Guilty of being young

Our children deserve better than to be written off as a group decent people need to be protected from.

Childhood memories of people in their 60s remind us how attitudes have changed. Fields and streets were playgrounds, especially on summer evenings. Children of four or five walked freely around cities, ran errands, did the shopping and helped working adults. They didn't need to be “taught self-esteem” because they were just seen as ordinary members of society. Today, if we see a five-year-old out alone, we tend to think: “What's wrong? Has the child run off? How can the parents allow this?” Public spaces are turning from places for people to meet as a community, into routes from A to B. “Don't hang about, move on,” children are told.

Ironically, the government says it is aiming to reduce social exclusion at the very time it is increasing ways to exclude young people. Social exclusion defines modern childhood. Children's unpaid work at school or home is not even recognised or valued as “work”. It is illegal for most children under 13 to do paid work, so the thousands of children who do so are, in a sense, outlaws, and have none of the legal protections that older workers have. Children cannot vote, or be politically engaged, or have much say in decisions that affect them.

Their limited access to their neighbourhoods reduces their social interaction. Courts increasingly assume that children must always be under adult control. They prosecute parents for leaving their children alone at home, although in Finland, Norway and many other countries, parents assume that eight-year-olds can be trusted to look after themselves all day, and do not need costly childcare.

The government also excludes children by treating so many as if they are criminals. A quarter of the government's children's fund goes on crime prevention; school truancy has become a seriously punished crime; exuberant behaviour becomes subject to an antisocial behaviour order (asbo); curfews, meaning house arrest, can be set for under-16s if someone has been, or fears being, “intimidated, harassed, alarmed or distressed” by two or more of them. These words describe subjective feelings and are claims that need no proof to be considered valid.

The system sucks in young people and sets them up to fail, especially children without back gardens or parents to chauffeur them to pricey leisure centres and meetings with friends. An asbo can draw a child into criminal proceedings. Young people who are arrested twice can be referred to a youth offender programme, even without legal representation or a court hearing. Anyone aged 10 or older who then breaks these rules can be prosecuted and may be fined. Britain now locks up more children aged 10 plus than anywhere else in Europe.

In 1998, English law not only abolished protections in court for children aged 10 to 13, but also the ancient doli incapax safeguard, under which the prosecution had to prove that children under 10 understood that they had done wrong. The UK already had the lowest doli incapax ages in Europe. This term is often mistranslated as "incapable of knowing right from wrong", ignoring the fact that very young children are deeply concerned about people being kind and fair. Doli incapax really means “incapable of evil” — ie the malicious relish in causing extreme harm to others. Graffiti and litter are hardly tokens of evil.

The problem here arises when adults can't see a difference between behaviour that is right or wrong, on the one hand, or irritating and inconvenient to them. In a democracy, alleged crimes are decoupled from punishment through a variety of safeguards — the presumption of innocence, legal representation, fair trial, due and transparent process of law. Young people are excluded from these basic rights. In protecting children from inquisitorial barristers, the courts fail to protect every child from injustice.

Yet in 1991, the government accepted children's rights to these democratic freedoms, and to such others as freedom of association and peaceful assembly and the right not to be imprisoned with adults, when it ratified the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. The UN has since criticised the UK for flouting these rights. For example, children's protection against being named in court proceedings and reports has been eroded by a new law that presumes an asbo can involve being “named and shamed”.

Young people may not be any better than adults, and a few are dangerous criminals, but they are all entitled to expect equal respect and protection in law. Growing sums spent on the police, punishments and prisons leech away funds from real crime prevention, such as places where young people can freely share in creative, challenging activities. Matters have become steadily worse. It seems that ministers genuinely believe that to be under 18 involves criminal behaviour or tendencies, which are best managed by zero tolerance of young people themselves.

Priscilla Alderson
22 June 2004

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,11026,1244423,00.html

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