Age of Criminal Responsibility Bill [HL]

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 8th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, spoke immensely eloquently about child development and the psychology and background of these children and young people. She is respected in this area. She is a social worker by background. I will put two things to her.

Speaking to her on a psychological basis, I am sure that she will be aware that children who experience rejection by their parents blame themselves for that rejection. They take the guilt of it upon themselves. Children are solipsistic: the world revolves around them. She may recall a film that came out many years ago called “Good Will Hunting”. It is about a brilliant young man who grew up in a very abusive family and went on to further studies. He was treated by a psychotherapist. In the final treatment session, the therapist embraces him and says to him, “It’s not your fault”. He repeats, “It’s not your fault”, and then repeats again, “It’s not your fault”. The reason he says that and why it is so important is because that young man blamed himself for the way he was neglected by his parents. I regret that the psychological flaw in the noble Baroness’s argument is that, by allowing 10 and 11 year-olds to be subject to the criminal justice system, the state is saying, “It is your fault”. I hear what the noble Baroness says about progress in this area, and I particularly welcome the reduction of the number of young people in custody, but I regret that I strongly disagree with her on that point.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dholakia, for bringing back this very important Bill. The current arrangements are barbarous, put the public at risk and are a gross waste of taxpayers’ money. Very many of the 10 and 11 year-olds in question will have been in local authority care or would be in care if their local authority were not so overstretched. Yet again, we are criminalising the abused and neglected children of our society. Only last year, my noble friend Lord Laming produced his excellent report on preventing children in care entering the criminal justice system. Today’s Bill is a superb opportunity to meet the spirit of his exhortation to keep our looked-after children out of custody.

I declare my interest as a trustee of the Brent Centre for Young People, which is a centre of excellence in the mental health treatment of adolescents and provides clinical treatment, outreach to schools and a youth offender service. I also declare my interest as a trustee of the Michael Sieff Foundation, which has been working to improve the welfare of children in the criminal justice system for 30 years.

Why do we treat these children in such a barbaric manner? It is hardly surprising if we consider the challenge that such children pose and the normal unthinking response to this challenge. Consider the history of children’s homes, where we have found not just sexual abuse but physical abuse: children may be tied to their beds because they misbehave and have been unmanageable in the past. We have so often found staff who were not equipped to meet the mental health needs of such children and who responded in a violent or overly punitive way. There have been improvements in the training of staff, yet the high rate of criminalisation of children in care, particularly those from children’s homes, shows that we have a lot further to go. Noble Lords will recall that about 63% of children arriving in care do so because of abuse or neglect. About 40% of children in children’s homes will demonstrate conduct disorders arising from past trauma.

I was speaking last year with a social worker from Finland about his experience of working in a children’s home there. He told me that you had to have a degree before you walked through the door. I asked him why, and he answered that when attacked by a young person, whether verbally, physically or in other ways, it is vital that staff do not reply in kind. They have to reflect, and then respond in the way that would be most helpful.

I recall working with a teenage girl with Down’s syndrome 30 years ago. Sally was bags of fun, but when we sat to picnic in the park, she would walk off and not listen to reason. This annoyed the inadequate teacher in attendance, so on the way back in the van, he retaliated by teasing her about her relationship with Paul, a boy she liked. Your Lordships may recall the brutal treatment of adults with learning difficulties recorded in the “Panorama” programme on Winterbourne View: staff forced patients to take cold showers, because the staff were uneducated and unthinking, and the patients were not able to comply with their behavioural demands. Why do we treat 10 and 11 year-olds in this barbaric manner? Because we are ignorant bullies, no better than that inadequate teacher or those inadequate care staff.

This Bill is long overdue, and I beg the Minister to accept it.