YOUTH JUSTICE OR INJUSTICE?

There are myriad aspects of society which can be used as indicative of the how or why that society is changing, developing, achieving or failing. The blunt truth exploited by those who rule over us is that anything can be proved by anyone with the tools available for the task and government exploits those tools invariably to its own advantage. The degree, depth and direction of such manipulation is dependent upon the tendency or otherwise of authoritarianism within that government. In simple terms the greater the transparency shown by a government the more likely its democratic functions are firmly entrenched and more resistant to control from above. There is little doubt that the greater the open mindedness of statistical analysis of youth criminality the greater is the likelihood of meaningful action of processes in its reduction.



The seeds of serious law breaking in adulthood have often been established within the youth justice system. England has amongst the lowest age of responsibility in Europe and where shoplifting is a concern in the high streets from Plymouth to Carlisle. The legal, social and moral path of magistrates faced with offending children is fraught with difficulties between retribution and rehabilitation. Last week at Highbury Corner magistrates court a bench led by a senior magistrate, Alexia Fetherstonhaugh, opted for the latter pathway for a teenager who pleaded guilty to a two year shoplifting spree of £116,000. A report is available here.



There is a particular brand of English self-flagellation that surfaces whenever crime statistics are published. We are, it is implied by headline writers and opposition spokesmen alike, uniquely delinquent. Our young people, we are told, are feral in ways that would dismay the good burghers of Copenhagen or Hamburg. Before those of us who have sat on the bench and seen something of what courts actually deal with are tempted to accept this grim verdict it is worth pausing to ask whether the evidence actually supports the conclusion being drawn.
The question is a specific one: are the children of England and Wales stealing more than their counterparts elsewhere in the developed world? It is, on the face of it, a simple empirical matter. In practice it is anything but, and the caveats that attend any honest answer to that question are not merely statistical pedantry. They go to the heart of how we understand and misunderstand the youth justice landscape.



To begin with The Youth Justice Board`s most recently published annual statistics, covering the year ending March 2025, record approximately 35,600 proven offences by children aged 10 to 17, a figure that has remained broadly static following two years of modest post-pandemic recovery. Theft and handling, which had fallen to as little as 7% of all proven offences in 2020/21, has crept back up to 14% of that total representing something in the region of 4,900 to 5,000 individual proven offences. That recent uptick merits attention. But it must be viewed against the longer arc: over the preceding decade youth theft in England and Wales fell by approximately 86%. That is not a rounding error; it could be classed as a structural transformation. On the other hand it could also be affected by the reluctance of victims to report criminal acts against them.



With regard to the situation in Europe the caveats begin in earnest. Anyone who tells you they can produce a clean, like for like comparison of youth theft rates across European jurisdictions is either badly informed or being less than candid. The obstacles to meaningful comparison are formidable. England and Wales as mentioned above sets the age of criminal responsibility at ten years old one of the lowest thresholds in the developed world. Germany, Italy and most of the Nordic countries do not criminalise children under fourteen. The French age of criminal responsibility sits at thirteen. When a fourteen year old shoplifts in Düsseldorf no conviction is recorded; the same act in Wolverhampton enters the statistics. The edifice of comparative data is built on foundations that are not remotely uniform.



Prosecution policies diverge further still. Whether a young person is cautioned, diverted or brought before a court; whether shoplifting below a certain value is treated as a criminal matter or a civil one; whether police recording practices emphasise detection or diversion; all of these variables contaminate the official figures before a single comparison is attempted. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law have been admirably direct on this point noting that official crime rates simply do not lead to valid international comparison owing to variations in crime definitions and prosecution policies. I suppose we should be grateful for that scholarly candour even if politicians and commentators rarely heed it.



The more reliable instrument and one that has gained significant traction in criminological circles, is the self-report survey. The International Self-Report Delinquency Study now in its fourth iteration and covering some forty countries asks young people directly about their own behaviour, bypassing the distorting lens of the criminal justice apparatus. These surveys suggest that England and Wales sits, broadly speaking, in the middle of the European pack. We are not Sweden. But nor are we Serbia. Self-reported rates of shoplifting and petty theft among British adolescents have historically been comparable to those in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany when age groups are properly matched. The hand wringing headlines about uniquely degenerate English youth are not, on this evidence, well founded.



What is rather more striking and rather more important is what has been happening across the whole of Western Europe and North America simultaneously. The youth crime drop is one of the most significant and least publicly understood social phenomena of the past thirty years. From the mid 1990s onward youth offending of almost every kind declined dramatically in country after country: the United States, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and yes, England and Wales. The proportional reductions were in many cases between 50% and 75%. Property crime, including theft, led that decline. The causes remain genuinely contested; declining unstructured socialisation between young people, reduced alcohol consumption, the growth of digital entertainment keeping children off the streets but the fact of the decline is not in dispute.




What is now also apparent is that the decline has, since approximately 2015 and more visibly since the pandemic, begun to level off. Self reported property crimes have been rising in at least five European countries. Shoplifting offences across England and Wales, for all age groups, have reached record levels. That the recent uptick in recorded youth theft in this jurisdiction is matched by similar trends elsewhere should at least prompt us to consider whether we are dealing with a locally generated problem or a shared European one. The evidence rather suggests the latter. The cost of living, the contraction of retail security investment during the pandemic years and the changing social routines of adolescents appear to be common drivers.



There is one structural feature of England and Wales that genuinely distinguishes us from most European comparators and it deserves more attention than it typically receives. The low age of criminal responsibility means that children who in Germany or Denmark would receive welfare or educational interventions are, in this jurisdiction, processed through the criminal justice system. A ten year old cautioned for shoplifting in Nottingham is a statistic; the same child in Nuremberg is a welfare case. This is not merely a question of nomenclature. It shapes the trajectory of a young life, the composition of our proven offence data and arguably the reoffending rates that subsequently haunt our statistics. Children with a theft index offence, we are told, reoffend at a rate of over 44%. One might enquire whether that reflects the criminogenic character of young thieves or the criminogenic character of early criminal justice contact itself. Several decades of research across European jurisdictions point rather firmly toward the latter.

Those of us who spent years on the bench know something that statistics struggle to capture: the extraordinary ordinariness of most of them. They are not a different species. They are children making poor decisions in circumstances that adults have frequently had a hand in creating eg inadequate housing, fractured families, failing schools and communities starved of youth provision. The Youth Justice Board notes that the average time from offence to completion at court now stands at 230 days, the highest ever recorded. Whatever one thinks about the merits of swift justice the idea that a fourteen year old connects a court appearance eight months after the event with the act that prompted it strains credibility.



The conclusion that honest engagement with the evidence compels is an uncomfortable one for those who prefer simple narratives. The youth of England and Wales are not uniquely delinquent. They are part of a Western pattern that rose, fell dramatically and has recently shown signs of modest reversal. The data that purport to show otherwise are built on definitional foundations too shaky to bear the weight of confident assertion. That is not a counsel of complacency. It is a demand for intellectual rigour, something which, in the discourse around youth crime, has rarely been in plentiful supply.