The scourge of so many deprived communities are
‘young people with nothing to do [but] make life hell for other citizens’.34 Both New Labour and the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition have attributed labels to young people that have largely echoed those of the popular press.
The governments of Tony Blair focussed on the social control of anti-social behaviour, which evolved into attempts to deal with ‘deviant’ young people via the introduction of a series of governmental mechanisms.35 These included Anti-social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs)36 and Parenting Orders37 created by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998; Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (ABC),38 Local Child Curfews Orders39 and Child Safety Orders40 introduced by the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001; Fixed penalty notices41 and Dispersal Orders42 created by the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003, as well as the ‘Respect agenda’ from 2005 until 2007 when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.
Thus, New Labour reframed criminal justice policy, resulting in the bolstering of police targeting of young people labelled as deviant, the criminalisation of certain offences that were previously civil offences, and the strengthening of sentencing of young people. It also involved holding families criminally responsible for the offending behaviour of their children, which amounted to the ‘policing of the family’.43 As a result, for Elizabeth Burney, ‘families and upbringing have become the prism through which youthful wrongdoing is viewed, remedial action is largely
34 Tony Blair speaking on Aylesbury Estate, Southwark, London, 2 June 1997, quoted in Peter SQUIRES & Dawn STEPHEN, Rougher Justice: Anti-Social Behaviour and Young People, Cullompton: Willan, 2005, p. 6.
35 See Andrew MILLIE, op. cit.; Peter SQUIRES (ed.), ASBO Nation: The Criminalisation of Nuisance, Bristol: The Policy Press, 2008; Sarah PICKARD (ed.), Anti-Social Behaviour in Britain: Victorian and Contemporary Perspectives, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, chapter 6.
36 ASBOs are civil orders to prevent and control threatening or alarming behaviour such as littering, spitting and noise pollution for people over the age of ten. Breaching an ASBO can lead to five years in prison and a criminal record.
37 Parenting Orders are specific conditions given to parent(s) of a child who has received an ASBO or been convicted of an offence in order to prevent reoffending.
38 ABCs are given to someone deemed to be engaging in ASB before he or she is given an ASBO. It is a form of early intervention and is not legally binding.
39 Local Child Curfews Orders can be given by local authorities to children over the age of ten to prevent ASB and protect minors.
40 A Child Safety Order is an early intervention measure (a court disposal) to prevent children under the age of ten becoming involved in ASB.
41 Fixed penalty notices permit the police, local authorities and schools to impose a fine on parents of children who do not attend school regularly.
42 Dispersal Orders allow the police to disperse groups of two or more people engaging in ASB.
43 Peter SQUIRES & Dawn STEPHEN, op. cit., p. 5.
aimed at these targets, even where there is no direct link with the children’s delinquent behaviour’.44 This shift occurred within a context of growing emphasis by New Labour on ‘rights and responsibilities’. Indeed, ‘the notion of juvenile responsibility has underpinned many recent penal trends’.45
As for the Conservative Party, when in opposition, Tory MPs repeatedly claimed that British society was a ‘Broken society’. The term was used by Iain Duncan Smith in a report entitled Breakdown Britain (Social Justice Policy Group, 2006) for his think-tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), throughout which he attributed numerous negative labels to children and young people, and used hyperbolic prose, such as: ‘young adults are engaging in a new culture of intoxication’.46 The Conservative Party continued to use the term ‘Broken society’
once in government and to point the finger at ‘deviant’ young people. When reacting to the August 2011 riots in England, David Cameron declared he would tackle the
‘broken society’, and the ‘the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations’.47 He attributed this almost Durkheimian anomie48 to a variety of factors: ‘irresponsibility, selfishness, behaving as if your choices have no consequences, children without fathers, schools without discipline, reward without effort, crime without punishment, rights without responsibilities’,49 and in particular ‘gangs and gang culture—a major criminal disease that has infected streets and estates across our country’. He also underlined the lack of responsibility among children, young people and their families:
When we see children as young as 12 and 13 looting and laughing, when we see the disgusting sight of an injured young man with people pretending to help him while they are robbing him, it is clear that there are things that are badly wrong with our society. For me, the root cause of this mindless selfishness is the same thing I have spoken about for years. It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to feel the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities and their actions do not have consequences.50
Admission of such dire circumstances—a broken society symbolised by irresponsible and feral youth—when in government might reflect badly on the party or parties in power. However, as Stuart Waiton has pointed out, ‘the extent of the problem of crime and behaviour is often pushed most vociferously by the
44 Elizabeth BURNEY, op. cit., p. 47.
45 Emma BELL, 2009, op. cit., p. 113.
46 SOCIAL JUSTICE POLICY GROUP, Breakdown Britain: Interim Report on the Sate of the Nation, Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), 2006, http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/
UserStorage/pdf/Pdf%20Exec%20summaries/Breakdown%20Britain.pdf [accessed 5 May 2014], p. 41.
47 David CAMERON, ‘Downing Street Statement’, 10 August 2011.
48 Émile DURKHEIM, Moral Education, Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1961 (1925).
49 BBC News, 15 August 2011.
50 David CAMERON, loc. cit.
government itself’.51 The negative labelling of young people by the government thus serves to justify demagogical social control. Indeed, Iain Duncan Smith, now Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, announced that young people convicted of involvement in the rioting could lose their welfare benefits, even if they were not jailed and could be evicted with the rest of their families from social housing.
The Labour and Conservative emphasis on individual responsibility is largely inspired by the writings of Charles Murray who played a significant role in attributing the ‘deviant’ label to young people. He argued, when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, that responsibility for juvenile delinquency and criminality should lie with young people themselves and their families. For the American sociologist, those labelled ‘deviant’ should be held to account for their acts and held to blame.52 For him, the growth of welfare dependency in Britain created a generation of young people at odds with their working-class origins and moral values. Thus, the new generation finds it morally acceptable to become single parents, with ‘alternative careers’ (such as drug dealing) in the informal economy:
inferior and deviant moral values. In other words, it is a question of individual morality (or immorality), and the responsibility resides with the young person and his or her family. Thus, deviancy among young people is not the fault of the government, but of young people who should be held responsible, along with their families.
The term ‘responsibilisation’ was subsequently employed by David Garland53 to refer to the process whereby governments, recognising that they have ‘limited power to deliver protection against crime, promote action by other agencies, public and private, to carry out the task taken at their own level’.54 The promotion of personal and familial responsibility by politicians deflects governmental responsibility from the problems experienced by many young people—poverty, debt, unemployment, homelessness, etc.—which undoubtedly contribute to ‘deviant’
behaviour. It is easier for governments to blame and criminalise irresponsible and
‘deviant’ young people than take responsibility for their problems. It is also easier to
‘manage’ the deviant behaviour (that does not fit with the prevailing social norms), rather than deal with the structural problems that may cause such behaviour.
Furthermore, as Owen Jones explains in his book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, ‘proclaiming that people are responsible for their situation makes it easier to oppose the social reforms that would otherwise be necessary to help them’.55 Another explanation is that when governments avoid the issue of structural problems, they maintain the established social order: ‘The crux of state intervention is how best to manage the problem of disadvantaged groups (their presence and activities), rather than to eradicate disadvantage—for to eradicate it would require
51 Stuart WAITON, The Politics of Antisocial Behaviour: Amoral Panics, London: Routledge.
2008, p. 123.
52 Charles MURRAY, The Emerging British Underclass, Choice in Welfare Series, n° 2, London: Institute of Economic Affairs, Health and Welfare Unit, 1990.
53 David GARLAND, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
54 Elizabeth BURNEY, op. cit., p. 33.
55 Owen JONES, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, London & New York:
Verso, 2011, p. 220.
action to reverse the polarizations in wealth and income, to pit the state directly in opposition to dominant class interests’.56
This trend towards the responsibilisation of youth and their families labelled deviant by politicians persists in 2014, according to Peter Squires: ‘We can observe this individualised attribution of responsibility in the continuing evolution of anti-social behaviour management strategy in Britain’.57 It is evidenced by two policies from the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government. First, the very controversial Troubled Families Programme (TFP),58 which according to the government is aimed at turning around the lives of families who ‘have problems and cause problems to the community around them, putting high costs on the public sector’.59 The discourse associated with the TFP clearly labels non-normative young people and their families whilst emphasising the cost to society of such deviancy.
Second, the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, which allows a court to impose an injunction against a person aged 10 or over who has ‘engaged or threatens to engage in ASB’ or ‘to prevent’ someone from engaging in ASB.60
Thus, the popular press and politicians both label young people in Britain. The labels have created a skewed vision of the situation and have led to public policies in which welfare and punishment have become blended.61 But the labelling of young people by powerful people also leads to other phenomena which merit examination.