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Offenders or Victims? Punishing Youth

Offenders or Victims? Punishing Youth. With special attention paid to the ASBO. Samantha Muncaster. Outline. The reading Youth as over-policed? The ASBO History repeated? Actors in a play? Socialisation The Future?. The Reading. Brown S (2005) Punishing Youth: Victims or Villains?

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Offenders or Victims? Punishing Youth

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  1. Offenders or Victims? Punishing Youth With special attention paid to the ASBO Samantha Muncaster

  2. Outline • The reading • Youth as over-policed? • The ASBO • History repeated? • Actors in a play? Socialisation • The Future?

  3. The Reading • Brown S (2005) Punishing Youth: Victims or Villains? • Key Points: • Some youth groups are more acceptable as victims than others. • Youth frequently seen as deserving punishment. • Visibility issues- the radical realist argument. • Accountability.

  4. The Reading • Effects: • United Nations Convention Report on the Rights of the Child (1989 and 1995). • Victoria Climbe • Survey results- Hartless et al (1995), Glasgow and Teeside (Brown, 1990 and 1992).

  5. Youth as over-policed? • Spatial confinement (Loader, 1996). • “They can be bastards if they want to... You’re powerless, there is nothing you can do... They can do away with you like that and nobody would know. They could cover it up no bother. You’re in there on your own”, Quote from 19 year old male, (Loader, 1996: 128). • “increasing invisibility (author’s own) of the net’s boundaries” (Cohen, 1985: 69).

  6. Case Study- The ASBO

  7. The ASBO- some statistics • West Ed, (2005), ‘The Little Book of ASBOs’ • 45% of ASBO’s have been given against children under 16. • Youngest female to receive ASBO is 11. • At least five autistic children have been given ASBO’s. • Get a haircut! 19 year old in Oldham. • Enforcing an ASBO costs an average of £5,350. The highest cost is £187, 770. • Is it worth it? 43% breached by Dec 2003.

  8. Are They Working? • Squires (2008)- How else would youth respond? • “ASBO usage has spread far beyond the original scenario of neighbourhood troublemaking and has become an almost random tool of control”, (Burley, 2008: 138) – it is too punitive in nature. • Goldsmith (2008) study in Hillside. • ASBO Concern. • Incorporate a wider set of problems behaviours (Muncie, 2009: 4).

  9. Video- New ASBO? • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkY_xhUonwo

  10. Recurring theme? • Geoffrey Pearson’s (1983) Hooligan. • If punitive measures haven’t worked in the past, will they work in the future? • Childhood as a ‘new’ phenomenon- it may take time for us to find the right methods to treat children.

  11. Actors in a Play? • “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms... power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth”, (Cohen, 1985: 1). • The C20th person as an actor- do we need to be ‘taught our lines’?

  12. “Adult Society is Riddled with Hypocrisy” (Brown, 2005: 128) • “Adult society, to put it bluntly, is riddled with hypocrisy. Children and young people have to earn (author’s own italics) their status as victims, whereas they are eagerly ascribed their status as offenders” (Brown, 2005: 128). • Routed in a history of institutional control of the family.

  13. The Future? • The New ASBO? • Make the age of criminal responsibility higher? (Scraton and Haydon, 2005). • Make children less permissive? (Scracton and Haydon, 2005). • Overturn the system? • Or carry on as we are?

  14. Bibliography • Brown, S. (2005), Understanding Youth and Crime. Maidenhead: OUP. • Burley, E. (2008), ‘The ASBO and the Shift to Punishment’. In Squires, P. (ed.), ASBO Nation: The Criminalisation of Nuisance. Bristol: Polity Press. • Cohen, S. (1985), Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification. Cambridge: Polity Press. • Goldsmith, C. (2008), ‘Cameras cops and Contracts’. In Squires, P. (ed.), ASBO Nation: The Criminalisation of Nuisance. Bristol: Polity Press. • Loader, I. (1996), Youth, Policing and Democracy. London: Macmillan Press. • Muncie, J. (2009), Youth and Crime. Third edition. London: Sage publications. • Pearson, G. (1983), Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears. London: Macmillan. • Scraton, P. and Haydon, D. (2002), ‘Challenging the Criminalisation of Children and Young People’. In Mucie, J. Hughes, G. and McLaughlin, E. (eds.), Youth Justice: Critical Readings. London: Sage publications. • Squires, P. (2008), ‘Introduction: Why Anti- Social Behaviour? Debating ASBOs’. In Squires, P. (ed.), ASBO Nation: The Criminalisation of Nuisance. Bristol: Polity Press. • West, E. (2005), The Little Book of ASBOs: Absolent Behaviour from Around the Country. Surrey: Crombie Jardine Publishing. • www.youtube.co.uk and www.asboconcern.org.uk

  15. Questions • At which age should criminal responsibility be set? Can we apply a cut-off? Is it important? • Should we move to a more welfare oriented response to youth crime, or should we be increasingly punitive to socialise children into the ‘play’? Does welfare work?

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