Demonisation

 

 

 

 

 

Youth culture and crime: what can we learn from history?

 

In the first of a new series in partnership with History & Policy, we ask historians to teach us the lessons of the past. Dr Abigail Wills explains what history tells us about antisocial youth in Britain

 

What is the problem today?
There is a widespread belief that antisocial behaviour among children and young people has reached a historically unprecedented high. A recent study by Cambridge University identified intense fears in communities across the UK about “the decline in mutual respect and social cohesion, the dominance of anti-social behaviour, materialism and the cult of celebrity”.

 

Newspapers highlight daily the menace posed by “hoodies” and gangs, and the increasingly creative range of measures implemented against them – from ASBOs to devices emitting high-pitched sounds designed to deter teenagers from gathering in public places.

 

Is this new?
The historian Geoffrey Pearson quotes a 60-year-old named Charlotte Kirkman, who lamented that, “I think morals are getting much worse... There were no such girls in my time as there are now. When I was four or five and twenty my mother would have knocked me down if I had spoken improperly to her”. Kirkman was speaking in 1843, as part of an investigation into the bad behaviour of contemporary youth. Lord Ashley, speaking in the House of Commons in the same year, argued that “the morals of the children are tenfold worse than formerly”.

 

Past generations, then, have been just as convinced as we are that the “youth of today” were misbehaving more than ever before. Pearson has suggested that such fears about youth are a way of expressing more general uncertainties about social change and recur with each generation.

 

So are we wrong to believe things have got worse?
Notwithstanding the above, the criminal statistics – first collected systematically in Britain from around 1900 – might appear to suggest that the situation has deteriorated over the last 70 or 80 years. After a relatively stable period between 1900 and 1930, rates of juvenile crime began increasing in the 1930s. Apart from a slight decrease following the Second World War, youth crime figures continued on a consistent and dramatic upward course until the mid-1990s.

 

In the 1950s increasing youth crime was largely attributed to a decline in family cohesion following the war, and to increasing consumer affluence. The new youth cultures of the postwar era provided a focus for such beliefs. Particularly notable in the 1950s were the Teddy Boys; with their flamboyant dress, fondness for US cultural imports such as rock’n’roll, and rowdy public behaviour, they were seen as epitomising the new culture of greed and amorality.

 

Society looked back nostalgically to what was remembered as the more “justifiable”, poverty-fuelled crime of the pre-war era. Later decades had similar beliefs about the causes of rising youth crime, leading to successive panics about mods, rockers and hippies in the 1960s, skinheads and punks in the 1970s and 1980s, and recently ravers and “hoodies”.

 

To some extent, these fears can be seen as justified, in that it is certainly arguable that the rising ownership of consumer goods has created more opportunities for theft. However, it does not follow from this that the morals of earlier generations were necessarily higher, merely that their immorality did not take the form of the theft of consumer goods!

 

More generally, criminal statistics do not tell the whole story of youth crime. In particular, definitions of criminal behaviour change over time. One example of this is that police are increasingly becoming involved in the management of incidents that once upon a time would have remained a matter for schools and parents. In 2004, the BBC reported that a 12-year-old schoolboy was “arrested, DNA-tested, fingerprinted and formally reprimanded” after throwing a fork at a girl during a playground argument. The casual violence and petty crime of the Edwardian slums, by contrast, took place largely away from police eyes.

 

In the same way, changing recording systems also have an effect on crime statistics. It is very difficult, for example, to compare today’s computerised data collection systems with the localised, ad hoc, paper-based approach of the Edwardian age. The existence of more sophisticated recording systems tends to mean that more crime is recorded.

 

Another issue is that new forms of media, such as the internet, create new forms of misbehaviour that have high public visibility. Incidents of “happy slapping” caught on mobile phone can be distributed around the world within minutes. Such cases bring crime “into the living room” of people who may not previously have been concerned by it. This does not, however, mean that youth behaviour is worse than it used to be.

 

Overall, we need to recognise that our fear of crime has very little to do with the actual risk of falling victim to it. Youth crime rates have been falling consistently for over a decade, yet this has not affected the degree of panic felt about youth misbehaviour today.

 

What does history teach us?
We should not deny that there are issues of concern surrounding antisocial behaviour and crime committed by children. However, our faulty grasp of the history of the problem is equally if not more problematic. Harking back to a non-existent “golden age” of deference and respect for elders is not merely harmless nostalgia: it has negative consequences for the overall relationship between adults and the young, which is increasingly characterised by fear and suspicion in both directions.

 

In many ways, this climate of suspicion is greater than in past decades. The increasingly independent, confident and commercialised child and youth culture which has grown since the 1950s has gone hand-in-hand with an increasing uncertainty about the social role of young people. Earlier eras had clearer ideas about the value of the young. In Edwardian Britain, for example, discussion around children focused on their role as future citizens, workers and soldiers.

 

The eugenicist Caleb Saleeby was typical in arguing that “the history of nations is determined not on the battlefield but in the nursery”. This vision had repugnant aspects – not least the idea that working class children should be raised in part as cannon-fodder for future wars – but it also meant that the young were valued as a precious resource for the future.

 

In recent decades, the increasing notion of children as a primarily selfish “lifestyle choice” by their parents means that we no longer have a clear sense of their social value.
We need to start thinking about ways of improving adult perceptions of the young, rather than thinking up panic solutions to an imaginary cataclysm of declining morals.

 

At present, our fear of the young is creating a self-reinforcing negative spiral. As the “children’s tsar”, Sir Aynsley-Green noted in a recent speech the “demonisation and lack of empathy for young people is a major issue for England. It causes anger and alienation”. He argued that normal youth behaviour, such as gathering in public places and playing ball games, was being demonised. This climate means that our stance towards juvenile criminals now is one of the most severe for generations.

 

Indeed, the past 15 years have seen the dismantling of long-standing principles that established the lesser criminal responsibility of children as compared to adults, and attempted to ensure their welfare in the face of their greater vulnerability. Since at least the 17th century, for example, the common law has operated using the presumption that unless proven otherwise, children aged under 14 were doli incapax – incapable of knowing right from wrong. This was abolished in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act.

 

In the same way, the 1854 Reformatory and Industrial Schools Act established the principle that children and young people receiving custodial sentences should be held in dedicated facilities, and that the regime in such facilities should be reformative rather than punitive.

 

One of the founders of the system, Mary Carpenter, argued that young criminals “have been hitherto so despised, that they hardly know whether there is within them anything to be respected. Yet let them be treated with respect… and they will give a ready response”. Today, this ideal has been seriously undermined, to the extent that the vast majority of young offenders are held in conditions that differ very little from those in adult jails.

 

The United Kingdom recently came bottom in a league of 21 industrialised nations for child quality of life, leading to headlines warning that British children are “the unhappiest in the western world”. The chief executive of the Children’s Society, Bob Reitemeier, said the report was a “wake-up call to the fact that, despite being a rich country, the UK is failing children… in a number of crucial ways”.

 

This situation cannot be attributed to children’s misbehaviour; it is rather the fault of anadult society which has come to see “youth” as a harmful social category. Misplaced nostalgia for the past has dangerous consequences.

Three lessons from history
1. Each successive historical age has ardently believed that an unprecedented “crisis” in youth behaviour is taking place. We are not unique; our fears do not differ significantly from those of our predecessors.

 

2. Statistics are complex things to interpret. Rising youth crime statistics since the 1940s are the result of a whole series of factors and do not mean that youth are becoming more “immoral”.

 

3. Our treatment of young offenders is in many ways harsher than it has been in the past. This has not been successful in reducing our fear of crime; if anything, it is compounding the problem and increasing mistrust between the generations.

 

Abigail Wills is a fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford University. Her research focuses on the history of juvenile crime in Britain in the decades after the Second World War

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

'Hoodies, louts, scum': how media demonises teenagers - The Independent

 

 

 The portrayal of teenage boys as "yobs" in the media has made the boys wary of other teenagers, according to new research. Figures showmore  than half of the stories about teenage boys in national and regional newspapers in the past year (4,374 out of 8,629) were about crime. The word most commonly used to describe them was "yobs" (591 times), followed by "thugs" (254 times), "sick" (119 times) and "feral" (96 times).
Other terms often used included "hoodie", "louts", "heartless", "evil" "frightening", "scum", "monsters", "inhuman" and "threatening".
The research – commissioned by Women in Journalism – showed the best chance a teenager had of receiving sympathetic coverage was if they died.
"We found some news coverage where teen boys were described in glowing terms – 'model student', 'angel', 'altar boy' or 'every mother's perfect son'," the research concluded, "but sadly these were reserved for teenage boys who met a violent and untimely death."
At the same time a survey of nearly 1,000 teenage boys found 85 per cent believed newspapers portray them in a bad light.
They felt reality TV – with shows like The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent – portrayed them in a better light – with fewer than 20 per cent believing they were being portrayed negatively.
As a result of the negative press, 80 per cent felt adults were more wary of them now than they had been a year ago. However, the most striking finding, according to the research, was that many were now more wary of boys of their own age. "It seems the endless diet of media reports about 'yobs' and 'feral' youths is making them fearful of other teens," it said. "Nearly a third said they are 'always' or 'ofte n' wary of teenage boys they don't know.
"The most popular reason for their wariness, cited by 51 per cent was 'media stories about teen boys' compared with 40 per cent who said their wariness was based on their own or friends' bad experiences of other teens."
Nearly three-quarters said they had changed their behaviour as a result of this wariness. The most common change, cited by 45.7 per cent, was boys avoiding places where teenagers hung around. Others included dressing differently (14.2 per cent), and changing who they were seen with (11.9 per cent). "For much of the press, there is no such thing as a good news story about teenagers," it added.

 

 

 "Stories about sport and entertainment, which might have balanced other negative coverage, also took a critical line. Only 16 per cent of stories about teens and entertainment were positive: only 24 per cent about teens and sport were positive."
The research found that – for all the coverage of teenage issues – the boys' voices themselves were rarely heard in newspapers. Fewer than one in 10 articles about young people actually quoted young people or included their perspectives in the debate.
Fiona Bawden, the WiJ committee m ember who presented the research at the British Library, said: "When a photo of a group of perfectly ordinary lads standing around wearing hooded tops has become visual shorthand for urban menace, or even the breakdown of society, it's clear teenage boys have a serious image problem.
"The teen boys' 'brand' has become toxic. Media coverage of boys is unrelentingly negative, focusing almost entirely on them as victims or perpetrators of crime – and our research shows that the media is helping make teenage boys fearful of each other."

 

 

 

 

 

Young People in the Media – www.headsup.org.uk

 

 

There's plenty been written on how the media portrays politics. But what about the media representation of young people and their involvement in politics. Stovin Hayter is the editor of Children Now magazine. H ere he talks about the damage the press is capable of when it comes public perceptions of young people...
You could pick up a local newspaper in almost any part of Britain and see articles that use headlines and terms like:

 

 

"... unruly youths... gangs of children as young as 13... terrorising people... youths running wild..."- Edinburgh Evening News

 

 

"Like a plague, the city seems to be in the grip of lawlessness among the young."- Peterborough Evening Telegraph

 

 

From the tone of these reports you would think that the behaviour they hype up is some new threat to society. They paint a picture of mayhem, fear on the street, and a generation out of control. The word 'youth', in the press, seems to have become synonymous with street crime and antisocial behaviour.
Most of those headlines are about real incidents where particular young people have behaved appallingly, and in many cases have mad e the lives of their neighbours a misery. But from the language and tone used, you would think that teenagers were responsible for the majority of crime and that young people were completely out of control. In fact only 1.8 per cent of 10- to 17-year-olds were convicted or cautioned in 2001. For 21- to 25-year-olds it was 2.4 percent, and for 26- to 30-year-olds it was 2.1 percent.
The sense of moral panic that is fuelled by the Press, the shrill demands that "something must be done", influences politicians and people who vote. It fuels public fear. Many people are afraid of young people in hoodies. Teenagers hanging around a bus stop are "threatening" simply because they are there.
Eventually, such hysteria feeds into public policy, such as the recently enacted antisocial behaviour law (which many of you discussed in an earlier HeadsUp Forum). That’s the one under which you can now be fined for missing school, or that allows councils to declare zones where curfews can be imposed, and where police will have powers to break up groups of young people if their presence is perceived as threatening. These measures will affect all young people, not just the troublemakers.

 

 

 

 

 

'Young People and Crime: Busting the Myths’ – Jenny Jones

 

 

"71% of media stories on the young are negative. Boris Johnson rode to power on the back of rising fear of youth violence embodied by those stories - a fear he stoked with paranoid rhetoric on soaring gang-membership and rising knife crime. This report shows that rhetoric to be baseless. Youth violence fell by over 10% between May 2007 and April 2008, while just 2000 of London's 1.72 million young people are involved with gangs.""That is still unacceptably high, but using young people as a political punchbag clearly won't help. Teenagers simply feel alienated from a society which responds to their problems with indiscriminate tools such as knife-arches which make everyone a suspect. That alienation and suspicion ultimately undermines real efforts to tackle crime.

 

 

 

 

 

Are British children being demonized by society? Helium.com

 

 

In a recent report to be presented to the United NationsCommittee on the Rights of the Child it is asserted that attitudes to children in the United Kingdom have hardened and that too many children are being criminalised. This is particularly apparent when examining recent newspaper headlines which suggest that there is a knife-crime epidemic amongst young people. There have been a number of high-profile murders as a result of stabbings perpetrated by youths against other youths. The government wants to bring down the age at which youths can be prosecuted for possessing a knife from 18 to 16, thus potentially criminalising more youths without sufficiently dealing with why teenagers are carrying knives in the first place.

This is only one aspect of how negatively young people are regarded in this country. How rare it is to read a news article about young people which does not concentrate on issues such as binge-drinking, drugs, under-age sex, and anti-social behaviour. The trouble is one bad' youth leads to a whole group being tarnished and labelled, as can be seen in David Cameron's proclamation that the hoodie represents all that's wrong about youth culture in Britain today'. Not all hoodie-wearers are thugs, but clearly in his mind the association between misbehaving youths and this particular article of clothing is symbolic of a gang mentality. Indeed, the decision by some businesses to employ mosquito devices, which release a high-pitch noise that can only be detected by under-25s, to discourage groups of young people from hanging around' their establishments was NOT met with a public outcry. [imagine if that was done to any other social group]. In fact there seemed to be a general acceptance of such actions, and consequently the premise that groups of young people pose a risk.

Government policies have not helped the situation; Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) are indicative of the demonisation of childr en. They stipulate what activities the offender should not engage in. However, teenagers are often contrary and tend to do the opposite of what is demanded of them. In fact, where are the parents?! If the terms of an ASBO are breached, there is the possibility of being convicted and imprisonment, and so there we have an ASBO generation'. Often those who look at ASBOs as a badge of honour' live in deprived areas in an unstable family environment.

The British media seem to take a perverse pleasure in propagating a negative view of young people in the U.K. Perhaps it has always been the case; in the 1960s there was a furore over the antics of the mods and rockers just as in the 1970s over the anarchy of punks. However, British children are some of the unhappiest in the W estern world according to a recent U.N. report, so obviously this negativity is having an impact on them. Is there not a danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby children labelled as bad' do their best to live up' to that label? On the whole, British children are no worse nor any better than children in other countries; of course there are those that will misbehave, but locking them up will not resolve the issue. It is time we stopped blaming the children and pay more attention to the parents; after all they are supposedly the grown-up, responsible ones.

 

 

 

 

 

Demonised: We lock them up. We give them Asbos. But is our fear of kids making them worse?

 

 

Ordinary children are being labelled as criminals unfairly because the crackdown on yob culture has gone too far. Who says so? Astonishingly, it's the Government's own youth justice tsar.

The noise of breaking glass - a sound familiar to generations of families as children play with balls in the street - alerted the neighbour to the fate that had just befallen his greenhouse. Understandably furious, he sought out the miscreant who had smashed the glass. It turned out to be his neighbour's son. The boy apologised after confessing to his parents, who told him his pocket money would be docked until he had made good the damage. Satisfied that justice had been done, the neighbour was happy to accept the apology and the money to replace the glass.
Yet what happened next vividly underscores the crisis in policing, justice and the way we deal with unruly children. Alerted to the offence before the neighbours had sorted out the dispute, the police arrived. Under existing law, they were obliged to arrest the child and take him to court. He faced a fine or the prospect of an anti-social behaviour order (Asbo) banning him for playing with a ball in his garden. In short, the boy was guaranteed a criminal record.

It is cases such as this that deeply trouble Professor Rod Morgan, the government-appointed youth justice "tsar" responsible for problem children. In an exclusive interview with The Independent on Sunday, Professor Morgan says he believes these measures are responsible for "demonising" a whole section of British youth. He knows all about out-of-control youths and badly behaved teenagers. There were times in his childhood when his parents would have been justified in marching him to the local police station for a ticking-off.

Over the past decade, the number of children labelled "anti-social" and dealt with by the criminal justice system has stayed constant at around 200,000 a year, despite reports that youth crime is on the rise. But there has been a dramatic increase in the proportion of those who end up in court - from a third to around a half. And nearly half of Asbos - the scheme introduced in 1999 as part of Tony Blair's respect agenda - handed out are given to children, although ministers' original pledge was that they should only be used in exceptional circumstances for under-18s.

There is no time limit on an Asbo, although the average is four years. In some cases, children as young as 13 are given 10-year Asbos, which Professor Morgan says they are likely to breach. The Home Office has agreed to review the orders after a year, but the youth crime adviser wants this to happen after six months. Professor Morgan says there are several reasons for this worrying "demonisation" of children and teenagers who are acting no differently from those throughout history. He believes schoolteachers feel disempowered and fear the reaction of parents if they discipline pupils. Child arrests have also risen because police no longer have the discretion just to hand out a warning if a crime has been committed.

In their defence, police argue that they are increasingly getting called out to homes by parents who want them to deal with out-of-control children with a slap on the wrist, not realising the police may have to make an arrest. "We are sucking into the criminal justice system behaviour which should be capable, and used to be capable, of being dealt with by informal, non-criminal means," the professor says.

The Government's chief adviser on youth crime is eager to point out that he is by no means "soft" on the issue of children making the lives of law-abiding people a misery. But after two years as chairman of the Youth Justice Board (YJB), where his job involves finding new ways of tackling youth crime, he knows that just because an 11-year-old hangs out on a street corner in a hooded top, it does not mean they are out to rob you. "There are adverse consequences of fixing a mark of Cain to a child's forehead," explains Professor Morgan, who was formerly Chief Inspector of Probation. "We should not forget the lessons of the 1960s and 70s of the labelling effect. The argument is that if you give a dog a bad name then the dog may live up to the bad name." He does not object to the use of measures such as curfews and Asbos. What he does object to is the lack of common sense.

Child-welfare experts and children's charities agree with Professor Morgan that society has become "obsessed" with criminalising young people. Martin Narey, chief executive of Barnardo's, says he is dismayed that increasing numbers of young offenders are ending up in court despite evidence that early cautions and warnings are more effective. "The teenagers we 'despair' of today will, in due course despair of the children being born in future decades," says Mr Narey, the former head of the Prison Service. "The difference is that we have over-reacted and we hear children routinely referred to as 'yobs' or being 'feral'."

For the first time, magistrates say they are having to deal with young offenders whose low level "crimes" have been committed in the home, a trend which they blame on parents over-reacting and calling the police, who are then forced to arrest. John Fassenfel, chair of the Magistrates' Association youth courts committee, also warns that more children than ever are being prosecuted. One case that he had to deal with recently was that of a 14-year-old girl who broke a window frame in a care home. Staff had locked her in a room and the girl, who suffers from an attention disorder, panicked.

"I've talked to child psychologists about this and the problem is it makes them feel wanted if they get even negative attention, and this can make their behaviour worse," says Mr Fassenfel. "We definitely prosecute more readily than we used to. I think we are a more punitive society. If people trip over a flagstone it goes to court." Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the Children's Society, says the huge gap in understanding between adults and children has led to a greatly increased fear of young people, and to many being wrongly labelled as criminals.

"Older people especially are very fearful of youths and it's something we have to address as a society. We are quite happy to point out all the failures of children and when there are problem behaviours we are quite happy to condemn them." As a part-time resident of London, Professor Morgan reveals that even he finds gangs of children intimidating. But what concerns him is that the hysteria over "yobs" and "feral children" has led to record numbers of children being targeted by the police for behaviour which in the past would have just earned them a reprimand.

"When I was a kid there were other authority figures around in uniform - ticket collectors, park keepers - [who] told you off, and the problem today is there are not people who are prepared to exercise authority - and some reluctance even in schools." In one case this month, a judge criticised prosecutors for bringing charges against a 10-year-old who used racist taunts against a fellow pupil in the playground. Professor Morgan says children calling each other offensive names is a "serious" matter but it could be dealt with by teachers. "We shouldn't move back to the bad old days where all you get is a bit of fingerwagging ... but that may be all that is necessary if you are a child [with] caring parents who are anxious to maintain control."

In his view, the racist taunt case at Salford Youth Court, which was eventually sent back to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) by Judge Jonathan Finestein, was the "tip of the iceberg". The YJB was heavily rapped over its handling of the case of Peter Williams, the teenager who murdered jeweller Marian Bates in Nottingham in 2003 during an armed robbery. Williams was supposed to have been monitored at the time when he committed the crime. But Professor Morgan warns that cases like this may happen again as youth workers are bogged down with dealing with children who break windows or who are unruly in the playground.

"If we are dragging into the system kids who can be dealt with outside then we are overloading it and that means it's likely we will not do as good a job as the public expects with higher-risk cases." He wants more schemes where dedicated police officers are used in schools to tackle anti-social behaviour. There are only 400 schemes in schools across the country, although these have been successful in reducing the number of children excluded from school and therefore reducing the possibility of such children committing a crime. The professor points out that this country comes out "pretty badly" in how it treats young people and that rising divorce rates and long working hours are all factors in child neglect and young people dropping out of school.

"I don't know a bigger turn-off for children than having supine adults in their household sitting watching a box all the time," he says. "We should be thinking seriously about how we view children - I think we demonise them. It strikes me that when you go to a Mediterranean country you see adults with not just adolescent children but very young children sitting in restaurants all eating family meals together, which you scarcely see in this country." Greater controls on alcohol advertising are also necessary, he warns, to curb anti-social behaviour, and he is critical of the fact that licences were handed out like "confetti" in the late 1990s.

"If you look at advertising in this country, the targets are young people. We have liberalised things yet simultaneously adopted a much more punitive attitude to those who, in this freer climate, can't exercise self-control ... Once you've opened Pandora's box, trying to reverse the process is extremely difficult. "I remember when my son was 16 he wasn't going to a pub in Bath because it was full of teenyboppers. Bath is awash with pubs with little control over who is using them."

The YJB is determined to reduce the number of children in custody by 10 per cent by 2008 but is frustrated when its attention is brought to cases where children are being locked up for breaking windows. Chris Wright, the director of services at the youth support charity Rainer, says that more children need to be involved in schemes that will help reform their behaviour. "There is a very thin line between adolescent mischief making and low-level crime," he says. "We need to ask ourselves - what is adolescence and what is actual criminal activity?"

Zach, 13: The child who was gagged
Zach was banned from using the word "grass" anywhere in England and Wales until 2010 after threatening other children for reporting him to the authorities. He is also not allowed to use the main road in Moston, east Manchester, where he lives with his mother. His father, who is Asian, is separated from his mother. Zach, although the subject of racial abuse at school and often called a Paki, has also been banned from using this word. Expelled for cutting someone's legs, he has been described as a thug, but a psychologist said he finds it hard to concentrate due to a short attention span.

Dean, 15: The child who is ball mad
Dean, who is football-mad, was given an Asbo forbidding him from playing with his ball in the street. Police applied for the order after confiscating 12 balls from him in two weeks. Durham magistrates were told he regularly used the local bus stop as a goal and would practise his skills in the middle of the road.
The teenager, from Pelton near Chester-le-Street, was given a map showing the areas where he cannot kick his football. He is also prohibited from going within 100 yards of the local community college, damaging property or congregating outside a number of takeaways.

Joseph, 4: The child whose toy hit a car
Joseph was threatened with an anti-social behaviour order after he threw his toy at the car of a council worker visiting his family's home. His mother claimed that two days after the visit the official returned and said that she wanted to give the child an Asbo. Tower Hamlets council said that it did not intend to proceed with the threat against the tot, but would have been powerless to act anyway as the minimum age for a recipient is 10. Critics of Asbos said the case highlighted the dramatic rise in the number of orders being issued and illustrated why 97 per cent of applications are unsuccessful.

Mark, 15: The child who stole £1
Mark was given an Asbo and spent a night in the cells after snatching two 50p pieces from a bus driver's change tray. He got off the bus as police arrived and set a dog on him. He was bitten twice before being arrested for attempted theft and put into a cell for the night, despite his family being at the scene. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating his complaint at how he was treated. He is regarded as a persistent young offender and has spent time at Feltham Young Offenders' Institution, but says that the case has stolen part of his childhood.

Nathan, 16: The child who got a tattoo
Nathan was forbidden from showing his tattoos, wearing a single golf glove or a balaclava anywhere in the country. If he breaches the Asbo - which also bans him from congregating in public with groups of more than three people - he could be jailed for up to five years. The order was imposed by magistrates in Manchester where he is part of Longsight's L$$$ gang. Mark Watling, a lawyer, described the golf glove, which signifies gang membership, as "a tight-fitting glove often used to discharge firearms".