Youth justice: exposing a system that is failing our most vulnerable children
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Version 0 of 1. Children in the Dock is one of six journalistic investigations shortlisted for the prestigious Orwell prize this year, in the category entitled Exposing Britain’s Social Evils. We talk to the team behind it Children in the Dock was an investigation into the youth justice system in England and Wales that involved the Guardian’s Manchester team spending a month monitoring every case at Greater Manchester youth court. Among other things, they found that the proportion of BAME children in court had doubled in eight years, and revealed that youth cases now take 40% longer than in 2010. Helen Pidd, North of England editor It was in the chaotic waiting room outside Manchester youth court where the idea for what became our Children in the Dock series was born. A 17-year-old boy had just been charged with murdering his friend and most of the north of England’s press pack were anticipating his first appearance in court. It was running late – it always is – and as I watched young people come and go, I wondered what they had done to find themselves in front of a panel of magistrates instead of behind a school desk that Monday morning. One or two looked as if they were in primary school. Perhaps they were: in England and Wales, the age of criminal responsibility is 10, younger than in any European Union country. No government has dared raise it since two 10-year-olds were convicted of killing three-year-old James Bulger in 1993, though every expert we interviewed – including the head of the Youth Justice Board and the children’s commissioner –agreed it is time for a rethink. Scotland stopped treating under-12s as criminals last year and has moved away from an adversarial system, putting welfare above punishment. Members of the public are not allowed in the youth court but the media are, as long as they don’t identify any of the children involved. In practice, however, journalists only go for the “big” cases: the most notorious murders, the most shocking rapes. Each day across England and Wales, thousands of hearings go unreported, even though fewer children than ever are now ending up in court. The number of 10- to 17-year-olds cautioned or convicted in England and Wales dropped from 106,969 in 2010 to 26,681 in 2018 – but we found that those who do are disproportionately likely to be black and minority ethnic and be in care. Just over 40% reoffend within a year, a much higher recidivism rate than in adults, suggesting strongly that the system does not work for these often very vulnerable young people. We thought these stories were worth telling, and last August decided to cover every single hearing at Greater Manchester youth court. Together with two indefatigable freelancers, Nicole Wootton-Cane and Philip Marzouk, our Manchester-based reporting team (me, Maya, Josh, Nazia and Amy Walker) sat at the back of court each day in an attempt to give readers a glimpse into this hidden – and often troubling –world. Josh Halliday, North of England correspondent Youth courts tend not to see many trials: young people are rarely sophisticated criminals and are advised to plead guilty after being caught red-handed. During the whole of August, there were just two trials in Manchester youth court. The first shock in covering them was the time they took to get to that stage. Both cases, which concerned rape and sexual assault, took more than two years from arrest to trial. That’s two years of lives being put on hold for each of the young defendants and complainants, who were all in their formative mid-teens. Not to mention the toll on their families. Such delays have sadly become the norm in the youth courts, as we uncovered, despite official guidance requiring justice to be done as quickly as possible. Barristers specialising in youth justice told us that years of cuts to the police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had taken their toll. Even though the number of cases being investigated by police has plummeted, so too has the number of officers and lawyers able to prosecute such offences. The youth courtroom remains as formal, stuffy and uncomfortable as an adult courtroom, despite barristers and judges dispensing with their wigs and robes. Even as a journalist who has covered court proceedings for a decade, I often struggle to decipher the legalese. Another thing that shocked me was the adversarial nature of cross-examination – when a witness is questioned by the barrister for “the other side” ie the defendant or complainant. One particularly uncomfortable exchange left a teenage victim of sexual assault in floods of tears when she was accused by her abuser’s barrister of “making it all up”. She was questioned about “behavioural issues” at school, which he said called into question her credibility but actually had little or nothing to do with the matter on trial. The barrister’s client, a boy in his mid-teens, was eventually found guilty by the judge and given a supervised community order, told to carry out 180 hours of unpaid work, pay £280 costs to the CPS and a £20 victim surcharge. The long-term effect on his victim, though, will surely be far greater. Maya Wolfe-Robinson, North of England correspondent When we began the project, it was two years since the publication of a review which had found “a significant problem in the criminal justice system itself” when it came to its treatment of children from BAME backgrounds. We were keen to report how the system had reacted to the warning issued in 2017 by the Labour MP David Lammy, who conducted the review, that the youth justice system needed to urgently address issues of race. Although each wing of the system, from policing to the magistracy, was very aware of the existence of the “disproportionality” problem, the situation had not improved. In fact, the proportion of children convicted of a crime from BAME communities had nearly doubled in eight years, from 14% to 27% in 2018. This rise was despite a focus on keeping children out of court. It seemed this “diversion” strategy had disproportionately benefited white children, in what Becky Clarke, a senior criminology lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, described as “an indictment of the whole justice system”. The Magistrates Association, in response to the “alarming disproportionality”, has proposed recruiting more diverse magistrates and promoting awareness among magistrates of the different factors that BAME individuals face. Perhaps that would have changed the experience of one boy, originally charged with stealing an iPhone at knifepoint and possession of cannabis, who appeared before the youth court five times in August, often for breaching his bail conditions. He had made his way to Britain from Sudan on his own to seek asylum. Each time he was in the dock, he had a different interpreter, was only occasionally accompanied by a key worker and on one occasion had no legal representation. He often seemed to have problems understanding what was happening, and when told to find new lawyers before his trial, he simply asked: “How?” Lammy told the Guardian he feared the worsening statistics had gone largely unnoticed, and that “the fact that half of our youth prison population comes from a black or ethnic minority background would [attract] far more comment and scrutiny” had the political debate not been so focused on Brexit. Against the background of a global pandemic, it remains to be seen if anything will improve for the BAME children who experience the underreported youth justice system. Nazia Parveen, North of England correspondent It was shortly after covering a long-delayed sexual assault case that I spoke with Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner. It and other similar cases would lead Longfield to describe the youth justice system in England and Wales as “chaotic and dysfunctional”. Following almost a decade of cuts and court closures the system was plagued by increasing delays, confusion and poor child protection. During the interview, partially as a result of the Guardian investigation, Longfield called for a wholesale review of the youth justice system, saying the youth court was “not a child-friendly environment where you could really help a young person and is not meeting standards that we had hoped”. Longfield said her team had visited youth courts and were shocked at what they saw, describing it as neither efficient or indeed child-friendly. You can read more about this year’s Orwell prizes here. |