Last updated 10:57, Saturday, 24 May 2008

CRIMES by children are apparently to be included in the next round of national crime figures, which is expected to push the number of recorded incidents up considerably.

This news was announced last Thursday, the same day that I saw Boris Johnson, London’s new mayor, being interviewed on GMTV for the first time.

It was also the same day that I heard a clergyman who is an expert on conflict resolution talking on the radio about being in the Gaza Strip.

We’ll start with him. He spoke about seeing children who had to walk to school because there was no public transport.

They had nothing but were spotlessly clean and full of smiles and enthusiasm.

The clergyman, whose name I missed, said that the one thing that faith did - and should do - was to give people a sense of their own worth as human beings. The children he saw in Gaza reflected that.

They may live in a war zone, they may have nothing, but they still knew they had value. Is that is what’s wrong in society today? Have we lost our faith and lost our own value and self worth?

Boris Johnson may have the answer in a nutshell; adults, he says, are too afraid to stand up to kids nowadays.

It is true, and often there is a reason. We have heard of people being stabbed or beaten to death because they have challenged yobs.

But the reason these kids are so out of control in the first place is that we live in a society where the rights of kids have become so paramount that people are afraid to take action in case they themselves end up in court.

Johnson says there is to be “zero tolerance” in London and it will start on the buses.

He wants to make it possible for adults to challenge kids who are misbehaving, throwing things around or shouting and swearing.

He says there will be more security staff on buses so that other passengers need not feel so intimidated.

It is like going back to the basics. If we show kids we expect politeness on buses and in public places the message might get through elsewhere, too.

The important thing is that young people misbehaving should be able to be told, should be able to made to behave, without furious parents rushing to the authorities to complain that the rights of their little darlings have been infringed.

I don’t think young people should be exploited or harmed; I have no desire to return to days when brutal, bullying teachers took the cane or a strap to pupils on the most trivial of excuses.

If we are going to treat kids with respect, we have to respect them, too.

But that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate nonsense and it does mean that we have to be protected if we’re going to stand up to the louts.

Another disturbing statistic is the growing number of girls involved in criminal and violent behaviour.

What a shame that the sexual revolution and the fight for equality has resulted in young women now having the “right” to drink as much as the blokes, to swear like the boys and to get into the same trouble.

When women way back fought for equality they were trying to improve the lot of women who were drudges, owned by their husbands or fathers with no rights of their own.

But that fight for equality went hand in hand with the temperance movement; women knew that most of their troubles stemmed from their husbands’ drinking.

If those women knew that their fight had resulted in the right for young girls today to drink along with the boys and be involved in all the anti-social behaviour that alcohol causes, they may have reconsidered what they are doing.

Their burden was probably not as great as that of many young people today who struggle with the lack of clear boundaries - with unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, unemployment and the rest.

If you spoke to any one of these ladettes, or any of the louts who are bothering people on the street, they would tell you many things.

But I bet they wouldn’t tell you they were happy.