The Story of Childhood

by Libby Brooks

  He is unapologetic in tracing the difficulties African-Caribbean boys have at school back to a ‘parental crisis’ in the community. Forty-eight per cent of African-Caribbean families are headed by a single parent, compared with 22 per cent of the general population. ‘What’s clear is that our reliance on raising males in situations where they are predominantly taken care of by single females is problematic. It can be done but the question is how can you do it successfully, and how do we bring black men back into the role of nurturing their children?’

  Others have argued that institutional racism in the education and criminal justice systems holds black boys back. For Gus John, it is young people’s disconnection from their collective past that renders them vulnerable. ‘There’s much less emphasis on identity and being competent by virtue of knowing who you are and where you’re from. In the seventies there was a confidence in the community that filtered across from the American civil rights movement. Nowadays young people have no idea about that period. For mixed-race children that’s even more of an issue. They’re at the sharpest end of that dislocation from history.’

  Ashley thinks it’s true that white kids think black kids are harder. ‘If you’re in a group of black kids, and you meet a group of white kids, there’s more chance they would run off ’cos they think black kids come with knives and stuff.’ His friends have told him: ‘Never let a white boy take the piss out of you, never let a white boy punch you in the face.’ It’s not like racism; it’s the way they’ve been brought up. The way Ashley was brought up, it was never let anyone punch you in the face.

  So it was a concatenation of events that left Ashley walking the streets: his parents splitting up, his operation, the attitude of teachers, his own attitude changing. And it was around then that he started smoking skunk. At first he smoked to be in the gang, to show off and that, but then he got addicted. He’s seen skunk turn some people mad, but he can handle it. Crack is ten times stronger. ‘If I don’t smoke weed my body just feels like shit.’ He says he’s trying to stop.

  His mum hasn’t been keeping so well these past few weeks. He’s been checking on her a lot. She has her good days and her bad days. He loves his mum, but she can’t get about too tough no more, not like when they were younger and she used to take them to the seaside. Now she takes twelve tablets three times a day. She’s always telling Ashley to get an education, so that’s why he’s trying to sort his life out.

  ‘I want to get a better education, I want to get a job, nice pay, something that I like doing, I want to settle down, have a wife. A couple of people have asked me what I want to do for a job, I don’t really know. But when I do know, it should be good,’ he says gently.

  Ashley’s dad came over from Barbados when he was sixteen or seventeen. He was working on the buses, but now he’s retired because he injured his knee. When he met his mum, she was married to his other brothers’ dad, then they separated, and she got with his dad, but they didn’t get married.

  When Ashley’s parents first split up, his mum didn’t want him to see his father, but he sees him most days now on the estate. A father can teach a son to be a man. If you’ve got to teach yourself to be a man it’s harder. ‘My mum’s sick and my dad wasn’t there to watch us when we was younger, so we’d just go out on our own. He’s your dad, yeah, he’s there for a reason. He can teach you things your mum can’t. When my dad was around I didn’t really get in trouble ’cos I knew I’d get beat.’

  He thinks that people should be allowed to hit their kids, but it depends on the way you’re hitting them. ‘If you just use your hand and you slap them on their arse or their leg, just once or twice to show them it’s wrong, but if you’re hitting them with belts and things …’

  There are a good many reasons to rue the glut of reality parenting programmes on our screens. But at least they serve to illuminate an unpalatable reality of many children’s lives. I have lost count of the number of times that a toddler has been woefully tendered to a telly nanny as unfathomably violent, only for footage of their home life to reveal that they are regularly on the receiving end of violence themselves.

  Despite previous condemnation by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, in the autumn of 2004 the government failed to support an outright ban on smacking in the latest Children Act, leaving open the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’. The lacuna on smacking is perhaps the most vivid exemplar of this country’s failure to treat all children with the respect they are due. Although over the past generation public opinion has shifted to favour a ban, the significance of the legal position cannot be underestimated.

  Just as rape within marriage used to be legally sanctioned because a wife was her husband’s property, so smacking maintains children’s position as chattels. The underlying message is that adults should not be expected to respond to children with the basic tolerance and self-control they are expected to employ towards people their own age. It reinforces children’s lack of rights in the most primitive of ways.

  Save the Children has noted that in Sweden, where smacking was banned over a decade ago, child deaths at the hands of their parents fell to virtually zero. In the UK, that figure averages one death a week. As Rabbi Julia Neuberger says in her book The Moral State We’re In, ‘It really makes no sense to allow parents to hit their children when we remain shocked by the deaths of children from violence at the hands of their parents.’ Until it is enshrined in law that it is never right to hit a child, one wonders how Britain can ever consider itself a genuinely child-friendly country.

  Ashley has friends who are already fathers, but he wouldn’t like to have a baby until he’s at least in his twenties. He’s not old enough now, and he hasn’t got money to buy nappies. That’s what he’s trying to do, sort his life out, and then think about those things. He’s got a proper girlfriend now, been going out a couple of months. He can talk to her about his worries.

  Ashley goes on to offer his male perspective on adolescent sexual politics. Girls can be either wifies or hos, he explains carefully. ‘Most people got their ho. When you’re with your friends, what’s mine is yours, I’ll share everything with you. I’ll share hos with you except for my wifie, ’cos that’s my girlfriend, and you could go out with her for time, or have a baby with her. But hos, they’re just girls that get sexed out for the fun of it.’

  ‘When you meet a girl you think, is she a ho or could she be wifie material? Because there’s hundreds of us, and if a girl gets about it gets around to the boys, so it’s easy to find out what a girl’s like, how many people they’ve slept with, and that’s how you can decide. A girl that has sex with loads of people, people call them prostitutes or slags or whatever.’

  Ashley believes it’s different for girls, though unlike Laura (in the earlier chapter), he tends towards the anatomical rather than the sociological for explanation. ‘Just remember, yeah, it’s worse for girls ’cos they’ve got different things inside. They’ve gotta be more hygienic. With boys, if they use condoms, there ain’t really nothing for them to do after, so they could have sex three times in a night, but with girls they’ve got to jump in the shower. If they don’t do that, they’re just nasty.’ He tuts fastidiously. He’s never, he adds firmly, had a problem with girls.

  The first time Ashley had sex, he was ten. But when he proper had sex he was thirteen, thirteen and a half. There’s a difference because when you’re little you haven’t got come, so you can just keep going, but when you’ve got come you’ve got to stop. Those early times he wasn’t really thinking about it. ‘I just wanted to do bare stuff, but when you get older you think: I’ve done that, I’ve done that, I’ve done that. I stole cars, I’ve had sex, look where it’s got me. If you think about things before you do it, it could come out better.’

  A week later, Ashley arrives stoned. It’s lunch-time. His lids are heavy, but his movements are fidgety. He has to work to stop his mouth falling into a lazy grin. He is rambling about the fakeness of the rap star Fifty Cent with the frien
d he’s arrived with. She wanders off and he gradually straightens out.

  His mum’s been feeling a bit better. ‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ he says defensively. ‘I don’t think like that. What I think is that my mum’s healthy, even though she ain’t, she’s really sick. I like to think she’s healthy, I’m checking up on her, she’s got all the help she needs, she just lives until her life’s done. Everyone’s gonna die, but I don’t hope or talk about what’s going to happen. I just wait till it comes.’ This weekend, he wants to take her to the seaside with his brother. She’s got a car on disability so she can drive them there.

  He doesn’t spend time at friends’ houses, though he might drop in to pick up some clothes, because he hasn’t got a lot and they’re everywhere. But he’s the kind of person that doesn’t like to be in one place. There’s only certain houses he can stay where he feels safe, like his mum’s. ‘When I’m there I’ve got my manners. I’m not saying when I go out I ain’t got manners, but when I’m on road I’ve got different manners. If people look at you the wrong way you’ve got a different attitude.’

  Ashley says that nobody’s safe. If he’s in his area then he’s all right. Nobody troubles him, because everybody knows him. But if he goes into other areas there might be trouble, like fighting, or someone might try to rob you because you’re not from there. He’s never been knocked out. One time, he got chased by a gang of twenty white kids, with sticks. ‘All I’m hearing is, “Come here you black bastard, we’re gonna fucking cut your balls off, you this and that”; pure racism.’ He just ran.

  He stopped carrying his knife because he kept on getting arrested, and if you’ve got a knife it’s worse. He thinks there’s a big gun problem in Britain. It’s not mostly street gangs, it’s people in their twenties. Street gangs are made up of people his age, up to eighteen or nineteen. They’re 80 per cent black kids, and the rest are the roughest white kids, the ones that won’t have it from nobody. Gangs are just about where you grow up. When those teenagers get older, it depends what happens next. ‘They either move on or they move up in the game. They get bigger, the money starts rolling for what they’re doing, shotting [drug dealing], or whatever.’

  There remains a lack of authoritative research to indicate whether youth crime is rising or falling. While it is true that adolescents do commit a disproportionate number of crimes compared with adults, the trend is for them to grow out of it as they get older. And it is still the case that most young people do not get involved with the criminal justice system, while the majority of those that do commit non-violent offences.

  But a glance through the newspapers any given morning would suggest otherwise. Children, in particular adolescent males, have faced growing demonisation since the beginning of the 1990s. Young people’s appearances in the media are now almost entirely related to criminality – be it deliberate commission, or ‘status offences’, like underage sex or alcohol and drug use. A select few remain ‘angels’, but they must be chronically ill, heinously abused or – ideally – dead to warrant that epithet.

  Bob Franklin, an expert in media coverage of childhood, believes that the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables for the murder of James Bulger in 1993 marked a crucial watershed. He argues that three responses were triggered by the vindictive media frenzy that followed their conviction: ‘First, the earlier romanticised social construct of children as innocent “angels” was challenged, toppled and reconstructed in more sinister guise.’ Thompson and Venables were described as ‘fiends’, ‘devils’ and ‘little bastards’, language that was soon extended to other, lesser, child offenders.

  ‘Second, the reporting of the Bulger case provided additional impetus to the existing media-generated moral panic about children and crime,’ says Franklin. ‘Finally, the Bulger case seemed to legitimise the increasingly authoritarian criminal justice policies of successive governments.’

  He traces the shift in public perception and policy reaction to the present day: ‘At the beginning of the 1990s, in the wake of widely publicised inquiries into the deaths of a number of young children at the hands of their parents, as well as events at Cleveland, children were victims and society was shaping policies designed to protect them. [Now], society is designing policies to protect the community from unruly, criminal and antisocial children.’

  There is much to be said for the presentation of children as individuals of average virtue, rather than wholly blameless victims. But the media pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme, caricaturing ‘teens from hell’ and ‘imps of Satan’.

  In 2004, Shape, a forum on youth crime organised by young people, conducted a detailed analysis of the print media over a three-month period. It found that most vitriol was directed at white, working-class boys. In crime reports, young people were described as ‘thugs’, ‘yobs’ or ‘louts’ far more frequently than as ‘young offenders’. The voice of the child who had committed the offence was seldom included, unless to emphasise their lack of remorse.

  The Shape report found that, in the majority of coverage, no space was given to mitigating factors which might have made children more vulnerable to offending. This is despite the fact that, according to recent figures, 40 per cent of young people entering care with no previous cautions or criminal convictions had one within six months of living in a children’s home, while 54 per cent of those referred to youth offending teams have experienced the death of a close friend or family member in the past two years, and the majority of young male offenders have been excluded from school.

  Across the tabloid press, Shape identified as a central theme the demand that the criminal justice system be tougher on children in trouble. Particular derision was reserved for the use of ‘soft’ community sentences, and the ‘pampered’ conditions inside young offenders’ institutions.

  Orchestration by the media of public unease is hardly a new phenomenon. Nor does describing something a ‘moral panic’ imply that public anxieties are entirely spurious. But policy responses based on a few exceptional and highly reported cases can only lead to injustice when they are applied to the mass.

  Following the Bulger trial, the Conservative Prime Minister John Major launched his ‘Back to Basics’ crusade, insisting that society should ‘condemn a little more and understand a little less’. The welfare-based approach to youth crime, with its emphasis on diversion, decriminalisation and decarceration, was effectively abandoned. Michael Howard, then newly appointed as Home Secretary, introduced privately run secure training centres for 12–14-year-olds, based on US military-style ‘boot camps’, and increased the maximum sentence of detention for 15–17-year-olds. Between 1993 and 1998, the number of imprisoned teenagers doubled.

  After Labour’s landslide victory in 1997, Howard’s successor, Jack Straw, was quick to condemn the ‘excuse culture’ of youth justice. The subsequent 1998 Crime and Disorder Act overhauled the system, most significantly abolishing the ancient presumption of doli incapax, which held that the prosecution must prove that a child under fourteen was aware that their actions were seriously wrong, rather than simply naughty.

  The abolition of doli incapax was in direct contravention of a UN recommendation that the UK give serious consideration to raising the age of criminal responsibility and bringing the country into line with the rest of Europe. Britain’s unusually low age of criminal responsibility means that children from the age of ten are now treated as having the same criminal intent and maturity as an adult. It would seem that the only time we’re prepared to treat children equally to adults is when we’re punishing the most vulnerable amongst them.

  Another crucial element of the 1998 act was the introduction of new powers, including child-safety orders, local child-curfews and an early version of the antisocial behaviour order, that did not require the prosecution or even the commission of a criminal offence. As criminologist John Muncie notes in an essay on children’s rights and youth justice, this programme of early intervention – which has become increasingly autho
ritarian in recent years – is couched in the language of crime prevention and child protection, and so ‘erosion of civil liberty is presented as an enabling, new opportunity’.

  But it is a programme above all driven by coercive powers, he writes. ‘Civil orders are backed up by stringent criminal sanctions. Similarly, by equating “disorder” with crime it significantly broadens the reach of criminal justice to take in those below the age of criminal responsibility and the non-criminal as well as the known offender. Above all the number of young offenders incarcerated has continued to grow.’

  Under New Labour, policy has continued to emphasise the containment and control of young people. The UK incarcerates more of its children than any other country in Europe. Between 2000 and 2005, twenty-seven children killed themselves in custody, some of whom were being kept in adult prisons, while young offenders institutions are rife with bullying and self-harm.

  There is ample evidence that this policy does not work. Eighty-four per cent of juveniles released from prison in 1997 were reconvicted within two years. But the addiction to custody shows no sign of abating.

  Youth justice policy has historically been manipulated for short-term political expediency and electoral gain. But it is the antisocial behaviour order that has proved the nadir of this tendency.

  In June 2005, the report by the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gils-Robles – condemning the British government’s record on children’s rights – was particularly damning of the government’s ‘ASBO-mania’, stating that ‘it is difficult to avoid the impression that the ASBO is being touted as a miracle cure for urban nuisance’. At the time, almost half of all antisocial behaviour orders were being served on juveniles.

  Gils-Robles was especially concerned about the broad definition of anti-social behaviour (anything likely to cause ‘harm, alarm or distress’), the ease with which ASBOs were obtained, and the ‘naming and shaming’ of children. This civil order, which relies on a lower standard of proof and can be granted on hearsay evidence, reverses for the first time in almost a century the presumption of anonymity for children appearing in court. A juvenile convicted of murder cannot be identified, while one exhorted not to swear in the street may find his local council posting cards bearing his image and details of his ASBO conditions through his neighbours’ letter-boxes.