Fascinating stuff. The full Home Office report is here.
There are so many interesting points here is hard to know where to start. I think my favourite bit on first glance is the table which shows how the same incident might be interpreted in different ways depending on which criteria you want to use. Really brings home that while an action might be extremely rigidly defined as a crime in law (which is often not the case, but still), this does not make it necessarily so if you think about things in another way. Which of course people do, all the time. Perhaps this underlines the futility of the last government's attempts to make almost everything they didn't like illegal, as if this was going to wave a magic wand and make everything OK. Because a crime is a crime is a crime, right? Wrong.
On the other hand you have to have some sympathy with Alan Johnson's point at the bottom of the Guardian piece. Based on a realistic reading of the situation - and not that of the Graun's own lurid headline - talk of a crime epidemic among the under 16s appears to be greatly exaggerated. The 'victim perceived' risk of crime for 10-15 year olds is 6 per cent, while the 'norms-based' risk is 14 per cent, both substantially lower than the latest adult risk of 22 per cent. Even on the frankly bonkers 'all in law' basis 10-15 year olds are hardly more at risk from crime than those over that age (and probably substantially less at risk than those immediately older them, in the 16-21(ish) group).
As usual, it behoves us to say that all crime suffered by children is bad, but this report will hopefully bring a welcome bit of sanity to the debate.
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