THEY SMOKE, DRINK AND BEHAVE BADLY. WILL WE NEVER LEARN?

It Is No Wonder Our Children Are Drawn to Cannabis and Petty Crime
When We So Demonise Them

There may be one aspect of what it means to be English about which we
can all agree. We love our pets, but don't much like our children. We
say we love them, but prefer to have as little to do with them as
possible. If we are wealthy we send them off to boarding school as
soon as they are capable of answering back, and if we are not wealthy
we separate ourselves from them by working the longest hours in
Western Europe or by endlessly watching television. We don't talk to,
eat with or spend time with them to the degree that our European
neighbours do.

The conclusion from the Unicef report that prompted such public
hand-wringing when published in the spring, and from other comparative
data, is clear. Despite our relative wealth, our young people come out
worst among a score of European countries on five out of six
dimensions of well-being. The exception, health and safety, where we
stand roughly midway down the list, represents no great achievement.
It is substantially the consequence of our not allowing our children
to go out of the house, or to do anything away from home unaccompanied
by an adult until they are teenagers, at which point many of them
unsurprisingly go wild, precociously engaging in smoking,
binge-drinking, use of illicit drugs and unprotected sex. Whereupon we
demonise them in the media, harass them with punitive legislation, and
lock up more of them than anywhere else in Western Europe.

This picture is a caricature, but only just. The trend is clear. We
are criminalising more and more children and young people - an
increase of 26 per cent between 2002 and 2006 - in a period when all
the evidence suggests that the incidence of youth offending fell. This
is primarily what prompted me to resign as chair of the Youth Justice
Board in February. I could not get a single Home Office minister to do
anything to reverse a trend that will not reduce the likelihood of
citizens being victimised and results in a grotesque waste of scarce
public resources. Moreover, after the dreadful death of Rhys Jones in
Liverpool, and the deaths of other juveniles apparently at the hands
of their peers this year, there is a real risk that this public abuse
of our children will get worse.

I am not saying that there aren't some young people whose crimes are
so grave they must be taken out of circulation. Of course there are.
Gun- and knife-related gang violence is so serious in some
neighbourhoods that the solutions must include the incarceration of a
few individuals. But there are not twice as many such children and
young people as there were 15 years ago, which is the scale of the
increased numbers in penal custody. Nor am I saying that children and
young people must not be made to answer for their anti-social and
criminal behaviour. They must. But that is not best achieved by
criminalising them for minor offences, or by adults distancing
themselves from them through fear, dislike or lack of appreciation, or
by dismissing kids as young as 11 or 12 as "yobs". During my time in
Whitehall, I am ashamed to say, that terminology appeared in a Home
Office ministerial press release when government policy was ostensibly
the promotion of respect.

What to do? I doubt it will cut much ice in contemporary British
politics to go on about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
or argue in favour of raising the age of criminal responsibility from
10 to, say, 14, the average threshold in the rest of Western Europe. I
am sure there are commentators who would like to reduce our age of
criminal responsibility. What might better succeed, therefore, would
be a concerted campaign to reduce the degree to which we resort to the
criminalisation of children. And that might be achieved
administratively, without resort to legislation.

The biggest driver of child and youth criminalisation is the Home
Office "offences brought to justice" (OBTJ) target from the last
general election. It is the Government's proud boast that we're well
ahead of target, 1.25 million OBTJs by next spring. But how is the
figure being achieved? Not by prosecuting and convicting many more
serious offenders, whose detection requires serious investment of
police resources. On the contrary. The overall number of convictions
in court has remained more or less constant. The big increase has
almost entirely been achieved by handing out on-the-spot fines and
issuing cautions for relatively minor offences. Children and young
people, the low-hanging fruit that it's easy for the police to pick,
account for a good deal of the increase, and this includes their
simple possession of cannabis. Bizarrely, the police have the
discretion to ignore an 18-year-old smoking a joint but must arrest a
17-year-old or younger. If we're going to retain an OBTJ target, it
must be based on an assessment of seriousness. Sir Ronnie Flanagan's
review has something to say about this: the police should generally
not be drawn in to deal with school playground-type offences.

Second, serious consideration should be given to Dame Elizabeth
Butler-Sloss's proposals for filtering out cases involving children
whose welfare needs (mental health, family neglect and so on) are
readily apparent. The Youth Court either needs the power to adjourn
proceedings and refer the matter to social services, or we need a
local filtering arrangement to ensure that cases that should never go
down the criminal justice route are diverted.

Third, we must restore a semblance of discretion to the police so that
minor matters involving young children are dealt with more speedily,
cheaply and effectively in situ and don't clutter up our court lists
and youth offending team caseloads. If neighbourhood policing is to
mean anything, it must involve that. We need to do this because, as
Lesley McAra and Susan McVeigh's largest cohort study of young people
ever undertaken in the UK shows, criminalising children, all other
things being equal, increases rather than reduces the likelihood of
their further offending.