sex or alcohol
and drug use. A select few remain ‘angels', but they must be chronically ill, heinously abused or – ideally – dead to warrant that epithet.

Bob Franklin, an expert in media coverage of childhood, believes that the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables for the murder of James Bulger in 1993 marked a crucial watershed. He argues that three responses were triggered by the vindictive media frenzy that followed their conviction: ‘First, the earlier romanticised social construct of children as innocent “angels” was challenged, toppled and reconstructed in more sinister guise.' Thompson and Venables were described as ‘fiends', ‘devils' and ‘little bastards', language that was soon extended to other, lesser, child offenders.

‘Second, the reporting of the Bulger case provided additional impetus to the existing media-generated moral panic about children and crime,' says Franklin. ‘Finally, the Bulger case seemed to legitimise the increasingly authoritarian criminal justice policies of successive governments.'

He traces the shift in public perception and policy reaction to the present day: ‘At the beginning of the 1990s, in the wake of widely publicised inquiries into the deaths of a number of young children at the hands of their parents, as well as events at Cleveland, children were victims and society was shaping policies designed to protect them. [Now], society is designing policies to protect the community from unruly, criminal and antisocial children.'

There is much to be said for the presentation of children as individuals of average virtue, rather than wholly blameless victims. But the media pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, caricaturing ‘teens from hell' and ‘imps of Satan'.

In 2004, Shape, a forum on youth crime organised by young people, conducted a detailed analysis of the print media
over a three-month period. It found that most vitriol was directed at white, working-class boys. In crime reports, young people were described as ‘thugs', ‘yobs' or ‘louts' far more frequently than as ‘young offenders'. The voice of the child who had committed the offence was seldom included, unless to emphasise their lack of remorse.

The Shape report found that, in the majority of coverage, no space was given to mitigating factors which might have made children more vulnerable to offending. This is despite the fact that, according to recent figures, 40 per cent of young people entering care with no previous cautions or criminal convictions had one within six months of living in a children's home, while 54 per cent of those referred to youth offending teams have experienced the death of a close friend or family member in the past two years, and the majority of young male offenders have been excluded from school.

Across the tabloid press, Shape identified as a central theme the demand that the criminal justice system be tougher on children in trouble. Particular derision was reserved for the use of ‘soft' community sentences, and the ‘pampered' conditions inside young offenders' institutions.

Orchestration by the media of public unease is hardly a new phenomenon. Nor does describing something a ‘moral panic' imply that public anxieties are entirely spurious. But policy responses based on a few exceptional and highly reported cases can only lead to injustice when they are applied to the mass.

Following the Bulger trial, the Conservative Prime Minister John Major launched his ‘Back to Basics' crusade, insisting that society should ‘condemn a little more and understand a little less'. The welfare-based approach to youth crime, with its emphasis on diversion, decriminalisation and decarceration, was effectively abandoned. Michael Howard,
then newly appointed as Home Secretary, introduced privately run secure training centres for 12–14-year-olds, based on US military-style ‘boot camps', and increased the maximum sentence of detention for 15–17-year-olds. Between 1993 and 1998, the number of imprisoned teenagers doubled.

After Labour's landslide victory in 1997, Howard's successor, Jack Straw, was quick to condemn the ‘excuse culture' of youth justice. The subsequent 1998 Crime and Disorder Act overhauled the system, most significantly abolishing the ancient presumption of
doli incapax
, which held that the prosecution must prove that a child under fourteen was aware that their actions were seriously wrong, rather than simply naughty.

The abolition of
doli incapax
was in direct contravention of a UN recommendation that the UK give serious consideration to raising the age of criminal responsibility and bringing the country into line with the rest of Europe. Britain's unusually low age of criminal responsibility means that children from the age of ten are now treated as having the same criminal intent and maturity as an adult. It would seem that the only time we're prepared to treat children equally to adults is when we're punishing the most vulnerable amongst them.

Another crucial element of the 1998 act was the introduction of new powers, including child-safety orders, local child-curfews and an early version of the antisocial behaviour order, that did not require the prosecution or even the commission of a criminal offence. As criminologist John Muncie notes in an essay on children's rights and youth justice, this programme of early intervention – which has become increasingly authoritarian in recent years – is couched in the language of crime prevention and child
protection, and so ‘erosion of civil liberty is presented as an enabling, new opportunity'.

But it is a programme above all driven by coercive powers, he writes. ‘Civil orders are backed up by stringent criminal sanctions. Similarly, by equating “disorder” with crime it significantly broadens the reach of criminal justice to take in those below the age of criminal responsibility and the non-criminal as well as the known offender. Above all the number of young offenders incarcerated has continued to grow.'

Under New Labour, policy has continued to emphasise the containment and control of young people. The UK incarcerates more of its children than any other country in Europe. Between 2000 and 2005, twenty-seven children killed themselves in custody, some of whom were being kept in adult prisons, while young offenders institutions are rife with bullying and self-harm.

There is ample evidence that this policy does not work. Eighty-four per cent of juveniles released from prison in 1997 were reconvicted within two years. But the addiction to custody shows no sign of abating.

Youth justice policy has historically been manipulated for short-term political expediency and electoral gain. But it is the antisocial behaviour order that has proved the nadir of this tendency.

In June 2005, the report by the Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gils-Robles – condemning the British government's record on children's rights – was particularly damning of the government's ‘ASBO-mania', stating that ‘it is difficult to avoid the impression that the ASBO is being touted as a miracle cure for urban nuisance'. At the time, almost half of all antisocial behaviour orders were being served on juveniles.

Gils-Robles was especially concerned about the broad
definition of anti-social behaviour (anything likely to cause ‘harm, alarm or distress'), the ease with which ASBOs were obtained, and the ‘naming and shaming' of children. This civil order, which relies on a lower standard of proof and can be granted on hearsay evidence, reverses for the first time in almost a century the presumption of anonymity for children appearing in court. A juvenile convicted of murder cannot be identified, while one exhorted not to swear in the street may find his local council posting cards bearing his image and details of his ASBO conditions through his neighbours' letter-boxes.

As Shami Chakrabhati, director of the human rights group Liberty, has observed, whether ASBOs lead to vigilantism or become a perverse badge of honour, ‘it's a situation not a world away from the mob justice of the medieval stocks'.

At the time of writing, no central records exist for the kinds of behaviour that are considered to merit ASBOs, nor for breach rates, though from the evidence provided by ‘naming and shaming', it would appear that the majority of children given ASBOs are from poor backgrounds.

Early assessments suggest that the breach rate is higher for juveniles, and concerns have been raised that the orders will serve as a fast-track to prison for young people. Others believe them to be a counter-productive addition to the framework that already exists for dealing with criminal children.

Marian Fitzgerald, professor of criminology at the University of Kent, conducted one of the first analyses of ASBO use for young people in the summer of 2005. She expresses deep concern at the ‘net-widening' effect of the orders, and found that pressure on police to meet targets and the practice of bolting-on ASBOs to other sanctions was resulting in serious up-tarriffing, whereby even first-time offenders were ending up in custody.

That is not to suggest that persistent young offenders should go unpunished. But those sanctions already exist. The pernickety conditions peculiar to ASBOs – not to wear a hat, not to use a certain swear-word in public, not to meet a particular friend – are surely setting young people up to fail.

As Terri Dowty, director of Action on Rights for Children, says, ‘The problem with ASBOs is that they are too weak an intervention for lost boys, and they are too harsh for those who hang around the edge of danger. They do not discriminate between a young person in need of massive containment, and one in need of an adventure playground and a good youth service. They trivialise serious delinquency, and criminalise aimless boredom.'

Critics of ASBOs have been dismissed as ‘Hampstead liberals', blind to the way that gangs of hardened youngsters can place neighbourhoods under siege. Of course, there are grim pockets of ever-diminishing public housing where local authorities have no choice but to concentrate antisocial families. Of course, life there can be intolerable, and will not be improved by building a youth club. But the Children Act of 2001 already provides a range of responses, including ones for children whose behaviour is out of control but not criminal in nature, and does so within a far more progressive framework.

Combined with curfew powers that allow police to chase young people off the streets after 9 p.m. whether or not they are known troublemakers, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that children are now criminalised purely by virtue of their age. Their right to inhabit the same public spaces as adults has been utterly violated.

Surveying some of the more absurd uses of the order, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that ASBOs are also being used to punish what adults find annoying rather than
threatening. In one case, a fifteen-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome, which can manifest in obsessional and repetitive behaviour, was given an ASBO with the condition that he was not to stare over his neighbours' fence into their garden. In another, a child with Tourette's syndrome was ordered not to swear in public.

The incivility of some young people is appalling, but it is not illegal. If they are acting it out on the streets, it is usually because they have nowhere else to go, so the legislation favours children who can afford expensive leisure activities or have parents willing to chauffeur them to friends' houses. All that rackety posturing is more often evidence of extreme insecurity – the hooded top a desperate attempt to cover acne – than it is a precursor to robbing pensioners.

The following week, Ashley arrives with his seventeen-year-old brother, who's been banned from the building for threatening behaviour. When the security man keeps him out, he kicks off again, screaming obscenities and trying to ram the door. He's high and enraged. Ashley's bothered but too stoned – and too used to it – to engage. His skin is pale, with a waxy sheen to it.