Prevalence of youth offenders across UK Doncaster represents ailing British society where lack of occupation coupled with other social complications push youth towards crime. EDLINGTON, SOuth Yorkshire // The fry-ups at Tasty Bites Cafe are not for the faint-hearted. Mountains of egg, sausage, bacon and beans washed down with sweet cups of tea are consumed. Grannies with prams, mums and daughters, and old men with walking sticks call in for a chat. It feels like a community centre. With chips.
A football-shirted boy, about 11, is describing how his best friend has just returned from hospital. "He's got bruises all over his stomach and chest," he said. "He showed me his arms, covered in marks and bruises. He had scratches and scars all over his head and face." He talks excitedly, as if describing a football match. The women in the cafe nod and murmur "terrible". But they know the story. The world knows it. This is Edlington, near Doncaster, northern England, where two boys aged nine and 11 were set upon and almost murdered by two brothers aged 10 and 11.
The boy's young friend is one of the survivors. The two assailants are in local authority secure accommodation while they wait for trial in a crown court in May. They have made two court appearances in the last two weeks. The attacks were seized on by politicians, as Doncaster had already made the headlines in January when it was revealed that the council had failed to care for vulnerable children, with the result that seven had died of abuse or neglect since 2004.
Chris Grayling, the home secretary in the opposition Conservative Party's shadow cabinet, said the attacks represented a "stark snapshot" of Britain's "broken society", but the people in Tasty Bites do not see themselves as representatives of a national loss of moral compass. They say the attacks could have happened anywhere. "It was disgusting," said Roy Colley, 72, who has lived in the village all his life, "but it was a one-off. Don't forget the lads who did the assault were not from here, they were being fostered by a local family."
The boys were born just outside Edlington, but moved away when their parents split up. What cannot be denied is the prevalence of youth crime across the UK. In the government's Crime and Justice Survey in 2005, it was found that 24 per cent of males aged 14 to 17 were serious or prolific offenders, committing crimes such as car theft, burglary and violent assaults on average at least six times in the previous year.
Take stabbings. In London last year 28 teenagers were killed. There have been three victims this year. Ministry of justice statistics show the number of people sent to jail for carrying a knife went up by 23 per cent, from 1,125 to 1,386, in the last three months of 2008 compared with the year before. The numbers of those who were jailed rose from 17 per cent to 21 per cent, while those merely cautioned fell from 36 to 25 per cent.
Dominic Grieve, the Conservatives' justice spokesman, maintains that 21 per cent is unacceptable. "Under this government you're more likely to get a slap on the wrist than go to jail," he said. "Under a Conservative government there will be a presumption of prison for those caught with a knife." In fact, despite the tough talk, the latest figures for England and Wales show that the number of recorded crimes fell by nine per cent between 2007 and 2008; that violent crime (eight per cent), home burglaries (four per cent), vandalism (13 per cent) and car thefts (14 per cent) all fell over the previous year. But, of course, what people remember, and what informs their sense of a nation in crisis are the high profile cases such as the Liverpool boy, Rhys Jones, then 11, shot in the back by an 18-year-old on a mountain bike, and Mohammed al Majed, 16, from Qatar, who died in August two days after he had been attacked by a gang of drunken youths in Hastings, East Sussex.
Then there is the drinking. According to the Institute of Alcohol Studies, young people in the UK are the third worst binge drinkers in the EU. The charity, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, found that more than half of 15 to 16-year-olds have indulged in binge drinking. And then there are the unwanted pregnancies. When Alfie Patten, 13, fathered a baby girl in February with a 15-year-old girl, he was swiftly adopted as another example of Britain's 'broken society'. Indeed, the latest figures for teenage pregnancies show that after five years of decline, conception rates among under-16s had risen for the first time since 2002 with more than 8,000 girls under 16 becoming pregnant.
If Doncaster does present a snapshot of all this then it is worth asking why, and if there are lessons that can be applied to society as a whole. The area was a booming mining community until Margaret Thatcher, the then prime minister, closed the pits in the 1980s. This week unemployment shot up 14.5 per cent on last year. Yet Doncaster, with its population of 286,866, is not some depressed, dystopian hell hole. It has a new shopping mall, a recently opened 16,000-seat stadium and sport centre, an improved horse racecourse and an international airport. It has pleasant pedestrian streets and fine Victorian civic buildings. Edlington is undeniably poor with more than its share of boarded up houses, but there is a small new estate and a smart health centre as well as a well-equipped recreation ground and football pitch.
It does not feel "broken", although the one thing everyone in Tasty Bites agrees on is that the sense of community that gave the village so much of its life and identity has been diminished since the closing of the pits. "It used to be a beautiful village with beautiful people," said Mr Colley. "Everybody knew each other and they treated each other with respect. They don't anymore. "When I delivered the papers as a boy nearly every door was left open for the rent collector with the money left on the kitchen table. You wouldn't do that today."
He watches a group of young boys walking past. They are not threatening - not a hoodie to be seen. "The trouble is there is nothing for young people to do. They get bored, so what do you expect? We had a fire at the old school recently and it would have been lads like that. All these stabbings in London - I've always been Labour, but I blame the government because judges just dish out silly sentences for murder."
So what to do? There are obvious causes of juvenile crime such as a troubled home life: Alfie Patten's dad turned out to have eight other children by various women; truancy and exclusion from school; drug or alcohol misuse and mental illness - in Doncaster a three-month-old boy died in 2004 after being found unconscious while sharing a bed with his alcoholic mother; poor housing or homelessness and peer group pressure.
This week, the government's discipline tsar, Sir Alan Steer, demanded that schools should use more of their legal powers to discipline unruly pupils, step up detentions, confiscate mobile phones, search for drugs and suspend or expel ill-behaved children. Parents should be fined £100 (US$149; Dh547) for condoning truancy or failing to control suspended children. But parents are also the problem. According to the recent Crime and Justice Survey, more than a quarter of children are now being raised by only one parent and more than 40 per cent are born outside marriage.
In England, 27 per cent of prison inmates had been in care and 47 per cent had run away from home as a child. Mr Colley has a brisk solution to those examples of a broken society. "I was brought up properly and so were my children," he said. "If I did wrong I'd get a whack on both hands and I didn't do it again." * The National
