Mark Smith: We need to understand more, and condemn less

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 21:25

I WAS reviled when I read accounts of what happened in the car park of Edinburgh's Omni Centre in January, when two teenage girls attacked a 13-year-old girl they knew, while a boy of the same age filmed and seemingly directed the whole scene.

The sustained brutality of the episode – highlighted again during the court case this week, in which the detail was described – seemed to be qualitatively different from teenage behaviours I had come across in the past. I began to reflect, however, on whether it really was.

Teenagers have always got themselves into situations that just seem to happen and which, given a particular combination of circumstances, can rapidly spiral out of control.

These things are rarely a matter of malice aforethought or calculated evil; they just happen. Had events taken a different turn that afternoon, another of the cast of characters might have ended up the victim.

We all might think back to teenage experiences that could have gone wrong. What generally prevented them from doing so was that niggling voice of conscience that reined in some of our baser instincts.

But conscience isn't picked up from the stones; it is developed over time and under the guidance of caring adults.

This essential reality was recognised by Lord Kilbrandon in his report into juvenile delinquency as long ago as 1964, which concluded that juvenile offending indicated a need for special measures of education and training, the normal upbringing processes having, for whatever reason, fallen short.

When kids behave in the way they did in the Omni Centre that day, it points to some aspect of their upbringing having been deficient. If the roots of such situations lie in this wider shortfall in upbringing, questions are raised as to ultimate responsibility.

Are 13-year-olds to be held accountable for their parents' failures to parent? Are their parents to be held responsible for the failings of their own parents? For what we are talking about here is failures in upbringing that thread through generations.

In terms of who might, ultimately, be responsible when kids get into bother, I recollect accounts of the "ragged" schools that emerged across Scotland as a response to the prob-lems caused by industrialisation. Dr Thomas Guthrie, one of the pioneers of the ragged schools, attested in relation to delinquency that the guilty party was not the child at the bar. He also questioned how any adult could bring himself to punish a child who had not that morning "broken his fast".

The message from Guthrie is clear: we can only understand children's behaviours in the wider social context from which such behaviours emerge. It was a message that Lord Kilbrandon clearly understood and reiterated. It is a sorry indictment of out current society that we seem not to recognise this.

One of the striking features of this case is that the boy convicted of the crime readily handed over the mobile phone on which he had filmed the episode to the police. He obviously felt that just watching and filming absolved him from any direct responsibility for the unfolding situation.

I wonder whether we are all, in our own way, guilty of standing and watching, absolving ourselves from any responsibility for the social circumstances of the children and families who find themselves caught up in such situations?

More immediately, I wonder what might have happened had some adult stumbled across this bloodfest. Might they have been tempted to walk on by, fearful of the reaction if they had taken responsibility to do something about it?

Former prime minister John Major, in the aftermath of the Jamie Bulger case in Liverpool, stated that we needed to condemn a little more and understand a little less. This is a misanthropic prospectus. It is also plain wrong.

We can only think about preventing this kind of tragedy when we can begin to understand how it could come about.

This isn't a "soft touch" response. For what it is worth, I believe the children involved in this case should be placed in residential care settings, where they will come under the guidance of adults who, belatedly, might offer an experience of upbringing so obviously lacking from their lives. But they should be placed there on account of their need for care rather than to exact punishment.

Caring for troubled kids is not a soft touch for them or those who care for them. For carers, it can involve soaking up kids' anxiety and pain, often expressed in acting-out that needs to be confronted directly, at times to the point of physical restraint.

And all too often, the emotion evoked for staff by such situations is compounded by them having to look over their shoulders, wondering what the reaction might be should someone cry foul.

The "soft" option in cases such as this is to pontificate about moral decline and the need for punishment, against any evidence that it works.

I'm not sure, either, about arguments that blame cheep booze or the influence of video games. Adding alcohol to the mix when teenagers get together will increase the likelihood of things going wrong. But kids have always turned to substances of some sort to assuage pain, hurt or just boredom.

When I started my career, glue and aerosols were the substances of choice; then prescription drugs; then cannabis and harder drugs. Drink perhaps ran through the various phases. But these are symptoms of a shortfall in upbringing, generally linked to wider issues of social inequality and fragmentation.

What really depressed me about this case was the reaction of the victim's sister, who was quoted to be "ecstatic" with the sentence handed down. While this response might be understandable at a personal level, it seems to reflect wider societal recourse to a psychobabble of "closure", which elides all too easily with ideas of vengeance. That is the cycle that needs to be broken.

&#149 Mark Smith is a lecturer in social work at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he worked for almost 20 years in List D Schools and secure accommodation for children.