What happened to Kilbrandon ?

Here`s a Daily Record article that reports on the Scottish Conservatives` attempt to stir up a moral panic about children offending.  

MORE than 1000 children under 10 have committed crimes in two years, according to police figures. A total of 1211 under-10s have been listed as offenders in Police Scotland records since 2013.

Thirteen of the offences by youngsters last year were crimes of indecency, compared with six the year before. Other offences involved violence, dishonesty or drugs. The age of criminal responsibility in Scotland is eight but children cannot be prosecuted until they are 12.

The numbers were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Scottish Conservatives. Their justice spokeswoman Margaret Mitchell said: "These figures are clearly alarming, and should be a cause for concern right across society."."The obvious question is, what are the parents doing while children this young are running riot? "More worryingly, this is not an isolated problem affecting one area, but rather an issue right across the country."

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/revealed-primary-kids-guilty-sex-4913396

Maybe this article puts things into perspective:

 



"THE number of homicides in Scotland has sunk to its lowest level in nearly 40 years driven by a falling murder rate in the country’s largest city."
http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/scotland-s-murder-rate-down-to-record-low-1-3629245

It is difficult to know the nature or seriousness of most of the offences reported in the Daily Record or whether `running riot` is an appropriate term for what some ten years olds are doing. Children do not play out in the street unsupervised the way they used to; statistically speaking therefore, it is unlikely that society needs to fear the behaviour of children below the age of ten.

Now we have a bit more sleight of hand in the Daily Record article:

Figures for 2011 to 2013 revealed 328 sexual offences including 48 rapes. Almost half the alleged offenders were children under 16.

This does not mean that half the alleged offences committed by under 16s were for rape - more likely it was for texting inappropriately.

A nine-year-old boy was charged with raping a three-year-old girl in Dundee in 2006.

Moreover, this should not be lumped in with figures for 2011 to 2013 - unless the article wishes to mislead the public.

"Quite simply, if these youngsters aren’t dissuaded from criminal activity, they face a dismal, dead-end future." The Scottish Government raised the minimum age of prosecution from eight to 12 in the Criminal Justice and Licensing Act 2010.

Dissuading youngsters from criminal activity is not as simple as whooping up a bit more `parent bashing` or punitive attitudes towards young children as the following research paper shows. Where once Scotland had its own independent system based on the Kilbrandon report, research reveals that Scotland is now converging towards a more punitive system that `does not work`. It`s time to re-think what independence actually means.

Based on findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transitions and Crime, this article challenges the evidence-base which policy-makers have drawn on to justify the evolving models of youth justice across the UK (both in Scotland and England/Wales). It argues that to deliver justice, systems need to address four key facts about youth crime: serious offending is linked to a broad range of vulnerabilities and social adversity; early identification of at-risk children is not an exact science and runs the risk of labelling and stigmatizing; pathways out of offending are facilitated or impeded by critical moments in the early teenage years, in particular school exclusion; and diversionary strategies facilitate the desistance process.

The article concludes that the Scottish system should be better placed than most other western systems to deliver justice for children (due to its founding commitment to decriminalization and destigmatization). However, as currently implemented, it appears to be failing many young people.

http://crj.sagepub.com/

See the Kilbrandon Report.

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/47049/0023863.pdf