It’s a rare sight these days, children playing in the street. But a couple of months ago two ten-year-olds made the most of their newly tarmaced street in Thames Ditton, Surrey. They rollerskated on it. Their friends joined in. One of the local mothers said she “met a whole load of new neighbours - a real community spirit has come out of this”.
Then, without so much as a knock on the door, the local police delivered a leaflet claiming complaints had been received and “playing or other sports in the street is a criminal offence particularly where the activity has caused (people) annoyance, alarm or distress”.
Happily, on this occasion in the face of local uproar, the police changed their stance but it was a sign of things to come. New laws that are before parliament now will make it very difficult for teenagers just to be teenagers, doing normal teenage stuff, like ‘hanging out’. According to the new laws, if a policeman or someone from the local council judges that a 10 year old is “capable of causing nuisance and annoyance” the teenager can have a legal injunction slapped on them. This could ban them from skateboarding in the street or restrict where they can go. If a 14 year old flouts or forgets these rules, he or she could end up in prison for three months.
Already children spend much more time indoors or in cars than we did at the same age. Youth clubs are being closed thanks to cuts. Distrust prevails between many teenagers and the police and, too often, older people distrust teenagers too. So I’m worried that this new law will make matters worse. Teenagers want to hang around in groups, shout and yell a bit sometimes, and play games. But if the police gain Draconian new powers to outlaw normal behaviour, the message we send to teenagers is ‘be afraid of being yourself’. Anyone with teenage children knows how insidious this would be to happy development.
Some teenagers do go too far and make life pretty hellish for their neighbours. Playing loud music late at night, scribbling graffiti on walls and knocking on doors again and again can really annoy. But the answer isn’t to slap an injunction on the perpetrators and so push them into the legal system at a young age. Police, parents and local residents need to get teenagers to understand that what seems harmless to them, is blighting someone else’s life. I don’t think the children in Thames Ditton were in that league - but surely a more sensible approach would have been for police to have a quiet word, or mediated between the complainers and the kids.
The new laws are a rehash of the old ASBOs, but the new definition of anti-social behaviour is much wider. New Labour brought in ASBOs as a measure to prevent troublesome behaviour. Originally they were not supposed to be applied to under 18 year olds. But they were introduced in 1998 applying to children as young as 10 and 40% of all ASBOs have been put on children.
They don’t seem to have worked – over two thirds of the ASBOs imposed on children have been disobeyed. This is hardly surprising since ASBOs enforced strict and quite ridiculous rules. A 13 year old from South Shields was banned from riding his bike and seeing four of his best friends for two years, four children in Swansea were threatened with ASBOs for aggressive snowballing, and a 15 year old from Cambridge received an ASBO for persistent “hedge hopping”. Hundreds of children have been imprisoned for breaching their ASBOs, leaving them more likely to be drawn into committing serious crime. But ASBOs were beginning to wane in popularity as police found better ways to deal with the few teenagers who were being genuinely anti-social.
These new laws are likely to open the floodgates to all those who find teenagers “annoying” and want them shut away. I and others are campaigning hard to stop this new law coming in. If you don’t like the proposed law either, talk to your MP, write to your local newspaper or just spread the word.