Canaries in the Mine

Please pause for a moment and think about 15-year-old Billy Cox, who has just become the third child to be killed in South London within a week. Six months ago, just half a mile from where I now sit, 15-year-old Jessie James was gunned to his death while cycling home from a party in Moss Side. Fatalities around here remain mercifully uncommon, although shootings are anything but. Five days ago the streets were taped off in the middle of the afternoon, just 50 yards from here, after another teenager took a bullet in his leg. Then there are the robbings, the beatings, the sexual assaults. Talk to any child in this area and they will know a friend, schoolmate or relative who has been the victim of violent crime, or indeed who has been the perpetrator of violent crime.

Is it any surprise to learn that our children have it harder than those of any other country in the developed world? According to UNICEF we come 21st out of 21 in terms of material and educational wellbeing; health and safety; family and peer relations; behaviours and risks; and children's own perceptions of wellbeing. The most telling stats are those that come straight out of the mouths of young people themselves: only 40% of British kids believe that their peers are friendly and helpful - around half the figure from the Netherlands or Switzerland.

Of course there is more to the UNICEF report than brutal murders. The vast majority of children in this country do not live in Old Trafford, Moss Side or Peckham. Most children in this country will never hear a gun fired in anger or find their street taped off as a murder scene, and they should not need to feel grateful for this. But it would be foolish to think that the problems faced by young people in small towns and safe suburbia are so different to the problems faced by the youth of the Tamworth Estate in Old Trafford. Children of all backgrounds are growing up with low self-esteem, excess stress, fear of violence, pressure to succeed, pressure to fail. The boy in Moss Side who responds to his circumstances by picking up a gun is really not so different to the girl slicing scar after scar into her arm in suburban Cheshire. The bags of skunk passed around after dark in Seymour Park are no more evil than those slipped into purple blazer pockets at the fee-paying Grammar School down the road. It is all part of the same sad picture. Billy Cox, Jessie James, Michael Dosunmu, James Smartt-Ford - these tragically-starred youngsters found themselves at the sharpest, deadliest edge of modern British childhood. Coming from our poorest, our most hopeless, and yes - our blackest estates, they have been forgotten, written-off, abandoned. Somehow these young people became little more than canaries in a coalmine - totems of a society gone off the rails. Little caged birds - helpless, fragile and ultimately disposable. Shame on us all.

I'm not going to sit here and feed you some easy, bogus solution. I'm not going to rant about the decline of the family or the legacy of the progressive sixties or the avaricious eighties. I'm not going to blame Big Brother or hip hop. There is no single cause for the situation we find ourselves in and no simple cure. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a vendor of snake oil and hidden agendas. Or a Daily Mail columnist. However I would offer one little nugget of opinion for you to chew on - something that may at least make a small difference.

In 1993, Prime Minister John Major said of juvenile crime "sometimes I think we should understand a little less and condemn a little more." Was there ever anything more dangerous said by a politician? Anything more damaging? And the terrifying truth is that this position has been echoed in policy for nearly 15 years. What is an ASBO but an attempt to understand a little less and condemn a little more? The Blairite 'Respect Agenda'? Understanding less, condemning more. Media coverage of feral youth? Understanding less, condemning more. It's so easy, so seductive. So wrong.

I see a lot of young people at Old Trafford News. Some come through the doors as volunteers, with an eye on a future in the media or just for somewhere to go, something to do. Some I meet at schools and youth clubs. Others come to us on referral from the Youth Offending Team, serving the community on the orders of a magistrate. They are a pretty good cross-section of our young people, some bright and cheerful, some sullen and angry, some shy and withdrawn. The boys mostly arrive on their bikes in their caps and hoods, their tracksuit bottoms flapping around expensive Adidas shoes. On their first sessions we sit down and discuss what concerns them, what they might like to contribute to our magazine. The same issues come up again and again: their fears of crime, and guncrime in particular; gang culture; the environment. And one word that comes up again and again - respect. What they want is to be taken seriously, to be listened to, to be cared about by adult society. At some level these young people understand the brutality of their situation - they know that to our wealthy 21st Century civilisation, they are considered little more than a nuisance. They are disposable.

They really don't want to be the canaries in the mine. Can you blame them?