Making People Behave

Anti-social Behaviour, Politics and Policy

Elizabeth Burney

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843926986
• eBook ISBN: 9781134026180
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Anti-social behaviour' has become a label attached to a huge range of nuisance and petty crime, and rarely out of the headlines as tackling this problem has become a central part of the British government's crime control policy. At the same time 'anti-social behaviour' has provided the lever for control mechanisms ranging from the draconian to the merely bureaucratic, most notably in the shape of the Anti-Social Behaviour Order, or ASBO.

This book seeks to explain why anti-social behaviour, as a focus of political rhetoric, legislative activity and social action, has gained such a high profile in Britain in recent years, and it provides a critical examination of current policies of enforcement and exclusion. It examines both the political roots of the variety of new measures which have been introduced and also the deeper social explanations for the unease expressed about anti-social behaviour more generally.

This updated new edition of Making People Behave takes full account of recent legal and policy changes, including the 'Respect' agenda, as well as relevant research on the subject. It also contains two wholly new chapters, one of them devoted to the expanding web of behaviour controls, the other on Scotland which provides an alternative to the enforcement-oriented approach evident in England and Wales – complementing the wider coverage in the book of developments in North America and Europe.

Chapter 1

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Why ‘anti-social behaviour’?

It is sometimes claimed, especially in the context of terrorism, that governments rely upon scaring people in order to prove that they are in control and doing something about a particular threat. In 1997 the newly elected Labour government introduced a cherished piece of legislation, Clause 1 of the Crime and Disorder Bill, which created the Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO). ‘Anti-social behaviour is a menace on our streets; it is threat to our communities’,¹ declared Lord Williams to the House of Lords. Just what was the nature of this menace, which has become the springboard for so much government action, providing an ever-increasing range of penalties and enforcement agents? And why has the notion of anti-social behaviour been embraced so keenly by the British public, who formerly might barely have been familiar with the term?

I hope to show why this has happened, what form the sanctions take and what influences lie behind them, and to address also the question: has offensive behaviour really become more widespread and/or intense and if so why? Is this significantly more than a recycling of permanent concerns about the behaviour of neighbours, and youths, and defilers/disturbers of public space? Is it a category distinct from crime, or – as is increasingly apparent – simply a way of relabelling criminal acts in a manner that permits short-cut punishment? The book will therefore look at the political process involved in the promotion of the idea of anti-social behaviour; the nature and application of the expanding body of legislation introduced in its name; the elements contributing to the perception that bad behaviour in the public domain has got worse; the way that some local authorities are addressing the issue; and, finally, whether there are signs that Britain is not alone in western Europe in increased anxiety relating to anti-social behaviour or, to use a less emotive term, ‘incivilities’.

The difference in terminology is not without significance. In recent years different names have been attached to a clutch of common phenomena associated usually, though not exclusively, with impoverished, run-down neighbourhoods. When American academics turned their attention to the plight of rustbelt cities in the 1970s and 1980s they used terms such as ‘incivilities’ and ‘disorder’ to describe a cocktail of social unpleasantness and environmental mess found in decaying neighbourhoods. Similar studies followed in Britain, with parallel concerns about the fate of urban areas blighted by the loss of jobs. But in the mid-1990s Britain (not America) began to become familiar with another name: ‘anti-social behaviour’. Over the years this name has been applied to most of the things itemised in American studies as ‘incivilities’ or ‘disorder ’.² But it has always had a distinct, personal, implication. ‘Disorder’ is a term applied collectively to communities; ‘anti-social behaviour’ is something done by individuals who are thereby singled out and blamed for the harm they inflict upon communities. One is about outcomes; the other about inputs. ‘Disorder’ focuses on a standard list of recognisable elements; ‘anti-social behaviour’ on the other hand has no clear identity, but results in the targeting of individuals or groups through predetermined instruments of restraint. It has politicised an almost limitless range of behaviour drawn into the net of new controls. It signals exclusion and rejection, trumpeted as a means of rescuing social order and strengthening communities.

It is indisputable that in the 1990s many poor neighbourhoods were indeed plagued and intimidated by persistent bad behaviour on the lower edge of criminality. New Labour recognised a serious need and linked it directly to a philosophy that set communities and their miscreant members at odds, expressed in a new law of rejection and banishment. Yet scapegoating individual perpetrators of neighbourhood disturbance and destruction enables the authorities to evade acknowledging the social and economic decline of those neighbourhoods, of which the objectionable behaviour might be seen as a symptom or a response. As Jock Young (1999) has argued, exclusion is the inevitable consequence of the condition in which late modernity leaves those deprived of status and opportunity in a market-driven society. Whole neighbourhoods are ‘socially excluded’ and their condition worsened by the harm inflicted by some of their inhabitants. The welfare interventions that might once have prevented some of the deviant behaviour are few and far between. Informal social control has weakened, to be replaced by formal instruments of a punitive nature. These instruments increasingly assume what Pratt (2000) calls ‘emotive and ostentatious’ forms, recalling past eras of branding, stocks and pillory. He cites a sex offender in the United States obliged to display a notice saying ‘Dangerous Sexual Offender – No Children Allowed’. There have been demands in Britain for similar public identification of sex offenders, so far resisted. But the deliberate identification of people – even children – on anti-social behaviour orders, including photographs and addresses, has been supported by the courts and is now commonplace.

This book examines how the concept of anti-social behaviour has come to dominate Britain’s law and order discourse, and what have been the consequences in terms of the way what Americans would still term ‘incivilities’ have been dealt with – often by methods directly copied from America. The introduction of the label ‘anti-social behaviour’ into the realm of public order enforcement was the direct responsibility of the first New Labour government of 1997. Until then it was a term used either in a clinical context by psychologists and criminologists to describe a certain type of personality or propensity, or alternatively in popular use simply as a loosely pejorative expression applied to behaviour offensive to tastes or norms. But since its introduction into the law and order discourse it has acquired a burgeoning life of its own in the public arena, assisted by an increased volume of legislation. The Times used the words ‘anti-social’ or ‘antisocial’ 74 times in 1993 but by 2003 this had risen to 292. The acronym ‘ASBO’ has passed into the nation’s vocabulary and regularly provides a source of shocking or entertaining news stories (such as headlines concerning a Norfolk farmer dealt an ASBO for failing to contain a herd of pigs).

‘Anti-social behaviour’ has been described as ‘a vague term, with a broad definition, which in the last few years has become a rallying call for some onerous and intrusive measures against individuals’ (Ashworth 2004: 263). The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights said: ‘[W]e do not think that people would be able to establish what it means by any predictable ojective standard’.³ As one American observer has remarked: ‘[B]y making antisocial behaviour into a major social policy problem, and by giving it sustained high-visibility attention, Labour has made a small problem larger, thereby making people more aware of it and less satisfied with their lives and their government’ (Tonry 2004: 57).

It is a ‘small problem’ in the sense that for a vast majority of the population anti-social behaviour is a very small or non-existent concern (Millie et al. 2005). A minority are affected in varying degrees, with a very small number devastated by it. It would be a great mistake to be dismissive about nasty forms of rampant and persistent bad behaviour which have afflicted certain neighbourhoods or vulnerable people. Racial abuse, threats and intimidation, serious damage to property, intrusive loud noise and the environment created by drug dealing cannot be ignored. Yet most of these things are plainly criminal and all can be targeted by existing legal instruments without recourse to anti-social behaviour orders. As we shall see, it was the perceived inefficiency of the criminal justice system that led to demands for something that would give the authorities a freer hand. It was this, rather than a more general concern about minor nuisances, that was the initial focus of the anti-social behaviour agenda. Yet, once the label ‘anti-social behaviour’ became current, it was very easy to adopt it as a description of any local irritation or the presence of any persons attracting disapproval in the public domain. It reflects back a perception that society is falling apart and that this process is driven by people who have no sense of civilised norms.

Doom-sayers like Frank Field, the MP for Birkenhead, take this to extremes. He has naturally been sincerely outraged by the sufferings inflicted on ‘respectable working-class’ constituents by a few grossly anarchic neighbours, usually children. In his book Neighbours From Hell (2003: 10) he describes how this first came to his notice by a visit from a group of pensioners.

Nothing had prepared me for the description of what they were enduring and the hell which had engulfed them. Young lads who ran across their bungalow roofs, peed through their letterboxes, jumped out of the shadows as they returned home at night, and, when they were watching television, tried to break their sitting room windows, presumably with the hope of showering the pensioners with shattered glass.

Birkenhead is indeed a vulnerable place, ravaged by years of unemployment and heroin addiction (Pearson 1987). The worst cases of anti-social behaviour are likely to occur in such areas.⁴ But Field goes on to extrapolate from similar examples of persistent horrible behaviour, garnered from his constituents and elsewhere, arguing that the whole country is suffering from an onslaught against old-fashioned values led by feckless families who have no interest in instilling behavioural standards in their children. Not only are these families seen by Mr Field as a local menace: he believes that they actually infect society as a whole, driving down behaviour towards their own level. Society becomes dominated by selfish, yobbish behaviour because we have lost the certainties and mutual responsibilities of religion and the welfare state. His main remedy consists of harsh measures, including the removal of benefits, to force parents to act responsibly. Gradually, versions of this latter remedy have crept into public policy.

The problem with this presentation is that it has no shades of grey. The bad cases are indeed very bad but they are the tip of a pyramid of lesser incivilities, sometimes upsetting but not devastating. People who are annoyed to see schoolchildren dropping litter at the bus stop when there is a bin right beside them may readily buy into Field’s worst-case scenario.

Disorder and fear

The government’s anti-social behaviour policy has succeeded in its own terms not only because it resonates with people at the sharp end, but also because it builds upon pre-existing causes of social unease. There is long-standing evidence that people (or some people in some places) are psychologically more affected by disorderly behaviour and messy environments than they are by more serious crime. The association of these perceptions with fear of crime – as a phenomenon distinct from measurable crime rates – has been the subject of academic study and debate, mainly in America, for over 30 years. It is therefore appropriate at this point to summarise this debate, which has affected policing methods both sides of the Atlantic and can be shown to have fed into the political process which is a main focus of this book.

We have found that the attitudes of citizens regarding crime are less affected by their past victimisation than by their ideas about what is going on in their community – fears about a weakening of social controls on which they feel their safety and the broader fabric of social life is ultimately dependent. (p. 160)

So wrote the authors of a report to the US federal government in 1967 (Biderman et al.). Since then there have been numerous studies, only a few of which will be referred to here, developing this theme and exploring the processes involved. Many involve questioning people about their perceptions of disorder (or ‘incivilities’) in the neighbourhood – social disorder, such as rowdy youths on street corners, public drinking and drug dealing, and environmental disorder such as litter, vandalism and abandoned or ill-kept buildings. Some researchers travel the streets themselves to assess visible disorders. People are also questioned about their experience of crime and their fear of the same – or avoidance behaviour, such as not going out at night. It was soon shown that neighbourhoods, and even subsections of neighourhoods, differed significantly in both levels of fear and perceptions of disorder, and that the two were somehow related.

For instance, when Lewis and Maxfield (1980) investigated Chicago neighbourhoods they found striking differences from place to place. The fear of crime was more associated with perceptions of incivilities than with crime rates, even where people had a realistic awareness of the crimes being committed in their area. They concluded (p. 185) that crime rates did matter, but that ‘levels of perceived risk are greatest when where there is a combination of high concern about crime and incivility’. High crime rates produced far less concern in tidy neighbourhoods. The theme was picked up in a highly influential magazine article (Wilson and Kelling 1982), which argued that unless early signs of disorder were dealt with promptly, deterioration and fear would set in, leading eventually to an increase in predatory crime. (The history of this ‘broken windows’ thesis will be described in a later chapter.)

The idea of risk was taken up by Lagrange et al. (1992), arguing that incivilities were mainly seen by people as indicating a risk of crime, and that fear was an outcome of this perception. The most fearful people, it was often pointed out, were those with a low actuarial risk of victimisation (e.g. Hough 1995). Ditton et al. (1999) argued that ‘fear of crime’ was a misleading shorthand for a mix of emotions, such as anger, experienced differentially. Some recent studies have focused on the way that disadvantaged neighbourhoods may feel threatened because of a sense of powerlessness, amplified by signs of disorder and the erosion of trust (Ross et al. 2001), a view which ties in with the ‘social disorganisation’ theory discussed in a later chapter. Again, not all high crime neighbourhoods suffer in this way (Walklate and Evans 1999; Evans et al. 1996). Innes and Fielding (2002), like Lagrange et al., prefer to talk of risk rather than fear. They argue that certain common types of disorder in public space, both social and environmental, are ‘signal crimes’, sending a message that the neighbourhood is unsafe. If there are signs that these things are being taken in hand, the public is reassured (hence the term ‘reassurance policing’). This interpretation has a strong bearing on recent government policy.

Jackson (2004) has analysed expressions of ‘fear’ as relating to a variety of mental processes – knowledge or perceptions of the characteristics of the neighbourhood on the one hand and broader socio-cultural concerns which shape what he calls ‘expressive fear’ on the other. People might be concerned about their own vulnerability, interpreting local disorders as ‘representational of a community that lacked trust, moral consensus, and informal social control’ (p. 960). But this unease was linked to more general attitudes about social decline:

Wider social attitudes shaped the social meaning of disorder and its links to community aspects. Respondents who held more authoritarian views about law and order, and who were concerned about a long-term deterioration of community, were more likely to perceive disorder in their environment. They were also more likely to link these physical cues to problems of social cohesion and consensus, of declining quality of social bonds and informal social control. (p. 960)

These observations fit with the findings of Bottoms and Wilson (2004, 2006) concerning contrasting attitudes found in two deprived, high-crime areas of Sheffield, discussed in another chapter, where punitiveness was far higher in the area most concerned about disorder. They also find an echo in the psychological survey conducted by Maruna and King (2004) where punitiveness is strongly linked to socio-economic insecurity.

How far people’s sense of insecurity therefore feeds into their concern about disorder, or more generally anti-social behaviour, is therefore a subject of much interest. There is no shortage of theories around the effects of late (or ‘post-‘) modern society on people’s lives and relationships to one another, describing the unravelling of traditional bonds and the rising dominance of risk as the key paradigm (e.g. Giddens 1990; Beck 1992; Taylor 1999; Boutellier 2004), leading to more punitive desires. Against this background, it is no surprise that government in Britain has tapped into some very broad areas of unease, in which the large but imprecise threat of anti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• List of figures and tables
• Foreword
• 1 Why 'anti-social behaviour'?
• 2 New Labour, new ideas
• 3 A short history of behaviour control
• 4 Engines of bad behaviour
• 5 The ASBO - law and practice
• 6 Expanding behaviour control
• 7 How different is Scotland?
• 8 Enforcement and problem-solving in the local context
• 9 Cultures of control - a European dimension
• 10 Conclusions
• Appendices
• References
• Index