Report on the plight of poor criminalised youths is rot
Bloomin' kids, they don't know they're born.
They're as bad as us always moaning, never content. It's all me, me, me.
Demonised, stigmatised, criminalised - and that's just the half of it, according to a joint report by the UK's Child Commissioners. (Yes, I didn't know we had any either until yesterday.)
These geezers, or "yoof" watchdogs, are gonna snitch to the United Nations. And when that happens, Gordon Blair will have the book thrown at him for breaching the Children's Rights Convention. Ummmm!
And if that happens, we'll all get a right ticking off in Sir's study, and we'll have to do lines in wet play, and we'll be banned from the end of year trip to dodge the goose poo in Cannon Hill Park. And then they're gonna tell our mum, and everything.
Ner, ner, ne, ner, ner!
The Children's Commissioners for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were originally appointed by Labour to look after the interests of our youngsters. So it is safe to assume they have got a vested interest. If the commissioners say everything is tickety-boo with the nation's offspring - and I am not suggesting it is - they'll be out of a job.
But are things really as bad as this bunch make out? It is claimed that more than three million children live in poverty in the UK. If poverty = junk food diet + satellite TV + Playstation + benefits dependency, then the forecast of millions of youngsters living in Dickensian squalor may hold water.
There are not, however, degrees of poverty. There is no such thing as borderline poverty or abject poverty, just as there is no such thing as an horrific murder. You are either poor, or you aren't; and murder, by its nature, is a distressing business. Hyperbole is not necessary, and if anything it demeans and offends.
It is why many people will question the findings of the Children's Commissioners because although there is undoubtedly poverty in Britain, significant numbers of children do not starve or walk the streets barefoot.
Cases such as that of seven-year-old Khyra Ishaq, who starved to death in Birmingham, are exceptional. Whether Khyra's death was due to poverty, as opposed to a criminal act, is now the subject of a West Midlands Police inquiry.
Rickets is not rife, although there are statistically insignificant occurrences. I may be lucky, but I have never seen a young child begging for cash or scraps of food in Birmingham. (And despite being white and nominally middle-class, I have been known to stray outside our leafy 'burbs.)
I am not denying there are social problems afflicting children in this country - that some children are alcohol and drug dependent; that some children are abused; that some parents, and some schools, fail some children; and that some children are coerced and exploited by some criminallymotivated adults.
But headlines that scream "UK demonises children" and "Nation's children in despair" are so wide of the mark for most British families that it is hard to take seriously anything that these doomsayers' report.
Buried in the learned commissioners' "damning" report (Basic Journalism Lesson 6 (e): reports are always "damning," and on the rare occasion that they are not damning, they should be portrayed as a "whitewash") is the fact that most children said they were happy. There you have it, in black and white: most of the nation's brooding youth is chuffed to bits.
Yet all we hear is a negative diatribe, including the fact that Britain bangs up more children than any other country in Western Europe. And that's meant to be a bad thing? Good on us, I say.
I was watching breakfast telly this morning and listened to a "reformed" yob bleat on about how youth custody was a waste of time because it only taught him more tricks of the criminal trade. Speaking in faultless faux gangsta street-speak, Mr I've Seen The Light proclaimed that "lockin' 'im up, liike" served no purpose.
I think he missed the point.
Yes, youth custody should not act as a finishing school for aspiring Fagins; and if it does, it is probably because the regime is too UN-compliant and "end-user focused" (i.e. soft).
Detention should, however, serve an old-fashioned purpose within the criminal justice system - satisfying that quaint old notion of punishment.
Perhaps most ridiculously of all, though, is the claim that child thugs are criminalised at an earlier stage if they are slapped with an ASBO.
Having their names and photographs published in newspapers, say the Children's Commissioners, breaches their right to privacy under a UN convention.
And you still think this damning report is credible?
