by I Fought the Law- A Riotous Romp in Search of British Democracy (epub)
ASBOs have been sold to us by the government as a way of controlling the feral children running amok in our communities. Statistically, these are the very people at the highest risk of being the victims of violent crime - of each other’s violent behaviour. According to the Youth and Crimc Unit, which was set up in 2001 to reduce youth crime across London, ‘young people are over-represented as both perpetrators and victims of street crime in the capital... The peak offending time is between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. weekdays when children and young people are leaving school for home.’ The British Crimc Survey found that 20 per cent of men aged between sixteen and twenty-four will be victims of violent crime every year. This is double the risk for women of the same age group.
As we have seen, your best chance of avoiding violent crime is to be a woman over sixty-five. Being well off is another way of protecting yourself from it. One in thirty owner-occupiers as opposed to one in ten people living in rental properties will suffer from violent crime. Here’s the British Crime Survey again: ‘The group most likely to be subjected to violent crime was single adult and child households - 11 per cent of this group were subject to some form of violence. Around three-quarters of the assaults committed against single adult and children households were of a domestic nature. The type of area in which people live can affect their likelihood of being a victim of violent crime. In general, those households located in council estates and low-income areas were the most likely to have been victims of violent crimes.’ So poverty and the level of violence present in your upbringing seem to be the deciding factors where violent crime and anti-social behaviour are concerned. It’s a shame, then, that under this government the gap between rich and poor in Britain is now wider than it was under Margaret Thatcher.
Are ASBOs actually improving the quality of life in these poorer communities? Are they reducing crime and cleaning up the streets? To find that out I met a youth worker who works with children in one of Britain’s problem estates. She wanted to retain anonymity in case speaking to me affected her job. I started by asking whether ASBOs had reduced crime in her area. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Instead of hanging out on a bench on one side of an imaginary line, the kids hang out on one on the other. All ASBOs have basic elements - you’re not allowed to verbally abuse another person, you’re not allowed to make threats against any other person, you’re not allowed to assault any other person, and every one I have ever seen has always had an exclusion zone, although they don’t have to by law. The exclusion zone has to be relevant to where they’re making a nuisance, so it’s usually town centres. If anyone hears a young person who has an ASBO swearing in the street they can be arrested and will immediately be taken to court for breaching their ASBO. The magistrate can’t order a one-month prison term in a youth court like they can in an adult court. The minimum sentence for young offenders is four months, so they are punished far more severely than adults. We just had three lads who breached their ASBOs by swearing and they all got given six months in prison.’
Do these kids understand the parameters they are dealing with? ‘We go through it with them and they do understand, but they just think, “Great, I’m not allowed to do anything for the rest of my life”, which gives them a “what’s the point?” attitude. The minimum ASBO they can get is two years and the maximum is five years. What tends to happen is that a child will be given an ASBO that takes them up to their eighteenth birthday. This means they’re being told that they can’t go into their local town, or wherever their exclusion zone is, for three or four years. Under any circumstances. They gave a lad I work with an ASBO and he wasn’t allowed to go into the town centre. So he had to go miles out of his way, walking around the perimeter of the town, to go to school on the other side. A report by the Youth Offending Team pointed out that going to school was his best chance of avoiding trouble, but because he wasn’t allowed to walk through the town to get there he didn’t bother going to school. I suggested taking him through the town in my car, but they said, “No, he’s not even allowed to travel in a car through that area.” He wasn’t allowed in a school bus either — it runs to the workshop where the kids fix cars - and he wasn’t even allowed in a council van with teachers present. So he just stopped going. I also had a lad on an ASBO who has Tourette’s syndrome. He wasn’t allowed to verbally abuse anybody but found that quite difficult to stick to. He got done for breaking the swearing conditions and was given community punishment orders. If that was any other disability ... imagine telling someone in a wheelchair that they have to stand up or else you’ll give them community punishment orders. You’d have people screaming about discrimination. It’s utter madness.
‘The police can also apply for temporary exclusion zones anywhere they like. If any young people hang out in an area the police can come in and move them on. But that’s what young people do. They hang out with each other. They say things to me like, “Where are we supposed to go? What are we supposed to do?” It’s going back to that idea of “whatever the victim feels is intimidating behaviour”. They don’t mean to be intimidating, but the fact that there are a lot of them in one place is intimidating to some people. But they can’t help that. It’s not their fault that they wear clothes other people find frightening. They wear them because it’s fashion.’
The Rowntree Foundation researched the lives and experiences of families living in the outskirts of Glasgow, one of the most deprived areas of Britain. Their study found that young people hang around in groups to protect themselves from being victims of violent crime. Having seen the statistics, you can see why they are so afraid. ‘Young people took responsibility for keeping themselves and their friends safe by sharing knowledge, looking out for each other and moving around together,’ the report concluded. ‘They used their detailed local knowledge to avoid or minimize hazardous situations. Some were aware that certain adults saw such self-protective groups as threatening.’30 The youth worker I spoke to said that the minority of children causing most of the problems in her area behaved in an anti-social way simply because they were living antisocial lives. ‘The majority of the kids’ anti-social behaviour is directly linked to drugs and alcohol use, and their drug and alcohol use happens because there is nothing else to do. There’s no great mystery about why people take drugs. They have a laugh when they’re drunk and on drugs. A lot of them have parents who don’t really give a shit about where they are late at night and that’s why they’re out late at night drinking, or they have parents who are drug and alcohol users as well. Most of them live in terrible poverty. A child that lives that lifestyle can’t change overnight. You can’t just say to someone like that, “You can’t swear any more in a public place or we’ll put you in prison” because their language is swearing. It’s not meant to cause harassment or to be intimidating, it’s just the way they speak with each other. Being in a group swearing at each other has now been made a public order offence which they can get locked up for. So the government has effectively criminalized youth. I can understand that something serious has to be done if people are making someone’s life a misery, but I don’t think ASBOs are the answer. They deal with the consequences of a situation but make absolutely no attempt to prevent the situation developing in the first place. You can’t expect kids who’ve been up all night because their parents don’t care or their parents are arguing or their parents aren’t there to concentrate on schoolwork the next day when the most important thing in their immediate life is, “What’s going to happen to my mum when I’m at school?”’
I also wanted to know what she thought the children she worked with would make of the government’s ‘Respect’ agenda. She smiled uneasily. ‘The trouble is that these kids just don’t live in the same world as you and me. That is the problem that no-one is prepared to address. I’ll give you an example. An old friend of mine used to teach in a primary school in the area I work in now, and one day he told me about this sweet litde three-year-old boy he remembered who used to cycle up to the school, which was half a mile from th
e litde boy’s house, looking for his older brother to play with. Their parents were alcoholics and just spent all day at home drinking on the sofa doing God knows what. They didn’t have a clue where he was half the time so he was fending for himself from the age of three. Well, that boy is now one of our clients. He’s fourteen and he’s in a young offenders institution because he breached his ASBO conditions by swearing. He didn’t stand a chance. People are fed up of hearing what they think are excuses but they simply don’t understand what life is like for these kids. It’s not always an excuse. For them it’s reality.
‘A lot of them have suffered abuse. That’s a big, big part of it. It’s just horrible. Chucking them in prison is absolutely pointless. The cost of keeping a young person in prison is phenomenal. We’ve got a secure unit that costs £5,000 a week per young person. If they got a six-month sentence they’d do three months inside. Spending £60,000 on kids who don’t recognize our society, kids who never had a chance to begin with, when it’s guaranteed they’ll re-offend, because they always do, is complete madness. For that you could set them up in a halfway house, a safe place to live, and give them a role model who does care where they are, who can teach them to look after themselves and give them just a fraction of a chance that people who don’t like swearing got when they were children, and then they might start understanding what the government mean when they talk about respect.’
I put it to her that some of these kids must just be little monsters who don’t care about anything other than causing mayhem, but she shook her head. ‘I know how this sounds, but they have all got something going for them. On a one-to-one basis they are brilliant, but it’s a pack mentality when they are all together that causes the problems. They have no self-esteem and are desperate to be accepted by each other so they just go along with what everyone else is doing. They become each other’s role models in the absence of any others, and that means they try and impress each other all the time. It’s about them feeling part of something, part of a group. If you combine that with drug and alcohol use then, unsurprisingly, you’re going to get anti-social behaviour.’
Finally, as part of my continuing search for Albion, I asked her if there was anything she felt was going unrecorded.
‘It’s people’s perception of young people that really bothers me,’ she replied. ‘There is a level of fear that is just totally unwarranted. The government and media have criminalized young people just for the way they look. It’s totally demonized them. A hoodie is not meant to intimidate people. They are just kids.’
Recent research by Bath University’s Dr Phoenix, who spent two years looking at youth justice in Britain, backs up the youth worker’s views:
The 1998 legislation which gave birth to ASBOs and Youth Offending Teams was supposed to create a youth justice system in which those in need of punishment were punished but which would also help those with welfare issues to escape a life of criminality.
What we have today is a youth justice system that metes out increasingly stringent punishments on young offenders and fast-tracks them through harsher and harsher punishments.
Information on the desperate welfare needs of young offenders is available to all those who make decisions about young offenders - police, Youth Offending Teams and magistrates - but in practice they have only punitive measures at their disposal.
The fact that young offenders arc first and foremost young seems to be of little consequence in our youth justice system ...
The overwhelming common denominator amongst the majority of young offenders is poverty; poverty which has introduced them to homelessness, alcohol abuse, drug abuse and crime from a very early age.
Once they become involved in the youth justice system, state interventions are inevitably focused on some of their emotional difficulties rather than their practical needs. Anger management classes are no substitution for attempting to do something about their home situation.’31
So how do you improve things in the most impoverished parts of Britain, the communities that are cursed with the majority of the country’s anti-social behaviour? Well, you could do worse than ask the people who actually live in these communities what they think rather than adopt well-meaning ideas handed down from central government that generate headlines but don’t address the root causes of these problems.
I went to visit Blackbird Leys, often credited as the birthplace of joyriding, to meet a local councillor for the Independent Working Class Association who lived there. The IWCA sounded a bit Socialist Worker to me, but Stuart Craft is unashamedly only interested in helping the working classes who live on estates like his. His view is that the political party they used to vote for, Labour, has deserted them, so they have to start looking after themselves.
It was a boiling hot day when I got on a bus in the centre of Oxford and arrived, twenty minutes later, on the edge of Blackbird Leys. It felt like being dropped off by the helicopter in Platoon. I was absolutely petrified. I’d heard lots of horror stories of crack houses and syringe-scattered streets; I imagined I’d be gunned down within moments of arriving. The first thing I noticed was a group of youths using the Perspex windows in a bus shelter as a punch-bag; the second thing I noticed were dried-out bunches of flowers attached to various lamp-posts and railings. I gulped and wandered around looking for Stuart’s house. Before long I came across a new cul-de-sac of orange-brick houses, and I soon spotted the one I was looking for. Stuart opened the door with a suspicious smile and welcomed me inside.
It took Stuart only five minutes to dismantle my middle-class prejudices. He reacted with disdain to my description of how awful life must be in his community. It had its problems and the residents needed help, he conceded, but the idea that it was beyond saving was insulting and absurd. Talking to Stuart, I began to realize how places like Blackbird Leys have become dehumanized. We think of them as hopeless worlds. Most of us don’t understand them, which is probably why we do so little to help them. Stuart told me about his attempts to shut down the crack and heroin dealers on the estate who openly sold drugs outside the 20p-a-ticket cinema he helped to organize for local children. As a result, the heroin dealers were evicted. In a survey carried out before the local elections in 2002, Class A drugs were the residents’ main concern, so Craft also organized a picketing campaign outside the houses of known drug dealers to scare them off. His critics talk about human rights violations — the people being targeted haven’t been found guilty of any crime - but Stuart is unmoved, pointing out that you can tell if someone’s using a house to deal heroin without proving it in court. A local gang of teenagers was terrorizing local residents, so the entire community - men, children, mothers with prams, everyone who was sick of the gang’s behaviour - held a demonstration against them on the park in the middle of the estate. They held banners asking for ‘Freedom for our kids to walk in safety’, and the gang hasn’t been seen since.
The IWCA took three seats off Labour in the last local elections so the community has obviously seen an improvement in their daily lives. The local Labour Party, however, are less happy. So unhappy, in fact, that in 2005 they resorted to dirty tricks to try to derail the IWCA’s progress. In the run-up to local elections, Bill Baker, Oxford City Council’s deputy leader, sent out leaflets about the IWCA with the headline WATCH OUT FOR EXTREMIST GROUP. He also accused the IWCA of being linked to Irish Republican nationalists. The allegations were groundless and Baker was forced to pay £15,000 to the IWCA in damages and to make a grovelling apology.
Stuart is also unpopular with the local council for fiercely opposing Oxford’s European Capital of Culture bid, accusing them of being more interested in tourists than the people of Oxford. ‘The last thing Oxford needs is more tourists,’ he insisted. ‘We don’t have anything against tourists, but tourism is an area which is generally self-funding. Regeneration, however, would be more than welcome ... yet the working-class estates of East Oxford stood to gain nothing from the Capital of Culture bid.’32 People like Stuart believe
the answer lies in helping local people to improve the quality of their own lives rather than boosting the attractiveness of a town for its tourists. There is a long way to go, but things are changing in Blackbird Leys.
I went to two other notorious problem estates on my journey around Britain, Cumbernauld outside Glasgow in Scotland and the Bransholme Estate on the outskirts of Hull.
As I’ve already indicated, it’s hard to see much evidence of Britain’s thriving economy if you spend any time walking around Cumbernauld. Except, of course, the identical brand names and shop fronts you’ll find everywhere else in Britain. In Crap Towns, Cumbernauld was described as an ‘unrelenting collection of dismal, crumbling, concrete housing schemes populated by shellsuit-clad maniacs and terrified pensioners’. The first-hand accounts of living there give an insight into the experience of the locals and the priorities of the local council. ‘My mum and I were walking back from my older sister’s house, at midnight, after babysitting my newborn niece, only to be confronted with a guy with a chainsaw cutting down his neighbour’s front door,’ one resident told me. ‘When he spotted us he charged at us with this saw. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the saw cut out so he had to try to start it again and then fell on his arse in the process, I wouldn’t have lived to tell this story. Needless to say the armed police swarmed the area and the guy was apprehended, but only after he had been cutting up his neighbour’s house for forty-five minutes without anyone doing anything.’