The Story of Childhood (37 page)

He slept at his sister's last night. He did manage to take his mum to Margate on the weekend. She enjoyed herself, he says softly. He's been tired this week, so he's slept quite a lot.

Does it bother him, always being half-cut? It's a habit, so it's not easy to stop if you've been doing it for years. If he had the chance to go back in time he wouldn't start smoking because over the years it does show on you. And if police know you smoke it's easier for them to catch you because they know you're going to be out of breath quicker, he adds mordantly.

‘But I'm the same person,' he insists. ‘I don't switch. It's hard to relax when there's so much going on around. I get into stupid stuff and there might be people out for me. Weed just keeps me relaxed so I don't think about it too much. It just motivates me through the day.'

If you're smoking considerately, not taking the piss, it just keeps you mellow. ‘I don't smoke to get a buzz during the day, I only get buzzing at night-time. If I'm doing stuff in the day I might smoke three or four spliffs. Say I'm doing education, I might smoke half a spliff, go in, do my lesson, come out halfway through, smoke another half, do another lesson. If I'm at home in the evening, watching TV or something, I smoke a spliff every two hours.' He estimates that he gets through about twenty pounds' worth of skunk each day.

His brother is still screaming outside: ‘I'm gonna fucking kill you!' Ashley explains that he's got an ASBO. He's got ADHD so he's hyper, and when he gets arrested they're not allowed to lock the police cell door because he's got mental problems. He can't really help it too tough. His brain ain't ticking, so he sees red, and when he's angry it's harder to calm him down. People tell him he acts a lot older than his brother. He feels very responsible for him, tries to keep a close relationship.

He's sweet on his brother. ‘He's just hyper, he's had a hyper life, so he's going to be more up for doing things. If you're on road and someone says let's steal this car, he's up for it. He's first one to say yes and the last to say no. It's because he's got ADHD so he likes being in mad situations.' He wants to be a stunt man when he's older.

Ashley explains the fine distinctions of the street community. ‘There's stupid kids, and there's kids that are trying to make money, and then there's kids that are crackheads and whatever. The stupid kids, they're just watching
TV and they want to be bad on purpose.' They're also mostly white.

He has no time for people who don't make the most of their chances. ‘I know a couple of kids, they walk around the same as me but they're wealthy. They've got all the new Nike, but they're just following fashion. We look like thugs 'cos we ain't got many clothes. They've got a wardrobe, we've got a couple of tracksuits.'

These are the stupid kids. ‘They weren't brought up [on the street] but they want to be like that for some reason.' He thinks it's a respect thing. ‘Me, I've got a lot of respect. No one will trouble me, but I've had to earn it.' Those stupid rich kids think they can have everything because they've got all the stuff, all the clothes. ‘But you've got to start at the bottom. I've earned my respect over the years, got to know people, done things for people. I've been brought up with the same kids, same surroundings, so I know what it's like.'

Ashley understands that strangers look at him and see trouble and, on occasion, he is. But what frustrates him is never being given the benefit of the doubt. ‘We're not always out to cause trouble.' He lays his hands wide. ‘You could just be playing out. But even when we're trying to be good, we're still getting pulled over by police. The majority of the black kids, we've got a police record, but if you go through it you see it's NFA, no further action, but it's still there on your record, so it just builds up and builds up.'

It's a lot to do with colour, he spits. ‘It's just history. I say the world's fucked up.' (Ashley very rarely swears in front of me.) ‘If there was no slavery and everyone was to just get on, there wouldn't be problems now, 'cos there's still people that want to carry on the racism.'

Ashley says he's not a racist boy. ‘When I say colour comes
into it, I don't really see why we should go without and they should have. When you look at it properly, you see it's more white people that got and black people that haven't got, like Africans starving and here you've got us with just enough money to live.'

On the estates, there aren't places for kids to go. ‘There ain't no youth clubs so there ain't much for kids to do but play out. There are crackheads who draw kids in, you see them a couple of days later, thinking what is he on, is he smoking crack now? Bare little mad things.'

This week, in May of 2005, a shopping centre in Kent has banned teenagers from wearing hooded tops on its premises. Ashley thinks that's silly. ‘I know what they're saying 'cos people use hoodies for doing street crime 'cos if you put your hood up you won't get seen on camera. But there's no point banning it 'cos it's not hard to make something to cover your face. It's just clothes.'

So has the incidence of antisocial behaviour amongst the young increased in recent years, or are we simply more aware of it? To an extent, this is symptomatic of the growth in adult surveillance of childhood. The noisy posturing and petty misdemeanours, the self-conscious boundary testing, the moments when good lessons are learnt from bad behaviour; these things no longer occur behind the proverbial bike sheds.

Even very young children are not exempt from centrally sanctioned surveillance. The government-funded RYOGENS (Reducing Youth Offending Generic Solutions) project is being piloted by a number of councils across the country. This ‘early warning' system asks nursery staff to identify children who display bullying behaviour or have a history of criminality in their immediate family in order to target potential offenders.
At the end of 2005, the youngest person entered on the system was just nine months old.

By no means all antisocial behaviour can be explained this way though. Plenty of incidents are far from petty. In the same week as the shopping-centre hoodie ban, a father of four was severely brain-damaged after being attacked when he confronted a gang of youths who threw a stone at his car. A sixteen-year-old schoolgirl was knocked unconscious and suffered temporary paralysis when she was beaten up by fellow pupils. In a craze known as ‘happy slapping', her assailants recorded the attack on a mobile video phone and circulated the footage around her classmates. And three more youths from Peckham were arrested for the murder of Damilola Taylor.

But what is significant is that these crimes – assault, GBH, murder – are now viewed as part of a continuum of juvenile behaviour, so unruliness or incivility is infected with criminal intent. Yet the majority of young people, it bears repeating, do not commit crimes.

Also that same week the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, dedicated his government in its third term of office to fostering ‘a culture of respect'. This has been a recurring theme of Blair's. In his disasterous Women's Institute speech of June 2000, amidst the cat-calls and slow hand-claps, he urged, ‘Respect the old for what it still has to teach, respect for others, honour, self-discipline, duty, obligation, the essential decency of the British character.' Now respect, and children's supposed lack of it, has become locked into social policy, culminating in the launch of the ‘respect action plan' in January 2006, which includes plans for a national parenting academy, new powers to impose parenting orders on those whose children are deemed ‘out of control' and possible fines for young people under the age of sixteen.

The culture of street respect Ashley describes is far removed from New Labour's rhetoric. But it is a highly nuanced and, in its way, coherent system. It may be mired in violence and drug-dealing, it may limit as much as it liberates, but it does have an internal logic of loyalty and apprenticeship.

Ashley cares a lot about manners, those quotidian rituals that smooth minor human exchanges, so often judged wanting in young people. ‘Most of my people got respect for our elders,' he says, before adding, ‘but it depends on how they're showing us respect, because if they don't respect us they don't get respect back.' Fair exchange is no robbery, after all.

He recognises too how much middle-class children covet his kind of respect, and why they will never – fortunately for them – be able to earn it. One could argue that this envy is the inevitable result of Ashley's ‘cool pose'. But it's also possible that children find an authenticity here that they do not find in the selfishness and venality of much of contemporary adult culture. Maybe they find little worth respecting in the popular injunctions to put self-love first, or to dismiss gradual graft in favour of instant celebrity.

Adult society has rightly jettisoned the traditional requirements of deference to others on account of rank or status. Yet it presumes that children should continue to defer to their elders, purely on account of their difference in age. This must be deeply confusing for young people, at a time when adults are still seeking a more equitable formula for conferring respect on one another.

It's a presumption that is based on the idea of children as incomplete adults. This country's record on children's rights provides another stark indication of their lesser status. So is it any wonder that children find it hard to respect their
elders when those elders seem consistently to disrespect them?

The corrosion of adult authority is hugely problematic for teachers and parents who wish to provide children with the structure and example from which they can develop their own criteria for respect. But adults have to accept their own part in the diminution of deference.

Whether coveted by middle-class children or lived by un-children, Ashley's system of street respect does not offer a genuine alternative. The American sociologist Richard Sennett might well have been describing one of Ashley's associates when he wrote about a young man called Robert in his book
Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality
. Robert, a drug dealer from a black ghetto in Philadelphia, who was imprisoned as a teenager, struggled in forfeiting the respect of his gang in order to go straight and build a business selling fruit and hotdogs.

Sennett describes how Robert had to recast the ghetto rituals of toughness and manhood in order to survive and keep out of trouble. ‘He uses street smarts – from turns of phrase to threatening physical gestures – in order to make a turf for himself which is “clean”; eventually he earns a respected place in the community for this toughness, now put to decent uses.'

Robert was no longer dependent on others for his self-respect, but learned to manipulate ‘the mutual exchanges which generate black brotherhood' in order to become a puppeteer of the code of the street, rather than a puppet.

Here Sennett observes a tension, between self-respect and mutual respect: ‘Ritual exchanges build mutual respect … so deep is this power of expressive exchange that it can be turned to the most contrary ends: inequality can feel good …' He concludes: ‘The art of expressing respect … does not imply
justice, truth or goodness. And as Robert's experience on the streets of Philadelphia makes clear, expressing mutual respect can do an individual harm.'

Sennett's remarkable book is devoted to exploring the ways in which respect can forge bonds across inequality. He believes that there is disparity inherent in the ways that contemporary society confers respect, critiquing in particular what I described as the ‘excuse of exceptionalism' in Allana's chapter. This is the idea that, through talent and determination alone, children can transcend their circumstances, so avoiding any wider interrogation of social exclusion.

‘The structural problem is that modern institutions are bad at dealing with individuals who are ordinary – at according them respect even though they are nothing special,' Sennett wrote in an article assessing the government's ‘respect' pronouncements in May 2005. ‘Schools and workplaces are obsessed with discovering exceptional talent … The social issue concerns what happens to those left behind. The meritocrats are held up as an example to the losers. The very word “losers” denies the masses their dignity.'

Ashley says that it's impossible to legislate for respect. ‘They can't make everyone in London respect each other.' He has little time for politicians. ‘It's them that made us like this, 'cos they're in control of us, they're up that high, we're down there. And they still don't give us enough to live on.'

Here he touches on another of the factors identified by Richard Sennett as diminishing respect – that society struggles to accept the just claims of adult dependency on the welfare state, while refusing to allow people to participate actively in the conditions of their own care, thus confusing caring with controlling. He suggests that the belief that any
kind of dependence demeans arises from a concept of adulthood in which dependency is viewed as an incomplete state, only acceptable in children.