Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Personally I believe the railway should publicise this more widely. A lot of people probably don't know these options.
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Tale of two Northern guards dealing with fare evaders.
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Personally I believe the railway should publicise this more widely. A lot of people probably don't know these options.
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Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
The issue isn't with kids travelling unsupervised by train. The issue is one of:
- The parent does not provide a means of payment, taking into account whether that child can be trusted with it. A season ticket or prepurchased ticket should be provided rather than cash if the parent has any reason to suspect that they might try to fare dodge and buy sweets. I was given a season ticket to go to school by train. Those who got cash predictably fare dodged and bought sweets.
- The parent didn't drill into the child how to contact them in a dire emergency (e.g. learning their phone number by rote and where to ask for help).
- The parent of a child they knew could not be trusted nonetheless allowed them out unsupervised.
All of those are to me neglect.
This is pure speculation! We do not know if the parent provided " a means of payment"; it would not be unusual for a kid to lose a ticket, nor to spend all their spare money while in town.
We do not know if the kids did or didn't contact their parents, or perceive it to be "an emergency"; perhaps they didn't want their parents to know they had lost their ticket or spent all their money or whatever.
I don't think you could keep a typical 12 year old locked in all day because they cannot be trusted. I think it's quite normal for kids that age to be able to go into town with friends.
I'll put money on this guess: there speaks someone who doesn't have children and somehow can't remember what being a child is like.
Every child has done things their perfectly respectable parents might be horrified by.
(EDIT: in response to Bletchleyite, not Yorkie)
Every child has done things their perfectly respectable parents might be horrified by.
(EDIT: in response to Bletchleyite, not Yorkie)
All I can say is things are not always as they appear to those on the outside. "Bletchleyite"'s posts are always carefully considered and worthy of attention.
I would however suggest that I am quite informed (and dare I say it rather good) at being a train guard and the way things work in reality is not necessarily related to what is either black or white or even particularly logical.
In any case I don't have time to write however many school kids up for formal paperwork in their typically very short journeys (ours average 5 to 10 minutes). If they cause problems we have ways of dealing with them (their teachers waiting for them on arrival with a BTP officer in about October usually focuses the mind for the rest of the year then you do it again with the new intake next year).
I always try and make my interactions as a guard with passengers positive unless I really have to play the big nasty. If I wanted to be a revenue protection inspector I could have taken that path but I have no real interest in that.
I think I get it about right anyway - I produce minimal delays, pay in a large amount of revenue and my customer feedback is superb.
None of that is achieved by picking fights on the day with children (I save that for proper scrotes and I invariably win in the end).
I would however suggest that I am quite informed (and dare I say it rather good) at being a train guard and the way things work in reality is not necessarily related to what is either black or white or even particularly logical.
In any case I don't have time to write however many school kids up for formal paperwork in their typically very short journeys (ours average 5 to 10 minutes). If they cause problems we have ways of dealing with them (their teachers waiting for them on arrival with a BTP officer in about October usually focuses the mind for the rest of the year then you do it again with the new intake next year).
I always try and make my interactions as a guard with passengers positive unless I really have to play the big nasty. If I wanted to be a revenue protection inspector I could have taken that path but I have no real interest in that.
I think I get it about right anyway - I produce minimal delays, pay in a large amount of revenue and my customer feedback is superb.
None of that is achieved by picking fights on the day with children (I save that for proper scrotes and I invariably win in the end).
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Anyone who doesn't have a liberal attitude to child upbringing seems to get that tarring from those under about 30 (Im guessing you are?). I do know as a kid I found fare dodging as wrong as stealing a bar of chocolate from the station newsagent, and could be trusted to do neither of these, ever. I knew my home phone number and mother's work number, and if I got stuck wouldn't hesitate to phone. If it came to it, I knew how to reverse charges. My parents were always very clear they would never be angry if I needed to ask for help but would be if I was caught fare dodging, stealing or lying.
I don't have my own kids but am closely involved in the upbringing of my nephew and niece and am a Scout Leader so am well aware of what 11-14 year olds can get up to - but also how to nurture actual trust.
Shaw S Hunter
Established Member
Complete non-starter. A UFN in legal terms is a short-term credit agreement and can therefore only be entered into voluntarily. Minors cannot do so at all. The correct course of action is to complete a TIR assuming of course that the child can be trusted to give correct details. If there is a genuine cause for concern about vulnerability then a call to control is useful before possible involvement of outside agencies which could include BTP or other constabulary but those are not the only options. In practice each staff member has to make their own judgement and as they are just as human as their passengers you will inevitably find responses vary.
craigybagel
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The people who do know about them are the ones who have multiple sitting in their home, forever unpaid. They're the ones who will straight up ask for an UFN when you try and extract money from them.
SILK's are all well and good if the person is on the platform of a staffed station and can be prevented from boarding a train until it has gone through, but they're useless to a guard dealing with a tickletless and moneyless person already onboard.
Exactly. If someone, vulnerable or not, is traveling alone, there is always a small risk that they will be attacked, it could happen any time during travel too or from the station/bus stop, or it could happen on a nice dark unpopulated station platform set back from the road.. What happens prior to the attack is irrelevant, the responsibility for the attack is entirely on the attacker. It is an unfortunate human cognitive fallacy to try and correlate events just because they happened to occur at similar times.
Some people might like to read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point
There is a section in this book about the crime in New York in the early 1990's and the general decay of the New York subway system. When minor offences such as fare dodging were clamped down on, crime across the city also ended up decreasing.
https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/broken-windows-fallacy/
"The impetus to engage in a certain kind of behaviour is not coming from a certain kind of person but from a feature of the environment."
Was the girl attractive? Like it or not beauty discriminates.
DarloRich
Veteran Member
None of that is neglect. Goodness m!
Metal_gee_man
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Am I correct in suggesting some guards are also given the power to issue penalty fares for travelling without tickets? Is it a complete ball ache to issue them to minors?
martian boy
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I well remember this report in the DM online. The general brainwave of the reader was”THE DRIVER SHOULD BE SACKED!!!!!” Fourtunately, there was some posts from readers saying the ATTACKER was to blame.
Has for children travelling without tickets/money, some parents SHOULD be investigated.
I’ve worked has a bus driver for fourteen years. It’s sickening how many children will be at a bus stop claiming they’ve lost their return ticket and can’t get home. The bus sets off, only to see said child wave to one of their relatives/parents looking out of the front room window fifty yards down from the stop.
MANY CHIlDREN ARE ENCOURAGED TO FARE DODGE WITH THE BLESSING OF THEIR PARENTS.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
It’s certainly bad parenting.
BurtonM
Member
TfGM have a range of poorly integrated smart cards with terrible nonsense names and horrible styling, the adult one is 'get me there', are you thinking of that? There's a kids' one called 'igo' that you pretty much need if you're over 11 for proof of eligibility to buy child tickets in GM. Could it be something to do with that? You can load tickets on to them. The smartcard function only works on Metrolink at the moment (except ENCTS passes that work on buses too). It's a rubbish scheme really, TfGM are massively behind on tech in general.
Not 100% on this, but I'm young and Mancunian, and this sounds like it was the thinking behind the old GMPTE ID-16 scheme - which was replaced with the 'igo' card in about 2009. Both are just under-16 concessionary cards.
ID-16 wasn't compulsory, I had an ID-16 purely to facilitate purchase of System One bus tickets so don't know if it had any other uses.
NorthernSpirit
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The parents should be heavily fined and given 10 years if they are found to be encouraging their offspring to misbehave on public transport - whether its fare dodging, using ageist, sexist or misandary behaviour towards others or even assaulting others; the parents should be cuffed and if found that they are not excercising proper control of their child, then the child should be removed from the biological parents and placed into foster care. Might be harsh but it may get parents to actually behave as responsible parents rather than expecting others to do it for them.
One way to get around the faredodging problem with kids is for them to be issued with a pre-paid national pass that would give them half fare and cannot be used after 7pm for safety reasons (think Friday or Saturday nights and having to travel with drunks).
The pass would need to be registered with the childs full name, address, date of birth and phone number so that if the child is found to be skipping the fare then appropiate action can be taken, such as the card being taken away from them and without the card the kid can't travel leading to two options:
- The parents cough up the unpaid fare.
- The child relinquishes their right to travel on all modes of public transport.
I'm assuming that you're not a parent.
DarloRich
Veteran Member
Ok. Still not neglect.
With any luck you'll never be a parent or indeed in any position of authority. I believe there may be a small banana republic with a vacancy for benevolent dictator though, contract term limited to the period until your honour guard get fed up of you.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Oh, look, that nonsense being wheeled out again, once again against someone who favours a stricter approach to parenting than is the trend with millennials (though admittedly far stricter than I would go with).
Why not debate the points instead?
NorthernSpirit
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Oh you'd love one of my neighbours then with feral kids running amok, misbehaving and vandalising their neighbours property (we're all sick of it). God forbid that when the child gets older it could be resorting to violence to others or even faredodging.
I favour a stricter approach as with stricter parenting, kids are more disiplined and less likey to misbehave in general and are therefore less likely to faredodge when using public transport. Which in turn keeps rail staff happy, as their job can be stressful at the best of times without having to put up with the feral offspring of laxed parents who it seem to seek to normalise faredodging amongst their own kids. Rail staff are also not babysitters as some parents think.
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Because the points are patently ridiculous. 10 years in prison if your child faredodges a £2 fare or being put into foster care.
The foster care system cannot cope as it is now (plus anyone with a brain knows that going into care is unfortunately in many many scenarios a one way ticket to drug addiction, prostitution and prison). It is completely bonkers to suggest we put children in prison for dodging a fare!
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Then make that point (as you have) rather than countering with an irrelevance as the other poster did
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I think a common problem is that the prevailing attitude is "the nasty train man tried to fine you, you should appeal" rather than "you were caught fare dodging? That's like stealing, you know. Right, you're grounded for a month, too, and if I hear of it happening again it'll be two months, oh, and there won't be any pocket money until it's covered the cost of the Penalty Fare".
Mind you, so long as the prevailing attitude in adults is not "it's a fair cop, I'll pay the PF/parking fine and not do it again" but "how can I get away with this even though I am guilty", there's little hope for children of those adults to grow up as moral, law-abiding individuals. It's precisely this selfish attitude that's causing increased enforcement of just about everything these days. Parking is an excellent example - if people just parked considerately and correctly, these companies nobody likes would simply go away as there would be no way for them to be profitable. People bring them on themselves.
Should a parent be prosecuted for the _child_ trying to dodge the fare though? Surely only if it's aided and abetted by the parents.
If a parent brings up their child to tell them that theft is wrong, and the child still steals _anyway_, it is completely morally wrong to prosecute the parents. Maybe the railway could have a word with the parents to help them ensure their child never fare-dodges, but unless there is evidence that the parents do not care about fare-dodging, they should not be prosecuted.
As for whether (older, secondary-school age) children should be travelling on their own, when I was 11 (in the 1980s, for reference) I travelled from Guildford to Stafford and return during daylight hours (with a valid ticket, of course...); when I was a little older (13) I made the same journey involving a change in Reading in the dark, (November, not terribly late, maybe around 6 or 7pm) on the way back. I never felt my parents were being irresponsible in allowing me to do this, nor did anyone else I spoke to. It did give me a chance to ride loco-hauled stock (47, 85, 86) for some distance though, which I was grateful for at the time!
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Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I think I'd go a bit stricter than that. Some parents think it's enough to tell their child they should not steal - it isn't. They need to be involved in the process of "enforcing" that as well and not just leave it to the state to do so as far too many children do. So I do believe parents should carry at least some legal responsibility for the actions of their children - certainly more than is the case at present - though it would take some thought as to exactly what form that should take.
As in, in quite a lot of cases (though admittedly not all), the reason a child still commits crime X *as a child* is often because parents have not done enough to instill on the child that X is not OK and that there will be serious consequences of X.
To use an example of where this is the case, parents can be prosecuted if their children do not attend school - it's not adequate for them simply to say "you need to go to school" then ignore them. I'd extend this to far more areas too in order to catch out the parents who simply don't care. Making them legally responsible for a PF, fare+admin fee or Byelaw prosecution (maybe not a recordable RoRA) would seem reasonably proportionate to me.
Similarly, when a child is caught, say, vandalising a bus shelter, "I didn't know where they were" should not be adequate. You need to know if you can trust your child, or supervise them more until you know you can trust them.
To make it clear I wasn't saying children should not travel alone, simply that parents should ensure they are properly trained, including on what to do if things go wrong, and confident that they do know what to do if things go wrong, before they do let them do so. There will be children who are responsible enough at an early age, and there will be children who are barely responsible enough even on turning 18. Judgement is important on this - and that's also ATOC's line as there is no specific age at which it's OK and not OK, unlike air and coach travel.
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NorthernSpirit
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Kids these days think that can get away with doing things without repercussion, lets bin all this PC parenting and lets get back to basics - if the parents aren't responsible enough to look after their own child then the parents should be punished, whether its 10 years in the slammer or their child being removed from them and placed into foster care. It would be enough to make parents think and to actually act and behave as proper parents, just imagine the headline on the front of a national paper (complete with newspeak) stating "Faredodger parent caged over theft of unpaid £3 fare", "Parent fears losing faredodging child over theft of £5.50 fare". It would completely s*** the parents up as they would be publicly humiliated, which would also be another punishment.
It needs to be hammered into some parents that if their child (male for female) is found to be faredodging it should be treat as theft and that crime doesn't pay. As I've said earlier, rail staff are not babysitters and I'll also add that if someones child does wrong the guard is unable to chuck the troublesome child off (at lets say Ulleskelf) as the guard themselves would be b******ed if anything happened.
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Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Threatening taking children into care would s*** (as you put it) the child up as well, which isn't the aim. I could be persuaded to support a proposal which would make the parent liable for the child's fare dodging as if the parent had also been there. This would, I feel, concentrate minds somewhat.
As I said above, if the parent does not feel that the child can be trusted not to spend the day's train fare on sweets, provide a pre-paid season ticket or, if cheaper, book pre-paid daily tickets and give them those each day, and impress on them that if they lose them they are to call you and not just fare-dodge home. Make sure it's seen as the same as that they wouldn't nick a sandwich from Boots if they forgot their lunch - and I'd venture that most kids would know and accept that that was wrong. Of course there are the problem children who do steal in that way - but it isn't many or even most kids that do. Fare dodging needs to be the same - seen as a criminal act that you just don't do unless you are just that - a criminal.
I was given a monthly season. No way of spending that on sweets, and replaceable if lost. And loads cheaper than paying cash too.
FWIW maybe it needs a better name. Just like "child porn" has been retitled to "child abuse images" to remove any normalisation the term might give it and make it sound as serious as it is, we should perhaps find a new name for "fare-dodging", which doesn't *sound* serious. Using "theft" is difficult because it isn't technically theft, but maybe we could use something like "travel fraud"?
As I said above, if the parent does not feel that the child can be trusted not to spend the day's train fare on sweets, provide a pre-paid season ticket or, if cheaper, book pre-paid daily tickets and give them those each day, and impress on them that if they lose them they are to call you and not just fare-dodge home. Make sure it's seen as the same as that they wouldn't nick a sandwich from Boots if they forgot their lunch - and I'd venture that most kids would know and accept that that was wrong. Of course there are the problem children who do steal in that way - but it isn't many or even most kids that do. Fare dodging needs to be the same - seen as a criminal act that you just don't do unless you are just that - a criminal.
I was given a monthly season. No way of spending that on sweets, and replaceable if lost. And loads cheaper than paying cash too.
FWIW maybe it needs a better name. Just like "child porn" has been retitled to "child abuse images" to remove any normalisation the term might give it and make it sound as serious as it is, we should perhaps find a new name for "fare-dodging", which doesn't *sound* serious. Using "theft" is difficult because it isn't technically theft, but maybe we could use something like "travel fraud"?
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GatwickDepress
Established Member
You're absolutely delusional.
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