So insanely far-reaching is ‘hate crime’ law in England that even children are now accused of it, and are being investigated by the police. According to a report by LBC, these children include a nine year old who called a classmate a ‘retard’ and two teenagers who told another student she smelt like a fish. As you can imagine, the police have traditionally not investigated such name-calling because they have far more serious matters to deal with such as, er, GBH, rapes and murders. Schools, which are tasked with the job of helping children to grow up into sensible adults, are the appropriate authorities for dealing with playground name-calling that is often the product of immaturity rather than a potential for crime. A good telling-off is usually all that is required from a teacher. But in our age of perpetual offence-taking and skins as thin as moth wings, the local constabulary is now expected to be involved. Of course, the above cases did not meet the threshold for criminal prosecution. Who would have guessed? Now, you would think that was the end of the story, but oh no it is not. These incidents of name-calling have been recorded as ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) and therein lies a spectacularly unpleasant problem.
Unlike a criminal offence committed by a minor which is expunged from the offender’s record once s/he hits eighteen, a NCHI is never removed. Therefore, what is often a single moment of unpleasant, childish behaviour which has been going on since humanity first emerged on the savannah plains of East Africa, is now a permanent blemish that will affect the child for the rest of his/her life. If s/he wishes to apply for a job which requires an enhanced criminal-record check, the NCHI will show up and have to be disclosed to the prospective employer who may well see that as a reason to deny the position.
Let us be blunt about it: this kind of sanction is child-abuse and potentially can more seriously affect a child’s mental health than being called a retard or an odoriferous fish. Toby Young, who heads the increasingly necessary Free Speech Union (FSU), says his organisation is now more frequently helping parents take legal action to remove NCHIs from their children’s record. He cites anonymously the case of a boy whom he is currently helping, whose mother has explained that her son now cannot sleep since the police informed the family that he has been given a NCHI. The boy rightly is worried about his future chances of employment and applying to university.
Young was optimistic that the FSU and its allies in the House of Lords had managed to curtail the use of NCHIs through an amendment to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act that enabled the then Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, to introduce a statutory instrument that imposed a new code of practice on the recording and retention of NCHIs. This meant that the police were not expected always to record hate crimes as they had been, regardless of how trivial the incident was, under the Hate Crime Operational Guidance issued by the College of Policing in 2014. The new code of practice also advised the police not to record NCHIs against children.
Young’s great concern, which ought to be every sane person’s concern, is that despite Keir Starmer saying that the police ought to focus on real crime rather than policing insults on social media, his home secretary, Yvette Cooper, believes the police ought to be recording more NCHIs not less. Young believes there is the real possibility that she will repeal the statutory instrument, which means more adults and indeed children will find themselves being investigated, and their records ruined by inexpungable NCHIs.
We are now in the situation where due to our continued obeisance to the European Court of Human Rights, a Congolese paedophile can win his case against deportation because it denies him the right to a family life, and an Albanian criminal, rightly deported, has won his right to stay in Britain despite returning illegally, because his girlfriend has now had their baby. And yet, a child who calls another child a ‘wanker’ in the playground is now saddled with a permanently blighted record. Good grief. How stupefyingly stupid is this inversion of priorities? How emetically unjust. So, where to begin the pushback? Let us begin with the children.
If you have children and are concerned that an NCHI has been recorded against any of them (the police do not have to inform you or your child of this), contact the Free Speech Union at their website. They can help you to find out what information the police have on your children through a subject-access request. If there is a NCHI against your child, they can help get it removed. The more people who do this, the more the message can be rammed home that the sane majority will not put up with Cooper and Co’s authoritarianism.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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Utterly disgusting but the blame should be with the school that involves the police. Ironically though if a teacher merely gave a good telling off, it’s entirely likely that the child’s parents would submit a complaint and the teacher would be subject to an investigation and/or disciplinary action themselves.
“a nine year old who called a classmate a ‘retard’”
I rather approve of clamping down on that noxious American slang. When I was a boy the term was “mental defective”.