CHILD JUSTICE

Tagging sends out the wrong signals

That a child as young as nine was recently arrested for his alleged involvement in housebreaking is rightly described as shocking. We should not excuse his behaviour, but we do need to keep it in perspective: only a very small minority of our young people commit crime or antisocial acts, and often because they have nothing else to do in their community or they may have problems at home or in school. Most children who do offend grow out of it and need minimal intervention. Their needs are the same as those children who come to the attention of the Children’s Reporter for reasons of care and protection; needs that are best addressed through the holistic approach of the Children’s Hearing System. But the system can only be effective in preventing this if it backed up by a broad range of services to provide necessary levels of support, protection, guidance, treatment and control.

In a climate in which crime rates are falling, convictions for young people up to the age of 21 are dropping and offence referrals to hearings remain stable, we are becoming less tolerant about the behaviour of young people. A young person who shows any disregard for orderly behaviour or any disrespect for their elders is likely to be labelled a yob. The problem is that the public’s perception is that crime is rising and particular communities are blighted by the problems of antisocial behaviour. Communities Minister Margaret Curran hailed the recent passing of the Antisocial Behaviour Bill as a defining moment for parliament and said that it gets the law right on such behaviour by plugging existing gaps and giving valuable new tools to those who are engaged in the fight to put our communities first. The Executive is trying to tackle a lot in this Bill, which does not just pertain to young people, but includes sections on housing, licensed premises, noise nuisance, the environment, parenting and the sale of spray paint. The package of measures proposed could criminalise and exclude the most vulnerable in our society. A nine-year-old found responsible for housebreaking, for example, could find his behaviour and movements curbed by an electronic tag, as the Bill proposes extending the use of electronic monitoring to under-16s.

Tagging works by way of a transmitter and a home monitoring receiver unit installed in an offender’s home. The transmitter is a tag, the size and shape of a large digital watch, fitted to their ankle. If tampered with, it sends an instant signal to a central computer system which alerts investigation. Scotland is unique in Europe in having legislation which allows the restriction of an offender’s movement both to a particular place and from a particular place. Some may argue that this would a preferable option to sending young people to secure accommodation. However, virtually imprisoning a child in their house will not address their problems and may actually make them worse if their problems stem from their home. Is it a cheap alternative to solving antisocial behaviour by putting the onus on the family to deal with the child and taking responsibility away from the authorities? The tag may quickly become a status symbol or badge of honour without tackling the problems for which it was provided in the first place.

If electronic monitoring is to be used for under-16s, it has to be accompanied by an intensive package of support to address their offending behaviour and wider needs. However, if there are no additional resources available to local authorities to enable them to put these packages in place, they may not be able to implement panel decisions to that effect. Services to address the needs of offenders are patchy across Scotland. The current shortage of social workers and the difficulties faced by local authorities in terms of recruitment and retention of key staff, leaves the system struggling. Research on a sample of 189 case files of children on home supervision found that a high number of cases did not have a care plan and that a high proportion had not been allocated to a social worker, with just over a fifth of cases remaining unallocated for several months.

As a society, we are becoming hardened and more punitive in our attitudes towards children and young people who are emotionally immature. The level of offending by young people in Scotland is no worse than in other jurisdictions because we deal with them through the hearing system with its welfare ethos. But we do expect them to have turned their behaviour and lives around by the age of 16 or take their chances in the adult criminal justice system.

Scotland has one of the youngest ages of criminal responsibility in Europe and compares unfavourably with countries such as the Netherlands where the age is 12 and Germany where it is 14. Since very few children in Scotland under the age of 13 are prosecuted, it would make little practical difference to raise the age of criminal responsibility here. It would still be possible for children under that age to be referred to the Children’s Hearing on other grounds, when they become involved in offending. We need to remember that the child or young person who is persistently offending today may become tomorrow’s neglecting parent, so we must invest our resources in early intervention to steer them towards a more positive future.

Bernadette Monaghan
27 August 2004

http://news.scotsman.com/columnists.cfm?id=1005192004

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