Monday, January 25, 2010 

Baby P to Edlington and angels to devils.

Here's a very quick test of just how soon we forget: who wrote the following and about whom?

HIS bright blue eyes stare out at us beseechingly.

A gorgeous, blond-haired, blue-eyed tot with a heart-melting smile.

If you answered with anything other than the Sun and Baby P, or Peter Connelly, as he is never going to be known, then I'm afraid you're wrong. It does however already seem so long ago though, doesn't it? A furore where the fervour has dissipated often later seems to be unreal when it's recalled; were we really that outraged, that angry? After all, it's not us, detached from the case who end up being personally affected, just those with the misfortune to be connected, however tenuously, who find themselves trapped within the vortex of a nation's temporary indignation. Social workers are still getting used to the voluminous amount of new recommendations as advised in Lord Laming's report on Haringey's failings, not to mention the increased workloads after councils across the country played it safe and took more children into care than perhaps needed to be. As for the Sun, well, one of the front pages from during their campaign took pride of place in their 40th anniversary celebrations.

I've gone over this before, but one of the most telling contributions at the time was from Martin Narey, the head of Barnardo's, who suggested had Peter survived he may well have grown up to be the "feral yob" of tabloid nightmares, condemned and castigated without a thought as to what made him. It was part of a speech which was intended to provoke, which is what it did, but it has also now rung almost too true. The case of the two brothers who committed their crime in Edlington could almost be the inverse of the Baby P case: there, an innocent child killed and tortured by those meant to be taking care of him; in Edlington, two "brothers from hell" torture and almost kill two other young boys. On the one hand, the angelic, on the other the demonic. The biblical implications of referring to the unnamed boys as the "devil brothers" is not openly alluded to, but it is there if you look deep enough: "the battle" between good and evil itself seems to be only just below the surface.

And as then, a similar political battle appears to be under way. Both examples of our broken society, of the failure of the state to protect children, with a familiar number of opportunities to intervene missed. According to David Cameron, not just an "isolated act of evil". Michael Gove described it, while calling for the full serious case review to be released into how social services dealt with the family, as "unspeakable evil". The Sun in its leader calls for the review to be released as well, but perhaps there's a clue to its real motives in the actual report's first paragraph:

THE Government was last night urged to publish the full report into the "Devil Brothers" case and shame the bunglers who allowed the savage attack on two boys.

The bunglers? One of those awful words which only the media use, and one which was put into repeated usage to describe Sharon Shoesmith, head of child protection at Haringey council when Baby P was murdered. And there is the other obvious parallel with Baby P: like then, we have no actual names to put to the individuals whose actions we have read about it. Then it was because there was another court case going on at the same time involving Peter's mother and her boyfriend, with their identities needing to be protected to prevent prejudicing that separate prosecution; here it's due to the judge quite rightly concluding that there was no public interest to be served in the brothers being identified. One suspects that it might have been different had they "succeeded" in killing their victims, like how the fact that everyone knew that Child A and Child B had killed James Bulger perhaps influenced the removal of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson's anonymity. With everyone in the Edlington case behind a shroud, the same never applied. And hence, because we don't know who anyone is, there's no one we can personally blame. The social workers who failed Baby P then became the natural scapegoats, even though they were hardly the ones that personally killed the blue-eyed tot. Without names, it's impossible to keep the story going for long: by changing the emphasis from the "devil brothers" themselves onto "the bunglers" they might just give it a longer shelf-life.

Cynical? Certainly. The Tories' reasons for calling for the release of the case review are purer, but not by much. They know that there's political mileage in embarrassing the government yet again, even if it's unlikely that anything will be achieved by its full publication. It doesn't seem to matter that the NSPCC have recommended that while executive summaries of the case reviews should be released, they oppose their release in full "as sensitive information must be kept confidential to protect vulnerable children."

That we are so quick to ascribe evil to the actions of children is itself a cause for concern. This goes far beyond whether those responsible understand the difference between good and bad, which was so hotly debated during the trial of James Bulger's killers. It goes to the heart of our own relationships, our own feelings for our offspring, which have never been so conflicted. We seem caught, not between the dichotomy of angel and demon, but between small adult and friend, and inferior and threat. We hug our own tighter, while pushing everyone else's further away. Until we're willing to unravel just how we've become so insecure about our own successors, we're likely to continue refusing to admit that ultimately the blame, if we're going to lay it at the foot of anyone, is with ourselves.

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Friday, September 04, 2009 

From Bulger to Edlington.

Probably one of the worst moments in this country's recent media history was the hysteria which followed the murder of James Bulger.  In one sense, it was to be completely expected: Bulger's death, at the hands of two 10-year-old boys, with the toddler snatched from his mother in a matter of minutes, was the most appalling, shocking and inexplicable of crimes.  It was also one of the rarest: although we have since gotten sadly used to slightly older teenage boys knifing and even shooting each other, not since Mary Bell had those so young committed a crime so grave.  It was one of those crimes which managed to affect the psyche of the nation, even if only temporarily: the Daily Star's headline the day after the identities of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were revealed still remains to this day one of the most disgusting and despicable, quite possibly of all time: "How do you feel now, you little bastards?"  It was, in fairness, shouted by someone in the public gallery, and probably reflected a mood which many felt, yet it also just highlighted that many had completely forgotten that those in the dock were children, regardless of whether or not they understood or could comprehend what they had done.

The effects of Bulger's murder are still with us today, with politicians reacting in much the same fashion as the media did.  Labour played off of it appallingly, much as the Tories do today with their "broken society" meme, but the real damage was inflicted by Michael Howard, who declared that "prison works", a position which has been only built upon by Labour.  For better or worse though, considering the major controversy over how their sentence was imposed and served, both Venables and Thompson came out of a system which so often fails those older, and genuinely were reformed.  If they were "evil" or "monsters" when they went in, there is nothing to suggest that they still were or still are now that they're living under their new identities.  Some will baulk, understandably, at how those who murdered got might what might well be described as preferential treatment because of the seriousness of their crime, yet surely the ends in this instance justified the means.

How little we've, or rather the media have learned, is reflected in the coverage today of the case of the two brothers in Edlington who more by luck than apparent judgement failed to murder the two other little boys with whom they had been playing, in circumstances similar to that in which James Bulger was murdered.  The differences though are surely important: neither Venables or Thompson had anything close to the record that these two brothers apparently had, although there were some similarities, and also the key, most terrifying detail of the Bulger murder was that he was snatched from his mother by pure chance, something not the case here, and dragged along for hours, in front of numerous witnesses.  Nonetheless, much the same attitude pervades, as typified by the Sun's editorial.  These two brothers are, variously, "hell boys", "evil", "monsters", "dangerous predators" and guilty of "sickening bloodlust".  Not once are they actually described as what they are, despite everything they've done, which is children.  It reproduces a litany of those who failed, in various guises, as well as those who failed to protect the "innocent children" from these savages, but it doesn't even begin to suggest that maybe it was these two brothers who were failed more than anyone else.  That would take the blame away from them, or rather undermine the stated fact that they had "a measure of evil" beyond even the normal "feral" child.

You can of course argue endlessly over whether those who kill or attempt to kill are created by nature or by nuture.  A background similar to that which these two brothers had can be a signifier for such crimes, but equally it would be an insult to those who have struggled through such deprived backgrounds and came out of it without being damaged to suggest that explains it all.  Likewise, you can blame anything else you feel like: the Bulger murder led to attacks on both video games and "video nasties", even though there was no evidence whatsoever that either of the boys had actually watched "Child's Play 3" as the media came to claim he did.  The very mention of the "Chucky" films by a supposed "relative" makes me wonder about the veracity of her comments; it seems far too much of a coincidence that the exact same series of films featuring that same doll would be brought up again.  With that in mind, it is however interesting to note that the same source claims that the boys were dealt with harshly by their father, maybe far too harshly.  That rather undermines the Sun's refrain that "consistent discipline" is the only means by which to tame them, and even Iain Duncan Smith, a proponent of "tough love", made the point that the discipline they received may well have had the opposite effect.

The most distasteful part of the Sun's leader though is that "intimidation is long overdue", as the court in which the brothers plead guilty apparently "bent over backwards" to "show them kindness" by the judge and lawyers wearing suits rather than their usual garb.  This has far less to do with kindness and much more to do with ensuring that they understood properly what was going on, even during a relatively short session in which they plead guilty to lesser charges rather than the attempted murder which was initially proposed.  Intimidation would probably be the very last thing which they need, something already presumably provided by their father.  Then there's just the complete failure to perform a reality check, calling regimes in youth custody "disastrously lax".  These would be the same regimes which are currentlyusing force more than they ever have, leaving little surprise when they fail just as much as prisons at preventing re-offending and reforming as well as punishing.

The hope has to be that same almost made up on the spur of the moment detention regime which Venables and Thompson went through, which involved not young offender's institutions but secure units, held separately, with both going through therapy as well as other programmes is also at the very least attempted in this case, although the sentence the two will receive is doubtful to be as harsh as that which Bulger's killers got, and how they will handle the fact that the two are brothers is also likely to be difficult.  It is though also worth reflecting, as the chief executive of Barnardo's Martin Narey did, on how close angels are to demons.  His suggestion, meant to stir debate, that Baby Peter may well have grown up had he survived to be a feral yob, the kind which are dismissed and demonised without a thought, inflammatory as it was, was the exact thing that the Sun did here.  If evil is inherent, then nothing can be done to prevent it or cure it; if it isn't, and naive liberals such as myself will protest profusely that there is no such thing, then it can be.  These two might not become "pillars of the community" as the Sun puts it, but to abandon hope in children and to demonise them in such a way is to abandon hope in humanity itself.

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9/04/2009 11:49:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, November 17, 2008 

The path from angels to demons.


One of the reasons why the outpouring of outrage over the death of Baby P has been so understandable is his age. Defenceless, tiny and attractive, his treatment has been all the more intolerable because of the three of those things. Statistics tend to show that it's babies and in fact older children (older than the 8 that Victoria Climbié was when she was killed) that are the most likely to abused and murdered. Whilst however we treat babies as angels, the demonisation of older youths has been highlighted by a poll carried out by YouGuv on behalf of Barnardo's.

While we ought to be wary to an extent of polls commissioned on behalf of such non-neutral organisations and of the questions asked, the results should surely still give us cause for alarm. 54% of the 2,021 questioned agreed that children were "beginning to behave like animals", 49% agreed that children are increasingly a danger to each other and adults, 43% agreed that something had to be done to protect us from children, 35% believed the streets are infested with children, 45% thought that feral was a perfectly acceptable way to describe children because they behave that way, and 49% disagreed with the statement that children that get into trouble are often misunderstood and in need of professional help.

Perhaps indicative of the increasing ill-regard to how children are described, troubled or not, was the reporting of the news that 4,000 under-sixes had been excluded from school in the past year. The Sun, in the summary of the story on its main page, described them, typically, as "yobs", probably for reasons of shortness, as the article more accurately calls them tiny terrors. These are children which are only a few years older than Baby P, who will typically often get involved such scrapes, unlikely to do much damage to each other, let alone an adult, and they were already being caught under such a completely unhelpful catch-all term.

Barnardo's also notes that the British Crime Survey recently found that almost 50% thought that half of all crime was committed by young people, while in actuality just 12% was. While we can blame the media for much of the public perception of the young as yobs or worse, some of the blame also has to been taken by the government which has done so much to promote the tackling of "anti-social behaviour". One of the questions asked of people to establish their view of how much is in their area is whether there are teenagers hanging around the streets (PDF). It doesn't matter what they're doing; just them hanging about is seen as one of the indicators of it. We've moved on it seems from the Victorian notion that children should be seen and not heard; now they should be neither.

Likewise, the fear that children are a danger to adults at least is an irrational fear. As can quickly be gleaned by examining those arrested and charged with the stabbings in London which have killed 22 teenagers there this year, the overwhelming number are being killed by their own peers. Children killing adults, or teenagers (one of those involved was over 18) such as the case of Garry Newlove which has been so used to portray the image of the country as broken, are far rarer. If we are to be judged on how we treat those that we incarcerate, then the picture is even bleaker, with one of the highest levels in Europe, without any evidence whatsoever to suggest that prison at such a young age either helps to rehabilitate or to bring actual crime levels down.

The 49% figure, which is open to misinterpretation (do they disagree with them needing professional help or being misunderstood?) is undoubtedly the most troubling. If 49% are already writing off those that get into any sort of trouble, when the vast majority will at some point during their upbringing do just that, then the intolerance we have towards the young is most likely beyond anything in the past. MushKush noted that over the past weekend people will have been donating to Children in Need, with their money likely to be used to help those that that they equally think are not misunderstood and not in need of professional help. One in five teachers asked a couple of months ago thought that the cane should be brought back to help re-establish discipline in the classroom; what is the difference between the thrashings that used to be administered to unruly children and the abuse that we now so rigorously condemn? Why is the hitting of children more acceptable to some when doing the same to another adult would be rightly considered to be assault?

Part of the fear of children is psychological. Like the Roman emperors, with help from the tabloids, we imagine that our children are going to be the ones that are going to get rid of us. When it comes to a battle between youth and experience, at the moment youth seems to be winning, even as our societies themselves inexorably age, with pensioners soon to outnumber the young for something approaching the first time. At the same time, the older generation are also being more called on to look after those children as the parents themselves go out to work, and with the government's determination to get mothers off benefits and into work earlier, this is likely to increase. None of this however seems to have softened our views towards the young; on the contrary, it seems to have hardened them. While the emphasis on knife crime, especially in London will have done little to help, the picture elsewhere is not so grim, yet it's cancelled out by the bias towards the Metropolitan and the demands for such apparently inexplicable slaughter to be halted.

Much like with everything else, the idea that the young are getting more ill-behaved goes hand in hand with the notion that everything is getting worse, even as we live longer and we enjoy wealth which our ancestors could only dream of, even if things could most certainly be a lot better. As Kim Catcheside points out, both Plato and a magistrate from 1898 believed that children's behaviour was worsening, based as always on their own personal experience. Again though, surveys tend to suggest that we actually think that our personal experience of the young, as with crime and the health service is rather good. It's outside of our bubbles that we think things are much worse.

The irony is that as we demand justice for Baby P, we ignore and castigate those slightly older but who we think should know better. Perhaps David Cameron in this instance is actually being more consistent than the government: having advised parents and others to show children a lot more love, which Labour promptly span as being to "hug a hoodie", he's been continuing the theme, if with more party political intent today. As Dr Chris Hanvey wrote five years ago, as long as we continue to have this deep ambiguity about children, splitting them off into villains and angels, we are unlikely to stop the tide of abuse. Consistency is something that very few manage, and it's not likely to be the result of the current witch-hunt.

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11/17/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, July 16, 2008 

The youth crime action plan.

After the understandable explosion of coverage over the weekend after the deaths of 4 men in London alone on the same day, including the 20th teenager to have been killed in the city this year, the reaction to the actual Youth Crime Plan itself, which has been long in the drawing up, has been almost entirely muted.

Partly this was because over the weekend the government managed to yet again get itself in a frightful muddle of its own making. Spurred into action by the immediate howling that something must be done from the newspapers, and also to respond to the Tories' pledge that anyone caught carrying a knife would be sent to prison, Jacqui Smith toured the studios on the Sunday making clear what the tough community punishments would be, as opposed to locking the miscreants up for God knows how long. This would involve restorative justice sessions, taking teenagers into hospitals to see victims of violent crime, face to face meetings with victims, and community sentences of up to 300 hours to be carried out on Friday and Saturday nights. Because Jacqui Smith was suitably vague, doubtless because all these measures had been thought up incredibly quickly, she gave the impression that teenagers were going to be taken into accident and emergency wards to see victims almost as soon as they had been wheeled into be patched up. The media ran with this, and then also got a father who had lost a child to knife crime in one instance saying that he would have nothing to do with seeing the perpetrators of his son's death face to face. It was apparent this wasn't what the government was suggesting, with them instead giving the possibility that offenders would be taken onto normal wards to see victims of violent crime, and only then if it was agreed with the individuals themselves and the doctors, and that only those who wanted to take part in such restorative face to face schemes with those who had carried knives would be considered for such sessions, but the media screamed U-TURN when Jacqui Smith stood up on Monday and gave a more substantial account of the proposals.

The whole avoidable escapade overshadowed the fact that this was actually a far better and more likely to work scheme than the blunt instrument of the Tory prison for anyone who carries a knife nonsense. No one challenged the Conservatives over the very basics of such a plan: with prisons already overcrowded and close to total capacity, how on earth would they provide the spaces needed for such a draconian policy? The completely useless answer to this is that the Tories plan to sell off some of the Victorian prisons and build new ones (as originally proposed by our friends at Policy Exchange). That this doesn't solve the problem at all, makes you wonder who wants to buy the prisons in the first place, especially in the current climate, and is in the neverland realm of time doesn't seem to matter. How exactly would prison solve anything anyway? We already know that prison for the young either doesn't work, or in fact equips them for an entire life of crime rather than deliver the sharp shock that might be necessary to get them out of carrying a knife, but it's a populist, easy proposal which you can make in opposition and not get called upon for.

The Youth Action Plan generally seems to have understood for the first real time under New Labour that the tough talking, eternal crackdowns and constant new initiatives have not worked. All they have done is just wetted the appetite for more of the same, and given the consistent impression that it's what we're going to get. This change in tact is almost certainly the work of Ed Balls, who's managed to persuade, with the Supreme Leader's help, the more Blair-inclined Smith and Straw of the virtues of a welfare based approach. Out has gone the distraction that was the ABSO, first introduced by Straw but not really used habitually until David Blunkett was home secretary, and in has come the view that targeting of those most at risk of turning to crime, the crucial involvement of parents and the setting up of dedicated local youth offending teams, involving all the local services, from the police to the social services to the schools, all involved in monitoring progress and intervening if necessary.

As identified by Mark Easton, the real heart of the report itself is not in the new measures proposed, but in the research behind it to back up its own suppositions. Hence 5% of youth offenders make up 50% of the actual crime committed, the hard core that do so much to give the vast majority a bad name. Equally, it identifies the factors that so increase the chances of someone being a prolific offender rather than one who might get in trouble once or twice during their childhood. Predictably, being a member of a "delinquent" group vastly increases the chances of offending; what doesn't however is a person's temperament, with both infrequent and prolific (high rate) offenders having broadly the same chance. What does make the difference is maltreatment as a child, if a parent is convicted of a crime, ADHD diagnosis, and low socio-economic status. Nothing ground breaking there either, but it has the useful effect of confirming what you already think that you know. This might be where specific targeting and targets can get over their deservedly bad name: specifically intervening where there is potential trouble ahead can in this instance make all the difference. Understandably, this does raise concerns about the nanny state, interfering in the family structure and the potential demonising of individuals; if however we are to make progress and as a result stop the mindless impression that everything is permanently getting worse and that the next generation are going to bring us all down, it might well be a necessary evil.

There are, as Lee Griffin especially has noted, some of the more harebrained ideas still in the plan. The eviction of families from council houses should they consistently fail to comply with successive orders, parenting ones as well as ASBOs, is a barmy idea which either just puts the problem somewhere or potentially makes the family homeless which makes a bad outcome even more likely. It simply isn't going to happen, and is probably only in there for the benefit of the tabloids and to make the whole deal same harsher than it otherwise is. Lee also objects to "unpaid work in the community" on Friday and Saturday night for child criminals, which I think is actually not so bad an idea. It's clearly just another harsher way of saying community service, and carrying it out on the nights when most teenagers go out will be the sort of punishment that might just get through to the minority that if they decide to act like morons or plague people to death that they'll have their leisure time to do so taken away. The only problem is just who will supervise it and given up their own weekends. Where I do agree with Lee and others is on the completely disproportionate mass curfew orders which the government is encouraging, which stigmatise youth as a whole rather than dealing with those who are a pain. Most the time it's not even that they're actually committing any sort of offence, it's that they're daring to be on a street corner or outside at all. There was a local news report the other week about anti-social behaviour where one guy who didn't want to be identified's chief complaint was that some of the youths had "called him names"; for fuck's sake people, grow some sort of a backbone. Especially illiberal is the Redruth saga, where kids who dare to be outside after 9pm during the school holidays are to be marched back home and their parents potentially given orders to keep them inside and otherwise, when they haven't broken any rule but have transgressed over the threshold of being young and outside at night.

On the whole however, the plan is mostly sensible, level-headed, backed up by evidence and might just well actually confront some of the most intransigent problems in some communities that we face today. It's a break with the tough on crime without being tough on the causes sense that has blighted policy for the last decade. The real tragedy is that it's likely to be thrown out the window by the Conservatives before it's even had a chance to work.

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7/16/2008 11:32:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, July 04, 2008 

Even more thoughts on knife crime and the Sun.

ChrisC objects in the comments on my previous post on all things knife crime, saying the statistics do not say that crime is falling. Going by the police statistics on violence against the person, he's right, which have been rising exponentially since the way they were recorded was changed in 1999. The past couple of years have seen this level off and the figures become stable. I am correct however when I refer to the British Crime Survey figures, considered more authoritative, which paint a completely different picture, with violent crime have fell by 43% since 1995. The police figures he links to conclude there were around 1,000,000 offences against the person in 2005/06 as reported, while the BCS for the same year measures over 2,500,000, a drop from a peak of 4,000,000 in 1995. Crime itself by both measures has also been falling since 1995 (PDF), but as we know all too well, it doesn't feel like that and very few outside police/political/judicial circles believe it.

The major flaw in the BCS when it comes to the current apparent epidemic of knife crime is that it doesn't survey under-16s, who are also those who are in the front-line of muggings for expensive gadgets, such as mp3 players and mobile phones. This is to change, as was announced by "Wacky" Jacqui Smith, but for now it is still the best measure we have. Also to consider is that increasingly those who are the victims of violent crime are turning up to hospital without reporting it and giving asinine stories when asked what happened to them. There have been trials in Scotland in hospitals that have attempted to link the numbers of those admitted to A&E with stab wounds etc with the eventual number of crimes reported, and to highlight how big the discrepancy is. This is something that most certainly needs to at least be considered south of the border, as the only way we'll ever get to the bottom of how the deep the problem is through valid, unquestionable statistics from all sources, police, BCS, hospital, even schools, as Lee Jasper(!) argues very eloquently on CiF in an excellent post which has a number of good suggestions of how to tackle knife crime without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Also vital is that the independent body Louise Casey recommended in her report for crime statistics of all varieties is established, which will hopefully put a stop to the selective and partisan reading of the crime figures.

Also very interesting on the statistics score is this post by the BBC's Mark Easton, who's digging on hospital patients with various wounds is rather eye-opening:

Between the years 2002-3 and 2006-7, the number of these children admitted to hospital with knife wounds in England "almost doubled" we are told. From 95 cases to 179. A rise of 88%.

However, over the same period, the numbers of under-16s admitted to hospital with gunshot wounds has gone down from 253 to 181. A fall of 28%.

So, 84 more children were admitted with stab injuries than five years earlier. But 72 fewer children were admitted with gunshot injuries.

If no distinction is made between knife and gun injuries, the headline might read "teen violence stable.


and:

Given the particular anxiety over youngsters with knives, I looked at the most recent data for under-16s and spotted something quite surprising. Of those 179 children admitted to hospital last year, 72 or 40% were in London.

Knife fights appear to be a particular and growing problem in the capital. Juvenile disputes are too often resolved with a blade.

It is a different story in the North West of England. In Manchester and Liverpool it is gunshot wounds that the hospitals are predominantly dealing with.

Between 2002-3 and 2006-7, London doctors treated 33 children with wounds from firearms. In the North West, medics patched up an astonishing 251.

During the same period, London A & E departments admitted 225 children with stab wounds compared with 117 in the North West.

What do we conclude from all this? Well, I don't think these figures tell a story of increasingly ferocious juvenile violence sweeping the land. Instead, they offer clues to the nature of predominantly urban gang culture.

If you don't believe me, consider this. In 2002-3, not one school child was treated for a stab wound anywhere in central and south east England outside London. How many victims were there in this large and populous region last year? None.


This is what I've been arguing here on the previous post and before. While there are serious, apparently intractable problems in London involving knife crime, and gun problems in Manchester and Liverpool, of which we've heard relatively little since the tragedy involving Rhys Jones, outside of the major cities there is not some huge crisis involving weapons, especially not "a Dark Age of lawlessness" as the Sun so hyperbolically put it. The emphasis on London is understandable - it is the capital city, reflects England and Britain as a whole and is where the media is encamped, and so of immediate concern to them and their children. For those of us outside of it however who simply don't recognise this picture of a land in constant fear of teenagers carrying blades, it rankles. While it would be crude to describe what's happening in London as a moral panic, as 18 teenagers this year already have lost their lives, what is noticeable is pattern of coverage. A couple of years ago the main concern was guns. At the beginning of this year it was drunken feral teenagers kicking adults to death for little to no reason. At the moment it's knives. The circle will probably square before too long.

The Sun itself, predictably, is in no mood for introspection or such analysis. Like with previous victims of crime where it's difficult to determine who's using who, the Sun is relying on emotion, this time from Ben Kinsella's distraught and clearly in mourning sister Brooke. Her suggestion is for national service to be brought back seems to be more one of desperation than of complete seriousness:

“I want politicians to consider bringing back National Service. If these evil people want to fight so badly, let them fight for their country. If they want to pick up a weapon, let them fight for a good cause.

“We’re losing hundreds of innocent boys in Iraq and Afghanistan, so we may as well send these criminals overseas to fight. The only way to stop this is to do something extreme.”


It doesn't seem to have been put gently to her by the Sun journalists responsible for the interview that the last thing the army needs are "evil people" when they're fighting what is not a typical war but one against an insurgency where public support of those in the area is crucial, and that training already violent young individuals to been even more ruthless in survival tactics is not the greatest of ideas, but then the paper isn't interested in realism. It simply wants her words to move minds for its own agenda.

There is this rebuke to the Sun's continuous demands for more prisons without thinking of the consequences however:

“I want to see proper prisons brought back,” she said. “It’s like a badge of honour for kids to be put in prisons these days. Inside, they gain more respect and make contacts which they use to become even harder criminals when they’re released. They’re in for a couple of years and when they come out they’re treated like heroes.”

Although what a "proper prison" is is anyone's guess.

Again, not that this alters the Sun's editorial view:

EACH day seems to bring more horror than the last.

The Sun warned yesterday that we are sinking into a Dark Age of crime.

And now we learn of the ghastly slaughter of two fine young French students in a London bedsit.

Even in the current climate of violence, the savagery of their murders leaves us numb with horror and revulsion.


Those murders are clearly an exceptional case, and as PDF reflects, it would be a major surprise if burglary really was the primary motive when such extreme violence and brutality was used. As we've seen though, to call this a "Dark Age of crime" is to ignore the evidence in front of your face.

As The Sun has repeatedly said, our political leaders, the police and the courts must show they grasp the seriousness of the crisis we face.

That means more arrests, stiffer sentences, more jails.

But more must be done to break up the gang culture.

Many will agree with grieving actress Brooke Kinsella, who calls in The Sun today for a return of National Service.


Quite. If there's one thing that'll break up gang culture, it'll be ordering them about and splitting them into regiments.

Brooke, whose brother Ben was killed by a knife gang, believes a tough spell of compulsory military life would stop teenagers drifting into street crime.

She believes it would instil in them discipline, respect and common decency.

Actually, she doesn't say anything like that all, or if she did it's not included in the interview write-up. The only thing she says about it is what I've quoted above. Looks like the Sun is trying to develop the idea for her or put words in her mouth. Either way, it's still an unworkable suggestion.

National Service was created to prepare a generation of young men to defend us from an enemy abroad.

Now the enemy is within.


Now the language is similar to that regarding the terrorist threat. Of course, if there was now a successful attack, the mood would swiftly swing from concern about knife crime to exploding brown people again. In both cases talking of an enemy within is over-the-top and unhelpful, but again that doesn't seem to matter.

Decent young people would feel outraged that they were having to suffer because of a mindless minority.

But the crisis we face is engulfing everyone.

That means nothing — including National Service — can be ruled out in our battle to end the savagery.


As we've seen, the crisis is not engulfing everyone, and it would be nice if the Sun could admit that it isn't. Once you've built your prospectus around eternal terror or insecurity on the streets though it's difficult to back down. Using such potentially counter-productive and discriminatory tactics will do nothing to solve the crisis that does exist, and will instead embitter a whole generation out of the desire that something must be done.

Then again, it could be worse. You could think that giving kids PlayStations for telling us what their lives are like is a good idea, as does the completely brainless Polly (what is it with that name?) Hudson via Anton Vowl.

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7/04/2008 09:09:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, June 09, 2008 

The real Broken Britain.

Another weekend in Broken Britain. Another teenager killed by a another teenager with a knife. Sorry? What's that? There wasn't this weekend? Oh. We'll go with the footballer charged with dangerous driving then. Or the grim milestone of 100 British servicemen dead in Afghanistan. Is there anything on childhood or teenagers this weekend? A dossier for the UN on how grim life is for many children in this country? Nah, depressing and too detailed to be worth bothering our readers with. Where can we make a single campaigning point from out of this? We can't. Let's just ignore it.

That, and it deals with some of those in society that the tabloids pretend don't exist except when to complain about them. Like the lone asylum seeking youths who the government want to attempt to age so that if they're older than they either say they are or think they are they can deport them. The thousands who are imprisoned and then routinely "restrained", involving a sharp punch to the nose or the bending back of a finger, at such rates that it seems to go far beyond the last resort gaining back of control which such techniques are meant to be restricted to. The 82% of those with learning disabilities that are bullied. The 3.8 million in relative poverty, and the 1 million in poor housing.

This is the real Broken Britain, the one that can't be fixed simply through soundbites, the ones which can't be solved either through the throwing about of money, through getting tough, zero tolerance, or any other cure-all solutions. At its heart is one of the most inherent contradictions of modern life: we love our own children and worry about them to such an extent that we are paranoid and concerned beyond reason at strangers, paedophiles and other monsters, either not letting them out to play until they are well beyond the age at which the parents themselves were allowed to do the same, or constantly keeping them under surveillance which would be more at home in 1984. Strangely, when it comes to other people's children, we seem to loathe them. As mentioned, we lock up a far greater proportion than anywhere else in Europe, and government platitudes that this is only 3% of those involved in the criminal justice system and that other countries imprison those with mental health problems or on other welfare concerns are simply not good enough. When they hang around on street corners, quite often because they have nowhere else to go, and amazingly, because that's what young people and teenagers tend to do, we're terrified of them and demand that they move on. Ministers refuse to condemn such indiscriminate "solutions" to this insoluble problem as the Mosquito, which affects not just teenagers but those up into their early twenties. When they drink alcohol in public, a cause for concern but not blind panic, the police confiscate it and move them on, something shortly to be made even easier. We've had those with personality disorders and mental health problems given anti-social behaviour orders, with ridiculous rules which they can't help that break, often leading to imprisonment. In the typical style of this government, they have been both illiberal and often ineffective, with them becoming badges of honour for some while indefensible for others.

The rot and our attitude towards children sets in when they enter the education system. Even away from the struggles of the middle classes to get their offspring into the "good" schools, buying houses in the catchment areas, thinking ahead as far as the family planning stage, as those with younger siblings usually automatically get a place in the same school while everyone else without the purchasing or personal power suffers, the testing regime which begins at 7 with the SATs. Back when I was 11, the SATs then were still just national indicators taken and then mainly used by the schools for setting when you moved onto secondary school. Since then our glorious Labour government has used the results to produce league tables, turning what had been something where there was no stress or pressure involved whatsoever into something where the children taking them do very much feel it and are drilled accordingly. This is then followed by the SATS at 14, then GCSEs, and if they don't decide they've had enough of been prodded and poked, AS levels at 17 and selected A level modules, then the whole A level shebang at 18, although with the diplomas coming in at the start of the next school year, and other qualifications such as GNVQs and NVQs, this will be changed still further. Again, this wouldn't be so potentially pernicious if for but two things. Firstly, the guidelines have been set so rigorously that schools have realised that they only have to teach what will be on the test and absolutely nothing else apart from the absolute basics, removing context almost entirely and with it the joy of learning, and secondly our infamous capacity for cynicism. Rather than celebrating that results keep getting better, we go in for the usual yearly routine of bemoaning the standards that are slipping away. Thing is, they're right to an extent due to the teaching to the test, but the putting down of the next generation just as they've worked their socks off as they've been asked to is little short of looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. As some have similarly sagely noted, you don't fatten a pig by weighing it all the time, while the league table system has only been to the benefit of those who have a choice, i.e. the ever complaining middle classes, than to anyone else, and that includes the teachers, students and society as a whole.

Which brings us neatly onto the remaining aspect of the real Broken Britain as alluded to at the beginning: the media itself. Research by MORI in 2004 found that 71% of stories about the young in one week painted them in a negative light, with only 14% positive, with 15% neutral. It also found that in stories about the young they themselves didn't have a voice, with just 8% containing a direct quote, and those were doubtless the positive ones. This kind of attitude towards the young doesn't just affect stories about youth crime, it infects stories that should be positive too. When George Sampson won Britian's Got Talent last week, the Sun used his example as how the youth of today could do anything with their lives and avoid crime, as if that was all they aspired to in the first place, while also only pointing out its thinking towards meritocracy: as long as you breakdance badly, as Sampson can, while having the confidence to appear on national television, you too can reach the dizzy heights of not becoming involved in crime. That Sampson, performing on the street to make money for the trips to the auditions was moved on numerous times by the police, was only worth mentioning in passing. It's in fact really worth thinking about: when is there a positive news story about the young that isn't around exam results time with the papers full of the ubiquitous leaping young ladies showing off their midriffs? Our images of the young aren't of those getting on with it and enjoying their lives, they're of those that have either been killed or have killed themselves. While you could say the same about the media and their attitude to almost everything else, it's especially damaging towards some of the most vulnerable. The recent, somewhat merited obsession with knives doesn't just make children themselves more fearful of their own peer group, it also influences their decision to carry such a weapon themselves. The survey that accompanies the UN dossier found that 12% had carried either a knife or a gun in the last 12 months, not separating them as it perhaps should have done, or defining whether this was a penknife or not. 87.1% had not carried any weapons, while 86.6% had never been in trouble with the police, and considering that most will have a scrape at some point that might lead to a warning or at most a caution, that's hardly an alarming statistic either.

The irony of this dossier being drawn up by the children's commissioners while those that appointed them are those that are directly breaching the UN's rights of a child will doubtless not be lost on those who ultimately review it. We've seen it all over the last few months, responses without thinking and purely being out of panic to what is being brewed in the press. Last week Gordon Brown directly answered a demand in the Sun for all those carrying knives for whatever reason to be prosecuted, although he lowered it to those older than 16 rather than to the age of 10. Considering that the heaviest sanction for carrying a knife without due cause in public is a 4-year prison sentence, we could be shortly seeing another rise in the detention of the young, while hardly anyone seems to see such a move as being anything like an answer to the problem. Then we had Jacqui Smith lauding the most alarming of police innovations in "tackling" anti-social behaviour, reported vividly by the Guardian under the headline "harass a hoodie", with police repeatedly taking photographs and video not just of those that are being targeted for repeated offences, but also their friends as well. They're meant to be given an choice as to whether they can be filmed or not, but unsurprisingly this was never offered to them. The scheme was justified while the reported was there under the pretext of two of those filmed subsequently being seen on a school roof, but as they were also filmed whilst playing football, it's not beyond the realms of thought that they were retrieving one. The problems with such schemes are obvious: they make all those filmed suspicious and hostile towards authority, especially when they feel they're doing nothing wrong; they continue to treat those that have committed offences in the past but who might have modified their behaviour as criminals; and it just moves them on from one place to another, where if the problem hasn't been sorted, it just inflicts it there rather than somewhere else. Again, this isn't just being done in one place, as the stop and search powers which are also being prepared to be expanded are also now being used to film those stopped and searched for weapons, regardless of whether they had committed any crime or not, for as the police state, "evidence and intelligence" purposes. This might be less illiberal than the keeping of the fingerprints and DNA of those who have never been found guilty of any offence, but it certainly seems to also be for the ultimate reason of creating a database with similar sort of material.

I myself am guilty here of exaggerating. I don't think this shows this country as broken in any shape or form, and I think the report which found Britain as the worst place in the industrialised West to grow up was probably on the inflammatory side too. The problems we do have though seem to be over emphasised, while those which are under-reported are far more serious. Those in relative poverty will have the lives shaped, not by what they experience by the time they start getting in trouble with the police, but by the younger years, and the care they receive then from their parents and the standards they receive from the state in health, nursery/pre-school then school itself. Those with learning difficulties and those that are themselves carers when they're not yet old enough to properly care from themselves are fenced off from experiencing what their peers do. The biggest problem of all however is how we ourselves think either about them or for them: when our overwhelming emotion is either to be scared of them or to be scared for them, something has gone wrong. It requires a lot more than the responses we've had so far, and will have in response to this dossier, than to get to the bottom of how to alter it.

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6/09/2008 10:34:00 PM | | | links to this post

Saturday, February 02, 2008 

Gun crime? What about being press ganged?

THERE seems to be a sense that it is no longer safe to walk the streets, and that anyone who pops out at night for a tasty kebab is going to come home spouting arterial blood from a bullet wound to the neck.

David Cameron, however, is undaunted. He made a speech in which he said that gun crime is spiralling out of control.

He brought up the tragic story of Garry Newlove who was kicked to death on his own doorstep and little Rhys Jones who was shot dead in a car park on his way back from football training.

Well, there’s one. And I suppose if I scoured the internet for half a day, I could come up with maybe five more people who’ve recently been gunned down by a gang of savage teenagers in hooded tops.

<This means, then, that so far this year 59,999,994 people in Britain have sustained no bullet wounds at all.

More people, and this is true, are killed by their trousers.

Yes, I’m sure that it would be very scary for a concave-chested little man to walk through certain parts of Liverpool at night while carrying a gold ingot.

But be assured, it was also dangerous to be on Brighton beach in 1965 when the Mods and the Rockers were throwing motorcycles at one another.

It was dangerous in the 19th Century because you’d pop out for a pint of milk and end up in the Navy. And I assure you that it was extremely dangerous on the streets of Doncaster in 1977.

On many occasions, burly miners would offer to “glass” me and when I tried to explain “glass” is a noun, not a verb and therefore couldn’t be conjugated, it seemed to make things worse.

The truth, then, is this: The vast majority of the country is completely safe. The vast majority of the people who live here do not want to murder you. And it is still extremely difficult to buy a gun.


Which politically correct, blind, ignorant and complacent moron wrote this then? Err, Jeremy Clarkson. Can some of our politicians perhaps follow his example and give his message more credence than Helen Newlove's?

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2/02/2008 08:05:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, February 01, 2008 

Here is my grief, tell me yours.

After reading out her list of grievances at the conclusion of the trial of the teenagers charged with her husband's murder, Helen Newlove's back, this time with a more expanded one, and all give ample space in the Scum.

The main article, headlined "Mourning mum could be YOU", has to be one of the most hackneyed and pathetic attempts for sympathy that a newspaper could conjure up.

Mum-of-three Helen, 45, fought back tears as she made her first heartbreaking return to the spot where her loving husband of 21 years was brutally murdered by a pack of teenage savages.

...

Helen moved away from the family home with daughters Amy, 13, Danielle, 15, and Zoe, 18.

But the grief-stricken family summoned up the courage to return there in front of our cameras in order to press home their call for action.


Or, in other words, to get a photograph of Helen crying so she can express just how much she means it, and how badly her demands must be acceded to by the politicians the Sun spends so much time decrying.

Arm-in-arm, heads bowed to hide the pain and sorrow etched on their faces, mum and daughters approached the spot where Garry was found dying 100 yards from his front door.

Once there, they knelt to place flowers and said a silent prayer to their fallen hero, a miracle dad who had beaten cancer 15 years previously.

Carrying a photo of her beloved husband – and clutching his favourite cuddly toy, Leo the lion – Helen said: “It’s traumatic just to be here. It’s still so raw and so painful but we had to come. Leo the lion stands for courage. We gave him to Garry to give him courage when he was in hospital fighting cancer. We brought him along today to give us that same courage. Leo goes everywhere with us now.”

Turning to hug her tearful girls, Helen added: “This is so much harder for them. But if people witness the pain we’re going through, they might just sit up and take notice.


Or they might just think that you're milking your understandable grief and anger to make a political point that politicians are incapable of disagreeing with for fear of being called heartless, cold and indifferent to those who are victims of crime. That's exactly what you're doing, and it's unfair both to all the other parents that have lost children or families that have lost parents to thugs but who haven't decided that it demands that something must be done, and that sad as it seems, it unfortunately happens, and will continue to happen regardless of any campaign. More than anything, it's deeply cynical.

What then, are Newlove's demands? Would you believe that they tie in almost directly with the Sun's own viewpoints?

Sentences that fit crime

THERE are decent, sensible judges in this country, but too often their hands are tied by barmy guidelines and nonsense about human rights.

To stem yob violence we need real deterrents before it’s too late.

We have a mandatory life sentence for murder, but I fear Garry’s killers will escape with as little as ten years each behind bars.

That’s not justice. They will be out on the streets at half his age. For me, life should mean life, and at the very least 25 years. Surely it is time to re-open the debate about bringing back the death penalty — or at least the birch? These people deal in pain - it’s the only commodity they understand.

If Garry’s killers were put to death I would feel absolutely nothing for them. Why should I? They knew full well they were committing the most heinous of all crimes.

Ignoring the jibe about human rights, in actual fact, judges under the last Criminal Justice Act to come into effect have been given far more power over the sentences they can hand down. Life should only ever mean life in the case of multiple murders, or where the offender poses a distinct, special threat to the public, and judges can also now opt for an "indeterminate" sentence if they feel that's the case. The few in prison that are on effective life sentences - Ian Huntley, Ian Brady, Peter Sutcliffe, etc - are those that do genuinely deserve them. It should also always be the judge and not a politician that decides on what requires a life sentence that means life, for obvious reasons. As for bringing back the capital punishment or the birch, apart from the fact that the former doesn't work as anything approaching a deterrent as America aptly demonstrates, it brings us down to the level of those who commit the crimes themselves. A yob beats someone up, so we give him a good state-sanctioned thrashing in return? A wonderful example, to be sure. I also doubt that when they beat her husband up that they had the intention of killing him, whatever despicable bravado they've since displayed.

YOU rarely meet a cop these days, if you do they are often overweight.

This is because most of them drive around instead of being where people need them — on the streets.


Really? I think it's a long time since I've seen an overweight police officer, but then what do I know? I haven't had my husband killed.

We’re entitled to a proper response to every 999 call. CCTV and community support officers are no substitute for a bobby on the beat.

A proper copper knows his beat. He can sense trouble and intervene before it’s too late. And officers need to be fit and strong.


And I'm sure that the Sun will be delighted with the rise in taxes necessary for every community, street, or estate to have its own individual set of police officers, as will those that have no need for them. We already have around 140,000 police officers, and over 15,000 community support officers. Exactly how many more are needed, or necessary? A far better idea would be genuine community policing, not necessarily involving the law itself but active citizenry and groups working together to nip problems in the bud themselves. That though might make too much sense, or involve trying to rebuild a sense of community that has vanished through the rise of ruthless individualism.

I’VE worked in courts and seen the justice system from both sides.

All too often the victim’s family are made to feel like second-rate citizens. Their rights come second to the rights of perpetrators.


Or as they're also known until convicted, the accused.

When Garry’s killers stood trial, the defendants came to the dock smiling and laughing. They were staring at us as if we were scum.

Nobody told them to pack it in. We were the ones told not to show emotion or call out in case it swayed the jury. Why wasn’t there a place for us to watch proceedings free from the menacing glares of yobs?


Why didn't you make a stand and ignore the advice? If you can do this now, why not then? Besides, the layout of most courts often means that those in the dock have to turn right around to stare at those in the public gallery. We could put closed off sections into courts or curtains, but why when most of the time they wouldn't be used? She perhaps does have something a point when they could watch proceedings in a side room via CCTV, but surely most also want to be in there and experience what's going on as well as watch?

I’m so angry at the way these kids play the system. The law says children of ten know what’s right and wrong — so why do we treat teenage killers like babies? They can have their mums sit with them and get refreshment breaks. No wonder court holds no fear for these kids.

Possibly because children mature at different ages, especially as we don't consider them adults until either 16 or 18. Again, they're not killers until they're convicted, and it's worth pointing out that not all of those tried for Newlove's murder were convicted. That's been conveniently forgotten.

BAD parenting is at the heart of Britain’s demise.

We live surrounded by incredible technology — yet some kids behave as if it was the dark ages.
When are lazy parents going to realise life is not a soap opera or a PlayStation game? I’ll tell you — when we strip their benefits, fine them heavily and shame them in the papers.

All of which has been shown to work so effectively in the past.

Parents need to instil respect in kids and teach them right from wrong. If kids run wild their parents should be hauled into court alongside them. And if kids get community service, the parents should have to join them.

Courts come down hard on pensioners who don’t pay council tax. So why pussyfoot around parents who don’t give a damn? And I’m sick of women playing the single mum card.


But this also risks punishing parents when they've tried their hardest. How many youths commit the odd offence, mostly receive a caution and never do anything like it again? You can imagine the parents becoming embittered if also having to attend community service meant them losing their jobs. How would impoverishing families impress upon them the need to bring their children up right, or indeed enable them to do so? It might be reasonable for repeat offences, but not in all cases. The council tax example is also ludicrous: perhaps one or two get sent to prison a year for refusing to pay, if that.

... When a head expels a violent pupil I want him or her to decide without having to explain it over and over or fill out endless forms. A head should be judge and jury without having his authority questioned. Teachers should also be free to intervene if they see a fight without the fear of losing their job.

Except the appeals process has time and again shown that decisions over expulsions are often made hastily and without thinking out the consequences. As for teachers intervening in fights, in all my years at school I never saw them being in the slightest bit afraid of breaking them up or cracking down hard on those who did.

And they should have the right to search pupils for drugs or weapons - a child who has nothing to hide won’t mind.

There's no better way to earn the respect of someone than to spend every morning either frisking them for something they haven't got or peering into their pockets using x-ray machines or metal detectors. There's a lyric that seems to sum this up: "And our schools look like prisons / and our prisons look like malls."

Finally, there's the Sun's leader:

ONE minute, Gordon Brown claims crime has fallen under Labour. The next we learn gun and knife deaths have spiralled by a chilling 20 per cent in one year.

There's nothing like selectively relying on the figures. Overall, homicides were down last year, and gun crime was also down. The quarterly figures showed a rise from 49 deaths involving guns to 59, but then the annual figures to September last year showed them falling back down to 49. Deaths involving knives were up from 219 to 258, which perhaps shows a change in weaponry or the force used, or even failings in hospitals. It's difficult to tell.

Yesterday, Justice supremo Jack Straw promised new prisons — but don’t hold your breath.

Today we discover 3,000 violent offenders are being released early because jails are full.


By a whole 18 days, and those that have re-offended have done so on a surprisingly low level. The Sun and others' demands led to the overcrowding crisis, yet all they want now is.. more prisons and ever harsher crackdowns. Just where does it all end?

Ministers seem hopelessly adrift.

But as murder victim Garry Newlove’s devastated widow Helen points out today, there is a simple remedy.

More bobbies on the beat, tough action at home, discipline in schools and real justice in court.

It comes to something when a bereaved wife and mum can come up with a better cure for crime than our cops and politicians.


Except it's the same cure that's been tried for over a decade and which in their opinion has so egregiously failed.

Where is the liberal response to this sabre-rattling? Where is the politician brave enough to stand up and say, yes, there are problems in certain areas, just as there always has been and always doubtless will be but that we'll try as hard as possible to try to change? That the the police, good as they are and as hard as they work, cannot be everywhere at once? Where despite populists and opportunists claiming that Britain is either broken or a failing society, by most accounts we're doing quite well, and up until recently, the middle classes, unlike the poor and vulnerable, have never had it so good? Or indeed, to end all taboos and stand up to a bereaved person and tell them that grief or anger is never a good motive for change and that their solutions are not necessarily the best ones? The Liberal Democrats have said they'll oppose any return to the "sus laws", but where are they or indeed anyone else with different solutions or suggestions that don't involve either the military, the birch, a "rebalancing" of the criminal justice system or ever more prison spaces? It's time that the narrative was changed and that the needle was taken off the broken record.

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2/01/2008 08:55:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, January 17, 2008 

The political tyranny of grief.

The tyranny of the tearful, grieving left behind seems to be an ever growing constant on both our TV screens and newspapers. The wife of the fallen soldier demands that the MoD and government do more to stop what happened to their partner happening again, even if it was an understandable accident; the parents of the missing child travel the globe warning of the dangers of strangers, even when they themselves have been by no means cleared of personal involvement; the parent of the murdered school-teacher urges the government to ban "extreme pornography"; and now we have the widow of the brave have-a-go hero setting out a list of everything that she thinks is wrong with society, and everyone is expected to ably nod along, wring their hands, comment that it really is appalling, or demand instant ever more draconian crackdowns, usually for their own short-term political gain.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not impugning on the right of those dealt the harshest blow that life can throw at them from pouring out their hearts at the injustice of it all; in fact, I'd encourage it. Better to let it out than to bottle it up. You can't fail to be disgusted at Garry Newlove's death, a man who had survived cancer being taken from his family at the feet of the local hoodlums, who deserve everything that they have coming to them, hopefully a sentence that will mean they'll at least be middle-aged before they're released from prison. His wife's eloquent statement, even if I disagree with large parts of it, took courage to both write and read out in front of the country's media.

The best policies on crime and punishment, or indeed on everything are however reached in the cold light of day, not motivated by vengeance or to buy off campaigning newspapers or individuals. The very last thing that should be indulged is knee-jerk reactions that aim towards ever harsher penalties, but rather focus on what works; outrage and apoplexy, along with the momentum that a tragedy provides a person with, have worked to huge disadvantage in the past. You only have to examine the dangerous dogs legislation or the video nasties farce to see what moral panics bring about.

Such rationality however can never stand up to emotion. The Sun's headline to one of its reports is "Get this evil off our streets". Its leader, which I'll return to later, is at least not as demanding of change as it was in the aftermath of the murder of Rhys Jones last summer. Easy answers, such as David Davis's statement today for zero tolerance, which would not have stopped the murder of Newlove even if it had of been in operation, typically miss the point and would only further stigmatise those who get in trouble once and where the shock of being caught is enough to stop from them committing any further crimes. The Tories' complete lack of any real alternative, only claiming that there is a broken society which Thatcherism and its continuation under Blair have done the most to create, and their promotion of bribes through tax cuts which would only help already married middle-class couples show the continuing failure for the party to come to terms with modern Britain. How school discipline could possibly be blamed when all three of those convicted had already left is also a moot point.

Helen Newlove's analysis and diagnosis also shouldn't be above criticism. She says that "[youths] should not be allowed to congregate on street corners", but the only solution she offers is the army or boot camp. One would think the very last thing we wanted to do with bored violent young people is introduce them to an organisation where they're trained to be even more violent, but such logic seems to go out the window in such circumstances. The solution appears to be for the young to be seen and not heard, or out of sight and out of mind. As long as they're off the streets and not scaring the adults, who cares? She talks about the government needing to put "into place an effective deterrent", but just what sort of punishment will make a young person who has spent the whole day drinking think twice before attacking a man who's challenged his authority? There simply isn't one. What can the government do when someone over the legal drinking age is only exercising his right to purchase alcohol? It's their responsibility, not the person who sells it to them.

This isn't defeatist, but does anyone really have an answer to how we can prevent the above without intervening in society in such ways that are neither necessary or likely to even have that much of an effect? Some of the suggestions are the equivalent of stating that we either need a policeman on every corner or a CCTV camera equivalent that recognises offenders and is ready to bark out orders; how else are we supposed to keep tabs on every single person that's out on bail that just might go on to kick someone to death? How are we supposed to change a drinking culture of getting smashed with all the side-effects that entails when that's exactly what the structure of the working week and phony individualism encourages? Why should we surprised that the young feel embittered and disenfranchised when the illusion of meritocracy which New Labour bases itself on is so exposed in the schools they often leave with such low aspirations?

In fact, this whole case leaves the typical blanket recommendations floundering. One of those convicted, Stephen Sorton, had nine GCSEs and was at college studying mechanics. It defies both casual prejudices and the typical assumptions, which is precisely why it's completely wrong to turn to them out of either type or comfort. Even so, it's still apparent that the young need somewhere to go more than ever, but at the same time also want to be left alone. Youth clubs and organisations are one thing, but they've never going to stop them from congregating and potentially intimidating others even if they don't mean any harm. Labour's anti-social behaviour legislation has given the police just the powers to move them on even if they're not doing anything wrong, just the sort of thing that makes teenagers respect their elders. Again, when cases such as these emerge and get blanket coverage, all of those who think they're in a similar boat feel threatened, and the constant scaremongering about "yobs" or "hoodies" only encourages fear and mutual mistrust.

Also typically missing the point is to blame those who are only attempting to do their jobs, as the Sun leader does:

Garry, a devoted husband and father, had repeatedly called on police to act against local vandals and hooligans.

They failed to do their job.

I'd say that they did everything they could: you can't do much more than arrest one of them and charge them with assault, and confiscating their alcohol. Unless they're in a special "no-drinking zone" and aren't disorderly, what else are they supposed to do?

So did the judge who set free killer cop Gary Weddell.

Having hanged his wife, Weddell last week blasted her mother and himself to death.


Surely just as much blame has to lie with his brother, who put up £200,000 bail and then failed to keep the tabs on him that he promised he would. That Weddell was a police officer and had a motive for murdering his wife (who had been having an affair and told him she wanted a divorce) and therefore didn't appear to be a threat to anyone else must also be considered.

A common theme can be found in all three cases — a reluctance to put dangerous people behind bars.

Prisons and police cells are so full of violent criminals that known villains are allowed bail.

And innocent members of the public are paying for that with their lives.


There lies the inherent contradiction - the prisons aren't full of violent criminals, they're full of the mentally ill and those who shouldn't be there, as well as the violent. The Sun's constant hardline is partially responsible for just that, and yet it now in effect demands all those charged with assault are kept in custody when such a policy would be complete lunacy and cost an extortionate amount for such a small possible benefit. Besides, those charged with assault have never been kept in custody regardless of the prison spaces available; it's just the Scum as usual conflating something with its own prejudices.

Put simply, we are never going to prevent every such tragic murder. There always have and always will be hotheaded young out of their heads and suitably inclined to beat up an easy target. Without taking a step back when such strong emotions and feelings inevitably manifest themselves in the aftermath, we'll be forever putting right the mistakes from the last knee-jerk. Reacting to each one as if it must be the latest to change us irrevocably is not just daft, it's dangerous.

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1/17/2008 09:31:00 PM | | | links to this post

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