UK DEBATE

For and against: Child curfews

Norman Brennan, director of the Victims of Crime Trust,
argues that curfews are necessary to curb 'feral' children.

“As a serving police officer in borough of Richmond, where this teenager is challenging the police, I have seen three or four different cases of anti-social behaviour in the last month. It is children as young as nine or ten drunk out of their heads. Lots of these are on drugs. They are 10 or 15 years old, standing outside McDonald's or pubs, obstructing the footpath so people feel intimidated and won't walk past them. If they do walk through they are likely to get bad language or, if they are female, to have part of their anatomy squeezed.
“Elderly people won't go into the town centre of Richmond or Twickenham to use the many restaurants and bars because of it. If you stand in the High Street after midnight you will see people fighting in the road. Their behaviour is out of control. You have to ask, where are all the parents in these cases?
“One of my colleagues said recently that we are living in a society where there is a huge number of feral children, and I entirely concur. And who is going to do something about all this, when youngsters use the Human Rights Act to challenge the police who are trying to do something about their behaviour?

“If this lad wins people will just conclude: who, if anyone, is trying to make the streets safer? The public loses heart, and if they don't see police on the streets then they don't bother to report crime, and then these young people don't get brought before the courts and punished, and that is anarchy, in my book.
“Child curfews are just one of the many dozens of promises that this Government has made and not kept. Their ideas are not properly thought through. You would think that they would have run this past their senior lawyers before they implemented it, so we don't have situations where the law is being challenged in court.
“Anti-social behaviour in many cities and towns in this country is out of control. Police have lost control on some streets of Britain. Then teenagers and criminals think they are untouchable, and the sad reality is that on some streets in fact, they are.”

Shami Chakrabarti, a director of Liberty, says that arresting
innocent teenagers will not promote respect for the law

“This is the first test case of the law, and the timing of it is important. It follows the Queen's Speech, where the Prime Minister is talking about bringing in yet more 'anti-yob' powers. And the summer holidays are coming up, when there are likely to be lots of curfew zones in place.
“At 9pm on an August evening it is almost broad daylight. The idea that a 15-year-old should be arrested for walking down the street is quite unfair.
“This teenager and kids all over the country have been and will be under curfew and therefore will be liable to arrest and forced escort home without doing anything wrong.
“In effect, it will be a crime to be 15. It is ludicrous. These powers are just over-broad, and make no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, which isn't the way to introduce a generation of young people to a culture of respect.
“Unjust laws are a great way to alienate a generation of young people.

“If we win, we think it would be helpful if the judges narrowed down the circumstances in which a person can be stopped, and write into the legislation that there must be some kind of evidence of bad behaviour or a child safety issue before they are taken into custody.
“The problem rests with the Government approach to anti-social behaviour, which it is trying to deal with by putting more draconian powers on the statute books. The bottom line is that the whole approach seems to be about passing more and more legislation.
“Mr Blair said last week that he can legislate but he can't raise our children for us. The police already have ample powers to tackle bad behaviour, yet more are passed every year. This is getting out of control.
“It doesn't tackle the reasons why people misbehave. It doesn't put more police on the street - in fact it just turns them into babysitters.

“There are some parents who think that 15-year-olds shouldn't be out after 9pm: I'd say, get real.”

27 May 2005

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1628874,00.html

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