The Dalai Lama is the head monk of Tibetan Buddhism and he used to be in charge of governing Tibet. Like all Dalai Lamas he was chosen for the role as a child. But how can you tell if a toddler would make a good head monk? And how come the current Dalai Lama isn’t even allowed to live in Tibet any more?

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When asked what he thought of Western Civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi famously replied: ‘I think it would be an excellent idea’. The wisdom of his words came to me the other week when I read that in 2008 the Metropolitan Police had used new anti-terror laws to stop and search 58 children aged 9 or under – 10 girls and 48 boys. How can this be justified, even under the guise of fighting terrorism?

Scotland Yard
[image © copyright Mr Ush, some rights reserved]

These police officers had obviously not heard of other contributions on the theme of what constitutes a ‘civilised society’. Louis Pasteur once said that whenever he approached a child he was always inspired by two sentiments: tenderness for what the child is, and respect for what the child may become.

What could have provoked 58 separate suspicions that a child under 10 years of age could be a terror threat? If we do not stand up for children in our society, what does it say about the society in which we live? To what depths we have sunk when we resort to apprehending in London alone so many children under the age of criminal responsibility in a single year. None of the children were subsequently found to be linked to terror offences.

Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 gives police wide powers to stop and search without the need for officers to have reasonable suspicion. Further examination of the data reveals that in 2008 a massive 2,331 children aged 15 and under were apprehended under the Act, suggesting perhaps that the Metropolitan Police have been using these powers as an instrument of general policing rather than for the special purposes for which they were devised.

It can hardly foster community relations when any police force abuses its powers through stop and search measures. In 2008 alone the Metropolitan Police carried out 170,000 stop and searches using Section 44. Alas, I could not find any national data for 2008 under Section 44 of the Act, but Hansard of 10th March 2008 proved more fruitful: interestingly, in the first 6 years since the Act was introduced, only six arrests resulted from over 168,000 stop and searches. The more recent data suggests that since 2005-6 the use of Section 44 powers have escalated hugely.

New Scotland Yard argue that the searches of children aged 9 or under is justified. Indeed many people would argue that this is the price we have to pay for combating terrorism, and that children who were apprehended are more likely to have been accompanying an adult who may have aroused police suspicions. However, no child under 10 has so far been associated with terrorist activity, and none of the children apprehended -or even their relatives - have so far been charged under the Act.

This trend mirrors several practices our so-called ‘civilised society’ imposes on the rights and welfare of children. A related issue of concern is the increasing number of asylum-seeking children now detained. Again in August disturbing figures were published which revealed that in the first 6 months of 2009, 470 children were detained indefinitely without charge. Their only crime appears to have been to try and escape war, torture, violence and persecution.

In August it was revealed that over one third of these children were locked up for over one month (The Guardian, 31 August 2009). It came as a shock to discover that the United Kingdom now boasts one of the worst records in Europe for the detention of children. So, in a real way, I am no longer surprised to discover that the Metropolitan Police are using whatever legislation they can to stop and search children under the age of criminal responsibility.

It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who in his Inaugural Presidential Address in 1933 asserted his firm belief that his people had ‘nothing to fear except fear itself’. Fear is a cancer that slowly eats away at civilisation. These disturbing figures on the way we are treating children in the UK should shame us all. Sadly our society seems to be losing its capacity for compassion. We seem to be drifting remorselessly towards more brutal and racist solutions to problems that deserve a ‘civilised’ response. Looking around the political scene in the UK several months prior to the formation of a new Government it is disturbing to find that few politicians seem to either be aware of the problem or care much for the implications. Children are the best resource we have. We must stop abusing them.

About the author

Richard Skellington edits Society Matters for the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Open University. He’s an administrator who manages the Environment, Development and International Studies programme.

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After watching recent news images of Afghani refugees climbing razor-wired fences around a Greek port, I prepared myself for the tabloid headlines screaming ‘invasion’ that would inevitably come the next day and for the government to announce yet more measures to sure up the borders of Great Britain. It seemed impossible to imagine a time when politicians in Europe actually encouraged ‘free’ movement, and discouraged the use of passports. Writers in the 16th century extolled the virtues of travel just for the sake of ‘curiosity’, and the onus was on receiving territories to extend a sense of hospitality to the traveller.

Of course, this is an idealised description: then as today, some travellers were more welcome than others. But reading Adam McKeown’s new book, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalisation of Borders, reminded me that our current web of migration regulations has a history, one embedded in the 19th century exclusion of Asian migrants from white settler colonies in the Pacific. His detailed research raises several paradoxes which perhaps point to why, even with the intense focus given to migration control by successive governments, we still have a situation that the International Organisation of Migration (2003) has called a ‘migration governability crisis’.

The first paradox is that contemporary border controls evolved from regulations developed by settler nations such as the United States and Australia, which were ostensibly founded on the premise of egalitarianism by pioneers of political freedoms despite the obvious racism in ‘white only’ migration policies and the decimation of indigenous populations. As a result, over time, discrimination has become acceptable at borders but not overtly within the state itself.

A boat crowded with Cuban refugees arrives in Key West, Florida, during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift
[image in the public domain, from United States Coastguard Service, sourced from Wikimedia]

Second, while neo-liberal globalisation is premised on an idea of free trade between countries, migration control is an obstacle to mobility. As a result, we have seen increasing separation between regulations relating to commerce and those relating to migration. Border control is now designed to facilitate some kinds of mobility, and migrants, and block others. Attempting to guarantee freedom, for some at least, through the imposition of regulations, transformed migration for others into an act of evasion and criminality. The meaning of ‘free’ has become ambiguous and opaque as a result.

The third paradox raised in McKeown’s research is that while migration laws coerce and exclude, interrogate, evaluate and attempt to quantify migrants, they are also considered as vehicles of justice, fairness, the ‘rule of law‘, and ‘efficiency’. They reflect normative ideals of how things should be, including the international order of states. It is impossible not to reflect on these distinctions and the right to be mobile when arriving at Heathrow Airport with an EU passport that only needs to be held up for a cursory glance by an immigration officer. To the left Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe queue up and wait. I am classified as a professional migrant, incorporated into a legal, formal administration, probably disappearing from the category of migrant altogether. In contradistinction are the ‘others’, those that work in 3D (domestic, dirty and dangerous jobs) who face resistance to their formal recognition within national labour regimes.

State institutions appear unable to resolve the inherent tensions in these paradoxes so the migrant continues to find their own way through red tape and over razor-wire. The kafka-esque world of immigration bureaucracy and rigid state regulations is met by the resilient human abilities of evasion and obfuscation in the hope of a better life.

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Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalisation of Borders
Adam McKeown, published by Colombia University Press

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Melissa Butcher is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the Open University. Her research and teaching focuses on managing change in culturally diverse urban spaces.

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