Girls and boys come out to play… aftercurfew

In the USA they have tried having a 'curfew' to stop youth crime. This means young people are not allowed out on the streets after a certain time in the evening. Do you think this is an effective way of dealing with crime? What do young people think about it?

Jonathan Freedland in Washington watches the city's youth react to an attempt to curb their freedom – and discovers that not one arrest has been made in 12 months

The witching hour approaches, when Washington’s teenagers will turn not into pumpkins but suspects. It is 10.40 pm just 20 minutes to go before the city’s curfew comes into force – and the mood is still

The scene is the 7-Eleven at Tenley Town in north-west Washington, not a glamour location for adults perhaps – but a hang-out for the area's mainly middle-class teenagers. On a summer evening they flock here, to pick up some chips at the McDonald’s across the road, to buy a packet of fags, to scope out the opposite sex.

But they’re not here now Maybe it's because it's a school night; maybe it's because Washington’s year-old curfew is so effective, the city’s teens don’t want to risk being caught out after hours. A police car waits ominously across the street.

The minutes crawl by At 10 47 a woman in evening dress – not a teenager – totters in to use the payphone.

Then, as if on cue, they appear. On the stroke of 11 – precisely (he moment when they are meant to be off the streets and tucked up in bed – the teens invade

“What curfew?” says one, not really joking. “Most of us don’t follow it,” explains Kathy, 16 years old and tiny in the driver’s seat of her mum's big Acura car. She says the police don't enforce the rule – which bans youths l6 and younger from public places between 11 pm and 6 am on weekdays and from midnight on Fridays and Saturdays – and official police figures bear her put. Not a single Washington teenager has been formally arrested under the law since it was passed last summer.

“They instituted it basically as a threat, and they never followed it through,” says Jason Pielemeier, his hair cropped, his ear pierced and his face flush with the fact that this is his last week of high school. “They made a big deal of it for the First couple of weeks and then you didn't hear about it”.

If the cops are around, though, it makes all the difference. Next week Jason and his buddies will engage in the teenage summer ritual of Beach Week – invading a resort for seven days of drinking and mating. Their destination is Dewey Beach, Delaware, where the curfew starts at midnight and applies to everyone under 18. “There’s a cop on every comer with a breathalyser,” says Jason. I’ll definitely be thinking about it then.

But tonight at Tenley Town curfews matter less than hiding from the guy who fancies you and that classmate you've been avoiding The kids keep coming, barefoot girls and whis­kery boys in grungy shorts long enough to reach their ankles.

'Are you talking about all the ways you can totally get round if asks Halah Al-Jubeir, springing open a new packet of Merit cigarettes as she slides up to a group of girls counting off exemptions to (he curfew In Washington, you’re allowed to stay out if you are accompanied by an adult – including an 18-year-old brother or boyfriend – participating in a school-sanctioned activity or even running an errand for a parent. When President Clinton praised curfews last month, he spoke in favour of such loopholes – but the teens of Tenley Town are not impressed. “There are so many excuses, it’s ridiculous,” says Halah.

Being good Americans, the kids’ main objection to the cur­few is that it violates their rights. “I think it’s a matter of principle, I don’t think the government should” say where you can be and when, fumes David Brunner. “1 should have certain inherent rights, like the right to stay but as late as I want.”

The American Civil Liberties Union agrees, claiming teenagers are being singled out for lesser rights than other Americans, and that law-abiding kids are being punished along with (he troublemakers. In fact it’s usually the parents who are punished – shelling out fines of up to $500 in some towns.

Now aged 17, Caroline Woolfe is beyond the reach of Washington’s curfew. But when she was l6, she was sitting on the porch of her own house when a police car slowed down and an officer yelled at her “to go on home”.

The kids all say the curfew serves as an excuse for police who want to give crap to teenagers, and that if there is to be an enforced bedtime it should be parents, not the law, which sets it. Kathy is explaining how the curfew unfairly presumes “that a teenager after dark is automatically dangerous” when she checks her bleeper and realises the time. “My mum gave me a curfew of 11, she says hurriedly. I’ve got to get home.”

Vocabulary curb: control, limit; witching hour: important moment when something is going to happen; flock: gather together in great numbers; ban: forbid; loophole: way of avoiding something; shelling out: paying out; give crap to: make life difficult for (slang).

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