You may have read my recent blog about difficult situations
with teenage girls while working out of hours. While I was having a look in the
Masked AMHP’s vault, I came across a couple of incidents from the 1980’s which
involved teenage boys, and a certain reluctance on the part of the police to
intervene, which I thought I would share.
Sean
One evening I received a call from Charwood Police to attend
as an Appropriate Adult under PACE (The Police & Criminal Evidence Act)
while they interviewed a young boy who had been arrested for a distraction
burglary.
Little was known about him, as he appeared unable or
unwilling to provide much information. He was from a group of Irish travellers,
who had settled on a piece of wasteland on the edge of Charwood. He had been
arrested when he and an older boy had been reported for attempting to steal
from a Charwood householder.
Distraction burglaries involve one of a pair engaging
someone in their garden in conversation, while the other nips into their house
and has a search for valuables. The older boy had made off, but the police had
managed to catch Sean.
Sean was unclear about his surname, and appeared not to know
his date of birth. All he knew was that he was 13 years old. This knowledge
could have been influenced by knowing that he could not be remanded in custody
if he was under 14.
I sat in on the interview, during which he admitted nothing,
and appeared to know nothing. Having gone through the due process, the custody
sergeant was keen to dispose of him.
This gave me a problem. As an Appropriate Adult, I had a
responsibility for his welfare unless and until I could find an adult,
preferably a parent, who could take on responsibility for him.
Sean was extremely vague about whether or not he had any
relatives living in the UK.
He said that his mother was in the Republic
of Ireland, but was
unclear as to the whereabouts of his father, or any other relatives. Unless I
could find somebody, I would have to accommodate him in a local authority
children’s home.
I discussed the problem with the custody sergeant.
“Do you think you could get an officer to pop over to the
travellers’ site and see if there’s a relative there?” I asked hopefully.
The sergeant looked at me as if I had suggested that he take
Sean home with him at the end of his shift.
“We’d be asking for trouble if a police car turned up
there,” he said. “It’d be too dangerous. It’s strictly off limits.”
So what was I to do? I really did not want to place Sean in
a children’s home if I could help it.
In the end, I decided I’d have to go there myself.
By now it was quite late in the evening. I cautiously
entered the site in my car. The caravans all appeared to be in darkness.
Although there were a number of vehicles on the site, there appeared to be no
actual people. I wandered around somewhat apprehensively for a little while,
then saw a face peering at me through a window in one of the caravans.
When the face saw that I had spotted them, it rapidly
withdrew, but I went forward and knocked on the door.
After a pause, the door opened a little and a man looked
suspiciously at me.
“I wonder if you can help me,” I began. “Do you happen to
know a boy called Sean?”
“I’m not sure about that,” the man answered with a strong
Irish accent.
“You see,” I continued. “I’ve got this problem. Sean’s down
at the police station –“
“I don’t know anything about that,” the man interrupted.
“The police have finished interviewing him and he’s ready to
be released. I’m a social worker, and unless I can find a relative, or at least
a responsible adult who can take charge of him, I’ll have to put him into care
in a children’s home.”
The man looked at me silently, considering what I had said.
At last, he said, “I’ll tell you what, you bring this young
lad down here and I’ll see if I can find anyone who knows him and can take care
of him.”
I went back to the police station, picked Sean up, and
brought him back to the site.
The man opened the door of his caravan and examined the
young boy for a moment.
“You come and get in here, son” he said to Sean at last.
“Yes, Dad,” Sean replied sheepishly, and slipped inside.
Sam and Stuart
It was late in the afternoon on an August Bank Holiday
Monday when I received another call from Charwood Police. This time they had
two 13 year olds who had been found by a passing police car hitchhiking down a
quiet country lane. They said that they’d been threatened, and were in fear of
their lives.
That August Bank Holiday weekend there had been a New Age
Travellers Festival on a rural site a few miles outside Charwood. These two
boys were there with the father of one of them.
New Age Travellers were particularly prevalent in the 1980’s
and early 1990’s. They were mainly itinerant, travelling from one place to
another fairly aimlessly in ramshackle convoys of old buses, ambulances, vans
and other vehicles that had been converted into somewhat makeshift mobile
homes, especially during the summer months, when they would move from one free
festival or country fair to another.
They were essentially the tail end of the 1960’s/1970’s
Hippy movement. Having had some pretensions to being a hippy in my teenage
years, before getting a haircut and getting a job as a social worker, I had some
sympathy for them.
But these boys were making allegations that could amount to
child abuse. Their story was that they had been wrongly accused of a
misdemeanour by some sort of ad hoc hippy parliament, and were escaping from
some dreadful, but unspecified punishment.
Clearly, I was going to have to do some investigation and
try to get to the bottom of it, otherwise I would have to place them in a
children’s home, at least until the local social services office could sort
something out the following day.
“Have you made any attempt to find the father?” I asked the
duty sergeant.
“I expect he’ll be on the festival site,” the sergeant said.
“Yes, I know, but have you sent any officers out to try and
find him, so we can find out what’s actually going on?” I had an inkling of the
reply I would receive.
“I can’t send any of my officers out there,” he said. “Far
too dangerous. Asking for trouble.”
So it looked like I would have to make my own
investigations. Again.
I drove out to the site. By now the festival had finished,
and many of the attendees had left, or were packing up.
There was nobody managing the entrance, so I drove over
several fields that had been used for the festival until I reached a group of
tents and vans. A few people were milling about, or just sitting round
campfires, cooking or smoking.
I saw a man with long hair and a beard standing at the mouth
of a yurt.
“Hello,” I said hopefully. I explained briefly who I was.
“Do you know a couple of young lads called Sam and Stuart?”
“Yes I do,” he replied a little grimly. “Do you know where
they’ve got to?”
I explained the situation to him.
“Come inside,” he said and ushered me into his yurt. It was
quite a comfortable and surprisingly roomy space, with a potbellied wood burner
in one corner, and a few beds which also stood in as seating. He said that he
was Sam’s father, and Stuart was with them with the permission of his parents
for the duration of the festival. Now the festival was over, they would be
returning to another part of the country.
He told me to sit down, while he got the nominal leader of
the group.
He came back with a pleasant looking middle aged woman. She
explained that Sam and Stuart, far from being the innocents they were claiming
to be, had actually been caught stealing minor items from others at the
festival.
The habit of the group when a member had contravened one of
their few rules (stealing was one of them), was to convene a meeting, confront
the offender with their misdemeanour, and then suggest some sort of restitution.
In the case of Sam and Stuart, their appointed job was to help to clean up the
site. They had not wanted to do this, so had decided to run away.
There really did not appear to be any reason to put Sam and
Stuart into care. The best solution was to return them to the traveller group,
and they could then go on their way.
I took the father with me to the police station, where the
boys looked rather forlorn, but not in any way fearful.
After getting some fish and chips from a local Chinese, which
was open on the Bank Holiday, I took them all back to the camp and went on my
way.
