Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- List of abbreviations
- List of contributors
- one Introduction: asking questions of community safety
- Section one Community safety: an incomplete project?
- Section two Community safety: a contested project?
- Section three Community safety: a flawed project?
- Section four Community safety: overrun by enforcement?
- Index
fourteen - Community safety and young people: 21st-century homo sacer and the politics of injustice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- List of abbreviations
- List of contributors
- one Introduction: asking questions of community safety
- Section one Community safety: an incomplete project?
- Section two Community safety: a contested project?
- Section three Community safety: a flawed project?
- Section four Community safety: overrun by enforcement?
- Index
Summary
It is inherent in the especial character of law, as a body of rules and procedures, that it shall apply logical criteria with reference to standards of universality and equity. It is true that certain categories of person may be excluded from this logic … that other categories may be debarred from access to parts of this logic … and that the poor may often be excluded, through penury, from the law's costly procedures. All this, and more is true. But if too much of this is true, then the consequences are counterproductive…. If the law is evidently partial and unjust, then it will mask nothing, legitimate nothing…. The essential precondition for the effectiveness of law, its function as an ideology, is that it shall display an independence from gross manipulation and shall seem to be just. It cannot seem to be so without upholding its own logic and criteria of equity; indeed, on occasion, by actually being just. (Thompson, 1975, pp 262-3, emphasis in original)
The ‘rights’ and wrongs of ‘community safety’
This chapter explores the impact of the now dominant aspect of community safety policy: the management of ‘antisocial behaviour’ through ‘early interventions’. The opening necessarily lengthy quotation, therefore, firmly sets the tone for this critical exegesis of community safety and young people's place therein. The argument is that, instead of objective judgement, justice and inclusion, community safety has become a tool of partiality and exclusion through ‘precautionary injustice’ (Squires and Stephen, 2005a) techniques that increasingly demonise, and consequentially deny justice to, children and young people. As Goldson (2004, p 27) observes insightfully, ‘the ideologies and domain assumptions that underpin ‘risk’ based early interventions are both intrinsically authoritarian and antithetical to long established principles of youth justice’. However, it is not merely that youth justice principles are being eroded through community safety discourses, but also that the very founding principles of British justice are themselves being dissolved. Accordingly, it is these ‘ideologies and domain assumptions’ to which Goldson refers that need to be considered first.
The first two weeks following the re-election of the Labour government in May 2005 produced a frenzy of derogatory representations of young people in 21st-century Britain. The Prime Minister's first press conference of his third term on 12 May 2005 raised the spectacle of ‘yobbish’ behaviour once more (see Office of the Prime Minister, 2005a).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Community SafetyCritical Perspectives on Policy and Practice, pp. 219 - 236Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2006