Britain Etc.

the situation felt otherworldly: a curious, dramatic postscript on the story I was writing — how we have become frightened of our children.

This extract from a post on my BBC blog in 2008 prompted some, shall we say, less than sympathetic responses. The attack happened at the scene of a fatal teenage stabbing in north London, where I had gone to illustrate a television report about young people. Time magazine had just printed a front cover which read: ‘Unhappy, Unloved and Out of Control — an epidemic of violence, crime and drunkenness has made Britain scared of its young’.

As the flashing fury in my assailant’s face exploded in spittle-laden expletives, I understood the fear. I had inadvertently trespassed into a gang’s private mourning. One of the ‘crew’ had died from a blade less than twenty-four hours before. Tearful young women comforted each other beside fresh flowers laid at the spot. Brooding men sat on a wall, shock and bewilderment in their eyes. I should have realised before stumbling in. I was alien. From another world. And like the immune system fighting infection, they rose up to defend themselves.

The article attempted to unpick the often dysfunctional relationship between youth and adult society in the UK, a tension illustrated by some of the comments posted beneath it. ‘Your blog reveals you as a far too tolerant person,’ one contributor wrote. ‘What they and nearly all adolescent males need is a healthy dose of fear of retribution.’ Another concurred: ‘I was a bad kid, I was naughty, but when I got caught I got the crap beated out of me and I never did it again, oh no. Kids just have no respect because parents these days are pathetic, I mean utterly and woefully pathetic.’ One post, bemoaning the ‘bloody liberals’ who only want to ‘mollycoddle’ young people, demanded a return to caning and spanking, arguing ‘that’s what it’ll take to check today’s feral youth.’

Then, a little further down the list of comments, a response from a younger reader. ‘I’m a teenager (don’t be scared). I am sitting in my room, quietly, revising for tomorrow’s Biology AS exam,’ he wrote. ‘By all means talk about the minority of bad adolescents, but remember the majority who are kind and polite. You may say you never see them, but it’s because they are in their bedrooms, revising for the Biology exam tomorrow.’

Over the past twenty years, Britain’s generation gap has been widened and deepened by the seismic forces released when prejudice meets panic. Outsiders find our relationship with young people oddly cruel, as I discovered when I went to see how one of our European neighbours responds to delinquency and youth crime.

Standing next to a teenager who is holding a large kitchen knife, and knowing that she had previously stabbed her sister, is as good a place as any to consider Britain’s relationship with children who commit crime. I am in Finland, a country travelling down a very different philosophical road from Britain. While the UK locks up around 3,000 juvenile offenders, Finland’s criminal justice system incarcerates just three. And the girl with the kitchen knife is not one of them.

My research had led me to a ‘reform school’ just outside Helsinki where troubled young people are helped through to adulthood. The girl with the knife was cutting onions in a cookery class. ‘We do not think the proper way to take care of a child is by punishing the child,’ the school director Kurt Kylloinen told me. ‘You must believe in childhood and not let the child’s misbehaviour deceive you. You must believe in the child and that’s what we try to do in Finland, whatever the child does.’

Young people cannot be prosecuted until they are at least fifteen in Finland, although in practice very few youngsters under the age of twenty-one are dealt with by the justice system. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the age of criminal responsibility is ten, among the lowest in the world. Scotland recently raised its minimum age from eight to twelve. When I explained that 10-year-olds are dealt with under the penal code in Britain, the reform school’s psychologist Merja Ikalainen looked aghast.

MI: I don’t have words for that. It sounds so horrible.

ME: You think it’s immoral?

MI: It is.

ME: Why, if a young person knowingly commits a crime?

MI: That’s not a young person. That’s a child. They need care.

ME: But shouldn’t a child have to suffer the consequences of their actions?

MI: Suffer! You use words that sound really horrible. A child shouldn’t be suffering. The word ‘suffer’ sounds really sad.

Over 60 per cent of the roughly 3,000 young people locked up at any one time in the UK are known to have mental health problems. In Finland such youngsters are more likely to be patients in well-funded psychiatric units. Children who break the law are seen primarily as welfare cases. When I went to Helsinki’s main mall, I could not find a single shopper who thought the state was ‘too soft’ on juvenile offenders. One man, unshaven and heavily tattooed, gave me this response to the idea that badly behaved teenagers need punishment: ‘That would be useless,’ he said, shrugging.

It is not just the Finns with their tradition of pedagogy (from the ancient Greek paidagogeo, ‘to lead the child’) who find British attitudes to young people irrational and disturbing. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has expressed its concern at ‘the general climate of intolerance and negative public attitudes towards children, especially adolescents, which appears to exist in the UK, including in the media, and may be often the underlying cause of further infringements of their rights’.

The international criticism came after a period in which alarm at the depiction of teenagers had led some influential British voices to speak out. Senior police chiefs in England and Wales warned that the demonisation of young people had become a national problem. One chief constable said his force received hundreds of thousands of complaints about young people every year, most of whom were doing nothing more than ‘simply existing or walking down the street’. The man in charge of Scotland Yard’s youth crime division, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, told the press that activity that would have been called youthful exuberance twenty years earlier was increasingly being described as antisocial behaviour. A generational divide was opening up, driven by fear.

In the spring of 2005, the giant Bluewater shopping centre in Kent announced it would evict young people wearing hooded tops and baseball caps because ‘some of our guests don’t feel at all comfortable’. A few months later, an inventor from Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales unveiled his ‘mosquito’, a sonic weapon which could be used by shops to repel ‘rowdy teenage ne’er-do-wells’ without being heard by ‘law-abiding forty-somethings and septuagenarian war heroes’. Howard Stapleton came up with the device after his daughter had apparently been harassed by youths at the local shopping parade. He tested it in a grocery store in Barry; the screeching noise, unbearable to adolescent ears, could not be heard by mature adults. Sales of the mosquito flourished.

Newspapers were stuffed with stories illustrating the apparent threat from ‘hooded gangs of teenage yobs’. The Daily Express advised its readers that ‘gun-toting 8-year-olds are roaming the streets of Britain’ and that ‘Britain faces raising a generation of “urban child soldiers”.’ Research found that in other European countries most citizens said they would intervene if they saw youngsters vandalising a bus shelter. In Britain barely a third agreed.

Britain was exhibiting all the symptoms of paedophobia, the irrational fear of children, routinely describing young people as feral animals or vermin. When the Conservative leader David Cameron suggested the problem might be more complicated, he was ridiculed. ‘Cameron faces backlash for hoodie love-in,’ screamed one tabloid. ‘Extraordinary defence of hoodie-wearing yob teenagers,’ said another. It is worth reminding ourselves what the Tory leader actually said.

Imagine a housing estate with a little park next to it. The estate has ‘no ballgames’ and ‘no skateboarding’ notices all over it. The park is just an empty space. And then imagine you are fourteen years old, and you live in a flat four storeys up. It’s the summer holidays and you don’t have any pocket money. That’s your life. What will you get up to today? Take in a concert, perhaps? Go to a football game? Go to the seaside? No — you’re talking ?30 or ?50 to do any of that. You can’t kick a ball around on your own doorstep. So what do you do? You hang around in the streets, and you are bored, bored, bored. And you look around you. Who isn’t bored? Who isn’t hanging around because they don’t have any money? Who has the cars, the clothes, the power?

It was a thoughtful and sympathetic view of the teenager, suggesting that the ‘hoodie’ was not the aggressive uniform of a rebel army of young gangsters but, for many youngsters, a way to stay invisible in the hostile environment of the street. Labour politicians, sensing that Cameron had taken the political risk of challenging widespread prejudice, branded his speech a ‘hug-a-hoodie’ plan. The Daily Mail noted that this ‘breath-taking Tory u-turn on law and order’ made no mention of punishing children and instead ‘stresses the role of “compassion and kindness”.’