Press Releases

‘ASBO culture’ making kids criminals

Email this to a friend Print Delicious Digg Facebook Reddit

10 December 2007

The use of Anti Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) on children needs to be reviewed according to new research from the Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) to be published next month. The report argues that ‘ASBO culture’ can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and that ASBOs for young people should be made more effective.

The call comes ahead the widely anticipated Children’s Plan, expected to be published by the Government this week. One in four of all young people aged 10 to 25 (almost 3 million young people) offend each year. Of those, more than half reported committing a serious offence(including assault with injury, theft from a person, theft of a vehicle, burglary, selling Class A drugs or robbery).

The report is critical of the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility to 10. It will argue that:

ASBOs should not be used on children younger than 12 unless accompanied by family or parenting orders.
All children, including older children (13-18), should be assessed before being given an ASBO
ASBOs for children should be scaled back to between six months and two years, instead of the current two to ten years
Anti-Social Behaviour legislation should be reformed, so that the most-at risk parents are targeted with tailored support and services to divert their children from crime.

ippr’s report will show that a lack of adult supervision of children and teenagers in communities where adults do not know their neighbours and where teenage groups go unsupervised on the street has increased the risk of youth crime and violence. The report recommends:

New supervision in play areas (like new style ‘Play Rangers’ or traditional Park Keepers)
More welfare teams of professionals (like social workers, behavioural psychologists and family welfare officers) located in schools where children are at greatest risk of underachievement and anti-social behaviour
New staffed adventure playgrounds in disadvantaged areas.

ippr Co-Director, Carey Oppenheim, said:

“The problem with ‘kids these days’ is the way adults are treating them. Britain is in danger of becoming a nation fearful of its young people: a nation of paedophobics. We need policy which reminds adults – parents and non-parents alike – that it is their responsibility to set norms of behaviour and to maintain them through positive and authoritative interaction with young people.”

ippr’s report will argue that children need adults who give them:

Consistency in rules and discipline
Warmth and interest
Stability and security
Authority without hostility.

ippr’s report identifies beneficial activities which combine skills-acquisition, hierarchy, interaction with adult authority figures and constructive activity, including:

Sport, drama or arts based activities at which attendance is regular and consistent, skills are acquired and a final goal is worked towards
Uniformed activities such as Scouts, Guides Martial Arts and Cadets where skills are acquired and rewarded through badges, belts and ranks.

But ippr’s report warns that activities which are associated with offending include:

Regular, unsupervised socialising with peers in disadvantaged, high-crime areas
Regularly socialising with older antisocial teenagers, without adult supervision.

The report warns that the following approaches can be counter productive and actually encourage youth crime:

Early or isolated use of ASBOs
Juvenile curfews
Boot camps.

	per cent juvenile of total prison population	total prison population	number of juvenile prisoners	total population of country	juvenile prisoners per 1, 000
Canada	6.20 per cent	34,244	2 123	33,390,141	6.35
Germany	4.50 per cent	76,629	3 448	82,400,996	4.18
UK	3.00 per cent	80,229	2 407	60,776,238	3.96
France	1.10 per cent	52,009	572	63,713,926	0.89
Italy	0.70 per cent	39,348	275	58,147,733	0.47
USA	0.40 per cent	2,245,189	8 981	301,139,947	2.98
Norway	0.30 per cent	3,533	11	4,627,926	0.23
Sweden	0.20 per cent	7,175	14	9,031,088	0.15
Denmark	0.10 per cent	3,626	4	5,468,120	0.07
Finland	0.10 per cent	3,595	4	5,238,460	0.07

Notes to Editors

Make me a criminal, by Julia Margo, will be published by ippr in January.

Previous ippr research shows that stable and consistent parenting is more important than whether parents are married when predicting whether children will succeed in life. Freedom’s Orphans: Raising Youth in a Changing World showed that having a warm and loving relationship with a parent can override the impact of living in a lone-parent family, but this depends on whether that lone parent is able to spend ‘quality time’ with the child. It showed that children who spend less quality time with their parents are more likely to commit antisocial behaviour than others.

The report argued that it is not realistic for Government to attempt to substantially lower rates of divorce, cohabitation or single-parenthood because they are socially and culturally driven trends. It also dismissed public policies that focus support on traditional family types, arguing that such approaches divert resources from those most in need and are unnecessarily morally prescriptive. It says financial incentives are unlikely to work: the introduction of the Married Couples Allowance in the 1970s famously coincided with the biggest increases in divorce of the last century.

ippr’s analysis shows that marital status matters much less than many other factors in determining whether couples stay together. It shows the richest 20 per cent of cohabiting couples are more likely to stay together than the poorest 20 per cent of married couples.

Freedom’s Orphans: Raising Youth in a Changing World is available from www.ippr.org

Contact:

Richard Darlington, ippr media manager, 020 7470 6177 / 07738 320 645 / r.darlington@ippr.org

Matt Jackson, ippr senior media officer, 020 7339 0007 / 07753 719 289 / m.jackson@ippr.org