In his new film 'Minority Report', Stephen Spielberg takes crime prevention to its extreme. Set in 2053, a revolutionary criminal justice system called 'Pre-Crime', is in place. Primed by a trio of visionaries, criminals are caught by flying cops just before - rather than after - they commit a felony. The streets are safe at last.
Early years staff who see the film may be reminded of David Blunkett's speech earlier in the year in which he, too, took the long view on crime prevention. In a speech to the National Family and Parenting Institute (NFPI), the home secretary said, 'The real challenge for the years ahead is how not only to support the normal day-to-day traumas of raising children...but how we can work with what can only be described as dysfunctional families.' Such families, he said, are causing havoc on our housing estates and we have to 'pick up behavioural reactions from the moment a child enters nursery education'.
Mr Blunkett is a big fan of Sure Start. He told the NFPI that he 'knows it works' and that some of the greatest pleasures he has had in the past five years are the visits he made to Sure Start projects when he was education secretary. And while he is acutely aware that he doesn't want to be labelled 'nannying', it is the provision of family support and parenting education which he clearly sees as playing a big part in crime prevention, telling the NFPI that he wanted 'decent education for parenting in schools and colleges' and programmes where people can take it up later on a voluntary basis without feeling stigmatised. Parenting programmes have even been referred to the Social Care Institute of Excellence to find evidence of which ones are the best.
Police view
The Metropolitan Police share this view too - 'we have a duty to bring up our children properly,' Commander Stephen Roberts at the Operational Policy Support Unit told me - and the police have been urging more emphasis on prevention.
Commander Roberts explains, 'It's like being on the banks of a river with all these drowning bodies floating down - more and more every minute. All we can do is jump in and pull a few bodies out. What we want is other people to go upstream and stop them falling in.'
The Met does not see its role as running a register, secret or otherwise, of children at risk of getting involved in crime, despite reports to the contrary. But Commander Roberts says it could be one of the agencies, along with health, education and social services, to share information on children so that the families of those at risk could get help.
'We regularly come across children truanting, a sign that all is not well,'
Commander Roberts says. 'Agencies such as health and education know which children are likely to be sucked into crime but they have difficulties sharing information. It's like a jigsaw; each service has its own bit but you only get a picture when you put them all together.'
The barriers to sharing information are threefold, he says. First, there's a perception that it is illegal under the Data Protection Act, for which there is personal liability; second, that, even if it is legal, it is improper as privacy must always be paramount; and third, there's a risk that children may be stigmatised.
The Government is now working towards breaking down these barriers by various means. First, guidelines are due to be published soon by the Home Office on how professionals can share information on children without breaking the law or confidentiality. Second, under the guidance of the London Youth Crime Unit and with an extra 50m, ten of the capital's boroughs now each have a strategy in place whereby local services work together to combat youth crime. And third, the Children and Young People's Unit has started to look at how local authorities can have the means by which they can identify and track children at risk of social exclusion.
These initiatives are a direct result of the Met's investigation into the murder of Damilola Taylor in 2000, where it found a vicious circle of violence in the London borough of Southwark with children being abused at home and subject to bullying and theft at school so that they sought refuge in street gangs.
To target or not?
Most early years practitioners would see good parenting and childcare as the key to happy children and ultimately good citizens. But the thorny problem is how to target the children who need it most without marking them out. It is hard not to sympathise with Commander Roberts when he says that there will never be funds for universal provision. 'It is nonsensical to talk about children being stigmatised. If we don't do anything, they'll end up stigmatised when they're arrested,' he says.
However, if individual children are to be targeted, then data must be collected on them. Who will have access to it? Who will decide which children go on this list and come off it? And what guarantee is there that it won't be used to identify potential criminal suspects in the years ahead?
This is especially difficult if younger children are to be targeted rather than be subject to universal or area provision, because while continuity in antisocial behaviour from middle childhood into adulthood is well established, very little research work has been done on the links from the pre-school period.
Professor Jim Stevenson, at the University of Southampton, and Robert Goodman, at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London, published a study last year of 828 individuals born in Waltham Forest, London, in 1969-70. They found that children's temper tantrums, activity level and what they call 'management difficulties, for example non-compliance' at three years old were associated with increased adult convictions, in particular violent offences. A study of the behaviour of 1,037 three-year-old children in New Zealand also bears this out.
However, the authors urge caution before planning any preventive intervention for targeted children. Just because a child has temper tantrums at three doesn't mean he or she will turn into a violent criminal.
On their reckoning, only half the cases of future criminality would be identified and a substantial number of cases at risk would be falsely labelled.
Essential services
Although the youth crime prevention work in London boroughs is focusing on older children already demonstrating behaviour problems or engaged in crime, in the long term it is parent support and education from birth that is essential to stop any cycle of criminality. An expansion of Sure Start using mother and baby programmes such as PEEP or NEWPIN would be a good way of making sure parents understand children's needs.
The NFPI is also piloting a single two-hour universal parenting information session. The session is to be given to parents at three key stages in a child's development: entry to primary school at five, the transition to secondary education at 11 and the transition to adolescence at 14. Sessions would be held on school sites for parents and would deal with, for example, language development, ways to encourage self-reliance in children, exam pressure and the effects of divorce.
Anne Page, policy and public education manager at the NFPI, says, 'This scheme would ensure that everybody gets a minimum of parenting information and has a contact so that they can get more help if they need to. It's not enough just to focus on families in need of help. It makes economic and human sense to help all families access support that may prevent problems arising in the first place.
'The ages of five, 11 and 14 are all points of transition when a lot of things happen. The more support given, the better able pupils are to negotiate those transitions.'
Ante-and post-natal services need to be strengthened too. The NFPI pilot grew out of the first-ever mapping exercise of family support services in England and Wales. It found that even supposedly universal services were patchy. For example, ante-natal classes were duplicated or non-existent and some mothers did not get a visit from a health visitor after a birth. These are the bare essentials to start parents off on the right track.
And the Government needs to take a stand on 'smacking'. In its response to the consultation document on the physical punishment of children, the Royal College of Psychiatry said it was likely that '(children who have been physically punished) will go on to use physical violence themselves'. In other words, smacking is not good parenting and should be banned.
