Children bear the brunt of “anti-social behaviour” measures
(From Statewatch, Vol. 14 No. 3/4, May-July 2004)

On 19 July the Home Office launched a five-year strategic plan entitled Confident Communities in a Secure Britain which Tony Blair claims marks the end of “the 1960s social-liberal consensus on law and order” that has enabled some to take “freedom without responsibility”. It is the latest step in the government’s drive to cut crime by 15% over the next four years and reduce “anti-social behaviour”. The main points are:
 http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs3/strategicplan.pdf

• Fixed Penalty notices extended to cover more crimes such as under-age drinking, petty theft, shoplifting and the misuse of fireworks

• Anti Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) to have their process of application sped up to a matter of hours and media reporting of those who break them to be made easier

• Numbers of Community Safety Officers (CSOs) to rise to 24,000 by 2008

• 12,000 police officers to be freed for frontline duty by reducing paperwork

• New £36 million unit to offer support to witnesses and crime victims

• Doubling of electronic tagging to 18,000 people and the introduction of satellite tracking of offenders

• Number of pilots for “Together” schemes to be increased from 10 to 50. The 50 worst offenders in each area will be “named and shamed”

• Under plans to be published in the autumn, local communities will be able to trigger snap inspections of their local police force, call for increased use of curfews and ASBOs, and set priorities for local policing. The levelling of petitions is the example Blunkett gave of how they would do this

• Specialist anti-social behaviour courts and prosecutors to be created, and legal aid to be “streamlined” so that by 2005 a system of fixed fees will be in place

• Everyone entering or leaving the country, after 2008, to have their photo taken and “facial mapping” technology to be used

The package was greeted with uniform hostility from opposition parties who claimed it to be little more than an attempt to grab headlines. Indeed, there are very few new measures, rather just modifications to existing mechanisms for combating anti-social behaviour. Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, claimed that “this government promised to be tough on crime and the causes of crime. We have seen a lot of get tough rhetoric but little progress on tackling the causes”. Criminalising low-level nuisance behaviour is not likely to reduce the public’s fear of crime. It is children, in particular, that seem to be the target of this anti-social behavioural clampdown having already faced increasing restrictions on their civil liberties over the last five years.

For example, a new power, introduced under the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, which allows for the dispersal of groups (defined as two or more people) gathered in an area deemed to be an anti-social “hotspot”, has been frequently applied. This is regardless of age and time of day and refusal to obey can lead to arrest. The Act also provides for the taking home of anyone under the age of 16 found on the streets after 9pm who “is not under the effective control of a parent or a responsible person aged 18 or over”. In Wigton, a Cumbrian market town, children were banned from the town centre after dark for the two-week duration of their Easter holiday. Summer “curfew” zones have also been established across London, (in Trafalgar Square, Regent Street, Camden and 14 other areas), in which children are not allowed to gather. If they ignore an order to disperse they could be held in a police cell and later handed custodial sentences or a fine of up to £5,000. Many other areas have pursued similar policies.

Police-style security and drug checks are also being enforced in schools. Sniffer dogs are regularly used in over 100 schools throughout England and Wales according to Drugscope, a UK drugs charity. Twelve police forces have taken up the scheme with a further 15 said to be interested in setting up similar projects. The Guardian says that:

A common approach is for a police officer to demonstrate their sniffer dog to an assembly while another dog is sniffing bags left behind in classrooms. The children are also individually sniffed as they leave. (18.5.04)

A Kent police survey found that some children felt they had been lied to about the bag searches and were uncomfortable around the dogs. Headteachers are also apparently turning to Drugwipe products which can conduct two minute drug tests detecting any traces of cocaine or ecstasy left on desks and keyboards. Drugwipe claimed, in June 2004, that 30 schools were using these tests. Martin Barnes, chief executive of Drugscope, argues that “these measures risk driving drug use further underground, an increase in truancies and exclusions and a breakdown in trust between pupils and schools.” Concern was also voiced by Chris Keates, the acting general secretary of the teachers’ union, NASUWT: “We are extremely concerned about the apparent trend for some schools to use private companies, whether or not they are using dogs”.

Children are also bearing the brunt of ASBOs, whose numbers have doubled over the last 12 months and the application of which has sparked much controversy. A key part of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 they came into force on 1 April 1999 and were later modified by the Police Reform Act 2002 and the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003. Breaching an ASBO is a criminal offence and carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Moreover, as a civil law matter the burden of proof is lower than in criminal cases, and hearsay evidence is admissible. Home Office guidelines for the Crime and Disorder Act had stated that “ASBOs will be used mainly against adults” and only against children in exceptional circumstances. This has been far from the case. Alarmingly in June a 10-year-old in Birmingham was punished with an ASBO by the city council for anti-social behaviour. Manchester City Council has received particular attention for the large number of ASBOs it has issued for a range of far-reaching sanctions. These include meeting more than three non-family members in public, the wearing of a single golf glove, the use of the word “grass”, and misbehaving in school. Five years in prison await these four children should they ignore the orders.

The misuse of ASBOs also extends to other areas such as environmental protesters (for example at the Newchurch guinea pig farm). Similarly, in June, protesters gathered at Caterpillar construction company’s offices in Solihull to demonstrate, as they had on previous occasions, at their continued sale of bulldozers to Israel. This time eight out of the 11 protestors were arrested under ASBOs. In Rugby, a man who has campaigned against the council over issues such as health and safety and corruption was served with an ASBO. Having broken it he is now on remand at Blakenhurst prison staging a hunger strike. Bizarrely in Rushmoor, Transco, a national gas company, was served with an ASBO after one of its buildings was spray-painted with graffiti and they had failed to clean it up quickly enough. Clearly ASBOs are being used well outside their original remit of dealing with “nuisance neighbours” with the trend only likely to accelerate as more police forces and councils begin to recognise its potential for quashing challenges to authority.

Those exercising a legitimate right to demonstrate are being criminalised under these measures. So are children when, without having committed or even been charged with a crime, they are liable to five years in prison if found standing on a forbidden street. This on the basis of an order attained through anonymous hearsay evidence and judged upon the “balance of probability.” National Youth Agency development officer Bill Badham claims the use of ASBOs to prohibit children using certain words, wearing certain clothes, and banning them from congregating in certain areas serves to “criminalise young people for non-criminal activity”. This represents a shocking reversal of the principal of innocent until proven guilty. The government appears happier to fine and alienate a 10 year-old child than to address the symptoms of “anti-social” behaviour.

A 2001 study by the British Medical Journal emphasised that the best way to tackle the latter is to provide their parents with a structured training programme at the earliest possible stage. ASBOs often seem to do little more than further alienate children already feeling disassociated from the society in which they live. Moreover, many apparently see the orders as little more than a badge of honour. Of course in all cases, ASBOs will only be effectively enforced if there is a high level of public awareness of which individuals are under them, hence the drive to “name and shame” people through leaflets and local papers. The 20,000 new CSOs will perform a similar function, but with the public now having a large role in both the issuing and enforcing of ASBOs there would seem to be a lot of potential for abuse. Regardless, it represents the latest step in the privatisation of police roles and powers.

Plans to create a national database containing the confidential details of every child in Britain will also be added to the Children’s Bill in the autumn. There will now be cradle to grave surveillance, and according to Barry Hugill of Liberty, “a national database through the back door. You start with information about all the children but in 20 years’ time you’ve got almost half the population.”

The Prime Minister’s recent soundbite blaming the 1960s for making these measures a necessity, argued that its eroding of individual responsibility has led to an onslaught of anti-social behaviour. No attention is paid to the promotion of individualism in the Thatcherite era, which many would argue played a significant role in the dismantling of civic society. This was followed by the Labour Government’s agenda on the privatisation of police roles and powers. Moreover, the claim that crime has dropped by 39% over the past nine years while Britain’s prison population has risen by 25,000 over the last decade needs an explanation.

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“MISUSE” OF ASBO’S (how does one “misuse” fascism by using it in a fascist way?)
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/07/294455.html

Critic of council is on an ASBO and on hunger strike
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/07/294170.html

Angry protest against “zero tolerance” and ASBOs in Basildon
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/04/289972.html

Marks & Spencer try to get ASBOs to smash protests
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/07/294946.html

Police use Anti-Social Behaviour Act to attack anti-McDonald’s protesters
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/08/296465.html

ASBOs used to persecute workers for standing up to council officers
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/06/293482.html

Animal rights protester persecuted with ASBO
 http://www.ainfos.ca/03/aug/ainfos00213.html

ASBOs used to smash protest against Caterkiller
 http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos14499.html

Youth stages rooftop protest against ASBO imprisonment threat and death of friend in custody
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/08/296495.html

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Lock up your daughters, and your sons!
By Nick Holden

On 19 May, posters began to appear near where we live in Wigston, Leicestershire. They announced that, from the following day, the police would be applying a curfew at 9pm every night for under 16 year olds, in two-thirds of the borough in which we live. The posters, giving us 24 hours notice of the curfews, were the first that most residents knew of the plan. The police claim that there is “evidence of a persistent problem with anti-social behaviour”, by which they mean that groups of teenagers hang around outside the chip shop, or in the park.

The curfew isn’t the worst of it. The police powers include being able to take people they “believe to be under 16” home, and instructing them to remain there until 6 am the following day. The civil rights group Liberty argues that this amounts to a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, and has tried to get a court ruling against the use of curfew orders since the first was imposed during the Easter school holidays last month, in Wigton, a small town in Cumbria. But there’s a big step from the two-week curfew in Wigton, and the curfew imposed in Redcar, which applied to just three streets, to the curfew now imposed where we live, which will apply to several thousand young people in a very large area — and be held in force throughout the summer until 19 November.

The curfew, together with the other police powers, to remove young people from the area if they don’t live here, and to “disperse” any groups of young people anywhere in the area (including, for instance, in the park, which would appear to make playing football with your friends now a criminal offence), amount to a further attack on the rights of young people.

Children are increasingly being scapegoated for so-called anti-social behaviour, while youth services and facilities are cut and closed. South Wigston, where we live, has no youth clubs, and the young people’s resource centre opened last year by the council, has been closed because the council wouldn’t staff it sufficiently. So the young people are back on the streets... until the police send them home.

(From Solidarity, a socialist newspaper).

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KAFKAESQUE ABSURDITY; WELCOME TO THE CASTLE: Police can declare a certain area a “hotspot” and “disperse” any group of “2 or more” people in an area, regardless of age or time of day, whether they are doing anything illegal or not. This is enforced atomisation. How is this not “anti-social”, in the very literal sense of trying to destroy all social relations by atomising?

ORWELLIAN ABSURDITY; WELCOME TO DOUBLETHINK: Freedom which is dependent on responsibility (i.e. submission to authorities) is not freedom but privilege. To define it as freedom is to identify freedom with slavery.
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COOPTING CIVIL SOCIETY AS THE STATE’S WATCHDOG: AN EERIE FORESHADOWING OF BRITAIN’S PLIGHT FROM 1970s ITALY
“The Communist Party in Bologna, on the other hand, has developed and experimented practically with a more mature State-form, a form which is more in line with mass social-democracy in a period of transition. A State-form in which it is the masses themselves who act as judge and jury, judging who is deviant and who is not, who is productive and who is not, what is socially dangerous and who is not. Now it is to be the factory mass meetings that expel the extremist; the mass tenants' meeting that decides to expel the young hooligan; and the college assembly to expel the "undesirable" student with his pistol and iron bar. Of course, the instances I am thinking of have been extreme cases – but the fact that this State-form is being tried out on the "autonomists" as guinea pigs does not lessen the marginalising potential of such a State-form within a framework of developing austerity, of the "politics of sacrifice" and of money being given hand over fist to capitalist enterprises. Once you have the collective acting as judge and jury, then the institutional forms of the law (wigs and robes etc) have only a ratifying function: they take delivery of the hostage, the tumour that has been driven out of the otherwise healthy body. The State-form appears as a kind of immunising process of civil society.”
(from Sergio Bologna, The Tribe of Moles – classic autonomist Marxist text)
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AND BEFORE THE USUAL NONSENSE STARTS…

“People who criticise ASBOs should go and live in the real world, where youths are making people’s lives a misery, old people are so afraid of being robbed of their pension that they want the state to steal it instead to build more prisons, and everyone’s so scared of gangs of youths that they want to be terrorised by gangs of cops instead” (typical Mr “Only Us People Who Live On Council Estates And Don’t Use Our Brains Know What Reality Is” Critic)

People who support police states should go and live in Iran or China and see if they still think police-state measures are worthwhile. Or they should go and live in Palestine or Darfur and see if the greatest miseries which can be inflicted are those caused by rebellious youths. Perhaps they could help protect the beleaguered Israeli soldiers from the stone-throwing yobs…

The trouble with the threat of fascism is, it’s invisible. So it’s lost to those people who only see the ends of their noses and the immediate problems. Give up one freedom, then the next, then the next… Perhaps the danger of Auschwitz is not immediately apparent from the mere fact of living in a deprived area. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real, as history clearly demonstrates.

And, by emphasising this creeping, invisible reality, I am of course on the side of The Yobs, or The Thugs, or the International Jewish Conspiracy, or other selected Bad Guy of the moment (delete as applicable). And I must, since I will not give up every right to smash the Bad Guy in question, support every act, real or imputed, which said Bad Guy has engaged in. Right?