Circles

There has been a lot said about the riots in England over this last week.  I thought I would add my small voice to the enormous cacophony of opinion out there.  Most of what follows was written on Tuesday, so please forgive me for the apparent lack of timeliness!

Most of the analysis that I’ve heard about the rioting has been trying to provide an answer for the question ‘why has this happened?’  Some people are shouting ‘I blame the parents’ at every opportunity, some are discussing poverty or inequality, while others are interested in how the broader economic situation, the scandals about MPs’ finances and the bankers bonuses are affecting people.  Others, such as the Prime Minister, preferring not to get into murky waters, evade the question and declare that:

This is criminality, pure and simple

They are, of course, all right.

Even the Prime Minister.

I think I should point out early on that I agree with the PM (in some ways).  It’s a basic tenet of my faith that we cannot excuse ourselves from the wrong we’ve done.  This rioting has been ‘lawlessness’, it has been ‘criminality’ and whatever reason we find behind it, it will still be those things.

But this efficient grasp on the legal situation cannot prevent us from asking the infernal ’why?’ question.  As I heard somebody say today, we should stop mistaking explanation for justification.

So, on Tuesday, Boris Johnson’s declaration failed to convince me when he said:

I think we’ve heard too much of the sociology and the economic background of all this.

Clearly hoping to sound like a man of justice, he actually seemed anti-dialogue and anti-academic.  He seemed to be looking for banners to wave, rather than answers.

On a similar note, those wider voices, that name specific reasons for these riots seem to fall short to me.  I realise that Thursday’s shooting of Mark Duggan and the lack of answers got people onto the streets, but as a police officer said on the BBC:

This was not an angry crowd, this was a greedy crowd

The riots have moved from a cause-based event, to one that appears to be driven by greed.

So perhaps we need to ask what has happened that has driven these people to the point where terrible, anti-social acts become possibilities in their minds.  One man was interviewed on a news programme, saying:

The most dangerous things on the streets are not the knives, not the guns, but the minds of the young people

I wonder how these minds become so dangerous?

This is strangely reminiscent of work I was looking while I was studying in the nineties.  There was concern at the time about the criminality of young men and, in trying to find a reason why, we used the broad, cover-all term ‘disaffection’.  This idea that young men didn’t see themselves as having a stake in society was as a result of their broad social context.  We watched films like the brilliant La Haine and the, frankly disturbing Clockwork Orange.  We wrote endless essays about the Bulger murder. We spent days trying to crack the nut of the complex inter-play of a young person’s behaviour and their social environment – which can perhaps be pictured a bit like this:

So the person who behaves a certain way is within the context of a familial situation, which is within a community, which is within a wider national and international context.  The real situation is obviously far more complex than this, but the point remains that individual people who make stupid decisions are doing so based on the influence of these circles.

So if a person has been out on the streets fighting and steeling for the past few nights, there might be a reasonable likelihood that their family context has made this possible.  Maybe they have missed out on good, moral foundations; maybe they’ve lacked a useful father figure; maybe they’ve not had good decision-making skills demonstrated to them; maybe the things that they have witnessed in their families (poverty, parents working so long to survive that they never see their children, drug misuse) have left them with a disrespect for wider society.

But these problematic situations in people’s families will obviously influence, and will be influenced by, their community context.  For example, some families cannot move away from areas where communities have problems  because they will never earn enough money from their numerous jobs.  Meanwhile, if their parent has many jobs, this can leave more room in a young person’s life for peers to influence their behaviour.

Additionally, communities can be the context for a person’s marginalisation – an individual might feel pushed to the edges of society because of their ethnicity, their economic status, or their age (I saw this great piece on inequality today).  Why is it that the media are representing these rioting groups as largely young, male and black? Whether the media image is true or not, we need to asses why these particular groups are being consistently marginalised in our communities.  Maybe the truth is that, as the heroic Patrick Regan from XLP suggested on Tuesday, we need to:

Separate the criminal element from the young people at the edges

Similarly the national and international context for a person will have a huge influence on their community, their family and the person themselves.  The media message that the way forward is ‘more possessions with less effort’ will surely affect people.  As will the sight of rich people running the country and speaking disparagingly about poor people, while cutting services and calling for reduced taxes for the rich. Or perhaps, as others have suggested, having authority figures in politics and business portrayed as ‘grabbing what they can and running’ might represent an example of how to behave.

If any of these examples are true, it seems clear that an individual develops within a system of these circumstances and contexts.  No single problem, whether parenting or international markets, can be said to have created these riots.  As Patrick Regan said on the BBC:

We need to tackle the reasons why people get involved in crime and get involved in guns

The stupid decisions of individual people have to be seen in the context of a wider system.  The problem is that, if this complex system of contexts and influences is true, every person must have an influential part to play.  For that reason, it seems more important than ever that all of us, Boris Johnson included, get our heads out of the sand, find their part and play it.