Mischief, Morality and Mobs

Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Pearson

Dick Hobbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138679733
• eBook ISBN: 9781134825394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Geoffrey Pearson, who died in 2013, was one of the outstanding social scientists of the post second world war era. His work spanned social work, social theory, social history, criminology and sociology. In particular, his work has had a huge impact upon studies of youth, youth culture and drugs.

This collection is made up of contributions from scholars producing empirical work on some of the key areas upon which Geoff Pearson established his reputation. All of the writers in this collection have been profoundly influenced by his scholarship. This collection focuses on urban ethnography, race and ethnicity, youth, and drugs. It includes chapters on: women working in male boxing gyms; understanding the English Defence League; Black male adults as an ignored societal group; drug markets and ethnography; and sex, drugs and kids in care.

The result is a cutting edge collection that takes readers into social worlds that are difficult to access, complex, yet utterly normal. Overall this is an exciting and fittingly challenging tribute to one of the UKs most important scholars. This volume will appeal to scholars and students of criminology, sociology, social history and research methodology – in particular ethnography.

1 They Didn’t Know Whether to ‘Fuck Me or Fight Me’

An Ethnographic Account of North Town Boxing Gym

Deborah Jump

Boxing is—to borrow Goffman’s terminology—‘where the action is’, a universe in which the smallest of actions becomes ‘fateful’, which is both exciting and problematic for the individuals involved (1967:174). Referring to my recent ethnography conducted in an inner-city boxing gym in the north of England, this chapter illustrates core observations from fieldwork in the ‘North Town’ boxing gym, and reflexively comments on the intricacies and personal relationships of the men in this social world. During the six months that I spent in the field of amateur and professional boxing it became increasingly evident that the gym was an important, exciting and valuable space for the men who attended. I therefore reflect on the appealing nature and social hierarchy of boxing for the men in this study, and discuss how the gym seemingly offers routes into employment while providing status-affirming attributes for those who attend. Secondly, I examine how the structured activity of the gym environment has the potential to promote desistance from crime, by detaining and incapacitating men when they may otherwise be involved in criminal behaviour.

Drawing on classical ethnographic research techniques (see Hobbs 1995; Bourgois 1996; Anderson 1999), I aim to give a strong experiential sense of the physical and social environment in which this research was situated, and of the role I played in shaping it. I aim to recreate and illustrate the habitus¹ of these men and bring alive their social world and subjective stories. Having previously worked in youth offending services for close to ten years I became particularly interested in how sport was being used as a vehicle for change via a diversionary activity that was being promoted to young men who found themselves constantly in contact with the youth justice system. Seeing the same young men return weekly led me to believe that ‘nothing works’ (Martinson 1974), and overcoming this cynicism became increasingly difficult. I became determined to find out why this might be the case, and therefore applied for PhD funding to explore the reason why young men seemed keen to take up the sport of boxing, and also why the authorities deemed this to be a good idea. Moreover, I wanted to understand if and how the sport of boxing could potentially contribute towards a process of desistance for young men, and whether it influenced the way in which they viewed and understood violent behaviour.

The basic question for any qualitatively oriented researcher is to ask how one can represent the viewpoints of the subjects he or she studies, and how to comprehend the production of social reality in and through interactive processes. In this research I sought to understand how members of the gym related to one another and what interactive processes formed their mutual understandings. In short, I was interested in the ways in which ‘legitimate’ (celebrated) violence was constructed, how it was viewed, and how it was practiced and rehearsed by men who boxed. Furthermore, I was interested in whether the collective and subjective meanings of those who participated in boxing contributed towards a process of desistance from ‘illegitimate’ (criminalised) violence.

In exploring these ideas I employed an ethnographic approach. This method has long been viewed as an effective and sophisticated technique for analysing social worlds from the ‘inside’ as it starts from a theoretical position of describing social realities and their making (Adler and Adler 1987). A common feature of ethnography is participant observation, and I relied upon this method to observe the climate and habitus of the boxing gym. It is the job of the ethnographer to gain access to people’s everyday thinking and interpret their actions and social worlds from their point of view; therefore, adopting this method assisted in my quest to understand what the gym meant to these young men and their trainers, and also how the relationships formed could potentially influence motivations and behaviour in and outside of the boxing ring.

This method further allowed me to observe the boxers in their natural setting, while encouraging me to stay close to the field and the world it represents. More importantly, it allowed me to develop an integrated set of theoretical concepts from the data collected, specifically those that related to my research ideas mentioned previously. Accordingly, the theoretical framework of both ethnographic research and grounded theory assisted in the unpicking of actions and meanings for these men, and therefore allowed me to explore what elements these men assigned to specific actions. Additionally, it facilitated my understanding surrounding the culture of the boxing gym, and also, how the inherent discourses of competition and masculinity potentially transposed into the wider community when men left the premises.

Gaining Access to North Town

Woodward (2004:4) posits that: ‘Men’s boxing gyms are very difficult to access for women’; however, previous work experience in the field of youth work gained me access to these arenas as former colleagues acted as gatekeepers. According to Coffey (1993:94) the sponsorship or use of gatekeepers in gaining access to the field ‘is the ethnographer’s best ticket into the community’, and these were essential components in the research.

Previous ethnographies in boxing gyms have mostly been conducted by men acting as participant observers (Sugden 1996; Beattie 1997; De Garis 2002; Wacquant 2004). In fact, the small amount of boxing research that has been conducted by women (Woodward 2008; Trimbur 2009) has generally been non-participatory and focused on issues of race and ethnicity. My research, while technically non-participatory, was actually that of someone who ‘hangs around’, a ‘researcher-participant’ (Gans 1962); therefore, I did seek to embrace the overall culture of the boxing gym as I felt this was important to maintaining access and understanding the lives of these men.

Sugden (1996:201) argues that: ‘It is only through total immersion that she or he can become sufficiently conversant with the formal and informal rules governing the webbing of the human interactions under investigation, so that its innermost secrets can be revealed’. While I acknowledge the benefits that ‘insider’ status can provide, I would also argue that full participation is not tantamount to producing knowledge and, as such, I am inclined to concur with Morgan (1992:87), when she states that: ‘Qualitative research has its own brand of machismo with its image of the male sociologist bringing back news from the fringes of society, the lower depths, the mean streets’, and further align with Wheaton (2002) when she suggests that very few ethnographies of boxing acknowledge gendered identity as part of their research, highlighting that maleness often passes unquestioned in these particular environments.

Notwithstanding, it was imperative that I was viewed as someone who played an active role in the gym, and I soon discovered that small amounts of participation were crucial to developing trust among the participants. Accordingly, I decided to dress in sportswear and assist and participate in the day-to-day activities of the gym. It was during these participatory moments that I was able to forge relationships with the men, as they appreciated the effort I had made to understand their social world and the importance that the sport had to their lives. Indeed, it was during the holding of the pads/participation in light sparring, or by sweeping the floor that I was able to schedule interviews and negotiate access to their lives.

Before commencing the interviews I ‘hung around’ the boxing gym for a period of two weeks. I became familiar with the faces in attendance and spoke informally to many of the men who seemed curious by my presence. I began by interviewing the trainers as I felt it important to begin with those who ran the gym because boxing gyms have strict hierarchal structures and the trainers and professionals are classed as being at the top. It was important to be respectful to the cultural standing of the gym members and begin with those deemed to be most experienced and influential. This was a wise move on my part as other men began to follow suit after the trainers had already been interviewed, as they reported feeling ‘safer’ about talking to a researcher once the trainers had ‘checked me out’.

Most of the interviews were conducted during the day at the boxing gym, as the evening sessions were very crowded and noisy. Most men wanted to train hard and I did not want to stand in their way (literally and figuratively); therefore I organised the interviews around their training schedules and often met them after their lunchtime workouts. The changing rooms proved to be a good place for the interviews to be conducted as they were away from the ring and the deafening sound of the bell. Furthermore, the showers were housed in a different section and this allowed me access without worrying about breaching the men’s privacy. Most of the men were responsive and found my research intriguing, whereas a few declined to ‘go on record’ but would offer me vignettes and anecdotes of their lives and boxing careers. I wrote most of these down, and incorporated them into my thinking and field notes. These short accounts, although not on tape, offered me a chance to think deeper about my subject area and helped build a rapport with the men in whose social world I had immersed myself.

Reading books and boxing magazines helped increase boxing knowledge, as the men would often test my understanding of the weight categories or terminology used in the sport. Hence, I was able to follow the trajectory of the interview naturally as the men discussed prior champions they had defeated, or boxing techniques that they had employed in winning. I soon became a known presence and on a first name basis with gym trainers and members. They began to allocate me boxing tasks such as becoming the ‘spit bucket’ holder as the men spat their gumshields into a bucket after a bout. The holding of the bucket and the passing of hand-wraps and gloves became second nature after a while; all the time offering either congratulations or condolences to bruised faces and egos, as the men often left the ring either dismayed or elated. All of this was recorded, jotted down and memorised as I attempted to blend into the ethnographic background.

As a result of this immersion, I began to understand the gendered experience of the research context, and more importantly, how my involvement shaped the production of knowledge.² As Denzin (1989:27) has argued, ‘There is no such thing as gender free knowledge’ as gender is a significant factor in the research process (see also Presser 2005). Woodward (2008) argues that the sexualised positioning of a female researcher in hyper-masculine arenas such as boxing gyms is highly significant. In her research, Woodward consciously adopted a subject position that was neither threatening nor complicit in masculine discourses, finding the ‘maternal figure’ to be the most successful research persona.

Joyce Carol Oates (1987:73) states that a, ‘Female boxer cannot be taken seriously—she is a parody, she is cartoon, she is monstrous, and had she an ideology, she is likely to be a feminist’. This resonated with me in the context of my fieldwork, as I identify as a feminist white gay woman. I suffered sexist remarks on several occasions, and while my aim was to remain as asexual as possible this did not always prove to be successful, as one boxer stated that he did not know whether to ‘fuck me or fight me’. Accordingly, a sense of distancing had to be established, as my distinction as a researcher was further constituted as an outsider particularly in terms of my class, race and sexuality.

In total I interviewed 13 participants. Most of these were professionals—or retired professionals—at least, and were therefore serious about their sport. I spoke with nearly every member of the gym, spending significant periods of time in these men’s company over six months, and through the taking of ethnographic field notes—what Emerson et al. (1995) refers to as ‘jottings’—an understanding began to develop. These jottings helped to shape and illuminate the particular themes in this research, and this proved to be invaluable in the analytical stages of the enquiry as they helped me to reconstruct interactions, discussions and the general characterisation of the order of events. Furthermore, by taking extensive field notes, I was able to recall first impressions of settings, ideas, people, relationships and elements of interaction.

The use of Biographical Narrative Interviewing (Wengraf 2001) proved very successful after a period of trying out a few different techniques. Using this method, and particularly the opening statement of: ‘Tell me the story of how you became a boxer’, initiated a dialogue that most men appeared to be comfortable with. The use of this particular method allowed the men to be more open regarding the nature of their stories, and some disclosed that they had ‘never told anyone this before’, whereas I sensed that this may have been because nobody had previously cared to ask. In certain interviews, I felt upset at the trauma and violence experienced by some of these men, as stories of familial abuse as both victim and perpetrator jarred me, and at one point a respondent broke down as he relayed his story of manslaughter involving a fellow boxer. At other times I felt objectified by the male gaze and angered by men’s often-profound misogyny.

Reflexivity from a narrative position scrutinises the researcher’s process and examines how power relations are attended to both within the relationship and in the construction of the narratives. Presser (2005:2070) argues that: ‘Cross gender studies of men generate unique concerns about research practice’, and from a feminist perspective this argument is well known. I align with Presser, when she argues that cross gender studies simply bring the processes of gender accomplishment into plain view, as I observed men using the research situation as a further opportunity to accomplish their masculinity (Messerschmidt 2000), telling me stories of masculine accomplishments involving violence, virility and status-affirming exploits. However, I acknowledge that there is no final version, and my narrative representation and interpretations are only made possible through interpretative readings. Hence, the narrative accounts presented in this study do not resemble every boxer, nor do they resemble every man. In short, they resemble a collection of life stories. Yet, by interviewing and facilitating the construction of these men’s narratives I was able to discern and analyse what violence, masculinity and desistance meant for them, both collectively in the gym environment and subjectively in their everyday lives.

Meeting ‘The Boys’: The Gatekeeper’s Introduction

I first met Rico, my gatekeeper, when he arrived at a youth project I was managing as part of my time as a youth offending worker. He was recruited as a member of volunteer staff for a local mentoring project I was involved with, but overall, his disposition reflected that of the client group we worked with. He admittedly referred to himself as ‘street’, and said that volunteering, as part of this mentoring project was his last chance to ‘get out’ of a troubled lifestyle. According to Rico what ‘saved’ him was boxing. He had turned his back on gang violence after seeing his friend killed in a fight over ‘something stupid to do with drugs and money’. After witnessing this shooting, Rico was determined to do ‘something else’. The local boxing gym—North Town—overlooked the estate where Rico lived, and the boxers could often be seen ‘road running’ around the park adjacent to the housing estate and gym. ‘Knowing a few of the lads in there’, Rico crossed the busy road that separated the housing estate to the gym that would become his ‘life and love’ for the next ten years.

Rico and I became colleagues, and over the course of three years of working together we became friends. As we were professionally tasked with designing diversionary programmes for young offenders, we started discussing the possibilities of boxing as a tool for reducing illegitimate violence. When the project ended, as funding dried up under a shift in government policy, Rico went on to train as a fireman. Regardless, we kept in touch as he said that if he was ever in ‘need of a reference from someone who “got him”’ then I was to be his ‘go to’ for this. Ironically, Rico ended up being my ‘go to’ as the idea of boxing as a diversionary activity never left my sights; therefore, Rico was the first person I called when I needed access to a boxing gym.

‘Meet me by North Town at 1 p.m. and I’ll introduce you to Marcus and Eric’, said Rico. He was excited by my idea and was willing to facilitate the introductions to North Town’s trainers and owners—‘his boys’ as he often referred to them. When I arrived Rico was already waiting for me outside—‘how’s it goin’ Deb?’ as was often his greeting when we worked together. We embraced and then walked towards the steel door that was the downstairs entrance to the gym. Rico did not knock nor ring any form of buzzer, ‘they don’t hear that shit anyway, what...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Geoffrey Pearson: Published Work
• Geoffrey Pearson: Research, Consultancy and Other Professional Experience
• Introduction: Geoffrey Pearson 1943–2013
• 1 They Didn't Know Whether to ‘Fuck Me or Fight Me': An Ethnographic Account of North Town Boxing Gym
• Section One Race
• Section Two Youth
• Section Three Drugs and Illegal Markets
• Section Four Geoff's Final Publication
• Index