“Tough on the causes of crime” Tackling antisocial behaviour by the young.

A group of the experts and campaigners have joined forces to demand a change in official attitudes to antisocial behaviour of the young, an end to inappropriate custody and the raising of the age of criminal responsibility to 14 in an open letter published today

In a detailed open letter addressed to the leaders and party conferences of the main political parties leading experts in the field of “child crime.”  Professor Barry Goldson School of Sociology and Social Policy The University of Liverpool,Rob Allen Director International Centre for Prison Studies,and King’s College and Carolyn Hamilton Director Children’s Legal Centre, University of Essex have joined forces with “The Just Umbrella.”  To demand radical change.

Stephen jakobi of the just umbrella said.

” The United Kingdom approach to child crime, would appear to be in the eyes of modern western Europe, a form of ritual child abuse.

Damning facts appear in the body of the letter.

·        We lock up 23 children per 100,000 population, compared with 6 in France,  2 in Spain and 0.2 in Finland.

·        The United Kingdom approach is exemplified by extraordinarily low ages of criminal responsibility in its various jurisdictions as opposed to the rest of western Europe: it is only 10 in England and Wales , but in the Italy Germany  and Spain it is 14, in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden15, 16 in Portugal and 18 in Belgium and Luxembourg.

We need politicians of courage and vision to tackle the problem.” END

Full Text of letter follows

Open Letter

“Tough on the causes of crime” Tackling antisocial behaviour by the young.

The new political season opens this month with the party conferences and all the major parties will be deliberating their attitudes to Justice and law enforcement.  It would appear timely for party leaders, their Justice spokespeople and Home Office spokespeople to debate in earnest attitudes to antisocial behaviour and subsequent imprisonment of the young.  This letter   is addressed to them.

Some events over the last month have drawn public attention to the problems connected with  the established political viewpoint within the UK on the disposal of very young offenders. It is essentially an adult criminal code.  Their treatment is as adults without any real regard to the effect on the children concerned or the knock-on consequences for society, should they attain adulthood as sociopaths.

In the Erith incident, an elderly man, playing cricket with his son was bombarded by an assortment of missiles by a group of young children – all boys - and died of a heart attack. On August the 31st five boys aged between 10 and 12 at the time of the incident were convicted of manslaughter after a full adult criminal trial: there were complaints of inappropriate behaviour during the month long trial in the Central Criminal Court, London.  They were remanded on bail to appear on October 19 for sentencing after reports.  The whole court procedure and mode of trial demonstrates an inappropriate British approach to very young offenders.

Last week, the news broke of an adult trial involving a 14-year-old girl who had killed her sister in the course of a physical fight.  The girl who had been seriously injured herself in the course of the fight was clearly overcome by grief and remorse and the jury recognized that the killing was not intentional: nevertheless, she was sentenced to 3 1/2 years detention away from her family.  As her mother put it, “ The girl really belongs with her family so that we can all grieve together, and it amounts to a life sentence on all of us.”

In 2001, whilst the public controversy raged about the wisdom of releasing the two boys responsible for the killing of James Bulger, a letter appeared in the Guardian from Beate Raedergard,a mother whose child was killed by young boys.

“My five-year-old daughter, Silje, was killed by two boys near our home in Trondheim, Norway. It was a year after the killing of James Bulger, and the two incidents were compared in the press. In Norway, where the age of criminality is 15, the boys were treated differently. Silje was stripped, stoned and beaten, and left for dead. I do not understand why and I will never recover, but I don’t hate the boys. I think they understood what they had done, but not the consequences. The boys went back to school, were helped by psychologists and have had to learn how to treat others to fit back into society.”

Also last month, the results of an opinion poll were published that demonstrated that although views were polarised, the majority of the British public were convinced that prison does not work and the punitive attitude on crime and punishment that appears to be adopted by our political spokesman is not necessarily reflected by the population at large.

The Bulger effect (since this would appear to be a response by successive populist Home Secretaries to a particularly distressing homicide by  two small boys in the early  1990s )  is in sharp contrast to the rest of the European Union, particularly western Europe, which treats such offences as social problems requiring social and psychological support of the offender and if necessary, the family, in order that the offender may grow to be a normal responsible adult. The result is that we lock up 23 children per 100,000 population, compared with 6 in France,  2 in Spain and 0.2 in Finland.

The United Kingdom approach is exemplified by extraordinarily low ages of criminal responsibility in its various jurisdictions as opposed to the rest of western Europe: it is only 10 in England and Wales , but in the Italy Germany  and Spain it is 14, in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden15, 16 in Portugal and 18 in Belgium and Luxembourg.

. Quite apart from the other problems we cause to ourselves as a community by our primitive approach to antisocial behaviour by children, the alarming variation is capable of causing serious injustices in the operation of the European extradition warrant and the European supervision order in which juveniles and children may be detained in detention in circumstances where adults would be freed on bail.

The time would appear to be ripe for radical reform of official attitudes to antisocial behaviour by the very young, and a socially responsible attitude, reflected in legislation, to the problems caused by individual misbehaviour.  A start must be made by raising the age of criminal responsibility to at least 14. We would observe that jurisdictions where the age of criminal responsibility has been raised to that age have not suffered any inflation affects in terms of juvenile crime rates.

.

Stephen Jakobi OBE, The Just Umbrella

Professor Barry Goldson School of Sociology and Social Policy
The University of Liverpool

Rob Allen Director International Centre for Prison Studies
King’s College

Carolyn Hamilton Director Children’s Legal Centre, University of Essex

Annette Lawson OBE

And others