No one who has opened a newspaper or watched the news in the past few days will have been left unaffected by the terrible case of two brothers from Doncaster, aged just 10 and 11, who carried out a grotesque attack on two other young boys.
The story was accompanied by the usual, polarised public commentary: depending on one's viewpoint, this is either an utterly isolated incident and we shouldn't make too much of it, or these two are scum and they should get a dose of their own medicine. In cases like this one, we become locked into a familiar, depressing cycle. First, look for someone to blame; then ask why the last set of recommendations in this area were not fully implemented; next, task some worthy with undertaking a further review to ensure "the system is tightened up"; then the political caravan moves on. We deal with the symptom rather than the cause.
The inconvenient reality is that, in Britain today, there are a growing number of dysfunctional families with multiple children who will, in turn, go on to breed even more dysfunctional children. They are living on benefits; often, the children are abused and grow up in a culture where the taking of illegal drugs is the norm and where education has no value; violence against women is commonplace. Such families are more often than not centred on the mother, who herself is the product of a similar background; at the heart of her life are a series of relationships with transient, maladjusted and often violent men.
There is research to tell us why. A study in New Zealand followed a thousand children as they grew up, commencing when they were born in 1972. At the age of three, they were assessed to determine which of them came from "at risk" family backgrounds; they were then reassessed at the age of 21. The results were revealing. At 21, it was found that the "at risk" boys had nearly three times as many criminal convictions – the vast majority of which were for violence – as the others. Also, half the "at risk" group of males abused their partners, a figure nearly five times higher than among the other men.
Of the females, all the teenage pregnancies occurred in the "at risk" group. Of those young mums, just under half were living in abusive relationships; also, the fathers of their children were drawn from the "at risk" group of males. The authors were able to conclude that immature mothers, with no strong parenting skills and violent partners, had already given birth to the next generation of "at risk" children. These families form a growing underclass, devoid of hope or aspiration, whose life experiences are completely detached from those of the majority.
Yet it is possible to get ahead of this problem. There is general agreement that the most critical time in a child's life is in the first three years: the brain develops at its fastest, setting the intellectual scope for the rest of childhood. In other words, what happens before a child enters the nursery or school outweighs all that takes place subsequently. It is in these first three years that a child's future is shaped and, in some senses, predicted.
Neuroscientists have been able to show us that children brought up in families where there is abuse and neglect, will by the age of three have smaller brains than their equivalent, functional counterparts. Furthermore, it isn't just about the relative size of the brain; it is also about the way the brain is able to communicate at different levels at the same time. Reading someone's visual responses while talking to them relies on the development of links known as the neural pathways. In dysfunctional children, these are often undeveloped, leaving the child uncommunicative and reactive.
Enough work has been done to narrow down the most important components that must be present if the child is to flourish and its brain to develop properly. At the top of the list is the need for the child to receive unconditional love, empathy and nurture from a parent. It is essential that a mother plays with and talks to the baby, as its brain slowly begins to imitate all that it sees and hears. Reading to the baby also stimulates its capacity to communicate.
In the US, there are over 60 remedial programmes for troubled families, such as the Nurse Family Partnership and Roots of Empathy. These have succeeded in turning lives around, by getting to and working with children and their mothers. One successful programme in the UK, "Save the Family", believes in taking mothers and children into care so that they can be assisted together as a unit: as they say, save the mother and you save the child. Where these programmes have been used in a concerted fashion, the results have been remarkable – one study of "at risk" families who had been given support, found that when the children grew into adults the number of arrests fell by 56 per cent and there were 81 per cent fewer convictions. By 15 years old, the children had had 63 per cent fewer sexual partners. Among the mothers, there had been an 83 per cent increase in employment by the child's fourth birthday.
Our prisons are full of those who have grown up in dysfunctional families. The majority of prisoners come from broken homes and have serious drug and alcohol addictions, going back to childhood. Half were excluded from school and a third played truant regularly. It is small wonder that nearly 70 per cent have a numeracy age below that of a child of 11, and well over half struggle to read at all. This is expensive: in the last 10 years, the cost of the criminal justice system has risen in real terms by nearly 50 per cent, and working age benefits by 30 per cent.
The pattern of life for the two brothers from Doncaster has been set. Their lives have been conditioned by their upbringing. Without empathy or concern for others, they are destined to become part of the furniture of the criminal justice system.
Over the past year, the Labour MP Graham Allen and I have come together to try to persuade all political parties to make intervention in dysfunctional families a priority. Over 15 years or so, we can reduce the scale of the problem and save money at the same time.
But it will take political courage to set such a long-term programme in place. To those who prefer to deal only with the symptoms of social failure, I can only say that the burgeoning criminal justice costs show you cannot arrest your way out of this problem. Unless we intervene now to change the lives of the next generation, our children and grandchildren will bear an almost impossible social and financial cost.
