Teenagers under the knife: a decivilising process

Abstract

The contradiction emerging between the lived experience of a minority of marginalised urban youth and the punitive operant conditioning of antisocial behaviour legislation is illustrative of the increasing gap between society's expectations of behaviour and the coming reality. In this paper, Loic Wacquant's sociology of advanced marginality is combined with Norbert Elias' concept of civilising and decivilising processes and applied to the dilemma of young offenders in a typical UK city. It identifies increasing educational exclusion and institutional abandonment in affected ‘neighbourhoods of relegation’. This process is part of a general trend towards the desocialisation of labour, which ushers in a reactionary, violent decivilising process among the minority most affected, where use of violence becomes the foundation of repute for otherwise powerless individuals, or for gangs in their control of small urban spaces. By analysing this dilemma from the perspective of the ‘perpetrators’ rather than the victims of knife crime, we seek to describe their praxis; that is, the nature of their habitus or consciousness.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• crime
• school exclusion
• gangs
• habitus

Acknowledgements

This article began as a paper presented to the 38^th World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology in Budapest in July 2008, and subsequently at the 2009 Conference of the Social Work Action Network (SWAN) at Bath University. I would like to thank Rob MacDonald for his initial encouragement and the useful advice of Loic Wacquant, John Hagedorn, John Astley, Will Atkinson, John Pitts, Helmut Kuzmics and two anonymous reviewers at this journal.

Notes

1. Criminal statistics are notoriously difficult to pin down. For example, in the wake of the wave of media reporting of teenage knife crime, Home Office figures in October 2008 reported a 20 per cent rise in grievious bodily harm (GBH) with intent – to which Police Minister Vernon Coaker responded that overall crime statistics were down 7 per cent (Channel 4 News, 23 October 2008). At this time, the Home Office refused to issue youth homicide figures supplied by the police, as they were judged ‘incomplete’. In January 2009, the criminologist Marion Fitzgerald explained that statistics now showed a disproportionately high rise in violent crime – caused by the need to correct a previous interpretation that had discounted ‘violent’ offences lacking a violent outcome – thus keeping figures lower in the past (BBC Radio 4, Today programme, 22 January 2009).

2. Bristol Evening Post, 12 August 2008 – other headlines from the same paper 2006–08.

3. The contention by Wacquant that ghettoisation describes US conditions but not those of the UK and Europe is an important distinction highlighting the national differences in marginality: ‘Immigrants and their children in the French city have become more mixed, not more separated; their social profile and opportunities are becoming more similar to those of native French people, not more different, even as they suffer higher rates of unemployment’ (Wacquant 2008b, p. 115). However, other commentators have retained the term ‘ghettoisation’ to describe marginalised communities in the UK and Europe because of the sense of anomie and alienation that can overwhelm disadvantaged individuals or communities; the idea that ghettoisation of a community can create a sense of ‘ghettoisation of the mind’ and ‘detachment from the mainstream’ (Heale 2009, p. 140). This is a mental attitude that breeds a number of defence mechanisms with calamitous consequences for the social fabric. This is as true for those doing the ghettoising as it is for the ghettoised. As John Rodger notes, ‘[t] he attitudes and emotional responses of the rich and comfortable to the problems of the ghetto and anti-social behavioural traits … can avoid addressing redistributive issues’ (Rodger 2008, p. 37).

4. Cited in H. Kuzmics, The civilizing process (1988), p. 175.

5. This parallel is also explored in Hagedorn's (1988, p. 49) groundbreaking study of black gangs in the USA. Because these ‘gangstas’ live in a zone where work has disappeared, they lack a purpose, and their antisocial behaviour is not understood and tolerated in the way that previous patterns of non-conformism may have been in the past: ‘Milwaukee's black gangs appear much more alienated … even from their own communities.’

6. Cited in Atkinson (2010, p. 10).

7. Doogan warns that ‘sympathetic commentators should recognise the risk of self-inflicted weaknesses created by the overstatement of capital mobility, job instability and powerlessness … the persistence of job stability and the widespread increase of long-term employment … suggest that the weaknesses on the side of labour are not structural but ideological’ (2009, p. 214).

8. Figures from Bristol Youth Offending Team 2006–07.

9. A term popular among German sociologists between the wars, which Elias defined as ‘something akin to “second nature” or social learning that has become embodied’ (Dunning and Mennell, in preface to Elias 1996, p. ix).

10. Cited in Atkinson (2007, pp. 544–545).