Pubdate: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 Source: Guardian, The (UK) Contact: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Copyright: Guardian Media Group 1998 Author: Decca Aitkenhead THE HEROIN PROBLEM IS POVERTY In the streets around Craigton primary school in Glasgow this week, you could hear two different reactions to the news that an 11-year-old had been found with UKP500 worth of heroin in his school bag. One was exaggerated shock. The other was exaggerated denial of surprise. More often than not, the two were expressed in the same breath. People said they couldn't believe it, then shrugged and said they could believe anything of children these days. It can't have anything to do with poverty, several said. This isn't such a bad area, and kids are still dealing drugs. The opinion that children are out of control is so deeply held that the discovery of heroin was considered less a revelation than extra evidence for a case already proven. It was just a few miles south of Glasgow, in Hamilton, that fear of youth crime prompted the country's first curfew policy earlier this year. Children found out after dark were taken home by the police, and the experiment was judged such a success that, as of last month, councils in England and Wales have the right to impose their own curfew. This is one of Jack Straw's biggest big ideas for cracking down on youth crime. When I visited Hamilton in April, I spoke mostly to youngsters, who were predictably indignant about the curfew. I spoke less to the elderly on the estates, the people whose deep, paralysing fear of children is greatest. Fear of crime can be as much a part of the problem as actual crime itself, and so this week I went back to the Hillhouse estate, to a day-care centre for the elderly. It offers lunch, bingo, quizzes and company to people who have literally nowhere else to go. I met only one man who will leave his flat by himself. The others are imprisoned in their homes, relying on council care-workers and family to take them out. When they were children, they used to play out for hours, and their parents didn't have to worry. Now, they said, the area is so dangerous, no parent should let their child out of sight. But parents do let their children play out, and this is something they cannot understand. What are the parents thinking? Where is the discipline? The kids who play outside their flats are rude and aggressive, and so they don't dare go out. You can't be too careful, they all said. Crack downs and curfews may cut youth crime, but they will not make the victims of fear of crime feel any safer. Old women at the centre said they adored their grandchildren, but that they never spoke to other teenagers. Consequently, every 11-year-old boy they see looks to them like he might have a schoolbag full of heroin, and so every 11-year-old might as well have. That old people should lock themselves away from the world because they do not understand it, and are therefore scared of it, is a bleak indictment of our law-and-order efforts. Elderly people on housing estates would benefit less from the odd extra police car than from measures which are not obvious law-and-order policies at all. If the council provided more day-care centres and home help, and ran buses which actually stopped outside their houses, the elderly would feel less vulnerable. There is nothing for kids to do on the estates, but there is nothing for the elderly to do either, and empty isolation is a terrifying thing. If local schools signed up to befriending schemes, so that teenagers were dropping into pensioners' homes, the mutual alienation would diminish; proposed citizenship classes for pupils could include such a scheme. This is surely what the Government could mean by "joined-up thinking" for "communities". But 11-year-olds with heroin are not always the invention of the elderly who sit at home and watch too much of The Bill on TV. A careworker at the day centre talked to me about the area. He has lived here all his life, and can scarcely believe how it has changed. Youngsters, he said simply, are abusive. A lot of teenagers are dealing heroin, and they're breaking into houses to pay for it. Twenty years ago you'd wander home from the pub, blethering with folk; now you avoid eye contact unless you want a fight. Clearly, it isn't good enough to dismiss the perils of run-down estates as alarmist fantasies of pensioners and draconian home secretaries. But nor is it good enough to say it has nothing to do with poverty. One woman in her 80s was uncomprehending. "When I was a child I got an apple and an orange for Christmas, and I was happy. These days, weans want computers. How can anyone say they're living in poverty?" It must seem incomprehensible to her - - but poverty is not an absolute. The care-worker explained that he used to be an engineer. The factory union was strong, and they fought hard for good wages. Then, in the 80s, workers were encouraged to buy their houses. "As soon as they had a mortgage," he said, "you knew they'd never risk going on strike again. And the management knew it too." Local wages have been driven down and down, he said, and there are folk working for UKP2.50 an hour or less, on personal contracts not worth the paper on which they're written. His friend is about to lose his home. He has lived there for 20 years, but a few years ago he bought it from the council. He's fallen into arrears, and the mortgage company is repossessing it on Monday. He owes just UKP600. "The building society's directors will spend that on a business lunch, won't they? That's less than a week's wages for them. Just UKP600. And on Monday they're evicting him. He's got a wife and two weans. No wonder children do drugs. No wonder people get bitter and angry." The elderly I spoke to remember poverty, but not the corrosive poverty of inequality, where children are forced into a homeless unit over the price of a businessmen's lunch. They weren't encouraged to buy a house they couldn't afford, and didn't work for bosses who made fortunes and paid crumbs. The problems facing these estates aren't the product of wilful fecklessness, but the ugly inevitabilities of inequality. When a child is found with heroin in his satchel, it is easy to forget this, because it's almost impossible to comprehend how such a thing could have happened. But youth crime can't be solved by curfews, or zero tolerance, or mandatory searches of school-bags. Crackdowns alone won't make the elderly feel safer, any more than they will help the children being made homeless on Monday. - ---