A few months ago, a newspaper reported the case of a girl who had been convicted for her part in the riots months after they took place. She was just thirteen when she got swept up in a riot in Basingstoke. On the day, she followed adults to an asylum seekers’ hotel and CCTV revealed her kicking the door. Once she was arrested a couple of months later, the police could easily have offered her a conditional caution - an out of court resolution which involves doing a programme/paying compensation/taking part in restorative justice. As it is, they charged her with racially aggravated violent disorder, she pleaded guilty and got sentenced to a referral order, which will probably have involved her doing the same activities as if she had received a conditional caution. And the sting in the tail is that, because she was convicted, the offence will now appear on higher level DBS checks until she is 100.
By the end of October, 84 children had been charged and presumably many more have been charged since for their part in the riots. Some were held on remand and served custodial sentences. But why were so many children like the thirteen year old girl prosecuted and convicted when the youth justice system has a proud record of resolving crime out of court? Most of the harmful behaviour committed by children could have been addressed by education and welfare services. Particularly if the child was arrested months after the riots. Instead children appear to have been subject to tougher punishment than their peers - 13 year olds accused of much more serious offences than the girl swept up in the riot are frequently dealt with by police out of court.
On the other hand, in the wake of the Commissioner’s report three racial justice organisations criticised it for ignoring the harm the riots did to children and young people from minoritised ethnic communities. More recently the very real suffering of asylum seekers as a result of the riots featured in a report from the Mental Health Foundation. Mark Rowland, the chief executive, said: “The racist riots of summer 2024 had a terrible impact on the mental health of many people seeking asylum in [the] UK. Some people told us they were scared to leave their accommodation, risking increased isolation, and others said they feared they’d be attacked walking down the street just because of the colour of their skin.”
Criminal justice is not a zero sum game. It can be the case both that children were punished too harshly for their involvement in the riots and that victims’ harm was not properly addressed. It seems that we missed a major opportunity for restorative justice. We should have brought the children who rioted together with the victims of the riots so victims could tell the children why incidents like a kick on the door of an asylum seekers’ hotel did such damage. All this could have been done out of court, thus preventing children ending up with a life-long criminal record.