Johann Hari

When it comes to children, Britain alternates between two shrieking extremes. On Monday, we have a paranoid fear for children, keeping them locked up at home because we have convinced ourselves there are paedophiles lurking in every public space. On Tuesday, we have a paranoid fear of children, convinced that every group of young kids is a knife-wielding mob.

When a story comes along that doesn't fit into these templates - angel-children or devil-children - we simply can't process it. Over the past week, children's charities have been warning frantically that the youth justice system is in meltdown. The number of kids being imprisoned has doubled over the past decade. Rehab and education programmes have jammed up. All the beds are full. Children are being shunted across the country, with London kids being sent one week up to the Scottish Borders and the next shunted back down to the South. This system could hardly be more obviously failing: 70 per cent of the children who leave our young offenders' institutes are back to crime within two years. But these are Bad Children, so the story soon slipped from the headlines.

And yet there is one organisation slowly, carefully teasing out the complexities of children who smash off the rails and into the rest of us. For the past three years, I have been writing about Kid's Company. It's a drop-in centre in South London that provides three meals a day and a sympathetic smile for the out-of-control children everyone else has thrown out.

I have watched its founder, Camilla Batmangelidh, as she holds the hand of a 14-year-old boy who is describing what it was like to smash in another child's skull with a hammer. These are the children of London's crackhouses and forgotten concrete estates. But Kids' Company is not only significant for its social work: Batmangelidh is at the forefront of research into why some children veer violently out of control, and how our system is failing to stop them.

Over the past decade, she has discovered that the key to understanding these children lies back in their cradles. After the Vietnam War, there was a long psychological study to find out why some people had lost the plot, when other soldiers in the same situation returned easily to normal life. They discovered one unexpected connecting thread: if you had a healthy bond with your mother as a baby, you almost always made it through. If you didn't, you almost always fell apart.

How does this affect Camilla's kids? She called in neuroscientists to study them, and explains: "We know from PET scans of babies' brains that a strong maternal relationship actually changes the way your brain develops at those crucial early stages. Look at the frontal lobe, the part of the brain that makes it possible to see yourself in the future, anticipate problems, and think rationally. We know now it is brought to life and programmed by a strong maternal relationship."

The children turning up at Kid's Company were born into households where the mother was so stressed she couldn't calm herself, never mind calm her baby. "So these children have underdeveloped calming mechanisms and underdeveloped frontal lobes," she explains. "The neuoronal pathways that are supposed to operate to help kids calm down just aren't operating robustly enough. On top of that, because they have grown up feeling constantly in danger, their bodies are flooded with abnormally high levels of adrenaline and cortisol that keep them constantly tense and primed to blow. So it turns out when these kids tell me they couldn't stop themselves, they mean it. They're not morally flawed - their terrible childhoods have actually left them neurologically impaired."

This is a hard argument to accept, because it challenges the basic idea underpinning our legal systems: that we all exercise free will with our basically similar brains. But there is startling evidence for it - and not just from brain scans. In the mid-1980s, the American sociologist David Olds selected 400 poor mothers in Minnesota to study. Half of them were given intensive support from health visitors to help them bond with their babies, and half of them were not. When he returned 15 years later, he discovered the children who had been helped to achieve a strong maternal bond were an amazing 50 per cent less likely to have been arrested.

So what do we do with these radical discoveries? We should stamp all our services for the young with a new slogan (with all due credit to E M Forster): only connect. Anything that helps a child connect with a mother-figure will save a fortune - and a lot of pain - further down the line, whether it's regular visits from a health visitor, SureStart or compulsory parenting classes.

But what are the implications for youth justice? Some clinicians believe a baby's neurochemistry is largely set by the age of three, but Batmangelidh believes there is another window of opportunity in adolescence when the teenage brain is reorganising itself. "You can't repair the harm one hundred per cent, but you can do a lot," she says, "if you try to form a very strong substitute maternal bond with the child at that point. This morning I've been with a boy who is a major criminal, and he wants to give himself up to the police. Why? Because he's experiencing guilt. Nobody would have ever thought this child would ever experience guilt. That's because he has been forming a maternal attachment relationship for the first time, so his brain chemistry is adjusting."

There are some social science studies suggesting she's right. In Missouri, the sociologist Charles Borduin studied an experiment where 83 young offenders were given the kind of intensive care and attention Camilla provides, and 83 were not. Four years later, 29 per cent of the kids given proper care had been rearrested, compared to 74 per cent in the group that did not receive therapy.

This helps to explain why the current system is flailing and failing so badly. There are only very patchy attempts to do the emotional repair-work these children need, slowly readjusting their brain chemistry by forming maternal bonds with them, once they are detained. It's almost impossible to imagine a testosterone-obsessed politician like John Reid talking about attachment theory. (His slogan might be - don't stand by kids, stand on them). We have one brief window to turn these kids around, but because of this macho politics we are wasting it on "tough" solutions that make the kids even less attached, reinforcing the root of the problem.

Each of these children being tossed every week from young offenders' institute to young offenders' institute is a neurologically impaired ticking time-bomb, primed to commit more crimes. Camilla Batmangelidh has shown us how to slowly defuse them, and make us all safer. So when are we going to see beyond our primitive urges for revenge against abused kids, and start listening to her?

You have to scroll down right to the bottom. (You will pass an interview I did with them ages ago, that's not the most recent one).

If there's anyone out there in cyberspace who wants to type up a transcript (I have lost the e-mail for lovely Nick in Glasgow who typed up the last one - are you out there Nick?) drop me an e-mail by clicking on the 'contact' button in the top-right of this page. I will send you lots of new books in return.

I haven’t written about Iraq recently, because I think those of us who supported this catastrophic invasion should apologise and then have the humility to shut up and reflect on what we have wrought.

According to Amnesty International, torture is as rife today as under the Ba’athist thugocracy. The Bush administration has used chemical weapons in the heart of a civilian city, Fallujah – after banning all men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving lest they were “enemies of the Iraqi people”. Women are being forced to quit their jobs and cover their faces. Iraq is rapidly depopulating as millions flee. And there are now plausible studies suggesting more than 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. That means for every one person who died here on 7/7, more than 10,000 people have died in Iraq.

The Iraqis I speak to every few days are in various stages of denial, despair and terror, lacking the language to describe what is happening to their country. As John Stewart asked on the Daily Show, “What do you call it when a hellhole hits a cataclysm?”

But it is worth breaking this silence to make a few points. There are ever-louder whispers from Washington that the Bush administration is considering junking the (very) limited democracy Iraq now has, sacking the Prime Minister, and installing a junta of “national unity” generals to “impose order”. These rumours are so advanced that last week, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki felt obliged to publicly ask George Bush for reassurances they were not true. Indeed, the imposition of stringent targets on Maliki from Washington this week – as though Iraq were an NHS trust in Bangor – rests on this potential coup d’etat as a threat: if Maliki fails to meet the targets, what will happen?

This Iraq-needs-a-dictator approach is based on a false analysis of what has gone wrong since the war, one that is strangely shared by some parts of the anti-war movement. As Bush’s team moots installing a strong-man, Piers Morgan, whose Daily Mirror was one of the most prominent voices against the war, recently said if he was still in charge of the paper he would be leading one last Iraq campaign: “Bring back Saddam.” Their argument is that Iraq is an irredeemably tribal society, always on the brink of fracturing into a Shia-vs-Sunni-vs-Kurd conflagration. This ethnic chaos needs an iron fist to keep it in order – an Arab Tito. Even a sliver of democracy is the problem. Dictatorship is the solution.

But to suggest that the emergence of a violent tribalism in Iraq was the inevitable after-effect of ending Saddamism is to actually let the Bush administration off the hook. It took more than two years – and a huge amount of violence directed by unrepresentative militias, against Shia and Sunni mosques, marketplaces and shrines – for Iraqis to turn on each other in significant numbers. Even now, a large majority of all three Iraqi communities – according to every poll – still believe in a unified Iraq under an elected government.

Tribalism has taken this toxic form because of the total economic collapse of Iraq overseen by Bush. His administration immediately and undemocratically imposed on Iraq the opposite of a Marshall Plan, a deflationary Republican wet dream: privatize everything immediately, impose a flat tax, slash the public sector to pieces. Everywhere this has been tried, from Argentina to Russia, it has led to total economic collapse. Create a situation where unemployment hits 70 percent in any country and people will look to tribes they barely think about in better times. If only a third of Brits had jobs and bombs were going off everywhere, we would fracture into warring white, Asian and black tribes too. Would we start saying Britain was an irredeemably tribal society that could only be ruled by a dictator?

So the emerging Bushite narrative about Iraq – hey folks, we nobly tried democracy but it turns out they’re just too damn tribal and they need a tough guy after all – is wrong and repellent. For people like Piers Morgan who have been vindicated on the war to fall for this now is an Act Three tragedy.

Indeed, the Bush administration has been deliberately scuppering attempts to end tribal warfare. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Maliki carefully crafted a 28-point national reconciliation package modelled on post-Apartheid South Africa. Militias would be pardoned, their colleagues released from jail, and their arms handed in. All the major groups expressed interest – but the Bush administration smothered it at birth by refusing to agree to the basic demand of most militias, a timetable for withdrawal of foreign troops.

This withdrawal is now inevitable, and soon. The only question is whether our governments leave very quickly of their own choice, or are chased out of the Green Zone like the last helicopters from Saigon. The shape of one possible Bush withdrawal strategy is now becoming clear, and it’s not hard to smell the suplhorous influence of Henry Kissinger – who has been outed by Bob Woodward as Bush’s new mentor – on it. Install a friendly CIA-backed dictator who will iron out Iraq’s creases (no need to ask about the messy tactics, boys) and ensure the oil keeps flowing.

This access to oil supplies was always the primary goal of the Bush team. As long ago as 1991 – back when the only thing George W. Bush tortured was the English language – Dick Cheney said about Iraq, “We’re there because the fact of the matter is that part of the world controls the world supply of oil.” Wolfowitzian talk of spreading democracy was a sugar-coating, easily burned away.

In opposition to this strategy-of-sorts, many people propose to leave immediately. I have some sympathy for this, but it has a big flaw: the departure would be seen as a victory for the mainly sectarian and fundamentalist resistance groups. It would increase their power and prestige in Iraq’s post-war vacuum.

I think there is a better way to achieve a very swift exit. It is for the occupying forces to hold a referendum, within one month, asking the Iraqi people – do you want the foreign troops to remain for another year, or should they leave now? The answer Iraqis will give is pretty obvious: in the latest poll, 82 percent opted for immediate withdrawal. But if the Iraqi people have a chance to give the purple finger to the occupiers as bravely as they did to the suicide-murderers last year, then the Anglo-American exit will become a victory for them and for the ballot box, not for jihadism. It will maximise their (horribly slim) chances of slowly patching together a more decent country from the militia-splinters into which it has fragmented.

Arguing for this quick democratic exit against the Kissingerian proposals of George Bush might be the last thing we can do for the Iraqi people, along with finally holding our leaders accountable for the crimes – the chemical weapons, the torture – they have committed in the course of this catastrophe.

Is it time to bunker down for an English-language remake of France’s 2005 bonfire of the car-and-vanities, when more than 8000 cars were blown up by enraged young Muslim men trapped in the concrete banlieues that circle Gallic cities? Are Bradford, Brick Lane and Leicester rumbling and ready to blow? Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, was issuing this warning this weekend. He said the argument about the veil “should have been a proper conversation” but “seems to have been turned into the trial of a particular community,” and “this could be the trigger for the grim spiral that produced riots in the north of England five years ago.”

From my home in the middle of the Muslim East End – where the mood is taut and hypertense – this doesn’t sound like fear-mongering. The lifting-the-veil furore of the past fortnight should have been an opportunity to shine light onto fractures within the Muslim community, and to show Muslim women who want equality that we are all on their side, willing them to win. Instead, it seems to have become a political Pandora’s Box, letting any old anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiment spew out. It has made Muslim women feel not empowered but besieged and despised.

Let’s rewind a fortnight, and see how this could have gone differently. Anybody who lives in a Muslim area knows that every day, thousands of women are in practice rebelling against misogynistic cultural practices that demand women cover their hair and – in extremis – their faces while men proudly display theirs. My friend Shazia Mirza, the great Muslim stand-up comedian, used to be a teacher here in Tower Hamlets, and she says girls “would arrive at school, peel off the hijab, put on make-up, and head down the pub to get pissed. They would snog their white boyfriends behind the staff room.”

But Shazia adds, “I would look at them and feel so sad, because they are forced to live a double-life. Come 3.30 they put the hijab or even the veil back on and they’re carted off to the mosque to rote-learn the Koran for three hours.” In the building where I live, there are veiled women who seem amazed and relieved when you stop to have a chat with them – but then clam up into starchy silence when their husbands are around. The veil is only a visual symbol of this pre-feminist shut-up, cover-up culture within some parts of Islam.

These are the British women this debate should have been reaching. This argument could have been framed from the start as an attempt to help them to make real choices for themselves, without intimidation from their fathers, brothers or husbands. True, there are a few determined women, mostly converts, who are so soaked in superstition they would still choose the veil, because they think it brings them closer to ‘God’. That is their absolute right, just as it is my right to wear PVC hotpants in Sainsbury’s. (No, don’t puke – I mean it purely hypothetically). But the number of women who will freely choose to be faceless is very, very small.

Yet instead of holding out a hand of support and the promise of real choice, Jack Straw launched this debate by talking about how veils made him feel “uncomfortable”. This encouraged others to talk about how they find them “offensive” – exactly what fundamentalists say when they call for irrational prohibitions. This is the opposite of empowering talk. To the bullied Muslim women we need to reach, it made the rest of us sound like just another group of moralising men telling them what to do. It leaves them trapped in a pincer movement between men who will call them a whore if they take the veil off and men who will call them a freak if they keep it on. Nobody seems to be offering the warm support they need.

Using government pressure to force women to peel off the veil has historically been hideously counter-productive. Under the Shah of Iran, the police were ordered to tear veils from Muslim women. The result? It fed the rise of the deranged Ayatollah Khomeini. Similarly, the only practical effect of this more moderate but misframed debate in Britain has been to bolster the ugliest fringes of Islamic fundamentalism and the likes of George Galloway, who at a rally just quoted a hardline Muslim man who boasts he “prefers the BNP who admit they hate us” to liberals who oppose the veil. This talk – and the swelling audience for it over the past fortnight – is making Phillips’ warning of race riots sound prescient.

All along, there has been a real way to empower Muslim women to give up their veils – one that doesn’t push Muslims to the brink of rioting. It is through a mass movement of liberated Muslim women taking the message of social, sexual and intellectual freedom to their sisters. If this sounds like ijtihad-pie-in-the-sky, you just have to look across the English Channel, where it is happening.

Meet Fadela Amara. She is one of ten children born to Algerian immigrant parents in France in the 1960s, and she spent her childhood cursing fundamentalist misogyny. She could not see why she was forced to do housework while her brothers lazed, or why she was reduced to begging her father for the smallest of freedoms. But she knew she was living in a free, democratic society where she could eventually challenge these stifling norms. She explains, “My own France – a view shared by a great number of people from immigrant families – is the France of the Enlightenment, the France of the republic, the France of Marianne, of the supporters of Alfred Dreyfuss, of the Paris Commune, of the Resistance. In short, the France of liberty, equality and fraternity.”

As she grew, she realised it was not enough to challenge fundamentalism in her own home. In 2002 an 18 year-old girl from the banlieues called Sohan Benziane was burned to death by fundamentalists for being ‘loose’. Fadela knew she had to act – in the name of Islam. With her friends, she launched a group called ‘Ni Putains, Ni Soumises’ (Neither Whores Nor Doormats).

They are now one of the most active Muslim groups in France, recently rallying 30,000 people to march on Paris. Some of their fights are small everyday acts of defiance: “Make-up has become war paint, a sign of resistance,” Fadela explains, and the headscarf is “nothing more than a means of oppression emanating from a patriarchal society.” But they also provide Muslim women with a place to run to for education, contraception and safety. Their work was not enough to stop the banlieues from blowing up last year, but they were crucial in stopping it from happening years before over the ban on the hijab in schools, by showing that the argument about the veil was not against Islam but rather within Islam, between feminist Muslims and fundamentalist Muslims. We badly need a British equivalent, and there are dozens of heroic Muslim women – from Sairah Khan to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to Baroness Uddin – who could launch it.

But for two weeks now, we have allowed this to be falsely presented as a fight between Muslims and The Rest. Trevor Phillips is right – much more of this, and the East End is going to look like a burning Brixton circa 1983.

As I write this at 3am, drenched in Red Bull and frighteningly close to trying to invent a way to intravenously inject caffeine directly into my veins, one of my friends is snoring and spluttering on the settee a few feet away. Another mate is asleep on my bed in the next room, dreamily muttering about a girl he went out with five years ago. They seem to be staying here for the indefinite future: one has just moved to London from a place in the far North apparently called “Nottingham”, and the other has split up with his girlfriend and needs a place to mooch. We will be crammed together in my East End dive for a while.

And it feels strangely wonderful. I am not alone in this huddling-together-for-warmth mood: over the summer, I noticed I only ever seem to get invited to a new kind of house-warming. The old bless-this-house parties of the 1970s followed a familiar pattern: a couple would invite you to toast their new nest, as they readied it for 2.4 children and a patio-heater. But that world has shrunk and shrivelled, and in its place there seem to be nothing but housewarmings for mixed groups of mates who have banded together in clumps of three, four or five to hack and claw their way onto the lowest rung of the property ladder.

HSBC announced this month that shared mortgages among friends have increased in London by 50 percent in the past year, and are set to rocket further over the next decade. Almost every building society is speed-printing reams of glossy brochures to cash in on it, and a new home in this city is now as likely to be bought by a friendship group as a family. This Life has become this life.

When these HSBC figures were first published, everyone assumed they were simply a symptom of the sky-high and hideous house prices in London: an affordable semi today costs ten times the annual wage of a nurse, teacher or social worker. But while this is clearly a big factor, I think these analysts are missing a wider social shift: how friends are becoming the new family.

London’s twentysomethings today are overwhelmingly the children of broken (and smashed, and trashed) homes where a family Christmas is enough to cause post-traumatic stress disorder. Toss in the fact that our parents had much smaller families and that we are now more likely than ever to live hundreds of miles from our blood-relatives, and you realise family is for millions of people a diminishing source of emotional returns.

My mum’s generation went straight from living in their parents’ family-unit to creating a family-unit of their own. Today, many of us wait a decade – or a lifetime – to do it, leaving a big emotional gap between families. Friendship has flowered in this broken space, becoming more intense and more permenant. In this new social landscape, many of us have grown up to believe spouses come and go but your mates are by your side Till Death Do You Part. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this is taking the form of a new kind of hybrid-household. It used to be only gay people, bohos and hippies who lived like this; increasingly, everyone is doing it.

I don’t want to make you vomit by turning this into a trite “I’ll-Be-There-For-You” homily: I wanted Friends to end with that insufferable Central Perk clique contracting e-Bola and haemorrhaging into shrieking pools of their own blood. But if I think of the really enriching relationships I’ve had – the ones that will flash before me on my deathbed – they are not with my boyfriends, lovely though some of them have been. They are with my closest friends.

Our politicians are always wittering on about how The Family is “the building block of our society”, but they never mention that friendship is the cement. Friendship is the safety valve that stops you quitting your job or strangling your family, a great shared conversation about life that never ends, the compass that guides you long after lovers have walked out and workmates have moved on.

This isn’t just warm blather – there are hard statistics to back it up. The sociologist Robert Putnam discovered that people who have no friends are “between two and five times more likely to die from all causes” than people with a strong network of friends around them.

Dammit. The writing of this column has been interrupted three times: by demands for aspirin, by sleep-shouting, and by my friend crashing into the bathroom and accidentally pulling the medicine cabinet onto his head.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.