By Nick Holden
On 19 May, posters began to appear near where we live in Wigston, Leicestershire. They announced that, from the following day, the police would be applying a curfew at 9pm every night for under 16 year olds, in two-thirds of the borough in which we live.
The posters, giving us 24 hours notice of the curfews, were the first that most residents knew of the plan. The police claim that there is "evidence of a persistent problem with anti-social behaviour", by which they mean that groups of teenagers hang around outside the chip shop, or in the park.
The curfew isn't the worst of it. The police powers include being able to take people they "believe to be under 16" home, and instructing them to remain there until 6 am the following day. The civil rights group Liberty argues that this amounts to a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, and has tried to get a court ruling against the use of curfew orders since the first was imposed during the Easter school holidays last month, in Wigton, a small town in Cumbria.
But there's a big step from the two-week curfew in Wigton, and the curfew imposed in Redcar, which applied to just three streets, to the curfew now imposed where we live, which will apply to several thousand young people in a very large area - and be held in force throughout the summer until 19 November.
The curfew, together with the other police powers, to remove young people from the area if they don't live here, and to "disperse" any groups of young people anywhere in the area (including, for instance, in the park, which would appear to make playing football with your friends now a criminal offence), amount to a further attack on the rights of young people.
Children are increasingly being scapegoated for so-called anti-social behaviour, while youth services and facilities are cut and closed. South Wigston, where we live, has no youth clubs, and the young people's resource centre opened last year by the council, has been closed because the council wouldn't staff it sufficiently. So the young people are back on the streets... until the police send them home.
