So the Government is going to crack down on three-year-old thugs. A leaked report of Home Office intentions in the Sunday Times suggests that the Crime Reduction Review wants to target toddlers.
We don't know what the review actually said, because the Government won't disclose it and the Sunday Times didn't make sense of it.
The paper's strange spin missed the point. Everyone would hope that three-year-olds being bullies might alert early years staff to address what might be going on their lives - the causes as well as the consequences.
In its mission to say 'ya boo!' to purported leftwingers, the paper tossed in targeted skills work, boot camps and foster care in a muddled itinerary of initiatives for troubled and troubling children.
But it missed another point: just how far is the Government's children's strategy actually joining up what we now know about cause and effect?
We know that it is within the first two years of a child's life that secure attachment is achieved, in which a child and its carer discover an emotional language of recognition and reciprocity.
But if the attachment experience is ruptured, if the carer is depressed or dangerous, abusive, unreliable or disoriented, then the child may display survival strategies expressed as aggression, avoidance, inertia, disorientation or domination.
If the child is living with domestic violence - and many do - then the mother will be experienced as a defeated, demoralised, unsafe carer, and the father as an overwhelming, dangerous person capable of dominion.
Children who are bullies are telling a story about attachment as risk, about danger, chaos and control - all the legacies of abuse, aggression and dangerous domination.
And yet the knowledge of domestic violence and its consequences for children remains warehoused in a silo that doesn't cross-fertilise with knowledge fermenting in other silos.
This dissembling of collective wisdom matters, because there is a larger tendency with this Government to shift social justice and social welfare investment for all into a criminal justice strategy. Childcare becomes skewed as crime prevention targeted at some.
But still, the Youth Justice Board doesn't do research on gender or domestic violence, Sure Start doesn't either, and the Home Office doesn't cross-reference everything we know that produces a thug at age three.
