One might imagine that all this animosity was a consequence of an increase in teenage delinquency or youth crime. Certainly, there were plenty of press reports claiming there had been a steep rise in juvenile offending after 2003. But, as so often, the stories were based on questionable use of statistics — assuming that because police were arresting more young people, they must be committing more crimes.
When experts looked at what was really happening they uncovered ‘net widening’: children drawn into the youth justice system in circumstances that would previously have been dealt with outside it. Police, under public and political pressure to respond more aggressively to the perceived youth problem, had been set targets to make more arrests. Surprise, surprise, that is exactly what they did; handcuffing kids for activities that would once have prompted no more than a bit of avuncular advice from the local constable.
Up until the point that police forces in England and Wales were told to improve their ‘offenders brought to justice’ rate, recorded youth crime had been falling rapidly — down a quarter between 1992 and 2003. As soon as officers were told their performance would be measured by how many children they nicked, it started rising again. Official surveys of people’s experience of crime did not suggest any increase — in fact, they showed the chances of being a victim falling throughout this period. It wasn’t youth crime that was rising, but the criminalisation of the young.
The incidents of rioting that flared up like bush fires across England’s inner cities in the summer of 2011 were swiftly blamed on gangs of youths, even though official records would show 75 per cent of those charged were over eighteen and only 13 per cent were members of gangs. The government found itself under pressure to deal aggressively with what the press had characterised as juvenile anarchy and responded with a promise to ‘name and shame’ children found guilty of involvement. Of those youngsters dealt with by the courts, two thirds were classed as having special educational needs. The chief constable of the West Midlands, Chris Sims, was so concerned at the vilification of Britain’s youth that he took the politically risky step of arguing, ‘We must not at this time abandon all compassion for some of our very damaged young people who have been caught up in these incidents.’
How had twenty-first-century Britain reached this point, so hostile to its young that it had won an international reputation for callousness and cruelty? The answers are buried across the previous two centuries — the period in which the phrases ‘juvenile delinquent’, ‘troubled adolescent’ and ‘problem teenager’ were first coined.
In 1659, Samuel Pepys recorded how soldiers and a ‘meeting of the youth’, apprentices wishing to present a petition, squared up in the City of London. ‘The boys flung stones, tiles, turnips etc. at [them] with all the affronts they could give them,’ he wrote to a friend. A number of the young protestors were shot dead.
Despite such incidents, it wasn’t until the early 1800s that youth came to be regarded as a distinctively threatening or subversive problem in Britain. With urbanisation and industrialisation, the job prospects for working- class boys had worsened: traditional craft apprenticeships disappeared while domestic service increasingly became the province of women. The end of the Napoleonic Wars saw demobilisation of thousands of soldiers, adding to the army of bored and troubled young men wandering city streets.
Britain suffered its first moral panic about youth crime at around this time. In London in 1815, the Society for Investigating the Causes of the Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency in the Metropolis was set up. The committee identified ‘the improper conduct of parents, the want of education, the want of suitable employment, the violation of the sabbath and habits of gambling in the public streets’ as explanations for the youth problem, ‘causes of crime’ that in revised form are still trotted out today. Amid the social turmoil of the early nineteenth century, young men came to be associated with the anxieties of rapid change. British youth was to blame for drunkenness, vice, insubordination and rising crime.
It was the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall who introduced the concept of ‘adolescence’ in the 1900s, arguing that the biological changes associated with puberty drove problematic behaviour that was different from younger children and adults. He described it as a period of ‘storm and stress’, when young people demanded freedom but needed discipline. In Britain, Hall’s theories were embraced as a scientific justification for an ever tougher line against the juveniles who threatened the established order. As it was, two world wars removed and then decimated the adolescent population, delaying the next round of moral panics until the 1950s.
Battered, bruised and broke, Britain surveyed the rubble-strewn post-war landscape and worried. There was particular concern that the damage had exposed national identity to contamination from foreign, particularly American, influence. Along with exotic clothes and loud music, a new word had crossed the Atlantic — teenager. It was a term that reawakened Establishment fears of the juvenile threat but, with the economy expanding, also inspired the development of a new financially independent subculture: simultaneously exciting and terrifying.
Over the next four decades, Teddy Boys, Bikers, Mods, Rockers, Hippies, Punks, Ravers and Grungers put two pubescent fingers up at authority in their own fashion and took delight in watching the staid grown-ups flinch and frown. Young people could cock a snook at their elders, confident that their consumer spending power gave them licence. Adults fretted at the collapse of deference and looked to the criminal justice system to restore order without damaging economic growth.
Wave after wave of youthful rebellion confirmed the cultural idea that teenagers equal trouble. Since younger people were either unable or unwilling to vote, getting tough with out-of-control juveniles was an easy political promise to make. Other countries were facing similar challenges, but in Britain the generational battle lines were scored into the social landscape as deeply as anywhere, and a storm was gathering.
On 12 February 1993, 2-year-old James Bulger wandered off from his mother in a Liverpool shopping mall. In the minutes that followed, security cameras captured him being led by the hand out of the New Strand Shopping Centre by two ‘youths’ as his mother frantically searched for him. Forty-eight hours later, the badly beaten body of the toddler was found on a railway line two miles away.
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When police charged two 10-year-olds for the murder, Britain’s anxiety over its relationship with its young boiled over. ‘We will never be able to look at our children in the same way again,’ said
The circumstances of James Bulger’s death were highly unusual, but the crime prompted a political sea change in the treatment of children by the state — not only of those who offended but of those who simply misbehaved. Conservative toughness was matched every step of the way by Labour, a response later characterised as an arms race to control the nation’s youth. Among Tony Blair’s first acts upon entering Downing Street was to give adults access to legal sanctions for dealing with local children who didn’t do what they were told.
The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 meant that any person over the age of ten in England and Wales who acted in a way likely to cause ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ could be subject to an ASBO — an antisocial behaviour order that, if breached, might see that youngster locked up. Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for a zero-tolerance approach to youth nuisance saw the introduction of electronic tagging of 10-year-olds, dispersal orders, exclusion orders, referral orders and penalty notices.
A campaign demanding that young people show more respect to their elders and betters saw the Labour leader refer to what he saw as a pre-war golden age. ‘My father, growing up,’ Mr Blair said, ‘didn’t have as much money as we have, he didn’t have the same opportunities, he didn’t have travel or communications, but people behaved more respectfully to one another and people are trying to get back to that and most people want it.’
At around the same time, a UNICEF report found that Britain’s young people were the unhappiest in any of the world’s rich nations. One of the authors blamed the UK’s ‘dog-eat-dog’ society. The Archbishop of Canterbury described a nation gripped by panic, ‘tone-deaf to the real requirements of children’.
The last few years have seen much hand-wringing as to how Britain has allowed the relationship between adult and adolescent to become so dysfunctional. In 2009 an independent inquiry panel made up of academics and child experts published a ‘Good Childhood’ report arguing for a significant change of heart in our society. It railed against the unkindness shown towards teenagers and of the need for ‘a more caring ethic and for less aggression, a society more based upon the law of love’.
In government, David Cameron dismantled some of the legal architecture around antisocial behaviour in the hope that communities might re-engage with their young people, but I don’t think it fanciful to suggest that
