Editorial

Citation

Bateman, T. and Fox, C. (2012), "Editorial", Safer Communities, Vol. 11 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/sc.2012.56011daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Safer Communities, Volume 11, Issue 4

In the recent period, families have moved towards centre stage in community safety policy. The UK Government’s “troubled families” agenda first appeared in its current form shortly after the civil disturbances of August 2011 and can be seen, at least in some respects, as a response to those events. In the interim period, every eligible local authority has bought into the programme. Turning around 120,000 dysfunctional families by 2015 has become a central plank of government social policy, designed as a panacea for a broad range of social problems, including the prevention of anti-social, and other forms of problematic, behaviour.

The programme has been criticised for conflating “troubled” and “troublesome” (Levitas, 2012) and this is an issue that we anticipate will generate discussion in future issues of Safer Communities. But whatever the merits of the initiative, it is clear that the approach is largely a prospective one, concerned with prevention. Reporting on qualitative research with five young fathers under probation supervision, Vicki Helyar-Cardwell contends that family relationships may also be significant at the other end of the intervention spectrum, for purposes of rehabilitation.

Helyar-Cardwell notes the correlation between young fatherhood and crime: a quarter of male prisoners under the age of 21 are fathers compared to a national average of 4-7 percent. However, she questions the common sense assumption that early fatherhood should necessarily be regarded as a risk factor for offending. While it is true that young parenthood is frequently an indicator of social exclusion, with a potential for negative outcomes, there is also evidence that becoming a father might provide a turning point for positive change. Drawing on desistance theory, she explores how the young men in her sample demonstrated a number of significant changes associated with fatherhood that might increase the prospects of them going straight. These included: increased maturity that comes with a recognition of the responsibilities of having a child; changed lifestyles involving reduced scope for socialising with delinquent peers; and increased motivation to take a different road as they adopted the new identity of father and acknowledged the importance of their own personal agency. Helyar-Cardwell concludes that social policy currently fails to take advantage of the potential defining moment offered by fatherhood, and that young men’s ambitions to change are not matched by the opportunities and support afforded to them.

In a very different context, a concern with what it means to be male also lies at the heart of Adam Baird’s article which explores the role of masculine identity in social violence and gang affiliation. Baird’s analysis starts from the position that in socio-economically disadvantaged circumstances which offer limited alternative pathways to manhood, the gang can provide an attractive forum in which to demonstrate masculinity. He presents the findings of empirical research with economically excluded young men conducted in two neighbourhoods in Medellín, Colombia’s second city. The city is characterised by extremely high levels of violence and has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, with young men overrepresented as victims. While acknowledging contextual differences, the author argues that learning from Latin America, whose gangs – like those in the UK – are constituted largely by poor young men, might contribute to an understanding of the reproduction of violence elsewhere.

Baird suggests that boys are “disposed to become men in a way that reflects the older men around them”, albeit imperfectly, leading to a reproduction of “masculine social practice”. Columbia has rigidly macho cultural norms about what it means to be a man. Respondents reported that some youths with limited legitimate opportunities saw, in gang affiliation, a credible route to material possessions and regarded older gang members as attractive role models of how to be a successful man. This applied to a minority of young people, demonstrating that a variety of pathways to masculinity exist: early influences could inculcate a rejection of violence and foster an interest in educational and alternative activities. Nonetheless, the numbers were sufficient to ensure the persistence of high levels of urban violence. Baird concludes that any solution will involve challenging gangs as “standard bearers” of masculinity and providing socially excluded boys with alternative models of manhood.

John Houghton provides a review of the privatisation of policing. His contribution takes on additional relevance given recent revelations in the UK of the failure of G4S to employ staff in sufficient numbers to provide security to the London 2012 Olympic Games at the level agreed in the contract, leaving the public sector – in the form of the armed forces – to take on the mantle. The article notes a tendency for forces across England and Wales to outsource an increasing number of activities. Such functions include the provision and staffing of custody suites, forensic services, and vehicle fleet management.

While these developments are in one sense novel, Houghton is able to trace the origins of the policy to the adoption by Margaret Thatcher’s administration of managerialism and the marketisation of the public sector in the UK. The police were exempted from the programme of privatisation imposed on other areas of service delivery, but were nonetheless subject to a rigid performance framework as a mechanism for measuring efficiency between different forces. During the 1990s, work was undertaken to distinguish core tasks involving the exercise of force or other statutory police functions, those which required police management rather than direct delivery, and ancillary activities that did not require any police oversight, in readiness for contracting out the latter. Under New Labour, there was extensive civilianisation of functions previously undertaken by police officers, but these staff continued to be public sector employees. Houghton concludes that a police strategy of resistance to privatisation through the adoption of such alternative measures has perhaps been rendered unviable by the unprecedented scale of reductions in the policing budget under the coalition government.

Concerns over security at the London Olympics also provide a useful context for research, reported here by Imran Awan, evaluating the impact of government policy in relation to counter-terrorism on Muslim communities. One of the declared aims of the Prevent Agenda 2011 is to promote partnership working at the local level to address the risks of radicalisation. However, qualitative interviews with representatives of a largely Muslim community in Birmingham in the UK cast doubt on whether the programme is capable of achieving this objective. The research found that government initiatives in the area of counter-terrorism were perceived as conceptualising Muslims as a suspect population, who were targeted because of their religion and culture. Relationships between the police and the community had become strained as a consequence of, what the latter considered to be, unwarranted stop and searches and over policing based on identity rather than evidence of potential involvement in terrorist activity. The consequent lack of trust tended to undermine the potential for community policing.

Respondents indicated too that government policy misunderstood the roots of radicalism, exacerbating the risk of Islamophobic reaction to any threat to security. Awan argues that public protection would be best served by a more proportionate response that focused equally on the dangers of terrorist atrocity posed by other sectors of society and that engaged with younger Muslims, in particular, to ensure that local partnership working takes into account their concerns.

Finally in this issue, Jon Silverman considers public protection from a different angle in his review of a book that critically analyses the preconceptions through which decisions as to the detention and release of mentally disordered offenders are mediated.

Tim Bateman, Chris Fox