Call for clampdown on 'needless' arrests of girls
Neil Puffett
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
A prison campaign group has called for police to deal with more girls informally, suggesting that tens of thousands are arrested needlessly each year.
Submitting evidence to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Women in the Penal System, which is conducting an inquiry on girls in the penal system, the Howard League for Penal Reform said as many as 170,000 girls have been arrested in the past three years.
A statement from the charity suggested that most of these arrests are "needless" as "very few" of these girls will end up in court and even fewer in custody. It has called on police services to resolve issues involving children or refer cases to child protection services.
The figures, obtained via Freedom of Information requests, show that girls account for around a fifth of the children arrested by the police each year.
In 2010, there were 48,360 arrests of girls by the police, however, fewer than a third of these resulted in a court conviction.
The charity said evidence given to it by senior police officers indicates that girls are arrested to protect them, for example because they are drunk, as opposed to any significant crime issue.
The APPG is due to hear that some police services are pioneering best practice, including Hampshire and Gloucestershire, where frontline police officers are encouraged to solve problems instead of taking the costly and less effective route of the criminal justice system.
Gloucestershire has led the country with the biggest reduction in the number of girls arrested from 798 in 2008 to 322 in 2010.
Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: "This excessive use of arrest puts a huge burden on the police, who have to do all the paperwork and tie up valuable time and money dealing with young children when they could be dealing with burglaries, rapes and other serious crimes.
"The high level of arrests leaves many young girls emotionally distressed and traumatised by their experience.
"Some of these girls are being troublesome because they are being poorly parented and may be in need of protection.
"Given all the evidence that increasing contact with the criminal justice system harms children and leads to poorer outcomes, every effort should be made at the earliest point of contact to divert children to services that can help support them and lessen the likelihood of reoffending."