Having taken delivery of your Sunday Times today, you have no doubt retreated to your panic room to read it in safety. There are criminals and thugs everywhere these days, many of them easily recognised by their distinctive hooded tops.

However, it is safest simply to assume that anyone under the age of 21 is a potential threat. This can cause some difficulties when you think about it for too long. We may outnumber them but they can move a lot faster.

Come to think of it, why should we allow them the run of our public places and especially our street corners? We should reclaim them for our douce elderly citizens, whose memories stretch back to those peaceful days when we could leave our doors unlocked.

A combination of nostalgia and disintegrating memory have us thinking again about child curfews. This time it is children in the Cornish town of Redruth who are to discover that they have no entitlement simply to exist in peace in public, thanks to a ban on staying out after dark during the school holidays. In 1997 it was the children of three areas in Hamilton who were the subjects of a similar experiment that was declared both a roaring success and a horrible failure.

Of course, as with any authoritarian measure, the curfew that was introduced in response to complaints of antisocial behaviour was not actually called a curfew. It was known by the more cuddly title of the Hamilton Child Safety Initiative.

Who could possibly be opposed to the safety of children?

Those under 16 had until 9pm to make their way home without any hassle. After 9pm the police roamed the streets in pairs and scooped up any youngster found outside. It didn’t matter if the kids were doing nothing wrong or even if they were doing nothing at all. It didn’t matter if they had a note from their parents. With an efficiency even the Child Catcher would have admired, their details were noted and they were returned home to whatever awaited them there.

The experiment wasn’t big on personal responsibility. Negligent parents had a cheap taxi service for returning their sometimes unwanted kids. The kids learnt that even behaving well was no safeguard against apparently arbitrary police action.

I recall the upsurge in the number of children on the streets after 9pm when the pilot started. They were out to see why there were so many film crews and thereafter to provide some footage of kids acting up for the cameras. Numbers dwindled again when the television crews lost interest.

In the first year of the initiative, 280 kids were taken home, but only five were the subject of criminal charges. This was not really about stopping gangs of yobs terrorising communities — the police have always had the power to intervene in such situations. It was about removing youngsters from the streets.

The official research was confusing. It claimed that crime dropped by 23% in the first six months. However, taking account of seasonal variations, the research also showed that crime had risen by 17% compared to the same six months the previous year.

At the time, I was on the committee of the Scottish Human Rights Centre. Given the significant intrusion into the lives of young people who were doing nothing wrong, we were interested in the pilot and had been contacted by some people in the area who shared our concerns.

We carried out our own study of the initiative. It showed another increase — a third of the local kids were more hostile in their attitude towards the police. Those kids are adults today, but with no doubt at least a residual memory of being taken off the street for no reason.

Our streets these days (as in 1997) are not significantly more dangerous than previously and our young people are about the same. What has increased is our fear of crime and our intolerance towards young people. It appears to be the curse of every generation to recall a perfect earlier time when the worst to be expected of the young was Oor Wullie-type japes.

This is combined with anti-youth propaganda that has some older folk living in genuine fear of anyone under 18. The Hamilton curfew helped to perpetuate the myth of dangerous youngsters roaming our streets and making them unsafe for law-abiding citizens. The curfew was largely a gimmick. The host of problems around some of our kids will not be solved by a hasty return to the homes where their difficulties lie.

Despite criticisms, John Orr, then chief constable of Strathclyde police, trumpeted the pilot as a complete success. It was, however, interesting to see that no other council followed Hamilton’s lead. There have been no other curfews since then until the Cornish experiment. That is a suitable testament to the truth behind the claims of success.

In fact, it was not all bad news for kids in Hamilton in 1997. The local authority increased resources for youngsters, including spending £3m on a new leisure centre. This was a more positive way to tackle a perceived problem and should be tried in Redruth instead of embarking again down the path of banning children from our streets.

John Scott is a leading human rights lawyer. Joan McAlpine is away

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