27 January 2021 • 8:00am
It’s a call that no parent would ever want to receive. To discover your child has been arrested for shoplifting and the police want you to come down to the station.
Yet it could get even worse. Parliament is currently debating a piece of legislation that will allow the police – as well as local councils, the gambling commission and the tax office – to recruit your teenager to inform on you, and indeed enable them to commit criminal acts as part of this. And you wouldn’t know a thing.
The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (CHIS) Bill formalises the process by which a person can be authorised to commit criminal offences as part of an investigatory process for over 20 different agencies. There is no minimum age for someone to do this and, in the last few years, there is growing evidence that children are being recruited for this purpose – and so kept in dangerous and risky circumstances as a result.