Anti-Social Behaviour Policy - Driving fast, running on empty? by Professor Peter Squires

[June 2008]

We entered the 21st century with concerns about rowdy and anti-social youth. Moving towards the end of the decade, communities are panicking about youth weapon carrying and violence. Crime and disorder policies have been hotly debated in the UK recently - problems spring up quickly, action is demanded and very soon a government initiative is launched. In the second part of his two-part guest series for Crimestoppers, Professor Peter Squires looks at whether ASBOs are working, and questions if failing methods of dealing with anti-social behaviour among young people has led to the violent crimes they are now being associated with.

Crime and disorder policy has developed in a real hothouse political climate in the UK in recent years. Problems spring up quickly, action is demanded and very soon a government initiative is launched.

The current focus on knife crime is a good example. Although stabbing with a sharp instrument has been the most common method by which young men have killed one another for years, suddenly the issue is seen to demand more serious attention. And yet, when the question is posed, it turns out that the police don't even collect statistics on ‘knife crime' as such (only ‘stabbing' and ‘wounding' injuries – not what caused them; the Home Office asked police forces to begin collecting knife data in 2007) and so we have had to rely upon hospital A&E admissions figures to provide more reliable estimates of the trends. Now everyone is taking knife crime more seriously. But difficulties will often result when policies follow problems too quickly, especially when there is a shortage of good information about what the problem really is.

Anti-social behaviour is a case in point; another example of a problem which grew quickly in the British political hothouse. Action to tackle Anti-social behaviour was very much part of Tony Blair's personal crusade - he said as much on a number of occasions. Growing and developing, anti-social behaviour turned very rapidly into a major governmental initiative - the RESPECT Agenda, with an incredibly ambitious brief.

Some commentators argued that the government had taken on too much, building a rod for its own back, that would inevitably fail. Yet there was no doubting the enthusiasm with which the government were going about the task, or the significance invested in the issue. And yet one strange thing about the anti-social behaviour issue was that, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) were never originally intended to be used for people aged under 16. Scotland adopted a much more restrictive use of ASBOs, but within a very short time in England and Wales, the notions ‘ASBO' and ‘problem youth' seemed to have become virtually synonymous. Anti-social behaviour had become, almost inadvertently it seems, a youth problem.

This month will see the publication of a book ASBO Nation (Bristol, The Policy Press) which takes a thorough look at Britain's anti-social behaviour story. I commissioned the various contributors and added an introduction and conclusion to the seventeen substantive chapters. The aim of the book was to try to capture the full range of commentary and opinion surrounding anti-social behaviour; everything that it was possible to say, supported by research, evidence and experience, about anti-social behaviour management. To this end, contributions were gained from policy makers and people working in community safety and anti-social behaviour enforcement in local authorities, criminologists, researchers, lawyers and, crucially, people writing about the experiences of anti-social behaviour victimisation as well as, originally, research looking at the experiences of those who had been given ASBOs. The intention was to include all shades of opinion, from that of people doing the anti-social behaviour enforcement work to commentators (in one case, Shami Chakrabarti of the pressure group Liberty) warning of the dangers of ‘ASBOmania'.

However, the main story that we end up telling in the book is about a policy which grew up quickly, resonating with a range of popular concerns regarding the state of youth in Britain today. This pushed the government to be increasingly more inventive with its programme of initiatives and, in the ever decreasing circles when a problem was detected and a new policy announced, we rapidly began to outrun the available evidence base regarding what the problem really was, how it might be tackled and what would be most effective. For a government that had pioneered a supposedly ‘evidence based' approach to policy making, this was the political equivalent of ‘running on empty'.

As we saw, the anti-social behaviour policy evolved quickly, shifting from ASBOs for adults and employed primarily in the social housing management arena to becoming the defining feature of a new approach to youth justice intended to ‘nip crime in the bud'.

Next, even earlier intervention followed, with Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (ABCs) available for still younger children. Then questions began to appear about the legal framing of ‘anti-social behaviour', its definition, the ‘due process' to be followed, and the evidence tests to be satisfied before an ASBO could be awarded. It turned out that around half of the ASBOs in the country were being used in respect of youth and that most of them were being awarded for behaviour that had been ‘illegal' anyway. Anti-social behaviour was not a new problem (as many commentators have noted, young people have always caused a nuisance for older generations), just the site for a new enforcement solution. In this light, the real issue concerned, perhaps, the existing performance of police and local authorities in respect of youth crime – and the nagging suspicion that some young people's behaviour was becoming insufferably worse.

As the problem quickly evolved, ASBOs and ABCs were complemented by Dispersal Orders, Parenting Orders, Individual Support Orders, ASBOs ‘on conviction', ‘naming and shaming' and so on, culminating in the much wider RESPECT Agenda and it's ambitious programme. But problems were soon to follow: first the new pressure group ASBOConcern began to publicise some quite bizarre cases where ASBOs had been awarded; next, evidence began to appear of a fairly high rate of ASBO breaches and, lastly, reports of young people regarding their ASBOs as ‘badges of honour' or ‘street diplomas' began to appear. I have to admit that I've never had much time for this issue, what does it mean anyway? Some offenders in court have often put on a show of masculine bravado, putting a brave face on their situation. How else might they be expected to respond? A defiant, even self-destructive show of ‘attitude' in the face of hopelessness: all they have left?

Some of the criticisms of anti-social behaviour management began to hit home, questioning the performance management agenda that had been established. It had never been the goal of anti-social behaviour policy to judge success by how many ASBOs had been awarded, any more than crime prevention policy is judged by how full the prisons are. And here, evidence that ASBO breach rates were running at close to two-thirds, was quite damning – after all the point was to prevent anti-social behaviour not come top of the ASBO league table. Anti-social behaviour practitioners began to question the enforcement-led agenda and the balance between support (to help young people deal more effectively with the issues leading to their offending) and enforcement began to shift. In the past couple of years the number of ASBOs awarded has been dropping as local authorities seek more effective early interventions, leaving the ASBO itself as more of a last resort. In a way we could say that the evidence of what worked, the experience in using the new powers was leading to a more considered and effective use of the powers – as compared to earlier days when a more politically driven ‘more the merrier' approach seemed to prevail. No-one, and certainly none of the authors responsible for the separate chapters of our book, is suggesting that the problem of anti-social behaviour is not real, deeply troubling and capable of making people's lives a misery when they face it on a daily basis, but we do share a commitment to addressing it in ways that are legal, evidence based and, above all, effective.

With the shift from Blair to Brown in Downing Street and the appointment of new ministers with new priorities we have also seen a change of tone in the ASBO debate. This was reflected, to some extent, in comments by Ed Balls, Secretary of State in the new Department for Children, Schools and Families which has become responsible for overseeing the new Youth anti-social behaviour strategy. He commented, “I want to live in the kind of society that puts ASBOs behind us”. Announcing the past year's anti-social behaviour figures, the Guardian even commented that we were coming to the end of the ‘ASBO era'. Maybe; maybe not.

The lessons from this fast moving decade of anti-social behaviour policy-making are several, but a particular conclusion drawn in the book concerns the dangers when policy innovation outstrips the evidence and experience base and popular belief rather than effectiveness driving policy. The Government's ASBO strategy has been criticised by Rod Morgan (former Chair of the Youth Justice Board) and more recently Sir Al Aynsley-Green, (the government's Children's Commissioner) for contributing to a general ‘demonisation' of youth in Britain (he was attacked in the tabloid press for his remarks). But they both had a point. If we began our fast-moving decade with concerns about rowdy and anti-social youth we have ended it in a panic about youth weapon carrying and violence. We have to ask, I would suggest, about the ways in which inadequate and failing methods of dealing with the former, may have contributed to the latter.

Author note

Peter Squires is the Professor of Criminology and Public Policy at the University of Brighton. He is the author of 'Gun Culture or Gun Control: Firearms, Violence and Society' (2000), and has just completed an updated ‘Gun Crime Briefing Paper' being published by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Kings College, London in the Summer.

Other research on anti-social behaviour:

• Squires, P. and Stephen, D.E. 2005 Rougher Justice: Anti-Social Behaviour and Young People. Cullompton, Willan Publishing.
• Squires, P. and Stephen, D.E. 2005 Rethinking ASBOs, in Critical Social Policy Vol. 25(4) pp. 517-529.
• Burney, E. 2005 Making People behave: Anti-social behaviour, politics and policy: The Creation and Enforcement of Anti-social Behaviour Policy. Cullompton, Willan Publishing.
• Millie, A., Jacobson, J., McDonald, E and Hough, M. 2005 Anti-social behaviour strategies: Finding a balance, ICPR and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Bristol, The Policy Press.
• Solanki, A-R., Bateman, T. Boswell, G. and Hill, E. 2006 Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. London, Youth Justice Board.