New Clause 1 - Children subject to asbo proceedings: reporting restrictions
Police and Justice Bill
3:15 pm
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister (Environment), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
The purpose of the new clause and the amendment is to provoke a debate about the fact that the Bill is increasingly drifting away from the assumption on which some of the original legislation in this area, including the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, and even the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999, is based. In cases covered by those, it is assumed there is a benefit to anonymity for children and young people in criminal and similar proceedings. The lifting of reporting restrictions and the ability to name and shame pose certain risks.
We see value in antisocial behaviour orders, as I have repeatedly said, despite the scepticism on the Labour Benches. However, the attendant publicity is sometimes counterproductive. I have heard about kids coming out of the courts in my constituency and going up to reporters from the local paper, the Gloucestershire Echo, and asking, essentially, “Will this get me my picture in the Echo?” To be named and shamed almost becomes a badge of pride in some families—it is seen as a mark of achievement. That is counterproductive. I can see the value of antisocial behaviour orders if they apply to an immediate local area, and of a level of publicity being given to a particular offender in the area, so that people going in to a particular newsagent or shop know that person’s identity and that they should not be in that immediate local area. However, the wider use of publicity and naming and shaming gives cause for concern.
It is worth revisiting a few issues. First, the Children and Young Persons Act originally imposed restrictions to protect the identity of children who are at a formative stage in their lives. In some cases, we are talking about children as young as in their teens, and perhaps younger, and who are still capable of being directed down more positive paths in their lives and able to respond to positive intervention, support and some of the other methods we have talked about, of a more supportive nature. The naming and shaming begins to set in stone the pathway down which those children are going, and risks placing them on a one-way path to further antisocial behaviour and perhaps ultimately criminal behaviour.
The Government and this country are signatories to the UN convention on the rights of the child. It is worth revisiting some of the clauses that we have signed up to in that convention because they should give us pause in the headlong rush to name and shame young people. Article 3 of the convention states:
“In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”
In other words, it is not a matter of weighing up the interests of the children concerned against the wider interests of the community. We have to treat the child’s interests as a “primary consideration”, and if there are other ways of meeting communities’ justifiable concerns, without naming and shaming, perhaps we should be looking at those more often.