The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Violent children become violent adults

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jul 11, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Violent children become violent adults

Oliver James

Britain has learnt a harsh but fair lesson from the U.S. — preventing violent offenders works best if you begin in the nursery.

A FOUR-YEAR-OLD boy in a nursery is scratching his nails along the arm of a younger child, drawing blood. Yesterday, he bit that child; last week he pushed another one off a tricycle, causing grazes. He picks on shy or passive children and has been persistently disruptive to the smooth functioning of the nursery.

While all children are prone to the odd nibble or jab, this boy is different. Further investigation reveals that he has a not very high IQ and that his stepfather and mother row a lot.

She was post-natally depressed and his biological father has a record of aggravated assaults. Levels of the boy's cortisol (the fight-flight hormone) are high.

At present, when all the known factors are taken into account, it is possible to predict with an 80 per cent accuracy which three-year-old boys will become violent men. This has been known for at least a decade and politicians have been pondering its implications.

If little or nothing is done to intervene in the boy's life, not only will he be very likely to wreck his own life, he will cause massive problems for a lot of other people. While nobody would pretend it is easy to help him or his parents, there is a large body of evidence that it is possible.

Famously, the Highscope project in the United States worked. A huge amount of help was offered to one sample of disadvantaged families — extra tuition, therapeutic and practical support for mothers, every kind of welfare benefit. Nothing special was done for a comparison sample and, 30 years later, the Highscope graduates had done dramatically better.

For every dollar spent up front on Highscope, seven were saved further down the road — the costs of police detecting crimes, judicial process, incarceration and those gained from taxes paid and benefits unclaimed; because not only did the Highscope-ites avoid crime, they got educated, got jobs and contributed to the economy.

Currently the authorities in the United Kingdom have tried to put the lessons of Highscope into practice. The removal of one million children so far from poverty has also done wonders.

Now there is talk of identifying at risk children in nurseries.

While this makes the Left jumpy that kids will be stigmatised as criminals when hardly out of nappies, rest assured, this will not be allowed to happen.

So long as the proper resources are provided to help them and their families, identifying the kids who are going to become violent will mean that hundreds of thousands of children will not wreck their own — and others' — lives.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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