‘Hate registers’ criminalise kids for playground insults

A 10-year-old boy who called a friend 'gay boy' has joined the growing ranks of children criminalised for everyday playground insults. Peter Drury will now be on his school's 'hate register', and monitored for signs of prejudice throughout his school career. His mother's protestations that Peter barely knew about sex, let alone homosexuality, cut no ice.

Still younger children have been branded racist for using words that they could not possibly understand. A five-year-old was reported by her nursery because she refused to let a black girl join in her game. A seven-year-old boy was reported to his local authority for calling two other boys 'chocolate bars' in a playground argument. A six-year-old girl was logged by a playground supervisor for using the term 'blacky', even though the alleged victim had not complained.

Children of all ethnicities have been targeted in this crackdown on hate-bullying. In Tower Hamlets, London, Bangladeshi children are reported for racism for their habit of teasing each other with the term 'Kala Bandar' (black monkey).

A British-Asian friend of mine was shocked when his daughter was accused of racist behaviour: they had been playing a game where each girl was a food item, and the black girl in the group had ended up as chocolate. My friend's daughter was particularly aggrieved since she had actually wanted to be chocolate, and had had to settle for strawberry.

The numbers of children branded racist, sexist or homophobic are steadily growing. Last year I published a report by the filmmaker Adrian Hart which found that 40,000 children are being reported for racist incidents annually. Birmingham City Council alone saw numbers rise from 943 incidents in 2002-03 to 1,606 in 2008-09, while 1,248 were logged by Leeds City Council.

Schools were first asked to report racist incidents to their local education authority in 2002; in 2007, they were asked to log homophobic incidents too.

Now ministers plan to go further. From September it will be a legal requirement for schools to log incidents and to make the database available to Whitehall for analysis. A new consultation document outlines plans to extend incident reporting to 'transphobic bullying', which is apparently bullying that "stems from a hatred or fear of people who are transgender". (Further translation: transgender is "an umbrella term that describes people whose sense of their gender or gender identity is seen as being different to typical gender norms".)

God knows how this cultural studies talk is supposed to bear any relation to the world of five-year-olds. The people who write these policy documents must have erased all memory of what it means to be a child.

Adult words take on a different meaning when they become part of children's games and insults. 'Scab' was the playground insult of choice at my Midlands school during the miners' strike, a term that to us meant someone who