Elise Langham - missing girl

I have been going to Soho for years and two or three times I noticed a scruffy ill-looking girl in the street, usually in the company of other people. She looked like an addict but I don't know if she was a 'street girl'. She never propositioned me. I wouldn't have gone with her, even though she was quite pretty. I would have talked to her though, and maybe bought her something to eat.

Then just recently I saw something in the window of the police office in Peter Street in Soho. There were pictures of several people, their names and details of the ASBOs they had been given. I recognised one of the photos. It was the girl I had seen. I'm pretty sure it is the same girl.

It said that she had been given an Anti-Social Behaviour Order for drugs offenses and prohibited from entering the West End or Camden for 5 years. It said this was to 'protect residents and businesses from further anti-social acts'.

I looked up the name on Google and there are several articles from newspapers from a few years ago talking about a missing girl. She had left home and people were looking for her. I got the picture below from a BBC news site.
Poster appeal for missing Elise

Police searching for a "vulnerable" 16-year-old girl are putting up posters in an attempt to find her, a month after she disappeared.

It seems strange to me that the authorities thought that the best way to deal with her was with an ASBO. Isn't there some better way of dealing with girls like this than just banning them from where they live for years? If she breaks the terms of her ASBO she will go to jail.

It could be that something radical has to happen before she can turn her life around, and the ASBO might be it. Maybe she is back in her home town or with her family and she needs to know her old way of life is no longer open to her. I doubt that this kind of approach to the problem will work though.

The little poster in Peter Street did not say she was a thief. I don't think she had been stealing from local 'residents and businesses'. So I think that to say she was anti-social and that the community needs protecting from her is just wrong. It's just another example of how police are misusing Anti-Social Behaviour laws to stop people from doing things that they don't like. If it helped them it wouldn't be so bad. But this naming-and-shaming zero-tolerance attitude isn't intended to help people and probably won't.