KEY POINTS:
You can't blame the Council for Civil Liberties for expressing reservations about the proposal to vet kids as young as 3 for anti-social behaviour. The council exists for the very worthwhile purpose of raising questions about the implications of public policy for individual rights. But the faintness of their response in this case makes it plain that they realise they are on a hiding to nothing.
The pronouncement by the council's chairman, Michael Bott, that "we may be encouraging a climate of fear where the state is looking into the private realm to find problems where there are none" will have fallen on very deaf ears indeed. Most of us know - or have known from time to time - what a climate of fear is. And what has accompanied such fear as we have felt has not been the thought that the state would intervene without reason but that it would intervene too late, too little or not at all.
Now a programme, developed by the Ministry of Education, working in conjunction with the Ministries of Health and Social Development, will screen kids aged between 3 and 7 for signs of anti-social behaviour which could identify whether they are likely to become future criminals.
The scheme is based on exhaustive research and trialling. Canterbury University educationalist Dr John Church, who did some of the research, says there is "fairly comprehensive evidence" that naughty kids turn into criminal adults.
Unfortunately, we don't need him to tell us that. How many of us can look back on memories of schoolmates who are now in prison or have lost their lives to substance abuse or crimes of violence and say, if only with hindsight, that we could always see it coming? Likewise anyone - parent or not - who has spent time in the company of young children realises that they are in the habit of very clearly advertising with their present behaviour what their futures will be like. The child who plays co-operatively, ensuring everybody gets a turn, is unlikely to grow into a cruel and selfish adult; likewise those who throw tantrums or resort to violence when they don't get their own way will probably not turn out kind and thoughtful.
As a piece of social science, then, all this might seem like a statement of the obvious. But the proposal at hand is not simply to identify negative behaviours that have always been obvious; it is to target the state's resources in support and remedial action where they are most needed.
In this intention, the plan is on the solid ground of knowing that a gram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure. The new initiative proposes training courses for both parents and teachers of the children - as many as 3000 a year - who will be identified. Pilot programmes suggest a cost of about $4000 per child involved, and a success rate of about 80 per cent. Intervention at 12 or 13 raises the cost to more than $16,000 and cuts the success rate to below 20 per cent. Says Church: "By the time they get to jail, the success rate is close to zero and the annual cost is well over $90,000."
So what's not to like? Only the danger that the programme's delivery could become mired in bureaucratic procedure. Identifying the children in need is, in relative terms, the easy part. In pilot schemes, the uptake has been high - only one in 800 parents refused to take part in the assessment. But telling parents that their kids are at risk is a fraught undertaking. Parents will tend to draw the inference that they are being labelled failures and, by definition, the families most in need of support will tend to be hostile to state intervention. It will call for a high level of inter-agency co-operation and managerial expertise to ensure that the support services achieve their goals.
None of this is to suggest that police and courts should not continue to come down hard on offenders. What is beginning here is a long-term solution to a deeply ingrained malaise. It deserves the support of everyone.
