“And yes, this is a race issue as well as a gender issue.”

Is it a race issue, though, beyond the fact that a higher propotion of black boys than white boys are poor and powerless? I’ve never seen data which suggests that there’s a significant correlation between race and violence when you normalise for income…

I’d agree to an extent John, I think it looks like a race issue because of the levels of black youths getting their marks on the crime stats, but then the argument is that it is down to poverty and aspirations not race. But then again no matter how much your normalise the situation is that it ends up with non-whites appearing to cause disproportionate levels of these issues…and surely the fact that they also find themselves in tougher life situations is an issue of race? Complicated one.

two nice white kids

I think the concern of the

biscuit eating public

had been rising long before this month

Other than “getting real” do you have any further suggestions?

A little more zero tolerance perhaps?
At least deal with the symptoms even if the disease is less tractable.

“It is not surprising that Londoners are looking for tougher solutions to youth crime, such as random searches on the Tube by police using knife scanners. What is surprising is that Boris Johnson’s main man in this task is black. Deputy Mayor for Youth Ray Lewis, who holds a summit on knife crime tomorrow, has already made it clear that in tackling street crime he has little patience with the kind of tired clichés about race that we used to hear on the subject from so many black community leaders. ”

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23488241-details/A+new+breed+of+leaders+can+tackle+knife+culture/article.do

Funny how zero tolerance doesn’t extend to zero tolerance of police brutality or official indifference or economic inequality or corporate larceny or (continued for 94 pages).

Funny, that.

Other than “getting real” do you have any further suggestions?

A little more zero tolerance perhaps?
At least deal with the symptoms even if the disease is less tractable.

If population density and relatively low affluence increase likelihood of people turning to crime or anti-social behaviour, clearly we need to improve their affluence and decrease the population density.

Although that’s a bit more boring, and much more difficult, than banging on about zero tolerance.

and surely the fact that they also find themselves in tougher life situations is an issue of race? Complicated one.

Its not that complicated, there are plenty of documented examples of police being more brutal towards black kids than white kids. Of more black offenders dying in police custody than white offenders. Of addressing black concerns less than white population concerns.

Race is a large part of the problem.

Bringing down crime via zero tolerance is perfectly achieveable, as NYC has shown.
I don’t know whether population density has gone down there, but I doubt it.

On the other hand, “banging on” about biscuit eaters and corporate larceny, now that’s easy.

Of course these possible solutions are not mutually exclusive!
But I suspect that, as happened in NYC, the hand wringers have had their (your?) day, and it’s time for another approach.
I hope so.
And I hope it is as successful.

“Although that’s a bit more boring, and much more difficult, than banging on about zero tolerance.”

It’s more difficult, but there’s nothing less interesting than a zero tolerance bore in full flow.

ZT hits two of my main triggers for crap policy – it’s unfalsifiable (no civilised person would argue for the opposite*, which means it’s arguably not actually a policy at all) and it’s a magic approach that fails the Underpants Gnome test – ‘impose zero tolerance,…,profit!’. If Mr. Lewis has some ideas on …, let’s hear them, but for heaven’s sake let’s hear less of bloody zero sodding tolerance. I’ve no tolerance for that sort of thing.

* the opposite being ‘we should tolerate crime’. Clearly that’s nonsensical – ZT thus includes an implicit straw man.

cjcjc,

As a ‘young man’, what exactly do you mean by zero tolerance? It’s certainly a formidable buzzword, but what do you believe a ‘zero tolerance’ policy would constitute?

Sorry Tom, what I meant by “boring” – and what I should have said – is that it is easier to capture the public’s imagination with “zero tolerance” than a complex weave of social and economic policy. For one thing, the former policy is only two words long!

cjcjcj, I’m ignorant of exactly how “zero tolerance” works in New York and how it has “brought down” crime. It may have displaced it elsewhere – perhaps to prison (perhaps that’s where you think the poor should be), or external to New York. Or perhaps it wasn’t zero tolerance at all: the results could be because New York has the highest proportion of justice department employees and police officers per capita out of all the states.

Perhaps you will expand on your earlier post.

And no, I’m not a hand wringer at all. What I dislike is people suggesting solutions that won’t work just because they are easier to sell and politically more palatable.

ukliberty: Point well taken, thanks. Agree entirely, in fact there’s a great deal of commonality between the prevalence of Underpants Gnome logic and soundbite/24 hour media culture, probably to lack of time and ability to seek an explanation of the … part.

cjcjcj:
a) New York is unquestionably several times more violent than London. Merely reducing crime from intolerably violent to several times as violent as the place you’re in charge of pacifying does not sell ZT to me as a solution. If you tell me you’ve got a gadget that will improve my car’s fuel economy to 45mpg I’m not going to buy it if I already get 70mpg, am I?
b) Violent crime’s been reducing sharply* in London for years, since 2002 in fact. Was this zero tolerance, are the Met Police lying, or was it something else, if so what?

* the effect of London’s teenage knife murders is to slow the rate of fall in murder rate rather than increase it. Doesn’t mean it’s not a serious issue, given the success in other areas it’s quite possibly the most pressing one. However, I’ve analysed the Bridgend suicides and found the rate went up after the tabloids got interested and publicised it, and I have an inkling a similar mechanism may be at the root of this, along with the well known discrepency between people’s fear of crime (which directly encourages knife carrying) and actual crime rates.

The “Freakonomics guys” of course think the credit belongs to abortion –
http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf

cjcjcj,

It may or may not be ‘unquestionably’ true that London’s crime rate is much lower than New York, but it isn’t *actually * true, it seems. Perhaps you should look at the figures before declaring the debate closed?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/2923665.stm

“Civitas’ study, entitled The Failure of Britain’s Police, said London can learn lessons from New York’s style of policing.

The volume of crime has increased faster than the size of the police force
Civitas report

It said New York’s robbery rate per capita is 540 compared with London’s 620.

Robbery in London grew 105% between 1991 and 2002, while New York’s figures fell 73%, it added.”

New York is unquestionably several times more violent than London

Oh dear.
Sorry,Tom, you have no idea what you are talking about.

2007 NYC violent crime (homicide, rape, robbery, assault) total: 41,000
Total violent offences down around 65% – yes 65% – since 1990.
Total crime down 77%.
How much is London crime down since 1990?

http://home2.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cscity.pdf

12 months to March 2008 London violent crime total: 218,000
Eeven leaving out “harassment” – not sure what US equivalent might be – gives you over 170,000

http://www.met.police.uk/crimestatistics/2008/2008_yend.htm

CB

You’re confusing me I think with Tom.

I agree with you!

All this ‘zero tolerance’ malarkey is just plain old BS, as I think the mother of Jimmy Mizen pointed out.

‘Zero tolerance’ is a false friend and a perversion of language – as Tom@4 correctly identified by its’ inherent contradiction, what is more properly meant is “equal intolerance of injustice, wherever it resides, wherever it can be found and whenever it can be rooted out” (let’s play guess the politician…).

I continue to be annoyed by Laurie’s one-sided perspective, although this article shows how hard she is trying to escape the perspective of her prejudiced politics.

You simply cannot distinguish between different forms of injustice without reinforcing them, so it is plainly perverse to create a heirachy of discrimination.

I contest the assertion that women have it harder, by pointing out that this is correct only from the perspective of the disempowered and that within the totality of sociaty there are inevitably plenty of obvious contrary examples (like does Elizabeth have it worse than Philip or Charles?).

We need to escape all the old gender, racial, socio-economic divisions with regard to this argument and finally inderstand that it is about power relationships and the old laws continue to apply: those that divide, rule with impunity; those that reconcile, rule with common consent.

‘ contest the assertion that women have it harder, by pointing out that this is correct only from the perspective of the disempowered and that within the totality of sociaty there are inevitably plenty of obvious contrary examples (like does Elizabeth have it worse than Philip or Charles?).’

Bwah! This is hilarious. Because the royals aren’t at all TOTALLY UNIQUE i and separate from the rest of society!

Laurie, stop being so self-centred for a second and you’ll see that other people have different experiences from yourself which are just as valid and equally worth considering.

No, the royals aren’t unique, they are as human as you or anyone else. Frankly, your generalisations are wildly immature. Can’t you handle contrary evidence?

To be fair, thomas, for the purposes of this discussion the Royals are basically unique – they may be human (I have my doubts about Philip…) but they’re in a unique social situation.

If you want an argument that men don’t necessarily have it better than women, you just have to look at suicide rates. Men are far more likely to kill themselves than women. The ratio is 4 to 1 in the USA, and is similar or higher elsewhere. Women report higher levels of mental illness than men, but this fact suggests that part of this could be due to men just not being as willing to “admit to it” – the great majority of suicides suffer from mental health problems.

Young men are also a lot more likely to be victims of violent crime than young women are. Of course this is probably because the kind of young men who commit crimes are also likely to end up being victims of them (you stab someone, his mate stabs you…) Nonetheless it’s important to remember that “male violence” generally targets males.

To be fair, Woobegone, I specifically chose to use the royals as an example because this is a story about power relationships and the royals have to be considered pretty much at the top of the tree, not because I can in any way of being a supporter of monarchy (constitutional monarchy, now that’s something I can get neutral about).

The point was that there are plenty of real examples where women do not have it worse in power relationships, therefore it is incorrect to place the blame on gender or any other indentifier as the basis for an imbalance in power relationships.

In fact by trying to identify differences as a ground for power inequalities it results in legitimising the use of differences as a way to create power imbalances.

So, because I dislike the injustices that arise from inequality I also reject Laurie’s assertion that ‘women have it harder’ and the natural conclusion of this that it should and will always remain the case.

While I support and agree with many of Laurie’s aims, I think her form of arguing places her at the mercy of her opponents to take advantage of: victims must also look to themselves for the causes of their plight – because only the new-born are innocent.

‘Laurie, stop being so self-centred for a second and you’ll see that other people have different experiences from yourself which are just as valid and equally worth considering.’

I really do know this, love, but this doesn’t mean I’m going to shut up about what I think. Sorry!

‘No, the royals aren’t unique, they are as human as you or anyone else. Frankly, your generalisations are wildly immature. Can’t you handle contrary evidence?’

Excuse me, but the royals ARE unique – there is no other family like them in Britain. It’s your straw men that are frankly immature. Anecdotal evidence is no evidence at all.

You’re right about the Royals, but you still need to justify this statement –

“In this horrifyingly unequal culture, young men as well as young women can find themselves powerless, albeit in smaller numbers.”

Given that it is men, not women, who account for the great majority of: suicides, violent crime victims, alcohol and drug addicts, and homeless people.

OK, Laurie, truce?

I’ll accept that the societal dynamic behind the royals makes them unique, but it’s also true that the social dynamic within their family is what also makes them so human (they have spats, get divorced and experience all the tragedies life throws out, too, even if it is done in substantially greater comfort).

I wouldn’t want you to keep a hat on your thoughts, but it helps to see beyond your own experience (and I’m certainly not blue-blooded).

There are plenty of examples which bring into doubt the assertion that women have it harder across the whole spectrum, so I won’t apologise for giving the most extreme example for the purposes of demonstration.

That’s not to say women don’t have a hard time of it at all, it’s just that we each have our own difficulties and they are each unique to the individual: to generalise about the terms of each individual case (from which: sexism, racism etc) merely provides validation of the grounds for your opponents to disagree with you without addressing the reasons why they are wrong in believing themselves justified in taking any specific course of behaviour (or, if it be the case, vice versa), which in turn damages your chances of converting them (or, equally, them converting you).

The problem is that it is impossible to silence those you think are wrong – you have to be open to the possibility of winning them over.

There, I’ve reached out an olive branch, I hope you’ll accept it.

thomas,

Sometimes, not often mind you, you make a little sense on here. And then, just after that, you say the most ridiculous things. Of course we all have our own difficulties. Wanna hear about mine? Well, unless you are a professional barman, I’d advise you to stay well clear.

Which is not the point.

If we play games, where the structure is that I’m OK, your not OK, then that is a different ballpark, is it not? Especially if you can tie it to a huge group, men for instance?

If men are OK and women are not, then we end up with one view of society. And it is not a good one, IMVHO.

If we take the corollary, Laurie Penny are you listening?, that women are OK and men are not then that too has an audience, and it will get a hearing, as it does on this forum.

It seems to me that neither is a valid hypothesis. Neither men nor women are OK or not OK. Some are, some aren’t.

The successful position, which neither you nor Laurie Penny seem able to adopt is that most men are OK and that most women are OK and that, hopefully, we could build a coalition around that idea.

I get bad vides from both of you.

Perhaps you should get married to each other.

This was brought to you through a, probably, complete misunderstanding of transactional analysis.

Dunno what a vides is, try vibes……apologies.

“I’ll accept that the societal dynamic behind the royals makes them unique, but it’s also true that the social dynamic within their family is what also makes them so human (they have spats, get divorced and experience all the tragedies life throws out, too, even if it is done in substantially greater comfort).”

I’m not sure how this is relevant to socially-constructed gender distinctions. Let’s remember that th’monarch is where she is today because George and Liz couldn’t muster up a son, not because of equality.

“The successful position, which neither you nor Laurie Penny seem able to adopt is that most men are OK and that most women are OK”

Bare assertion fallacy…

I think you need some sleep, Douglas. So do I, but what’s a few exams when you can consider gender roles and power-structures.

Laurie,

You think that criminal violence is a symptom of ‘poverty’ ‘inequality’ and ‘desperation’, yet it seems your theory melts away in the face of these HOT facts:

In 1900 the number of indictable offences per thousand of the population was 2.4 whereas in 1997 the figure was 89.1. In 1900 there were only 9.6 homicides per million of the population whilst the figure for 1995 is 14.5.

(http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf)

And in 1900 society was much poorer than most of us can imagine, millions lived in the most disgusting slums, on wages that which were hopelessly low. There were no social services and very few state securities besides the workhouse; council housing did not exist; Trade Union membership was negligible and state pensions for the elderly were yet to be introduced.

Let me just add that the 1900 figure for homicide would have included deaths from back-street abortions. Also that courts at that time were far less willing to accept pleas of manslaughter, and crude medical treatments meant that any severe injuries could result in death whereas nowadays the NHS can successfully treat thousands of such injuries. Do note that a this time, there were no legal restrictions on gun or knife ownership.

Even if the crime figures for 1900 were manipulated (which is rather unlikely since English police forces were run locally and crime was not really a political issue) how could the difference between then and now be explained by poverty and inequality? Even the greater “provocation” to steal caused by the increase in mobile property is not enough to explain such a massive rise.

But enough of the statistics; historical reports can often be more telling. In 1944 George Orwell could still plausibly write:

“An imaginary foreign observer would certainly be struck by our gentleness; by the orderly behaviour of English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling …And except for certain well-defined areas in half-a-dozen big towns, there is very little crime or violence.”

A few years later the anthropologist, Geoffrey Gorer, could still say that:

“The English are certainly among the most peaceful, gentle, courteous and orderly populations that the civilized world has ever seen … the control of aggression has gone to such remarkable lengths that you hardly ever see a fight in a bar (a not uncommon spectacle in most of the rest of Europe or the USA) … football crowds are as orderly as church meetings.”

And this was written at a time in which welfare provisions were minimal. But since then there has been a three-fold increase in GDP per capita, including that of the poor. How can this not destroy your theory?

I don’t deny that the lives of the people in the lowest social class are squalid. They live much shorter and unhealthier lives than those in the richer classes and the infant mortality rate in the lowest class is twice that of the highest. But note that the infant mortality rate of illegitimate births is double that of legitimate births, and the illegitimacy rate rises sharply as you go down the social strata.

Yet again, it appears that the “practical absence of the family among the proletarians” is responsible for the higher rates of infant mortality. It’s not that they can’t afford proper medicines or a proper diet – it’s their way of life not material poverty that is the cause of their misery.

Why is it that they lead such wretched lives? Well part of the reason is that we have an undiscriminating, gargantuan welfare state which destroys people’s dignity and turns them into parasitic egotists who are morally illiterate, emotionally vacuous and completely ignorant of how to live. They have nothing to lose or gain or anything to hope for; their lives have no direction and no meaning.

(Incidentally, do you not think that much of this displaced ‘hyper-masculinity’ comes as a result of the gradual removal by Parliament and the courts of men from their roles as husbands and fathers? Do you not think the fact that sons are being deprived of stability and authority in the home has nothing to do with it?)

But let us also remember that to explain everything is to excuse everything. When you write that “of course they want to f****g kill something” what you are effectively saying, is that these people are acting as expected in their current situation; they are criminal by their fundamental nature; they have no deliberate choice in the matter and do not act on any wicked impulses. But to argue that crime has any defensible moral content is a dangerous falsehood which is immensely satisfying to evildoers. Without a doubt, criminals have willingly absorbed this mode of thinking because it enables them to pose as the victims rather than as the victimizers. Robbery in their view is just a type of redistributive taxation. So by spreading these theories you are unwittingly helping to foster criminality.

It is true, that the decision of criminals to commit their wicked actions must have some antecedents but these have nothing to do with poverty, or inequality. They have everything to do with the immorality of our libertine popular culture from which they form their thoughts about the world. They also have everything to do with the calculations that criminals make, i.e., the probability of their being arrested and prosecuted. The ongoing social experiments in leniency in the police and criminal justice system mean that many criminals know that their evil will probably go unpunished. Can you not see that the police have been thoroughly politicized and demoralised? Did you not know that the process of an arrest requires on average 43 forms which can take four hours to process? (Incidentally the source of most of this paper-work is the police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984, passed by a Tory government, so don’t accuse me of being party political) Did you also know that very often the police will not follow up on a prosecution because the sick-joke sentences that follow a conviction mean that it is often not worth the effort? Do you ever read about this stuff in the ‘Observer’ Laurie?

And please don’t use such silly terms as ‘biscuit eating public’. If you knew how much the fear of crime dominates the lives of people in poor areas, (the elderly in particular) you would never use such frivolous language again.

And Tom,

The amount of times I’ve heard complacent left-wingers go on about the ‘well known discrepancy between people’s fear of crime and actual crime rates’!!

So do you expect a person to regulate his level of fear in accordance with the latest crime figures? Do you expect them to feel 6% more fearful or 6% less so because crime has risen or fallen by 6%?

BenSix,

Of course it’s a bare assertion. It just happens to be a good bare assertion….. If I say being happy is better than being sad, that too is a bare assertion, whether it is a fallacy or not, well, who knows?

Best of luck with the revision…and the exams.

douglas,

Sorry, it was my idea of joke at half past three.

Thanks, I have two hours left to channel myself into this textbook.

Gender differences play out in a number of ways because of the intertwining
of social and biological forces. If one consults life and health tables for longevity and disability for example, one finds that while women have a longer live expectancy than men, they also have higher rates or frequency
of disability occurances over the same time frame.

The ‘two nice white kids’ appear to have been killed two less nice ethnic kids.

Tom, ever thought of trying for Prime Minister? Your outlook is very encouraging, in amongst all the rest of this.

Whether men have it worse than women is slightly a red-herring to this argument, I would say. But none the less valid for all that. The underlying point that I think needs to be made (penny red can do it way better than I) is that whoever you think has it worse, the worseness is predominantly coming in both cases from aspects of masculinity – the violence, the aggression, the hierarchical thinking, the competitiveness, the disempowerment of women, other races, *and* certain groups of men – it all stems from the same fundamental premise, all these things are traditionally aspects of masculinity, aren’t they, not femininity. Which is not to say that women don’t do them, but when they do, they’re engaging in traditionally masculine behaviour.

Historically, it hasn’t seemed to matter that masculinity hurts women. Maybe now that people are starting to see how it hurts men, they might sit up and take notice?? Why am I not surprised by that…

Part of the reason women do less violence than men is that it undermines rather than reinforces their sense of their own gender role.

And as for the tired old suicide statistic, that’s simply because men tend to choose more violent (ie lethal) methods, hence their higher success rate. In terms of suicide attempts, women still top the charts, I’m afraid.