What Shall We Do With Naughty Children ?

By BARBARA WOOTTON Nor so long ago children of seven years old used to be tried in the ordinary adult courts, alongside of every type of adult criminal. That came to an end in 1908, with the establishment of our now familiar juvenile courts; though even today not everybody realises that a child who is unwise enough to commit an offence in com- pany with an adult will be tried where the adult is tried. Even a boy of eight who accompanies a youth of seventeen on a housebreaking expedi- tion is still liable to be committed for trial at Quarter Sessions for all his tender years. Since 1933, however, children below the age of eight cannot be made the subject of a criminal charge in any court.

After fifty years' experience, it certainly seems time for a thorough review of these juvenile courts, and for some fresh thinking on the whole subject: perhaps even for what the Chinese like to call the Great Leap Forward. The appointment four years ago of the Ingleby Committee to make such a review was, therefore, generally welcomed; and, although the Committee's Report* makes only a few timid steps—some backwards, some forwards—rather than any Great Leap, its publication is a sign that change is in the wind. Legislation,.in fact, is on its way.

What, then, shall we do with naughty children? All children are naughty: some children are very naughty. A few are quite abnormal and alarming in their naughtiness. Nearly all children at some stage or other commit what in an adult would be a criminal offence. They take, or try to take, things that are not theirs; and many of them also pass through phases of what adults regard as wanton destructiveness. (It is perhaps worth noting that a passion to destroy likewise appears to be normal in chimpanzees.) The practical question, raised by the Ingleby Committee, is what should be the role of the courts and what the role of other agencies in eradicating these original, or acquired, sins.

As at present constituted our juvenile courts are a curious mixture of punitive and 'welfare' elements. By statute they have a duty in all cases to have regard to the welfare of the children who appear before them; and they have important civil jurisdiction in cases in which children are neglected, abandoned, ill-treated or otherwise in need of 'care or protection.' At the same time they are courts of summary jurisdiction— criminal courts, in fact.

The Ingleby Committee holds that this paradox can best be resolved by the juvenile court `moving still farther away from its origin as a criminal court.' Its Report proposes, therefore, to raise from eight to twelve the age at which a child can be made the subject of a criminal charge, but at the same time to allow children of any age (below seventeen) to be brought before the court iris in need of 'protection or discipline.' It must be said at once that in practice this is certain to prove a distinction without a difference. The child of eleven who is brought before the court as in need of discipline, on account of his habit * H.M. Stationery Office, 8s. of helping himself to sweets from shop counters, will hardly appreciate the distinction between himself and his brother of twelve who is 'charged' with doing exactly the same thing—least of all if, as is quite likely to happen, the court deals with them both in exactly the same way. Children are not lawyers: neither are most of their parents.

The plain fact is that, however much the courts try to get away from their criminal origin, they are still courts. Surprisingly, the Ingleby Com- mittee does not even recommend getting rid of some of the more grotesque features of the present practice, such as the requirement that a child must be given the option of either giving evidence on oath and subjecting himself to cross- examination, or making an unsworn statement in which case he cannot legally be cross-exam- ined. All that the Report has to say on this is that 'promising before' Almighty God might take the place of swearing by Him; and, with Olympian detachment, its authors add an injunc- tion to the courts to take 'pains to explain the pros and cons' of giving or not giving evidence 'in language that will be understood by both parent and child.' Let them try their own hands at such explanations! In my experience the spec- tacle of a magistrate presenting this option to a child of eight or nine resembles nothing so much as a scene out of Dickens—even if the magistrate happens to be oneself.

Admittedly the oath is one of the minutia; of court procedure : but it is significant of much else. Court rules and court procedure illustrate the fundamental difference between the discipline of home and school and that of a judicial process. It is all very well to say, as does the Ingleby Report, that it is 'becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between punishment and treatment.' The Report itself is redolent with punitive attitudes. The word `punishment' is scattered with surprising frequency through its pages, and is always given priority, as in the constant references to `punishment or other forms of treatment.' As for the children themselves or their parents, recent surveys have shown that both are firmly convinced of the essentially punitive nature of the juvenile courts. Some even despise the courts for the feeble way in which they dis- charge their punitive role. Children are not taken in by adult sentimentality about blurring the dis- tinction between punishment and treatment: they know the difference all right! In the words of one of the more charitable of a juvenile court's `clients': `Some of our sentences depends on your magistrate and your offence, we might think that the magistrate is an old coot but he has his job to do like our fathers and mothers so it's our own fault if we get into trouble so there's no one else to blame.'t Of course, children have, on occasion, to be punished. But by whom? That is the crux of the matter. After dealing with some thousands of children in the London juvenile courts, over a 1*.Quoted in Peter Scott's article on 'Juvenile Courts: The Juvenile's Point of View.' (British Journal of Delinquency, January, 1959.) period of nearly twenty years, I have myself been driven to the conclusion that these courts are most unsuitable instruments for dealing with the very young—certainly with the under" twelves and perhaps even with any children below the school-leaving age. For any court, simplify its procedure how you will, is always a highly artificial institution. What is more import- ant, it is manned by strangers; whereas children respond to those whom they know and respect, and most of all to those whom they love and by whom they are themselves loved—not to 'old pensioned -gentlemen who doesn't like the clothes you are wearing or long hair,' to quote Dr. Scott's survey again. Even for the children (and there are quite a few of these) who recog- nise that the 'judge tries his best to help,' a sell" tence meted out by a stranger cannot carry the emotional charge of one that comes from a familiar and beloved adult.

Indeed, the whole psychological assumptions of the court procedure are surely very wide of the mark so far as children are concerned. The rationality of behaviour presumed by theories of the deterrent effect of a court appearance or a court sentence rests on very dubious assumptions. Even in the case of adults there is reason to doubt if the mechanism works in anything like the way that our judicial system assumes. But with children particularly, the fear of punishment is a poor second-best as an incentive to good behaviour (especially when there are, as there usually are, excellent chances of getting away with it) in comparisOn with the internal sanction of a guilty conscience, or the need to retain cherished affection or esteem. Conscience, how" ever, cannot be implanted by strangers, and a stranger's esteem is emotionally worthless.

The fundamental mistake is to cut off a seg. ment of behaviour and to hand this over to all institution wholly distinct from the agencies that are continuously concerned with a child's ur bringing. In the modern world education is a matter for schools and homes : what the one can' not (or occasionally will not) supply, the other must contribute. This goes, or should go, for every kind of education—for training children to curb their natural destructiveness and to recognise property rights just as much as for teaching than algebra or Latin. That, after all, is how the job is done with the vast majority of middle-class children, and there is no reason whatever to Sur pose that what works for the middle classes would not in principle also work for children of every social class.

In principle—yes; but, as everyone knows, the practical difficulty lies in the miserable under' equipment—both human and material--of 5°, many of our schools. Teachers with classes 01 forty or more cannot be expected to devote adequate attention to the one or two difficult cases among them. If they can keep the 11113b quiet and make it literate that is as much as earl, fairly be expected. Nevertheless, that the school and the home who sec the whole child day in day out should take over the job that the courts novo' so inadequately perform is still the ideal to work for.

A formidable apparatus already exists which one would suppose was intended to do this very thing. Already our educational provision includes (on paper) schools for every variety of handi- capped or difficult child, including schools for the educationally subnormal and schools for the maladjusted. If the Approved Schools now under the control of the Home Office and even the Attendance Centres now run by the police were integrated into the same system by transfer to the Ministry of Education, surely the educational world should be fully equipped to provide the education 'and discipline' required by any nor- mal child and to do this within the framework of its ordinary schooling. Only in the event of a proposal to send a child away to a residential institution against both his own and his parents' wishes should it be necessary to invoke judicial process—and with patient co-operation between the education authorities and the parent such cases can be rare.

Even stronger ground for taking younger children out of the courts is the fact that merely to bring them there is to initiate them into the delinquent community. By this I mean much more than the risk of the deliberate inculcation of wrong ideas through association with 'bad company.' From the moment that a child first .enters the waiting room (where in busy metro- politan areas he may spend many hours) he is introduced to a new world—and a world in which the most important figures are other children in like case. What matters is the shared experience, the sense of apartness, of becoming a member of what the sociologists would call 'the in-group.' Understandably enough, we habitually shut our eyes to this aspect of the present procedure. Yet it may well be that this, more than anything else, is the process by which recidivists are manufac- tured. One goes along with the group one finds oneself in, graduating with them from one stage to the next.

By contrast the child who is reprimanded or punished in school, who is kept in at home or deprived of his pocket money or other privileges, or is compelled by parent or teacher to make good damage that he has done, lacks this communal Support. In far greater degree his is an individual experience which he must sustain alone without the warmth and encouragement of, and the con- sciousness of belonging to, a self-sustaining but distinctive and 'different' community of his peers.

For all these reasons the time has surely come to raise the age of criminal responsibility in fact as well as in name. The law that in this country allows criminal charges to be brought against children of eight is quite exceptional: in Sweden the minimum age is fifteen; in Poland thirteen. Yet the Ingleby Committee seems to have made no effort to learn from experience abroad—its astonishingly insular report contains only the most casual references to the practice of any other country. Nor can it be said that the image of any real living child anywhere shines through its chilly, legalistic pages. As one critic has said, the Report, though signed by humane and experi- sned men and women with children of their own, seems to have been conceived entirely in terms of 'other people's children.'

Can it be that the British really hate and fear

the young? As one goes about the world, some- times it would seem so. The Italians obviously and happily enjoy their children: the Scandin- avian peoples treat theirs with the dignity and respect enjoined by their whole 'progressive' way of life: the anxiety-ridden Americans, textbook in hand, conscientiously try to follow the dictates of one or more psychiatrists. Only in a British seaside resort does one hear the all-too-familiar nagging, the threats to fetch a policeman, the injunction (so impossible for the restless young to fulfil) to 'sit down and keep quiet.' lust as medieval artists used to paint infants with the proportions of miniature adults, so we perhaps see ours in the form of miniature criminals' which, maybe, is what makes them so.