Civil liberties campaigners get it wrong in defending the indefensible

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

The children’s commissioners for England and Scotland have joined civil liberties campaigners calling for a ban on the sale and use of a device that emits a high-pitched noise designed to disperse young people, reports The Independent. Alongside the article is a poll, in which 52% of respondents don’t agree. I’m with them on this one—if the police can’t or won’t do anything about the terrorism of the elderly, and all we have are the lamentably inadequate and ineffective Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) when they eventually do act, then I don’t see how sending packs of kids running away covering their ears affects their civil liberties at all. What about everyone else’s?

The Mosquito is used in public places to force groups of teenagers to leave the area, emitting high-pitched frequencies to which babies, children and young people are particularly sensitive. It does no physical harm. It only causes discomfort. Campaigners say approximately 3,500 devices are in use across England and Scotland. The device came to market in 2006. I have been unable to find one so far online but I’d like to get one for my parents if I can afford it. I’ve no idea as yet how much the thing costs. My parents even said they’d pay for the device, no matter how much it costs. They’re desperate for a means to end their suffering. Nobody in authority is listening to them, or many other thousands of old people across the country.

The call for a ban has some powerful backers, none of whom, I suspect, live on high-density housing estates or have much experience of the horrible things packs of teenagers get up to when their parents either don’t discipline them or actively encourage their anti-social behaviour. There’s the Children’s Commissioner for England, Professor Sir Al Aynsley-Green, who launched the Buzz Off campaign to ban the device. ‘I have spoken to many children and young people from all over England who have been deeply affected by ultra-sonic teenage deterrents,’ he said.

Oh, shame. So they’re traumatised not by the booze or the class A drugs, or their own acts of terror and vandalism, but by a sonic device?

Has this man spoken to my parents, not at all unusual in their nightly experiences, who have had drink cans, used tampons and dead rats thrown into their garden, who have been harassed and ridiculed outside their own home, who regularly see drug dealing from the house next door—the drugs provided by the kids’ mostly-absent father, who lives elsewhere, but pays a visit to his children every Monday morning at 7am in a van to deliver the drugs he imports into the country? He brings them in by ferry. By ferry. From the European mainland. If you thought drugs were smuggled in via boat onto remote shores, think again.

The rest of us, we go one ounce over our baggage entitlement coming back into the country, we get pulled up. So how the hell do these criminals get away with what they do on a regular basis? Perhaps if these kids and their dad were black or Asian Muslims, instead of white, they would get noticed. And that’s as wrong as the crimes being committed. It’s a crime in itself.

I know Aynsley-Green hasn’t been anywhere near an estate like the one my parents live on. Until he’s lived under those conditions, for more than a token period, he should keep his mouth shut on this subject.

My parents have had to switch off their security light because the twisted feral teens next door like to wind them up every night by deliberately activating the light—on, off, on, off—through to the early hours. They have raves in their house that go on for days, snorting drugs openly at the kitchen window, hanging out of upstairs windows screaming, smashing things up just for the hell of it. The mother lives with her fancy fella on the other side of town and, despite owning the house, never comes to visit her children. They are home alone.

Park a car on the road for any length of time unattended and you risk the windows being smashed, the contents lifted. These kids don’t even have to travel or mask themselves from CCTVs by wearing hooded tops to commit serious crime. They do it at home, or just outside it. Crime is easy, convenient and completely risk-free.

The police have been informed, time and time again. It would be easy for them to lie in wait on a Monday morning to catch the father, and his family of dealers. Before selling drugs, the father began his criminal activities by importing cheap cigarettes illegally and storing them in the garden shed. Customs & Excise officials were tipped off back then, over ten years ago now when the kids were small, but didn’t investigate. The police tell my parents not to ‘provoke’ the teenagers. That’s all. Of course the police in different parts of the UK vary massively in how they tackle (or don’t tackle) crime. There is no universality, and there should be. The law is the law.

But my father isn’t abusive, he isn’t playing his Slim Whitman records at full volume late into the night, he most certainly isn’t doing anything other than trying to find some peace and quiet in his retirement alongside my mother. My father is 86 years old. My mother is in her 70s. My father fought in a war so that these evil little bastards could have freedom to live, not to terrorise.

These kids don’t work and left school without qualifications. They do, however, have far more money than just their benefits to live on. Drug dealing is profitable. That’s why people do it.

The police could start action against the drug-running dad. The children, all of whom are over the age of 18, could be tackled as well. Social Services, while they can’t do anything about these young adults, could most certainly step in to remove the girl’s baby. There is no doubt she is an unfit and dangerous mother who whores herself as frequently as the rest of us make cups of tea.

Use of the Mosquito device ‘would not be tolerated for any other section of our society. Young people have a right to assemble and socialise with their friends, without being treated as criminals,’ says Kathleen Marshall, Commissioner for Children and Young People in Scotland. Again, I doubt very much that Marshall has first-hand experience every single day, for years on end, of the things these youth gangs get up to. Until she does, I have no time for her sympathetic whining about the rights of children, not when the rights of the elderly and vulnerable are ignored to devastating effect.

Don’t get me wrong. Children should have rights. But those rights are dependent, as for the rest of us, on them having a sense of community, a respect for the law and for other people’s rights. When we break the law to devastating effect we still have our human rights. We should get fair trials, and clean toilets and reasonable food. But the view from the window should have bars across it.

I usually have a great deal of time for whatever Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights group Liberty, has to say. Whenever she is on TV, I like what she has to say and she is clearly intelligent and caring. But I’ve no time for what she has to say on this subject. ‘Imagine the outcry,’ she asks us, ‘if a device was introduced that caused blanket discomfort to people of one race or gender, rather than to our kids.’

What is the relevance of your point, Ms Chakrabarti? As far as I am aware, there is no need for a device that keeps women or men at bay other than sonic rape alarms for when we face sexual attack or muggings. And nobody complains about those, do they? And rightly so. There is absolutely no call for a device that repels people from different ethnic groups, either. That would be racism. We aren’t talking a prejudice against children and young adults here. The situation doesn’t involve bigotry. My parents love children. They have five of their own, and an extraordinary number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all of whom they love dearly and treasure. They simply have no time for terrorists, and the children these devices are employed against are terrorists. There is no other word for them.

The state and police have failed our most vulnerable citizens, and so an enterprising inventor by the name of Howard Stapleton from Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, stepped into the inexcusable void. His potentially life-saving device is manufactured by Compound, a security systems company. Find out more about the Mosquito from the company’s website.

The Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) represents 33,000 local shops and defends use of the Mosquito.

‘Unfortunately, in many locations around the country, retailers are victims of anti-social gangs of youths that congregate around their premises. These youths deter customers, intimidate staff and can commit vandalism and violence,’ says James Lowman, the association’s chief executive. But protecting retailers is one thing, and while I agree they should be able to use the device, I’ve yet to ascertain the affordability of it for domestic use. The fact is, the Mosquito could be a life-saver.

I cannot support it ever being banned, not until we see feral, violent and abusive teenagers banged up for their crimes instead of being given counselling sessions, job training, hand-outs and the occasional five-day dose of community service. Right now there is simply no incentive in the form of punishment for these vicious animals to stop what they’re doing. They’re fully cogniscent with the notion of human rights–’you can’t do anything to me, I know my rights’ is the oft-heard refrain, even from eight-year-olds picking fights at bus stops with senior citizens—but they have been raised to have absolutely no awareness of the need to be socially integrated and responsible. Moreover, they are being bred through neglect to care about nothing other than their own gratification through sex, drugs, and alcohol. The generation that follows on will be even worse, because the one thing these gangs can do, and do well, is have indiscriminate sex without contraception. At what point will we have to cage them, for goodness’ sake?

When are these civil rights campaigners and anyone in authority going to give a damn about the rights of the elderly? It’s rare, so very rare, for me not to be on the side of civil rights campaigners. And I most definitely recognise that these marauding teens are a minority, albeit a sizeably scary one with huge and detrimental impact. But as with Green Party members, many civil rights campaigners lack any ability to approach matters pragmatically. For so many on the caring left of politics, there is simply no ability to recognise that there are hunters and there are prey, there are victims and there are perpetrators. On the right, of course, there’s way too much pragmatism leading to no action being taken against anyone until big business suffers.

We cannot care about the rights of violent anti-social criminals much when our own loved ones are suffering and nobody is doing anything to help them. I’d like to—really, I would—but only if we move away from a system that increasingly rewards the criminals and leaves the victims out in the cold.

categories: all wired up, rattle bag