THE Children's Commissioner for England is set to call for a ban on a device which disperses young people by emitting a high-pitched sound which only they can hear, it was reported today.

The gadget, known as the Mosquito, exploits the fact that people's ability to hear very high frequencies declines in their 20s.

Professor Sir Albert Aynsley-Green will lead a new campaign called Buzz Off which will call for a ban on the mosquito on the grounds that it infringes the rights of young people, the BBC reported today.

"These devices are indiscriminate and target all children and young people, including babies, regardless of whether they are behaving or misbehaving," he said.

"The use of measures such as these are simply demonising children and young people, creating a dangerous and widening divide between the young and the old."

The campaign will be supported by human rights groups who have also spoken out against the use of the devices to disperse young people from parks, shopping centres and other areas where they like to congregate.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of human rights group Liberty, said: "These untested, unregulated devices are at best a dog whistle and at worst a sonic weapon directed against children and young people.

Sinister

"They have no place in a civilised society."

Scotland's Children's Commissioner Kathleen Marshall said in December that she believed the devices break young people's rights to assemble, which are embodied in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

She described the devices as "sinister" and called for them to be withdrawn from sale.

"It's really a short-term fix with the nightmare that it's feeding into this long-term problem that young people are moving away from older generations," she said.

"This is as way of dispersing people as a problem without engaging them."

The Mosquito was invented by Howard Stapleton, from Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, and is manufactured by Compound Security Systems.

Mr Stapleton said a test case in the courts might be the only way of establishing the Mosquito's legality.

"I have been contacting Liberty, the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers over the last 18 months requesting that a fair usage document is drawn up," he told the Western Mail.

"We tell shopkeepers to use it when they have a problem and I would be more than happy to introduce a contract which stipulates to shopkeepers how it can be used.

"People talk about infringing human rights but what about the human rights of the shopkeeper who is seeing his business collapse because groups of unruly teenagers are driving away his customers?"

Read more about the device, and hear how it sounds to teenagers, via the links on the right of the page.

Should the device be banned? Have your say.