Boy 'yob' in High Court bid to avoid being named
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Lawyers for an 11-year-old boy who smeared a baby's face with dog excrement and taunted a neighbour with Nazi salutes asked the High Court yesterday to prevent the media from naming and shaming him as a "yob".
The boy, known as T, can be identified only with a judge's permission. He is among the youngest people to be made the subject of an anti-social behavioural order.
Dacorum magistrates' court, Hertfordshire, imposed the order after hearing how T and a friend turned the lives of neighbours in Hemel Hemstead into a "living nightmare".
T, who is believed to have won legal aid to take his case – thought to be the first of its kind – to court, was accused of taunting a foreign-born resident on the estate by mimicking her accent and making Nazi salutes in the belief she was German.
The court also heard he had pushed dog excrement into the face of a baby sitting in a buggy and swore at and racially abused the child's mother.
Under the terms of the order the boy is prohibited from behaving in a threatening or abusive manner for two years. Any breach will amount to a criminal offence.
In January a judge gave permission for a local newspaper to name the boy, saying the public had the right to know about his offensive behaviour.
Judge Colston, sitting at St Albans Crown Court, said the order was meant to provide general public protection and publicity was necessary to let the public know they had that protection. The judge described the incident involving the baby as "beggaring belief" and T's conduct as "unspeakable".
But in the High Court T's lawyer argued that to allow him to be named by the press and humiliated was "a disproportionate response" that could seriously harm the boy, who faced "having the finger pointed and being jeered at as a yob".
Since the court proceedings, T is understood to have cut his wrists in a suicide attempt.
Yesterday his barrister, Hugo Charlton, argued that the Crown Court judge had misdirected himself and exercised his discretion unlawfully in discharging an anonymity order made under the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act.
Mr Charlton said the irony was that the proceedings for obtaining the order were civil – and if T had appeared on a criminal charge in a youth court, his identity would probably have been protected.
Young people committing "extremely unsavoury" crimes did not normally have their names in the press. Even the killers of James Bulger were protected from having their new identities revealed, he said. The sort of behaviour of which T was accused was no more than "minor harassment" and "relatively trivial, especially when performed by an 11-year-old".
Revealing his identity and "naming and shaming" him could prevent him making good progress and staying out of trouble, as he was now doing, said Mr Charlton. The incidents of harassment and vandalism involving him were committed only on the estate, against a background of "ill-will between various groups".
David Feldstein, editor of the Hemel Hempstead Gazette, which had announced its intention to "fight to name yob of 11", told the court it was in the public interest to identify T. He said anti-social behaviour orders were intended to provide "a short, sharp shock" and the public had to know names so that anyone who breached an order would be caught.
Judgment was reserved.