Yesterday's seminar on informal social control (details here) attracted 60 people and stimulated a lot of discussion. I'll post a link to the presentations here soon: meantime a few points and thoughts that emerged.
Inevitably we paid a lot of attention to how the fear of retaliation discourages people from intervening when they witness delinquent or anti-social behaviour. Jacqueline Barnes's research, as I have mentioned before, shows that monitoring of children associates strongly with informal social control; low fear of retaliation and more non-family networks predict more informal social control. In her presentation Jacqueline noted that "it's the families that retaliate, not just the young people."
In discussion about the policy implications, she suggested that more attention be paid to the retaliatory (and presumably, intimidatory) behaviour of parents within communities. At which point Richard Sennett, chairing the discussion, asked: "Because fear is a poor motivator, what do you put in its place?"
Liz Richardson's research at CASE complements this in several fascinating ways. Essentially she has been looking at ways in which neighourliness could be incentivised, and the degree to which formalising local social relations has an effect.
In the areas studied, when considering intervention in response to delinquent or anti-social behaviour, some 80% of people said they would do something. One focus of Liz's anaylsis was then on the extent to which people felt the need for official (police or other uniformed) support if they were to try and stand up for acceptable norms. (This theme was also covered in some absorbing research by Rowland Atkinson and John Flint in a 2004 paper in Policy & politics).
The CASE research found high levels of neighbourliness in the study areas:
- 47% look after keys at least once a year
- 80% do favours at least once a year and 60% monthly
- 63% visit neighbours at home at least once a year, and 43% monthly
- 85% say hello at least monthly
- 46% know most or many people in neighbourhood, 12% do not
- 29% trust most or many people, 16% don’t
I had been conscious that the programme did not cover the significance of the built and natural environment, so I'm grateful to a couple of participants who readily picked this up and stressed it, banging the drum for urban design and sensitive regeneration policies.
Polly Toynbee challenged the government representatives with the point that policy approaches appear not to reflect the common survey finding that people of all ages and backgrounds think there should be more things for the kids to do. Partly acknowledging this, David Halpern from the Cabinet Office told us that investment in youth interventions, pound for pound, is 40 times as effective as investment in policing.
So why (the cry went up) is there not more of such investment? Of course, as David himself clarified later, that calculation is a bit of an over-simplification, and there is (apparently) plenty of money going to local authorities for such purposes, much of it diverted into education. This needs disentangling: we await the Youth matters paper with interest.
We also heard from a member of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit, hinting with reference to the Respect Action Plan that much of what strikes us as a punitive approach, hitting the worst cases, is from the government's point of view "actually symbolic - sending signals that can have a beneficial knock-on effect." (This is what I was pondering a few days ago).
Richard Sennett drew our discussion to a formal close noting that "informal social control has to be positive. There has to be a mutuality. The data presented to us suggest that people don't feel that bond."
Jacqueline Barnes's book Children and families in communities is due out soon from Wiley.
I'll post some thoughts on this soon.
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