youth | ukwatch.net

Young people harassed by Labour yobs!

Ellie Keen — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:37:43 +0000

For the second year in a row child poverty has risen. Children in poverty increased by 100,000 in 2006-7 on top of the 200,000 rise in 2005-6 (before housing costs). And that was at the height of the economic boom – the coming recession will make it worse still.

Figures for child poverty after housing costs are even worse, with 3.9 million living in relative poverty instead of the target of less than 3.3 million (relative being 60% of average earnings).

Thirty per cent of children – yes, that’s nearly one in three – live in poverty in the UK (all statistics from government website) and the figure is rising despite New Labour’s tax and credit reforms. Labour’s promise in 1997 of halving child poverty may be missed by one million.

But the government’s failings are even worse. Last month, the Children’s Commissioners for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland released a damning report to the United Nations that highlighted how legal and political attacks on young people’s rights and living conditions have intensified over the past few years.

The report highlights a “very punitive approach to misbehaviour” in the UK and that the UK has a low age of criminal responsibility (10 years compared with an EU average of 14), locking up many more children and young people than most European countries. In addition, the report exposes how severe child poverty makes the UK stand out from much of Europe, with bad health, poor education, substance abuse and teenage pregnancy.

There is a clear racial dimension to child poverty. The commissioners’ report condemns the treatment of young asylum seekers who are “consistently treated differently” and experience “serious breaches of their rights”, while a recent House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee report found that rates of poverty were twice as high among children in Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in the UK.

Labour’s approach to youth since 1997 has been underpinned with Tory rhetoric such as “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, but in reality has focused on the former and not the latter. Antisocial Behaviour Orders (Asbos) have been used mainly on young people, criminalising youth for activities that under criminal law would not be offences. There’s no ‘innocent until proven guilty’ when it comes to Asbos: no trial, no jury, no case for the defence. But it’s a criminal offence to breach an Asbo – with penalties including heavy fines, and even imprisonment. The latest Home Office statistics (from 2006) show that 61 per cent of all Asbos on young people were breached. As part of the same package of legislation, dispersal orders have allowed police to ban gatherings of young people in certain places, which threaten groups of more than three young people with criminalisation.

Alarmingly, new technology has also started being used to target young people indiscriminately. The “mosquito” device projects a loud high pitched noise that can only be heard by young people in order to disperse them from an area.

Workers Power spoke to a young woman in Huddersfield who described its effect. “There is one outside Kingsgate shopping centre which is on constantly. It doesn’t hurt but it’s distressing, it’s really unpleasant and just makes you want to run away.”

In a further attack, the Labour government has cut funding for youth centres, with many having closed or been threatened with closure, and has built on many of the remaining inadequate urban green spaces in the UK. Schools have sold off playing fields to developers. The result has been that young people in Britain have far fewer places to meet and socialise –important because young people often feel the need to escape the restrictive environment of home and family.

With widespread poverty, victimisation by local government and the police, racism and a deteriorating standard of life, young people in Britain have never been more alienated from society.

Despite the government’s age discrimination laws, the minimum wage for young workers is officially lower than for over 21s. Lower pay in most workplaces and rising costs of living are forcing those who would choose to leave home to stay in unhappy family situations. School life is becoming increasingly difficult for younger teenagers who have had to put up with a huge burden of homework and examinations.

Little wonder then that the report by the Children’s Commissioners point to the fact that young people in Britain drink more alcohol and smoke more cannabis than in the rest of Europe. The report also shows that the mental health of children has deteriorated over the past 30 years, with one in 10 children between the ages of five and 16 suffering a clinically recognised mental disorder.

Young people are easy scapegoats for the cowardly Labour government. Its attacks on wages, education, social and health care are causing many social problems, and are increasing levels of poverty and crime. The media whips up panic about “chavs” and “hoodies” – this is another example of how young people are victimised for social problems caused by poverty and alienation.

But young people have shown that they can be the most energetic when it comes to fighting back. Young people led the way in organising demonstrations and walkouts against the Iraq war in 2003, and came to take a leading role in anti-capitalist struggles across Europe in early 2000-02. Today, young people have the potential to fight back against the poverty caused by the Labour Party today, and against racists like the BNP who are trying to take advantage of disillusionment to divide us against ourselves.

The trade union movement should break its silence on the issue of young people, and condemn the Labour governments attacks on youth. They should rally the support of young people for workers’ struggles against low pay, privatisation and cutbacks. They should launch a huge recruitment drive to organise young workers, fight for equalisation for the minimum wage and an end to low pay.

Young people also need their own political voice: a revolutionary working class youth movement, run by young people, for young people, which can organise in the schools, colleges and workplaces to resist the government’s attacks on the youth and link resistance to the worldwide struggle against capitalism.

'My son was killed by a knife but he was failed by the system'

JamieSW — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:15:10 +0000

Leon Francis was just 24 years old when he was fatally stabbed in December last year. He was a bright young man, adored by his family and treasured by his friends. Yet life had not been easy for Leon. He was excluded from his Birmingham school aged 15, and without proper help he drifted into crime and then a prison sentence. On release, Leon was determined to turn his life around and plan a future away from crime.

But every effort Leon made to do this was met with failure or contempt by the very bodies that were supposed to help him. Following Leon’s death some of the press chose to demonise him. This week Jackie Ranger, Leon’s mother, speaks to Socialist Worker to set the story straight.

My eldest child Leon was only 24 when he was stabbed to death in December last year. Our family and friends are still devastated at his untimely death, but we are campaigning for justice for Leon, and to make sure that his name is not discredited.

We want him to be remembered for the person he was. Sadly Leon’s story is indicative of the destructive paths that some of our young people find themselves trapped on.

My son was no angel. He made some mistakes throughout his short life, but it is important to know that 2007 had been a year of reflection and transition for him.

He realised that he had to change and he kept trying to turn his life around right until the day that he died.

Leon brought joy and laughter throughout his life and was a popular young man with a potentially bright future ahead of him.

He was extremely loyal to his family and friends and greatly valued his close relationships. His troubles began when he was permanently excluded from school aged 15. Sadly it was a downward spiral from there.

Exclusion

Inadequate post exclusion support contributed to the choices that Leon made. He blindly entered a life of crime and went to prison for five years for attempted armed robbery.

To this day I question if Leon really understood the seriousness of the offence that he committed and the consequences it would have on his life – he was after all still a child at the time.

Leon’s imprisonment was an extremely traumatic period for all his family, but more so for Leon himself.

He often tried to mask the pain of the injustice he felt at being excluded from school, and subsequently excluded from society.

As a parent it was important that I did not allow him to minimise his responsibility for what he had done, while acknowledging the way social factors contributed to his predicament.

Leon himself understood he had done wrong and was remorseful. During his sentence Leon was transferred between prisons more than 15 times.

He was also placed in some difficult situations – a poignant and most insensitive ordeal was being jailed on the same wing as the man who killed his fiancée’s brother.

Nonetheless, Leon remained extremely resilient, striving to remain positive about the future.

While incarcerated he gained some qualifications and was determined to lead a more productive life after his release in 2006.

Due to the nature of his offence, and the political climate around “gangs” at the time, Leon was released with extremely strict conditions about where he could go and what he could do which impacted on his human rights.

In April 2007 he was wounded after being shot in the head while in his “exclusion zone”.

He reluctantly offered the police information about the incident and was assured he would be treated like a victim, but instead he was sent back to prison.

This led to an irretrievable loss of trust in the police. When he was released again in August 2007, Leon fought to maintain his focus of rehabilitation.

He was on the verge of beginning a new life outside Birmingham and had secured a place on a BTEC music technology course.

Leon was excited about his fiancée’s pregnancy and the thought of becoming a father. He was looking forward to 2008 with an increasing sense of maturity – he had everything to live for!

However he became increasingly concerned that his efforts appeared not to be taken seriously by those responsible for assisting his rehabilitation.

He was sick of the differential treatment and outcomes for people of African heritage in education and the criminal justice system.

A series of incidents in October last year meant Leon was in breach of his residency conditions, and as a result he went on the run.

His family urged him to give himself up, but Leon was adamant that he would never go back to prison.

On 27 December 2007 Leon was fatally stabbed.

Quite rightly there is national uproar when the victims of knife crime are innocent. However, when the victim is involved in a gang or caught up in violence it is a different story.

The press demonises them, and their families are further victimised, humiliated and treated with disrespect.

There is no opportunity to present an accurate picture of their loved one.

Yet my pain is no less than the mothers of “innocent” victims. My son is also dead. My family have the same feelings of grief, sorrow, regret and frustration that the family of all other victims share.

Leon was also somebody’s son, somebody’s fiancé, somebody’s father, somebody’s brother and somebody’s friend.

He was my child and I love him and miss him dearly. He was my friend, my confidant, and my heartbeat.

Statistics about exclusions, violence and black deaths belie human tragedies, and Leon is yet another tragic victim that can all too easily be forgotten.

However, both his life and his death emphasise the drastic and urgent need for more preventative, innovative and timely measures to be developed for all young people who have been excluded from school or who are subject to anti-social behaviour measures.

Myths

We should not fall for the myths of poor parenting, absent fathers, family breakdown or demonise our youth like the media often does.

Instead we must try to understand the complex reality of young people’s struggles and provide them with proactive support and an earned second chance. That is their right!

I want to reach out to all the families, and especially the mothers, who have lost someone to gun, gang or knife crime – particularly those who have been made to feel ashamed that their child was involved in a gang, and it is said that they only ever did terrible things.

Now our children are dead, and there is little sensitivity towards us. We have to stop demonising people and look behind the myths that stop us from acting to change things.

Leon left us with a beacon of hope, his beautiful daughter Princess who was born five months after his death. She symbolises life, youth, opportunity, hope and light.

Young People, Violence and Media

tim — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 14:58:12 +0000

Crime, violence and young people out of control – is this the true story of Britain or is it a media exaggeration of problems we have always had? Here is a simple test. As a researcher, I am aware that all the people I know, plus the ones that they know actually constitute a very large sample if I chose to ask them questions. It is a rough and ready sample and distorted in some ways, but it will still illustrate trends. I don’t know anyone who has been in an air crash, but if I ask about car accidents, then almost everyone has a story. From this I can deduce that one is much more likely than the other. Now try crimes of violence.

Here are some of the ones I know about: A young relative of mine was attacked on the council estate where he lived; in the street behind me a local boy was attacked outside his house by a wandering gang; the son of another neighbour was beaten by a group of boys in a local village; a colleague at work told how her son was beaten by a group of boys who wound belt buckles around their fists; the son of another work colleague was chased and stabbed in the face by a group of skinheads; my daughter described how the brother of a close friend was killed. He was standing in a taxi queue and a stranger apparently on drugs and drunk struck him on the head with a baseball bat. A boy from a local school stabbed a relative to death, another with his father kidnapped a drug addict and brutally assaulted him.

Gang fights now spill over into the school. A teacher told how a terrified boy had taken refuge in the staffroom while the gang trying to attack him was in the corridor outside (shouting ‘get a knife’). I mention these to friends and they give their own catalogue of horrors. Their children speak freely of the dangers they face. In London, the night 29 bus is spoken of with awe as the one you do not go on alone. Word of mouth is not necessarily more reliable than media accounts. Stories must be checked, but direct experience does have a certain power to convince.

I grew up in south east London on the borders of Bexleyheath and Erith. In the 60s, I walked about places like Abbey Wood with my friends or alone, and at weekends wandered all over London. I was once pushed by a guy who was showing off to his pals, but that was about it. There were no knives or guns and no gangs that I, or any of my friends saw. There were remote tales of mods and rockers fighting but these were largely media constructions¹. So my experience is of a quite decisive change and the available statistics bear this out. Between 1979 and 1997 recorded crimes of violence increased by two and half times. In the following ten years they doubled again². The figures need qualification because sometimes different crimes are being counted and some types may be going down- for example, domestic violence if women are leaving abusive relationships earlier. But the trend has been clearly upward with well over a million recorded offences in 2005-6 with young males most at risk. So what has happened?

Important changes came in the 1980s with the rise of new right politics and the release of the free market. This signalled the movement away from regulation and planning by the state in what was seen as the public interest, to a new philosophy which reduced the role of government and focused on the encouragement of individuals to make money and prosper. The ‘wealth makers’ would pay less tax and their enrichment would supposedly trickle down to benefit others. This political approach very rapidly divided Britain into a society of winners and losers, and exacerbated the economic difficulties which already existed. The traditional industries were already in decline but without state organisation and investment the decline became terminal. This laid waste many communities and produced sustained, structural unemployment. Children experienced growing up in families where no-one had officially worked – parents or grandparents.

Currently, about 11% of 16-18 year olds are not in employment education or training³ (estimates put the figure for 16-24 year olds at 1.2 million people). As apprenticeships and links to industry declined, school became increasingly irrelevant to many working class children. Classroom discipline problems come in part from the inability of teachers to link good behaviour to future references and the possibility of jobs. One teacher described how some 16 year old boys are only in the classroom because they are being paid around £50 a week by the local authority to be there. They have no interest in the school, are disruptive and sometimes violent. But they cannot be excluded, for as the teacher put it: “their parents are desperate for the money, for drugs, so if you stop them coming the parents will wait to get you as you leave the school”.

There was an instability produced by the displacement and movement of populations. In the 1980s, youth unemployment meant that young people were targeted for cuts in benefits and were pressured to move in search of work. The transient population also included new migrants moving from the poor to the rich world – a process intensified by the de-regulation of the international economy and the effects of conflict and war. The free flow of capital is followed by the flow of labour as people search for jobs, and the children of migrants and disadvantaged groups grow up in the poorest areas of cities like London. The vulnerable population was then added to by the policy of emptying the traditional long term mental health facilities, which in practice left many people on the streets or moving in and out of prisons.

In the new service economy, those with money and property or who traded in these did well. The top 1% doubled their wealth between 1996 and 2002. But by 2002, the bottom half of the population owned only 5% of the total wealth (down from 10% in 1986⁴). Some unskilled, low income groups were effectively excluded from the mainstream economy. One response to this amongst young people is depression and anxiety, so suicide rates especially for young males rose sharply. But this excluded class can also generate an alternative economy with its own entrepreneurs – people trading in fake designer clothes, car parts or drugs. Another response in the council estates and low income areas is the traditional human behaviour of forming into groups and fighting for what resources and territory do exist. Success goes to the toughest young males who lead in the culture of aggression and machismo. Gangs, guns, knives and drugs then tend to overlap. Research from the University of Leicester shows that gang members are more likely than non members to deal in drugs and are five times more likely to carry a gun – though street gangs are more likely to prefer knives⁵.

Another de-stabilising factor was the increased availability of cheap alcohol and drugs, and the targeting of young people by the drinks industry. In the eighties and nineties, the tourist areas of Spain, Ibiza and Crete showed the possibility of having whole villages largely filled with young people drinking. In my youth I would probably have favoured the idea of drinking a large amount and misbehaving with my friends in my local pub. But the adults there would have thrown us out. The drinks industry solved this problem by putting loud music in the bars to drive away the grown ups and packing young people vertically, into what were streamlined alcohol delivery systems. This, together with the growth of violent subcultures turned town centres into the Wild West, and quaint old pubs in St Albans now have bouncers on the door.

I want to finish by commenting on some of the points that have been raised in this conference. It has been mentioned that people sometimes look back to a golden age that perhaps never existed. The suggestion is that current concerns about the young and violent crime are influenced by such rose tinted views, while in reality the same sorts of behaviour are with us all the time. I don’t accept this argument. My view is that behaviour changes in relation to a variety of social and economic conditions and these can be affected by political policy. It is not true that people always look back to a mythical past in which times were thought to be better. Look for example at the end of the nineteenth century, when British society was seen to be calmer and more settled than in earlier periods of industrialisation. The Criminal Registrar noted in 1901 that, since the 1840s, ‘we have witnessed a great change in manners: the substitution of words without blows for blows with or without words…a decline in the spirit of lawlessness⁶‘.

There has also been discussion here about the accuracy of media portrayals of young people and crime. I was interested in a comment made by one delegate that there had been a long campaign in his area for a youth club, but it was only when someone was stabbed that anything was done about it. Many other people complained about the persistently negative images given in the press and on television. But is there not a contradiction here? Media reports of a knife attack can actually push politicians into thinking about the problems of young people and solutions such as setting up youth clubs and other facilities.

We need to face the issue that there really are problems which have to be dealt with. On the other hand I accept that there are issues of balance in representation. To present only negative images would lead to a false stereotyping of very large numbers of young people (and play to right wing political solutions such as simply building more prisons). So there is a need for a more sympathetic account in the media of what is happening in youth culture and how young people think, believe and act. There is a great lead in this being given by local media groups such as The Mouth That Roars (www.mouththatroars.com).

My main point is that the changes to our culture, which I have spoken of here, are not a media fiction. In fact the bulk of violent acts are not covered. They become like car crashes – horrific, but just too many to report. Another key conclusion is that the changes are a result of political and economic policy. The negative consequences were not always intended, but they are the result of bad government.

Gangs and violence did not begin in the 1980s –people have attacked each other with knives and other weapons for long periods of our history. But decisive intervention by the state and the building of alternative cultures has at times markedly reduced this. The challenge for social scientists is to identify possible solutions for the problems which we now face. Some of these will require a large scale re-allocation of resources and good planning. Those who worry about the nanny state and regulation forget that we either plan or put up with what the jungle delivers.

Notes:

1. See the account by Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Routledge, 2002
2. Home Office, ‘Violence against the person’ – long-term national recorded crime trend,http://www.crimestatistics.org.uk/output/page38.asp. For Scotland the figures from 1997-2006 show a one third increase( See Scottish Parliament written answer by Cathie Jamieson 23 March, 2007) http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/webapp/wa.search
3. Department for Education and Skills, Departmental Report 2007, TSO
4. Office for National Statistics, Social Inequalities, December 2004, HMSO
5. University of Leicester, ‘Gang Culture’, ebulletin, based on article in National Community Safety network News, Spring 2006.
6. Cited in H.C.G. Matthew and Kenneth O. Morgan. (1992) The Oxford History of Britain, Oxford University Press, P32-33. For a longer account of this argument see Greg Philo and David Miller, ‘The Effective Media’ in Greg Philo, 1999 (ed) Message Received, Pearson, London (http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/mediagroup/Effective%20Media.pdf)

Nineteen young suicides in South Wales

tim — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:09:06 +0000

The death of 23-year-old Christopher Jones from Nantymoel on May 5 is the latest in a series of tragic suicides of young people in and around the South Wales town of Bridgend. In the last 12 months, 19 young people under the age of 27, many of them in their teens, have committed suicide in the area. The latest death is the 34th since 2006.

The deaths have generated a media furore, with astonishment and confusion being expressed by the political establishment as to the cause.

Officially, however, an inquest into five of the deaths, held on March 19, said that the deaths were not related.

Allyn Price, a 24-year-old man from Maesteg whose death was investigated at the inquest, was described as “happy go lucky,” with no overt signs of depression. Similar accounts were given of cousins Nathaniel Pritchard, 15, and Kelly Stephenson, 20. A relative told the press, “We just don’t know what is going on in Bridgend. Kelly and Nathaniel were both brilliant kids with good futures ahead of them. We would never have thought in a million years that they were capable of anything like this. None of this makes sense.”

In 2007 Dale Crole, 18, was found hanged in an abandoned warehouse. His friend David Dilling, 19, took police to the scene. Dilling was also found hanged little more than a month later.

It also emerged that Kelly Stephenson knew two other young men who died last year, prompting media speculation of “copycat suicides.” Some of the other suicides were friends, some distant acquaintances; many knew each other through social networking sites. It is reported that seven of the dead are believed to have frequently used the social networking site Bebo, for example. Angelina Fuller, the 14th suicide, had her memorial site posted by her partner on MySpace.

Consequently, the media have blamed such sites for the suicides, claiming that online memorials, which supposedly gave the victims some “prestige,” were triggering the tragedies. With each new suicide inspiring more memorial pages, the louder become the calls for these sites to be controlled and censored.

Madeleine Moon, Labour MP for Bridgend, said, “If you are a young and vulnerable person who sees nothing in life ahead of you, if you are feeling in despair and you can see no way you are ever going to make anything of yourself, having your photograph and your way of dying splashed all over the national media is perhaps one way of gaining fame; a very sad way of getting it but one that certainly some of this coverage is exploring and exploiting.”

The Ministry of Justice, with the departments of Health, Culture, and Children, is currently reviewing laws to censor or shut down sites that give information regarding suicide as an acceptable option. Many users of such sites are not in fact youth, but older people suffering from illnesses for which no palliative care is available.

The police have set up a task force investigating the computers of the youth, as well as the social networking sites.

In fact social networking sites have become hugely popular, particularly among youth, precisely because they offer a limited possibility of expressing both feelings and broader social concerns that have no other outlet—particularly under conditions where young people are deeply alienated from existing forms of political expression.

The calls for censorship of social networking both shift attention from the more fundamental issues giving rise to suicides amongst young people, and prevent discussion at the point when it is vitally necessary to talk to young people about how they feel and what they think. Equally it is not enough to blame media coverage for the suicides, even when it is as shallow and sensationalist as is suggested by lurid headlines about “Death Town” and “Suicide Valley.”

After all, figures from the Office of National Statistics show a death rate from suicides of 19.4 per 100,000 of the population for Welsh men, and 6.3 per 100,000 for women. This is the highest in Britain, which overall has a disturbing rate of 17.4 per 100,000 men, and 5.3 per 100,000 women. Most of these tragic cases never make the pages of the media and the victims do not regularly use social networking sites.

In any case, what is necessary is to ask just why it might be, if Madeleine Moon’s suggestion is true, that some young people are so vulnerable, and see “nothing in life” ahead of them and no way of ever “making anything of themselves,” that suicide could be seen as a way of “gaining fame.” And even if one rejects such a claim, the issue remains of why some young people are so filled with despair.

As a letter to the Times from a writer in Pontypool in South Wales pointed out, would young people stop being depressed if the sites were censored?

The writer went on to call for an examination of the reasons for “such a depressive state of mind,” and suggested it had more to do with “the fact that they are priced out of higher education, have little or no chance of affording a house of their own. And that their only option is to work in a poorly paid job simply to continue their existence … Even when things were bleak in the 70s and 80s, young people had a voice, and often protested passionately against their circumstances. Sadly, those in authority seem to have silenced today’s youngsters, and here we see the logical reaction.”

The fact that the cluster of suicides centres on the former industrial town of Bridgend underscores the necessity to probe these questions more fully. Tens of thousands in the area were employed in mining, or in the steel industry in nearby Port Talbot. Today this has all but disappeared. The major employers now are call centres.

The betrayal of the miners strike of 1984-85 by the trade unions and the Labour Party began the devastation of the area. The closure of pits led not just to a loss of jobs and declining wages, but the break-up of entire communities.

Accompanying this, vast amounts of wealth have been transferred from the poor to the very rich, who have demanded ever greater attacks on the social conditions of working people by the very party that once claimed to represent labour against capital.

For most young people, good job prospects are a thing of the past, and buying a house is impossible. And in the areas of health, social work and mental health, that would once have identified and helped treat those in most need financially and emotionally, cut after cut has been made based on the claim that overcrowded, understaffed and under-funded schools can provide an adequate “joined-up” substitute—using the services of unqualified support staff.

The government’s own official education body, OFSTED, describes 10 percent of state schools as “inadequate.” Class sizes are among the highest in Europe. Meanwhile there are diminishing welfare facilities, long waiting list for counsellors, social workers with dozens of “clients” and a system in breakdown.

The victims of this onslaught on social provision are in turn vilified, demonised and criminalised. Today young people are often regarded as a problem, not as society’s greatest asset and its future. Figures on British youth crime, drunkenness, pregnancy and violence are at their highest and dominate the press. Time magazine led a recent issue with the cover story, “Unhappy, Unloved and out of Control: An epidemic of violence, crime and drunkenness has made Britain scared of its young.” Britain has the highest population of children behind bars in Europe, with almost 3,000 children now in custody, an 8 percent rise since 2005, compared to Germany with 1,422 and France with 646.

This situation must inevitably produce a deep social malaise that affects significant layers of young people. But it also creates opposing sentiments: a sense of anger, a critical attitude to the existing social set-up and an often profound desire for change. This response is far more widespread than is ever acknowledged by the media. Those within the establishment who have plunged Britain’s youth into such dire straits have no answer to the social despair this generates and are bitterly hostile to and threatened by the inevitable growth of a more forward looking and universalist desire for a better society.

‘A Tale of Two Englands’

Ellie Keen — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:50:12 +0000

‘Race’ and Violent Crime in the Press

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report explores the reporting – and the semantic meanings transmitted through reporting – of violent crime in relation to the ethnicity of both victim and perpetrator. The purpose of this study is to analyse the place of ‘race’ and ethnicity of both victim and perpetrator in reporting of violent crime, and to draw out and make explicit the implicit theories underlying and informing this reporting. By systematically examining crime articles in the national print media as well as a selection of regional media over a period of two months, this report demonstrates how notions of race still tint the lens through which criminality is both viewed and projected. The report argues that violent crime is seen as endemic within the minority ethnic ‘communities’, but unrelated to the structure of British society and the experience of minority ethnic people within it. In crime reporting, wider structural factors – such as discrimination, disadvantage and inequality – are generally ignored as contributors to crime trends and patterns.

The key argument is that a particular understanding of ‘culture’ has replaced overtly racist ideologies as the dominant discourse on race and crime. However, following the decline of racial determinism as a paradigm of diversity, ‘culture’ has re-introduced racism through the back door. ‘Culture’ appears to have replaced ‘race’ because, as a non-biological concept, it is supposedly non-racialized, and thereby non-racist. But in spite of its de-essentializing appearance, ‘culture’ still leaves racial understandings of diversity and difference as a profound challenge. Together with two other master tropes – community and ethnic identity – culture has become one of the pillars of the dominant discourse about ethnic diversity and ethnic minority groups. This discourse conceives culture as an innate quality, something people have and makes them act in certain ways under certain circumstances; culture is understood as a ‘way of life’ determined by birth.

Culturalist explanations for behaviour have entered crime reporting of the mainstream media in force. The debate about crime in contemporary Britain, particularly violent teenage crime, habitually invokes a specific notion of ‘culture’ to explain the behaviour of perpetrators of violent acts. Gang, gun and knife violence is conceptualized as ‘cultural’ phenomena, albeit pathological sub-cultures distinct from and in contrast to the moral values of the law-abiding majority. Given the simplistic equation between ‘culture’, ‘ethnic identity’ and ‘community’, the report demonstrates the ways in which the press connects different types of criminal ‘cultures’ to specific ethnic communities.

The connection between criminal ‘cultures’ and ‘communities’ leads to a logical fallacy. The claim that ‘culture’ is the source of violent crime necessarily attaches violence to certain ‘communities’ defined by their ethnic ‘identity’. This implies that most members of those groups are violent. The effect is that entire ‘communities’ are criminalized on the basis of their ‘cultures’. Importantly, this equation relates exclusively to ethnic minority groups, but largely excludes the white majority. ‘Culture’ and ‘community’ are seldom evoked when speaking about white Britons. White middle-class England is not thought of as a ‘community’ in itself, and to be English is not considered a ‘cultural’ trait.

The purpose of this study is not to accuse the media of institutional racism – a term that is often used without particular qualification of what it actually means – but rather to explore the ways in which popular understandings of race and crime influence reporting in the media, and vice versa. A fair and reflexive media representation of the state and nature of crime in Britain – including the involvement of all ethnic groups as both victims and perpetrators – is necessary not only from a social justice point of view, but for practical reasons as well. Through this report, we hope to engage the media in a constructive dialogue on how British society thinks about the complex relationship between race and crime.

Key points

Although diverse views are discernable both between and within papers, there are clear differential patterns in the way in which the press reports on violent crime. These patterns are strongly informed by notions of race.

In essence, England is conceived as two-fold: an England consisting of a law-abiding and morally superior Us; and an England inhabited by criminal and pathological Others. The current breakdown of law and order is conceived as spilling out from inner cities and sink estates into leafy suburbs, threatening the very pillars of Englishness.

Many journalists employ a strategic lack of precision when discussing different ethnic groups. In some instances, this includes an allusive taxonomy equating criminal cultures with particular communities: Eastern European bag snatchers, Jamaican yardie crack dealers, Somali gang members and so on. At other times, however, all these different ‘communities’ are lumped together as standing in direct contrast to white middle-class England. This strategic lack of precision creates an impression of a ‘tide’ of alien and hostile elements threatening the white English identity and its values.

Media theories – both implicit and explicit are often ‘common sense’ theories. Anecdotal evidence is habitually treated like evident truths and conclusive proof. For example, an inconclusive and brief Metropolitan Police report on the London gang profile was employed as evidence that the majority of young refugees from ‘anarchistic warlord cultures’ are necessarily committing violence on the streets of Britain.

An important aspect of the common sense connection between ‘culture’, ‘community’ and crime is that it freely lends itself to a logical fallacy generic in the press; while it may be true that certain groups are responsible for a disproportionate amount of certain types of crimes, it does not logically follow that most members of those groups are involved in offending behaviour. However, this logical leap is often made.

Although a ‘gang’ can refer to both black and white youth, it is not a race neutral term. young black criminality would more often be associated with ‘gang membership’, drawing on stereotyped images of gangs in America. The archetypal ‘gang member’ is black; correspondingly, a murder covered in the news was more likely to be assumed to be ‘gang related’ if there was black youth involved than if all involved were white.

It would be unfair to point the finger exclusively towards the media. The press is part of a discursive system which includes a range of social actors. However, the media does have an immense influence on the development of social and ideological perceptions and practices of not only its audience, but other elite institutions and influential social actors as well, such as politicians, corporations and civil society.

Judging from senior politicians’ responses to the media frenzy of 2007, crime reporting is potentially a strong force in policy development. The over-representation of young black people in the criminal justice system (CJS) is a problem of enormous severity, and the gap appears to be growing wider. Media attention to these matters may prompt a more decisivepolicy response. However, the question is how the problem, and by extension the solution, is analysed and formulated. Policies based on the assumption that black ‘culture’ is criminogenic, that black crime is qualitatively different from white crime, and that black communities are themselves to blame for their overrepresentation in the CJS are unlikely to be effective.

The rest of the report can be downloaded here

Deaths in Detention

Ellie Keen — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:14:15 +0000

‘When I calmed down I asked them why they hit me in the nose and jumped on me. They said it was because I wouldn’t go in my room so I said what gives them the right to hit a 14 year old child in the nose and they said it was restraint.’

These poignant words were written by Adam Rickwood who was found hanging in his room at Hassockfield Secure Training Centre in August 2004 – at 14 he was the youngest child to die in custody. Hours before his death, he had been subject to restraint by four male officers including the use of a technique designed to inflict pain known as ‘nose distraction’ and which caused his nose to bleed for an hour. His death followed that of Gareth Myatt a mixed race 15 year old boy who was killed at Rainsbrook STC on 19 April 2004 during the application of physical restraint methods which continued despite Gareth complaining he could not breathe, that he was going to defecate, did defecate, and then vomited. He died from asphyxia and was the first child to die following the use of restraint.

What became clear from the inquests in 2007 was the complete failure of the Youth Justice Board to properly manage the circumstances in which physical restraint was used and the safety and appropriateness of the techniques used. INQUEST has worked closely with the families and their legal team to brief parliamentarians, other child rights and penal reform organisations and the Children’s Commissioner on the human rights abuses these cases exposed resulting in widespread public, parliamentary, and media concern about the treatment of children in custody.

After the conclusion of the inquest into Gareth Myatt’s death the Coroner, His Honour Judge Pollard made a report to Rt Hon Jack Straw MP, Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, under Rule 43 (of the Coroners’ Rules). Following extensive consultation with the family’s lawyers, the report specified 34 preventative actions which range widely over the treatment of children, the use of restraint, monitoring, good practice, access for emergency vehicles, and inspection saying that it would be ‘wholly unforgivable and a double tragedy’ if there was any delay in learning from and acting upon the lessons of Gareth’s death. This followed the scathing narrative verdict reached by the inquest jury which implicated failures by the Home Office/Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board in the death.

The government’s abiding lack of will to engage with the serious and wide-ranging failures to emerge from the tragic deaths is reflected by unjustified and undemocratic amending of the Secure Training Centre Rules. This broadened the circumstances in which children can be forcibly restrained without parliamentary debate or consultation.

Instead, in July 2007, the government announced a joint review of the use of restraint in STCs, Young Offender Institutions and Local Authority Secure Children’s Homes. This review is an inadequate response to the broader systemic issues these deaths raise about how we deal with children in trouble with the law. A proper legacy for these families and their children would be an independent, holistic enquiry in public of the juvenile justice system with the effective participation of families, children, and those working within the youth justice system. Such an enquiry could effect meaningful change by moving us towards a more humane and safer society – and by preventing future child deaths. We fervently believe that there can be fewer goals which are more important.

INQUEST has been calling for such an enquiry since the death of 16 year old Joseph Scholes in HMYOI Stoke Heath in 2002. He was a vulnerable boy with a history of self-harming behaviour who, despite the expressed concerns of professionals with whom he was engaged and clear warnings by himself, took his own life, by hanging, in his prison cell just nine days into his sentence.

At the time of writing, we learned of the death of a 15 year old boy found hanging in HMYOI Lancaster Farms. Why, despite the deaths of 30 children in detention since 1990, have successive governments resisted a public enquiry? The deaths raise issues that go beyond the prison walls and to the heart of society’s collective responsibility for tolerating a system that responds to challenging children and young people with punishment and the infliction of pain to control behaviour.

What often goes unmentioned is the high price paid by bereaved families in remaining involved in the lengthy, complicated investigation and inquest process. The families have shown incredible courage, diligence, and persistence to ensure that the disturbing issues surrounding the deaths of Gareth and Adam came to light. Without their participation in the process, it is doubtful that these hidden practices within STCs would have been exposed to any proper scrutiny.

While these two deaths are deeply shocking because they involve children, INQUEST deals on a daily basis with some of the most horrendous consequences of detention in prison, in police custody or in psychiatric detention.

Last year, INQUEST published Unlocking the Truth: Families’ Experiences of Investigation of Deaths in Custody that documents some of the unseen consequences of deaths in detention – the impact of a death and its investigation on the family of the deceased and the lack of adequate mechanisms to ensure similar deaths are prevented.

INQUEST has consistently worked alongside families to build up relationships of trust, respect, and compassion so that the families feel empowered and engaged, and feel they can cope with the intrusive and complex legal process in which they are involuntarily engaged. The strategy of persisting in trying to broaden scope of enquiry at inquests, supported by detailed knowledge of other cases and an experienced network of lawyers, has ensured that the details of many deaths in custody are made public.

Establishing the truth about deaths in custody sheds light on the way we treat some of the most vulnerable men, women, and children in society. It is important that we recognise, scrutinise, criticise, and argue for reform of the way the state deals with deaths in custody, as these processes are an indicator of the condition of its democracy.

Last year, of the 45 inquests that have concluded on INQUEST’s cases, many after delays of years since the death, four have involved deaths in psychiatric detention, six police custody, and 35 deaths in prison. Many of these inquests have been unreported, not even deemed worthy of a couple of lines in the local media. But they reveal, again, shocking failures in the treatment of vulnerable detainees. Inquests into deaths in police custody have highlighted ongoing concerns about the poor treatment of people with mental health problems, drug and alcohol problems, and poor medical care.

Running through INQUEST’s work are concerns about the lack of accountability and failure to learn lessons to prevent similar deaths by taking follow up action on inquest and investigation outcomes across custodial institutions. We worked with others to successfully achieve amendments to the Corporate Manslaughter and Homicide Act 2007 to ensure it would apply to deaths in detention. The government attempted to present the current mechanisms of investigation and accountability as sufficiently robust. Parliament disagreed, and this was further underlined when the Forum on Deaths in Custody published its Annual Report in September 2007 in which the number of deaths in all forms of custody in the preceding year were officially collated and published centrally for the first time. These figures need more scrutiny and analysis than the Forum can provide, in particular the 328 deaths in psychiatric detention.

It does not have the capacity to research deaths in custody, to collate and analyse jury findings and coroner’s reports or to monitor the implementation of recommendations arising from inquests or investigation reports. It cannot call to account and recommend action against those institutions and individuals who fail to take action. In May 2007, the government conceded that the Forum’s powers and resources were insufficient and made a commitment to reviewing and strengthening the current arrangements, something which is ongoing.

INQUEST has proposed a properly resourced independent overarching Standing Commission on Custodial Deaths with statutory powers to address the complexity and breadth of issues that arise. It is clear that the current mechanisms are insufficient as death after death occurs revealing horrific conditions and lack of basic humanity in the care of detainees. In November 2007, the inquest into the death of 25 year old Martin Green, who died in HMP Blakenhurst in July 2002, concluded with the jury returning a highly critical narrative verdict. Found dead in his cell in the health care centre while undergoing detoxification, Martin, who was 188 cm (6 ft 2 in) tall, weighed just 43 kg (6 st 10 lbs). The jury made numerous criticisms in their verdict, and concluded that his poor medical state coupled with poor assessment, planning, and communication contributed significantly to his death.

The shocking fact of this case, the lack of media interest in the inquest, and the delay of nearly five years in concluding the investigation make a mockery of the government’s arguments earlier last year that current investigation mechanisms are sufficient, further illustrated by the last-minute ditching of the promised coroners reform bill. The circumstances of this death raise very serious questions about the quality of medical care afforded prisoners in the custody and care of the state. Martin Green was owed a particular duty of care, and that duty was not met. As a result, he died an inhuman and degrading death.

The number of custodial deaths remains far too high, and many cases reveal a horrendous catalogue of failings in the treatment and care of vulnerable people in custody or otherwise dependent on others for their care. They raise questions about excessive and inappropriate use of custody for some of the most vulnerable people in society; they also highlight failures to fulfil the state’s duty to protect life. Inquests repeatedly identify the failure to implement existing guidelines on the care of ‘at risk’ detainees.

It is clear from INQUEST’s monitoring and analysis of deaths in custody that understanding why these deaths occur requires an examination of their broader social and political context. No discussion of self-inflicted deaths in prison can ignore the regimes and conditions operating in prisons, criminal justice policies that imprison the mentally ill and vulnerable or the institutional culture of violence and racism that exists there.

Deborah Coles and Helen Shaw are co-directors of INQUEST.
http://www.inquest.org.uk

How do we end the bloodshed?

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:55:21 +0000

With five young men already murdered in Edmonton, north London, this year, questions are being asked at the highest levels about how to stop the bloodshed on the streets.

Edmonton has been dubbed the new ‘murder mile’, and many young residents are as anxious as politicians and parents to end the violence.

Mark Thomas lives near to where fifth victim Bakari Bernard-Davis resided. Known as ‘preacher’, the 18-year-old student told The Voice:

“More policing, better CCTV coverage on the local estates, and harsher punishments for those caught with a weapon needs to be put into place straight away in solving the growing epidemic of knife crime in Edmonton.”

He added: “Trust me when I say I hate feds [police], but right now the community needs to work with them to make our streets safe again.

“These so-called ‘street thugs’ are literally getting away with murder, and innocent people are dying.”

The murder follows those of 18-year-old Henry Bolombi on New Year’s Day, Louis Boduka, on January 21, 16-year-old Iyke Nmezu, on February 29 and 18-year-old Michael Jones, on March 13.

Bernard-Davis, a 24-year-old father of one, was murdered outside his home hours after Boris Johnson, the Conservative candidate for London Mayor, visited Edmonton’s Bounces Road Community Hall.

Johnson had been on a walkabout with Conservative leader David Cameron to discuss violence and anti-social behaviour among youths.

Bernard-Davis was found lying in Bedevere Road, Edmonton, just before 9pm on March 31. Suffering from stab wounds, he died at the scene half an hour later, making him the 16th victim under 25 to be killed in London.

The figure so far has already passed the half mark of total deaths last year. In 2007, 26 were killed – 16 were attacked with knives, nine died in gun incidents, and in one case the cause of death is yet to be confirmed.

Known to his family and friends as ‘Judah’, Bernard-Davis came from a well-respected Rastafarian family.

His parents had recently returned to the UK after spending some time in Kenya. He also leaves behind a younger brother and three sisters.

Within an hour of the murder, The Voice spoke to several residents that live near Bedevere Road. Cries of “not another yout” were heard from many onlookers.

“I can’t believe dreadie is dead,” said a neighbour. “He was a good yout who always walked alone. Why…why him? He did not even have the chance to cry for help.”

The huge rise in the number of teenagers being killed on the streets of London is the biggest threat facing the capital, after terrorism.

Two more teenagers were stabbed to death within hours of each other in separate incidents this week. A boy aged 14 was stabbed in the throat after an argument with a friend, and a 17-year-old youth was stabbed in the chest. Both attacks happened in daylight.

A close-knit community, Edmonton was once known as the ‘towers of Enfield’, due to the four high-rise flats that dominated the north London skyline. However, the flats were demolished in 2001 and replaced by modern redbrick houses, in an attempt to create a pleasant and safer environment for the community.

Edmonton MP Andy Love said: “We need to break this trend. I am profoundly shocked…this is totally and completely unprecedented in living memory.

“There is nothing on the scale of what we have seen in the last three months for the whole population.”

Devastated that her son’s life was cut short, Bernard-Davis’ mother told The Voice:

“I still can’t believe that my son is gone… Judah was a great son and brother to his siblings, not forgetting a dad. He was intelligent, with a good heart.”

Police are appealing for anyone who witnessed Bakari Bernard-Davis’ murder, or has any information, to call Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.

Marching in March

Ellie Keen — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 22:10:03 +0000

There’s not much good to be said for those grim days in March 2003 when American and British troops invaded Iraq. But one of the few positive things to happen during an otherwise dark time was the extraordinary reaction to the war by Britain’s supposedly apathetic and feckless youth.

Tens of thousands of children in the UK, myself included, walked out of school to say no to the war. At my Welsh comprehensive, 50 or so sixth formers marched out together only to be followed by a less disciplined rabble of Year Sevens, who took their protest up to the local chippie and skived off several of the day’s lessons.

The action spread far and wide: in Birmingham more than 4,000 school-uniformed protestors took to the streets; in Edinburgh around 300 12- to 15-year-olds tried to occupy the castle, and in Manchester over 400 students sat in the road, peacefully blocking the traffic.

For many of us it was our political awakening. Not old enough to vote it was our first chance to try to change the world we were living in. The few hours off class were simply a bonus.

Despite all our best efforts we failed – Bush and Blair ignored us, and the 2 million who subsequently marched in London; it seemed I’d missed French for nothing.

This month, for Red Pepper magazine, I spoke to a number of young people who had joined the demos five years ago, asking them how they felt that British troops were still holed up outside Basra. Had the continuation of the war made them more politically engaged or rather increased their disillusionment?

Predictably most of them still felt as strongly; polls show that over 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds are against the war. And, to my delight, many said the issue was way too important to give up protesting.

One young activist I talked to said, that even though it might appear we had been unsuccessful, being part of the biggest demonstration ever held in the UK was not something we should quickly forget. He thought our action then had helped to stop us going to war with Iran, “It made them think before doing it again”.

But, as I suspected, the events of 2003 left some with a distinct sense of disillusionment about politics and the possibility of change. One asked, “How can such an illegal, destructive, counter-productive and divisive operation like the Iraq conflict have been allowed to happen?”

When, earlier this week, I sent out a text asking for friends to join me on today’s march, I received a worrying number of messages back saying, “We’re marched out” or “What good will it do?” Some of these were from people who’ve been quite politically active in the past few years. One person even said they were playing rugby, another that they had a lunch date in Kensington. Of course I texted back, giving them the hardest possible time. Quite a few are coming now.

With no one with policies to represent us, voting turnout among the young is destined to stay low. In the 2005 election only 37% of under-25s turned out to vote. Some see cultural interventions as the way forward. With anti-war anthems like the Ugly Rumours gaining chart success and films like Nick Broomfield’s Battle of Haditha getting rave reviews, perhaps this is a new way to focus and spread dissent.

But I’m firmly in the camp of not giving up on getting out on the streets. I’m disappointed, of course, that our breaking out of school didn’t get us further in 2003. But I still remember the great feeling that came with making our voices heard, by doing something together. And I’m worried that if we stop marching it allows those in power to presume we don’t care any more – WE DO!

It fucks you up, your country.

JamieSW — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:43:46 +0000

Every now and again, the government has a policy review about how it will deal with the national childhood problem. There are a range of themes taken up, but the basic problem is that they are violent, clubbish, bestial and need to be controlled. Britain is, as studies have shown, a particularly harsh place for children to live in. New Labour, representing a virulently authoritarian version of neoliberal social-democracy (if that’s possible), proposes a combination of modest poverty-reduction strategies (which fail, both in the specific goal, and in the intended effect), curfews, control orders, ASBOs, hoodie bans, stop and search mechanisms, and more detention. Blair wanted to spy on potential ‘problem families’ (apparently identifiable through the warning signs of track suits, tatoos, Lambert & Butler cigarettes and an insufficiently appreciative attitude toward the government). The heavily punitive accent of government policy is supported by a culture of child-hating, which is ironic given the late capitalist infantilization of adults (in which capital tries to convert us into impulsive, needy, irrational consumers, cultivating nonsensical enthusiasms so that we part with our money more quickly). A direct corollary of the sentimentality about ickle children is the incredible amount of aggression toward the young in popular culture, especially as they reach their adolescent years, and especially if they’re working class. Behind the scenes, if you like, this aggression more frequently takes the form of child abuse by parents than one might think. For example, a study in the UK found that 11% of boys and 21% of girls experienced some form of child abuse. I would have thought that most of this is emotional abuse or neglect, which is horrendous enough, but the study found that when it is narrowed to ‘contact’ abuse (sexual or physical), 16% of women and 7% of men said that they had experienced this kind of abuse. Obviously, this is not simply an unpleasantness that one can ‘walk off’ and ‘get over’. It exacts a long term psychological toll – shrinking the hippocampus, which deals with emotional responses, and producing abnormal levels of cortisol, which deals with fight or flight responses – and the younger it happens the more severe the effects. Beyond the family, it is also expressed in the other institutions in which a child might be raised: foster care, obviously, and penal custody. On average, two children died in penal custody every year since 1990, and a controversy has recently erupted over the officially sanctioned abuse of children known euphemistically as ‘restraint’.

The ‘Children’s Commissioner’ has become an easy target for rightist polemic after he criticised the use of painful ‘restraints’ in custodial institution, which are designed to control behaviour with the application of pain. He spoke of the rights of children, and he lamented some of the authoritarian measures used by the government. Melanie Phillips blustered in the Daily Mail: Children’s rights? What about the rights of those who live in fear of young thugs? This was only a particularly forceful version of the raised media heckles of ‘dimwit’, ‘who-does-he-think-he-is’, ‘waste-of-taxpayers-money’, ‘we’ll-smack-our-kids-if-we-want-to’, and so on. (These people do get terribly exercised about their inherent right to beat their children. When a smacking ban was first proposed, they went absolutely bonkers. The comedian Jack Dee, by contrast, suggested that it was a good idea to stop beating kids, but “maybe we should stop fucking them first”). For this particular persuasion, children have only one right: the right to remain silent. Here is one ‘young thug’ who won’t be around to bother the nice people. A fourteen year old boy, who suffered enormous trauma due to deaths in his family, experienced emotional turmoil, and was locked up for ‘behaviour difficulties’ after allegedly wounding a man. He survived a month in his prison until he was violently ‘restrained’ by officers, who broke his nose, leaving him terrified, as well as sickened and depressed: he hung himself. But that’s just one example. There was also Joseph Scholes, a mentally unwell young man given to self-harm, who was imprisoned for a minor street crime, despite multiple expert witnesses telling the judge that the boy would kill himself if he was put in that kind of environment. Of course, even those witnesses couldn’t have known that he would be forced to wear a loose garment resembling a horse blanket, and demeaned and driven to his death within a week. Then there is Gareth Paul Myatt, who died four days into a one year sentence at a ‘training centre’ run by Group 4 following an ‘incident’. Shortly after that death, the government announced £16m for more child prisons.

Now these examples are not incidental. Gordon Brown’s twee catchphrase is that “children are 40% of the population, but 100% of the future”. We can either collectively vomit over this phrase or try to extract some literal truth from it (or both). The truth is that fucked up children make for fucked up adults. Brutalising children is not going to produce a nation of well-adapted citizens. The clinical psychologist Oliver James points out that one of the most alarming statistics of recent years is the discovery that 90% of the prison population was in some way mentally unwell. As he further elaborates, the causes of this are not rooted in the poor genetic stock of the working class, who are vastly over-represented in all penal institutions. Far more often, it is the result of a particular kind of nurture experienced especially but not exclusively in the first three to six years of childhood. You raise a kid in a comfortable bourgeois home with lots of attention, you get a comfortable bourgeois person. You raise a kid in a strict, authoritarian home with parents trying to break his will through the application of regular violence (tough love) all for his own good, you get a young fascist. You raise a kid in a chaotic household with episodic, rather than structured, violence and abuse, you get manipulative people with poor consciences prone to acting out physical or sexual violence. You raise a kid in a tough working class household with a survivalist mentality and regular insecurity, you get Monty Python’s bragging Yorkshiremen. Sorry, I’ve lost my thread, where was I …? Oh yes. To extend the logic, suppose you raise children in a cruel, aggressive country with: violent, manipulative, sanctimonious hypocrites in charge; a virulent ethos of social competitiveness saturating the culture; underfunded schools with over-worked teachers and kids bored or stressed through banal lessons and routine examination; few and degraded amenities and hostile over-policing in the remaining public spaces such as shopping centres; violent ‘control’ of children encouraged on the one hand, with violence exalted in the culture as a means of empowerment on the other; with manifest injustice coupled with powerlessness to do anything about it; and so on. Violence, neglect, hypocrisy, wilful manipulation, insecurity, competition as the sole source of self-esteem, abuse, injustice, indifference – it’s a recipe for disaster. Yet the program appears to be more of the same: cut benefits, close facilities, install CCTV, impose stricter discipline in schools, toughen policing, lock more kids up in violent penal institutions, threaten their parents with benefit-cuts if they bunk off school, intensify social competition through more testing – and now, on top of it all, Lord Goldsmith wants kids to swear allegiance to the Queen so that they’ll feel more British! If Goldsmith epitomises ‘Britishness’, then our elusive national ‘values’ can now be summarised as naked corruption, criminality, careerism, arms dealing, warmongering and a facade of blustering pomposity.

Of course, I would be the first to admit that children are awful people. Having a sensible conversation with anyone under nine years old is almost impossible, and they are as a rule unbelievably tactless. The smaller they are, the less they know about anything. As Randy Newman once sang about rednecks, they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. On the other hand, most population groups have flaws, especially those in the armed forces, and I wouldn’t wish the amount of crap kids go through on them either.

Report Reveals UK Youth Abandoned by Education System

Ellie Keen — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:19:33 +0000

The Bow Group, a Conservative Party think tank, published a report on May 25 entitled Invisible Children. Using the government’s own statistics, albeit selectively, it paints a devastating picture of a whole generation of young people being abandoned by the current educational system.

The report states that up to 100,000 children and young people are losing out on an education. It indicts the Labour government for failing some of the poorest and most deprived young people in the country.

The benchmark that schools in England and Wales use to measure success is how many pupils pass five GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) with grades A to C. In 2006, 59 percent obtained five good GCSEs, 14 percent more than in 1997. The report states that this has been achieved at the expense of less-able students. Almost a quarter (129,700) of all pupils taking GCSEs do not gain any grade above a C.

Whilst the number of pupils not gaining GCSEs has declined from 45,000 in 1996-1967 to 29,800 in 2006, this is misleading since many pupils are being kept out of the “no qualifications” statistics by achieving a single grade. The reports then add to this the number of those who do not turn up for exams, which is estimated at 70,000.

A closer look at this phenomenon, it continues, reveals that 43 percent “of pupils do not reach the expected level in reading, writing and mathematics when they leave primary school. The knock-on effect is that pupils are permanently playing catch-up.”

Between Key Stage 2 (age 7-11) and Key Stage 3 (age 11-14), 84,100 pupils make no progress or fall backwards in English—38,100 in math and 145,000 in science.

Almost a fifth of 14-year-old boys have the reading age of a seven-year-old.

This is in spite of various initiatives and strategies such as the literacy and numeracy hours in both primary and secondary schools, and numerous initiatives spent to combat truancy. The number of unauthorised absences has risen by 189,749 since 1997. These include persistent truants, which make up 60.9 percent of all truancies.

A substantial number of those who have “disappeared” from school are those who have been permanently excluded and who are not accounted for in the alternative education provision of a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU). The numbers of those attending PRUs have dramatically increased “from 3,860 in 1997 to 7,080 in 2006.” Of these, only 56 percent are entered for a GCSE.

Britain ranks 37th out of 40 in a league table of major industrial nations of 17-year-olds staying in full-time education. But of particular concern to the Bow group are the numbers of pupils not in education, employment or training (NEET) at 16, which is currently one in six. A large proportion of these engage in crime or use of illegal drugs.

The figures produced are indeed an indictment of the Blair government’s education policy. But the Bow Group’s use of them is cynical. Its aim in focusing on the plight of vulnerable young people under Labour is to advance alternative proposals for education and training that will only worsen the situation.

The strongest condemnation within the report focuses on the money “wasted”—e.g., on areas such as PRUs (currently £263.3 million)—and the fact that young people are dropping out because they are “uninspired by what they see as an overly academic curriculum, or a curriculum that does not engage with what they want to do, or the way they want to learn.”

The authors of the report claim that the primary aim of the research is the setting up of a national database to track what happens to young people of school age. This has been planned by the current government since 2002. However, their proposals to address the massive underachievement that exists is the implementation of a weeding-out process, through streaming and setting—by ability—(which already takes place at 40 percent of secondary schools) at an earlier age so that those children can be identified for vocational courses and “hands-on learning.”

Current practice allows young people from 14 to opt for a vocational route of which three days are spent in school studying core subjects and two days on placement.

The main thrust of the report is “to raise the status and quality of practical learning in schools.” This is to be achieved not by giving schools more money to build the facilities necessary to carry this out, but by creating in every local authority “Enterprise Portals” run by small businesses—in return for an exemption on business rates.

One would normally expect a strong rebuttal of such a report by the Labour Party. Yet, even as a departing Prime Minister Blair boasts that education is one of the success stories of his administration, no reply has been made.

This is because the drive by the Tories for greater selection, channeling those deemed unsuitable for academic courses through setting and streaming and encouraging private investment, are policies Labour is in full agreement with and does not want to publicly reject.

The government is currently encouraging all schools to either become privately run academies (run by industrial or Christian organisations), or trusts, or to move to foundation status, which takes the school out of local authority control. Some of these will be able to establish their own admission policies; some will use selection.

Labour’s silence on the Bow report also suggests that, as so often in the past, it is already planning to adopt policies initially pioneered by the Tories. This time, what is at stake is the final reestablishment of a two-tier system, similar in all essentials to the old grammar schools and secondary moderns where, from at least the age of 14, academic education would be denied to millions of children.