This was prompted by something I heard today on Naga Munchetty's programme on BBC Radio Five Live.
It was an interview with a woman who called herself 'Alex' from London. She reported that her 12 year old son had been mugged on his way to school last week. She says although she traced the phone to another school, the police weren't interested …
The audio is here from 2:19.57:
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I found this Telegraph article from Dec 2019 -
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Child victims of mobile phone theft not reporting crimes to police 'amid fears of retaliation'
Over 500 young people are falling victim to thefts but are too afraid to alert police, new figures suggest
More than 500 children a day are becoming victims of thefts and muggings but the crimes are not being reported to police amid fears of reprisals, new figures suggest.
The number of children being robbed of their mobile phones has risen since 2017 after successive years of decline with increasingly valuable smartphones and cuts in police officers being blamed.
However, just one one in eight children aged 10 to 15 (13 per cent) report the thefts to police, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Criminologists attributed their reluctance to fears of revenge attacks if they reported thieves and a belief that police are too stretched to investigate such high-volume “low-level” crimes.
They blamed the thefts on the surge in smartphones as children sought to remain connected to social media and the pressures on policing with 21,000 officer posts cut since 2010. Only seven per cent of robbery cases result in a suspect being charged compared with 21 percent four years ago.
Head teacher Christopher Lamb warned muggings had become an "accepted part of being a teenager now". “Smartphones can be worth up to £800 but nine times out of ten children won’t report a theft so it is easy pickings for gangs,” said criminology professor Simon Harding, director of the national centre for gang research at the University of West London.
“If the thieves are not in the playground, they are outside the school when you leave or in the park. There’s no getting away from it. They know who you are and they will threaten you online. The threats are more serious than when we were at school and come at you 24/7 on social media. ”
Schools have introduced patrols or chaperones to take children home or banned smartphones and permitted only cheaper “brick” phones to reduce the risk of pupils being robbed at the school gate.
Enfield Grammar School in north London introduced patrols after a spike in muggings with 200 parent volunteers armed with walkie talkies and high-vis jackets out on the streets.
“It seems to be an accepted part of being a teenager now,” said headteacher Christopher Lamb, who has two school-age children of his own.
“The crime rate has gone through the roof. I’ve seen first-hand that our patrols prevent muggings. I’ve watched two boys mugging four boys, and a patrol got there and said, ‘Are you alright boys?’, and the perpetrators ran off.”
Between 0.9 percent and 1.6 percent of those aged 10 to 21 said they were victims of mobile phone thefts, equivalent to nearly 100,000 children, according to the ONS crime survey which records children’s actual experience of crime.
The proportion of 10 to 15 year olds who suffered a theft in the past year rose to 4.6 per cent, equivalent to 193,200 or 530 a day. Those who said they had been subjected to violence jumped to more than one in 20.
Victim Support said it had seen a 33 per cent rise in teenagers aged 13 to 19 seeking specialist help because of the distress from mobile phone thefts. Cases were up from 1,962 in 2016/17 to 2,614 this year.
Chief Constable Olivia Pinkney, the National Police Chiefs Council’s (NPCC) lead on children and young people, said she was “really concerned” that children “very rarely” reported thefts even though it could be “a significant life moment for a child.”
She acknowledged it was partly because “they don’t think the police will be interested which is absolutely not true.” “Police will always investigate crime where there’s vulnerability, violence or harm. That does often involve young people,” she said.
She said the NPCC had been trialling online projects on platforms like Instagram to build police “trustworthiness with young people rather than broadcasting to them” such as a guide to safe and lawful protest.
She warned that the peak times for thefts were around Christmas and the start of university terms when many students had new phones. “Young people need to be responsible and try not to walk along the street with their £1,000 phone. It’s so much part of the existence of life it’s not something we consciously consider,” she said
Robberies are rising at a faster rate in England and Wales than any other major developed nation with 269,000 young people involved in or at risk of violence last year, according to criminal justice consultants Crest Advisory, which links it to the UK’s higher smartphone ownership.
They are up by 33 per cent in England and Wales since 2014 against falls of 24 per cent in France, 19 per cent in Germany and 14 per cent in the Netherlands.
The Home Office said: “The Government is cracking down on crime by recruiting 20,000 new police officers and putting serious criminals behind bars for longer.
“We have also invested £25 million into a Safer Streets Fund, which will help tackle burglary, theft and other offences in crime hot spots.”
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I also found this BBC article from July 2012
"Readers' experiences of being mugged"
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