Hello, my name's Professor Steve Case and I'm going to talk to you about the youth crime problem and how I think that we can solve it. So it's quite a straightforward talk and quite ambitious. Now, the youth crime is a problem. Youth crime is a big problem.
It's a new problem. It's a growing problem. Young people who commit crime are running out of control in society.
Desperately in need of control. But nothing that we've ever done in the past has ever properly worked to try to solve this youth crime problem. And that's the message that we get from politicians, from government. from the media, from some academics. That's the message that the general public gets.
Is it true? No. Youth crime and the youth crime problem is what we call a social construction. It's been created, manipulated and exaggerated by these interest groups.
It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy, created into existence. by the methods that we've used to understand it and the methods that we've used to tackle it and are often to serve the interests of these groups and I'm going to tell you what I mean by this. We're taking you on a journey, a five-stage journey.
through the creation, manipulation and exaggeration of this problem. I'm going to start by talking about the creation of youth as a category. I'm going to move on to talk about the creation of the youth crime problem. Then I'm going to talk to you about how that youth crime problem has been maintained and perpetuated. Then how the actual maintenance of the problem has been an illusion to serve the interests of government and the media.
And finally, give you my ideas, based on my research, as to what the solution could be to this problem. I'm going to use images. in this film up here, The Wizard of Oz, because I believe that they're highly illustrative of the points that I'm trying to make, because these guys in the film, they go on a journey, they encounter a problem, a terrifying problem, which forces them to run away to a supposedly all-powerful being that can help them to control and solve this problem.
But the reality is, when they pull back the curtain, they find that this supposedly all-powerful being is working extremely hard to maintain the illusion of the problem. problem, the illusion of their own control over the problem, when the actual solution to the problem is rather straightforward. It turns out to be a bucket of water. I don't want to spoil the ending if anybody hasn't seen the film.
Spoiler alert. So let's start with a bold claim. 200 years ago, youth crime didn't exist. No such thing in the UK.
No such thing. So we certainly didn't have a youth crime problem. Because we didn't have a category called youth. It hadn't been created yet. What we had was children and adults.
We had children increasingly visible in society because they were no longer working in factories following the Industrial Revolution. They'd been pushed out onto the streets. But they didn't have any formal compulsory education to go to so they hung around on the streets all day long in groups.
Doing what children do. Being distinct from adults in their appearance, in their behaviour, in their language, in their attitudes. Being boisterous and noisy and energetic and chaotic and loud and troublesome. them and bothersome being children in other words and this caused adults in society a great deal of anxiety how do we understand this group and how do we control them and what it did was create a conflict and ambivalence about how to understand children that's illustrated there when the lion in the wizard of oz jumps out onto the elaborate road dangerous threatening noisy boisterous gets a smack on the nose and starts to cry and becomes childlike and innocent and vulnerable and it was these conflicting views that reflected how children were understood in society because on the one hand because they were increasingly visible and distinct and boisterous society being the media the general public politicians saw children as threatening and dangerous and somehow out of control you But on the other hand, we were starting to construct views of children in society as innocent, invulnerable and in need of support and protection.
So social reformers... And the middle classes were starting to see children as children, for the first time as distinct from adults. So we had these parallel views of children.
Innocent, threatening. And how do we resolve that? That causes a great deal of ambivalence and ambiguity in the public's mind.
So how do you resolve it? Well, one way of doing that, one way of resolving this issue, was to create a new category of person, called the adolescent or the youth. Older than a child, so puberty, teenage years, younger than an adult.
So we created the category of youth and understood this developmental stage as being beset with storm and stress and chaos and dramatic and rapid upheavals and changes physically, emotionally, psychologically, hormonally. This period of chaos for an older child, an adolescent or youth, lent itself quite well to understanding children's behaviour as threatening. And particularly, understanding children's behaviour when they broke the law.
So what we had was this dichotomy. We had innocent children and dangerous and threatening adolescents or youths. So we've socially constructed the category of youth and that's the first stage. The next stage is to create youth crime and to exaggerate it into a problem.
And what happened in the mid-19th century, around the time that adolescence was being created, was that official crime statistics were being created too for the first time in our society. We're starting to measure crime to inform our responses to it. Initially, crime was measured based on severity, type of crime. But then it started to be measured based on age, and a category, this new category of youth, gave us a new category of crime to measure, youth crime. We could compartmentalise or categorise crime by developmental stage.
So we created youth crime. The response to this was special attention. From the government, from the media, from the public. So the government started to create legislation to respond to youth crime. And structures and systems, reformatory schools, juvenile courts, custodial institutions, for example.
The government created new laws that only juveniles or youths could break, called status offences, precociousness and truancy being two good examples there. So we're consolidating this idea of youth crime, this creation, into existence. We're legislating it into existence.
Through the creation of structures, official statistics, bespoke responses. And that plays into media representations of this view of this new behaviour, youth crime. But the problem here...
was that this special attention from politicians, from the media, and from criminal justice agencies like the police and the courts, it had a negative knock-on effect. So young people started to be targeted. They started to be labelled. They started to be criminalised by this special attention.
So they found their way increasingly into the official crime statistics. So inevitably, year on year, official... youth crime statistics rose.
And year on year they rose to the extent that eventually youth crime was considered to be a social problem because it was increasing year on year, because it was receiving special attention. When in reality, it was just a behaviour because youth crime occurs. I'm not denying the existence of youth crime.
I'm denying that it should be seen as a problem. The youth crime occurs but it had received so much special attention ongoing that it was perpetuated to the level of a problem and once it became seen as a problem in the public eye and in the eyes of the media in the eyes of politicians it merited more special attention. which exaggerated the problem or the perception of the problem and so it went on and so it has gone on over 200 years. So the youth crime problem is a self-fulfilling prophecy that's been created and legitimized if you like by the methods that we've used. to respond to it.
So no longer do we have this innocent versus threatening view of children in society. We have a youth crime problem on the streets. What's visible on the streets is youths running out of control, committing crime, a danger to society, causing fear amongst the general public.
We should all run away from it. Who do we turn to for support, to control and deal with the problem? Well, we turn to the government.
But the government has had a hand in creating, consolidating and exaggerating the problem in the first place, creating this fear of young people in our minds. By creating itself, as some kind of agent of social control that has power over this problem. The government defines the parameters of youth crime.
It decides what a youth is. The government has historically decided how old people can be in order to be considered to be youth criminals or youth offenders, what the age of criminal responsibility is. And it's ten in our country at the moment, but it's been as low as seven historically. So the government extends the category of youth crime to cover children who are never intended to be considered youths, teenagers. 7 year olds up to 12 year olds, 10 year olds up to 12 year olds now are not youths.
children but they're thought of when they break the law as youth offenders so what we're doing there is artificially extending the category of youth offending to catch more and more people within it which artificially exaggerates the extent or perception of a problem okay What it also does is exaggerates the illusion that the government has some kind of control over this problem. Because they also then define, shape, determine, dictate the strategies and... priorities of criminal justice agencies that deal with this problem. They task them to deal with it.
They task the police to prioritise youth crime. They task other criminal justice agencies and the courts to deal with youth crime. So the government has control over the extent of the problem and the extent of the issue. The government wants to be seen to be doing something about social problems, regardless of the extent to which the government may have collaborated in the creation of these social problems. It wants to be seen to be in control of these issues.
and have power over them. It creates that image, that dependency amongst the general public for a variety of reasons, not least to win votes and to maintain public confidence. But if you pull back the curtain and you look at the reality of the situation, you'll find a government, politicians, historically collaborating with the media and certain academics to maintain and exaggerate the extent of this problem, to maintain their own control, illusion of control, over it.
Working frantically behind the scenes so that this problem doesn't go away, or the perception of this problem doesn't go away. go away, creating mechanisms to respond to it, to legitimise it, legislation and structures and organisations and laws and, I've said legislation, but I can say it again, because it emphasises the extent of the issue. Because governments will create more legislation on top of legislation.
To exaggerate their level of control or perceived control over the problem. And the media collaborate. And what the media and the government are doing here is called attacking a straw man.
They're misrepresenting a social issue to the level of a problem that they can be seen to solve. When really the problem doesn't exist. It's very, very easy to do. They represent the problem as bigger than it is, more frequent than it is, more severe than it is. They misrepresent their own level of control and capability over the problem, to maintain public dependency, to serve their own interests, to sell newspapers, to gain an audience, to gain public confidence, to justify their own existence and the existence of the responses that they've put into place to deal with this issue and represent it as a problem.
So what do we do about it? It's as simple as pouring cold water on the problem. We need to change our perspective on youth crime so that we no longer see it as a problem.
We understand the issues and we know that it exists and we don't deny it. But we don't see it as a problem. We view... The government, politicians, the media, academics, is working together not only to originally create the whole category of youth and youth crime, but also to generate this problem, to perpetuate this problem, to consolidate this problem and exaggerate this problem.
We see the problem itself as a social construction because youth crime problem is a red herring. The real issues are adult created issues, social deprivation, disadvantage, poverty, unemployment, unmet needs, health issues, psychological problems that children and young people experience, that adults need to support them with. youth crime is not a problem in itself, it's a manifestation of a series of other problems that we should be focusing on. Children and young people are not the problems in themselves, they're part of the solution to the problem.
And my research has developed a model called positive youth justice that responds to children who break the law as children first they are children in their status in their age in their relative lack of maturity and development lack of responsibility and understanding and that needs to be acknowledged and prioritised in everything that we do in response to youth crime. We don't problematise, view children and young people as dangerous or threatening, view the youth problem as a problem in itself, as a reality that we can all agree on. We tackle the real issues. Everything that we do with children and young people should be child appropriate and child friendly. It should involve them, it should be conducted in partnership.
I've generated a wealth of evidence working in partnership with children, young people, families, youth justice agencies, politicians, to show that these approaches are far more effective than government based approaches. in resolving some of these issues that lead to youth crime and bringing it much more into perspective because it's what we need, a reality check. These children are part of the solution to these problems that they face that have been generated by adults. We should promote positive outcomes and positive behaviours for these children and young people.
whilst resolving the issues that have led them into youth crime. We shouldn't overly punish or stigmatise or label or target or do all the things that have helped to create, manipulate and perpetuate this problem in the first place. This change in practice can also lead to a change in perspective about how we view youth crime and how we view youths and young people so that we no longer see them as a problem and we start to address the real problems through positive youth justice in children first ways.
And that's what I think.