‘I was waiting for a mate but they said i can’t stand here. They’re scared we’ll cause bother but we’re not all like that’

15-year-old Jessie Nicholls is talking about the dispersal order that has been in force in her neighbourhood, Lypards in Worcester, since 23 January. Her local police force, West Mercia, was one of the first to use powers permitted under the 2003 Antisocial Behaviour Act to define a “dispersal area”. This is a designated area from which groups of more than two people can be told to move on and under-16s hanging about unsupervised after 9pm can be taken home.

The use of dispersal orders is still relatively new (see “The legal case”, below). The Home Office has yet to produce any figures on how often they have been put into action but, as the school summer holidays begin, there are calls up and down the country for police to use them.

But there’s also a very vocal lobby that opposes the powers. This group, comprising children’s charities, human rights groups and members of the public, argues that young people are being punished for doing nothing wrong. The danger, they say, is that the youngsters will become alienated within their local communities.

In Worcester, the area in question is a sheltered spot in the middle of the new Warndon Villages estate, between a community centre, a chip shop and a Chinese takeaway. “In winter, when it was raining and there were thunderstorms, that’s where we used to go because there was no shelter for us anywhere else,” explains Nicholls. “None of us wanted to go home, we wanted to hang around with our friends. You would get the odd few pestering the shops but the majority just used to stand there and talk.”

She says only 15-25 young people would be there at any one time. However, sergeant Chris Allen, antisocial behaviour coordinator for South Worcestershire Community Safety Partnership, and local community workers offer estimates ranging from 40 to 90 kids.

If it literally is the case that they're not doing anything wrong, then who's smashing up the bus shelters?

Inspector Greg Oakley, West Midlands Police

Allen admits that not all of the kids were troublemakers, but says: “They intimidated just about everyone. We had complaints off shopkeepers and residents and comments by young people that they didn’t like it, either.”

“Although they weren’t doing anything criminally wrong it was causing alarm,” adds Angie Rich, assistant community development manager at Worcester council. “Young people being young people are quite loud.”

And this is the heart of the issue. Whether or not young people are breaking the law, their presence makes others uneasy.

Law enforcers are frustrated by an often-reported anomaly that, while crime is decreasing, fear of crime and of youth crime in particular is increasing. This is what the Home Office is determined to crack by targeting the less serious crimes that disrupt neighbourhoods.

A dispersal area sets a standard that's accepted by the young. They will know as soon as they're in the wrong

Sergeant Chris Allen, West Mercia Police

To this end, the government set up the Antisocial Behaviour Unit in January 2003 to encourage councils and other organisations, such as housing associations, to use the powers in the Antisocial Behaviour Act.

It reaffirmed this drive on Monday with the launch of a five-year strategy that will focus on “yob culture”. It’s part middle-England crowd-pleaser and part New Labour’s avowed intent to revive communities. “People are becoming more fearful of others, and they’re anxious about challenging people’s behaviour,” says antisocial behaviour consultant Adam Greenwood. “That’s why communities fail, not just one problem family. Part of the agenda is to restore that community confidence.”

But opponents argue that the antisocial behaviour campaign puts undue emphasis on young people. The Home Office’s pronouncements on dispersal orders make a priority of the need to “prevent people from feeling frightened and discouraged from using public spaces because they feel threatened by groups of people hanging around” over the right of those groups to be there, regardless of whether they are actually committing any crime. These groups are most likely to be young people, who have fewer resources at their disposal and fewer places they can go.

Tellingly, one of the categories of problem behaviour on the Home Office website is simply called “youth”. No wonder, then, that Home Office figures show that more than half the 1064 antisocial behaviour orders issued between January 2002 and September 2003 were against under-18s.

Their presence causes distress to people, especially those who don’t know who these kids are

Adam Greenwood, antisocial behaviour consultant

“Much of the rhetoric seems to treat children as if they’re not members of a community so much as a threat,” says Kathy Evans, assistant director of policy at charity the Children’s Society. The society opposes dispersal orders and last year published research showing that eight out of 10 youngsters thought the new antisocial behaviour powers were unfair and would create tension with the police. “If people are frightened of young people, we need to get to the heart of why that is,” says Evans.

Police inspector Greg Oakley has just secured a dispersal order on the Quinton estate in Nottingham, after receiving 149 reports of disorder in the preceding year. He describes gangs of young people – and the litter and vandalism they may leave behind – as “signal factors” that contribute to community unrest. And he believes these youngsters are more unruly than their parents and grandparents were. “These young people are accountable to no one,” he says. “Youths are subject to fewer restraints now than they used to be. Society gives them more scope to do whatever they want.”

But researchers disagree. Peter Crawley is a research fellow at the University of Keele’s criminology department and has just finished a study into how police and local authorities deal with antisocial behaviour in North Staffordshire. “There seems to be a lot of continuity between the behaviour of youth today and one, two, even three generations ago,” he says. “Some of the behaviour people label as antisocial is not that different from that of the past, but it might be that the term is used more loosely. All sorts of behaviour that would have been tolerated is called ‘antisocial’ and people call the council.”

If this is the case, the Home Office’s publicity machine is only partly to blame: the media has also played a significant role in creating fear of young people. The Daily Mirror’s current “Reclaim Our Streets” campaign against a “yob epidemic” is a case in point. “This is an example of a moral panic,” says Crawley. “It’s not just the national press, it’s the local papers as well.

They're a great bunch of young kids doing nothing more than being young. All you do is disperse them to other areas, where there's less chance of supervising them

Councillor John Buckley, Warndon, Worcester

“There are some very extreme examples of youth crime which remain isolated incidents, but it’s possible to produce the belief that you can’t go outside your door because of kids hanging around.” He also suggests that, as home entertainment has become more widespread since the 1950s, people are less likely to socialise outside. “There’s no sense of community and the kids are the only ones who are on the streets,” he points out.

“We’re much more negative about teenagers than we are about younger children,” says Laura Edwards, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research who has studied young people and antisocial behaviour.

She sees the government’s approach as a balanced mix of enforcement and diversion – the work of the Home Office’s Youth Inclusion Programme, for example, which currently runs 72 schemes targeting 13- to 16-year-olds most at risk of criminality. The Home Office pledged on Monday to double the number of projects. However, Edwards cautions against a situation where any activity at all that gets young people off the streets is seen as positive. “They need to tie up with what the Department for Education and Skills is doing,” she says.

More joining up of government initiatives is indeed on the way, particularly with the introduction of a children’s commissioner for England and a director of children’s services in every council, as promised under the Children’s Bill launched in March.

Seeing children as the problem and believing it will be solved by getting them off the streets is draconian. Clearing away the problem doesn’t get to the root of it

Kathy Evans, assistant director of policy, Children's Society

On the front line
The theoretical debate is heated, but it cools significantly by the time it reaches the ground, where those enforcing the dispersal orders are far more pragmatic.

Since 18 June, inspector Terry Davies has been policing a dispersal order in Rhymney, Gwent. For him, “it’s not a case of moving everybody on. The policy is to enter into a dialogue with the young people, make them aware that they’re in a designated area and let them know they’re OK if their behaviour is acceptable. It’s putting the onus on them.”

But there is still the question of what happens next. “How will the young people feel and behave when the dispersal order is lifted?” asks Evans at the Children’s Society. “Will they have learned to engage with the community? Will the places to go to have improved?”

No one directly involved in using the dispersal orders sees them as something to be used in isolation. Almost everywhere, there seem to be counter-measures to give young people an alternative to loitering on the street.

It's criminalising people just for being young. The answer is to deal with the individuals causing trouble, not a blanket ban

Alex Gask, solicitor at liberty

For instance, in Jessie Nicholls’ area, Warndon, local people believe young people’s behaviour won’t change until the construction of a new youth shelter in a nearby park. Sergeant Allen says the dispersal order is a short-term measure to “break habits”.

Councillor John Buckley has been very involved with talking to young people about the shelter; he points out that on the Warndon Village estate, home to 7000 people, there are numerous parks for younger children but nothing for them as they grow up. He has also been involved in setting up activities in the local community centre that happen two or three nights a week during the school holidays.

Recognition seems to be growing that asking young people how they feel about their communities and involving them in finding solutions to residents’ fears is the only way to avoid alienating them for good.

Unlike other groups held as pariahs in society, young people are not organised and have no official representatives – apart, perhaps, from those like Nicholls, who is a member of the Youth Parliament for Worcestershire. She is adamant that dismissing or branding young people is

the worst thing the media and public can do: “A year ago, a TV crew came from London to film us on a normal night out,” she says. “But they only wanted to film the bad things that we did – they wanted to make us look bad.

“The local councillors write about the ‘yobs of Warndon’ but we’re not all yobs. It puts all the young people down – and then they wonder why some behave badly.”