In his speech to conference last month, Tony Blair took a swipe at David Cameron, reminding audience of the ‘hug a hoodie’ appeal. A week later, Cameron responded: ‘in that one cheap joke, he gave up on one of the best things he ever said – that we need to be tough on the causes of crime’. Whilst there is plenty of evidence to counter this claim, it does tap into a growing unease that anti-social behavior legislation is unfairly targeting young people, serving to further embed criminal behavior rather than provide diversions away from it.
In the government’s defense, the Respect Action Plan recognises that the system is often intervening too late, and that positive activities are crucial in fostering a greater engagement with civil society. At Labour party conference Gordon Brown emphasised that the vast majority of young people are not troublemakers and that we need to do more to encourage their sense of opportunity and idealism. Yet the dominant message is still that young people are an unruly minority, undermining the shared values of respect and civility in communities.
I recently spent some time on an estate in Hackney researching young people’s views of respect and their interpretations of anti-social behavior. A lot of the young people I spoke to were undoubtedly ‘up to no good’ and it was clear that other residents on the estate were distressed by their behavior. But the young people had a strong sense of the mutuality involved in ‘Give Respect, Get Respect’, as well as an attachment to their community. They felt acutely that the older residents and authority figures on the estate did not show any respect in return, especially as, with the armory of ASB tools on their side, they were engaged in a campaign against the youth club, and the young people who went there. This response is telling – removing the one place that the young people had to go on the estate seemed a counterintuitive response to the issue. Rather than enforcing respect on those who are seen to be lacking it, a much closer understanding and appreciation of the different forms it can take is necessary, or we risk furthering the divides that exist in communities.
Where next for ASB legislation? Rather than a loosely employed rhetoric about strong communities taking a stand against anti-social behavior that risks demonising young people, we need to learn to tell a more positive story about young people in the first place, and recognise that many neighbourhoods create the conditions where the slide into criminality is all too easy. Despite the extra money announced in the last budget, funding for core youth services is still inadequate, and we lack imaginative provisions to bring young people together.
Engaging young people around issues of crime and disorder can risk them being seen as having a negative effect on social life, rather than as an asset that might contribute to the diversity of an area. A case could be made for encouraging a greater emphasis on restorative justice principles and community reintegration initiatives when anti-social behavior does occur. If there was more collective involvement in reaching solutions, some of the misunderstandings between neighbours might be broken down.
An over reliance on enforcement cannot be a sustainable way of dealing with social problems. As leading sociologist Richard Sennett has argued, we must negotiate mutual respect rather than command it to happen. Not only must we make an effort to show our respect to young people in political debate, we must find (and importantly, fund) positive paths for young people to get the respect of people around them. Anti-social behavior legislation cannot be framed entirely in terms of one group respecting everyone else – we need to find a way for young people to get respect from the rest of the community too, and in doing so, extend social justice to more members of society.