Cat's bums

[dreamer_easy]

A discussion of British identity on GB promptly disintegrated into chav-bashing. For a start, they dress flashily and show off their expensive cars, violating middle class standards of taste. What's more, they're "violent feral animals vomiting kids", "collecting ASBOs like trading cards". In fact, "They are a 'cultural' section of british society that chooses to alienate itself from the rest of the nation by preying upon it, making its life miserable, robbing, mugging, and vomiting out more kids when they want a bigger house or more benefits."

Now. When someone's merely making a mouth like a cat's bum, you can't exactly quantify it, but crime and birthrates are a different cup of tea. How well do UK statistics match this picture?

Firstly, there's the huge gap between how much crime is actually going on, and how much people think it's going on. Crime in Britain has dropped steadily since the mid-90s; violent crime has dropped by a half. But our perceptions of crime are shaped not by studying statistics, but (quite naturally) by our personal experience and the media. In the British Crime Survey, about 1 in 6 people surveyed thought it was likely they'd be victims of burglary or violence; their actual risk was about 1 in 20. Almost everyone said there was an increase in knife attacks nationally, but less than a third thought there was an increase in the area where they lived. Half of people surveyed said they personally lived in a low crime area. And so on. Obviously, if there's all this crime in the papers, but we can't actually see it in our own neighbourhood, then it must be happening somewhere else!

More on this later. I'm particularly interested in seeing how much crime committed by young people is committed against other young people; and what the birthrates are for different sections of British society. (If anyone can quantify how many children one has to bear in order to qualify as "vomiting" them out, I'd be obliged.)

But before I go: if I'm honest, I think ASBOs are a joke. "Anti-social behaviour" covers not just actual crimes like drug dealing, but incredibly minor annoyances like noisy parties, abandoned cars, and littering. These are real problems that have to be dealt with somehow, but how on earth did they end up in the crime statistics?!

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

... I thought noisy parties were a rich kid's thing.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Ah, but you see, they are rich, thanks to the combined proceeds of welfare and crime. Obviously.

[alawston.livejournal.com]

What would make you think that?

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I'm particularly interested in seeing how much crime committed by young people is committed against other young people;

Anecdote does not equal data, but ISTR that the target of one particular tribe of "chavs" in one particular locale I once knew was another group of primarily young people (with a few older folk of the post-beatnik variety hanging around) who happened to congregate in the same corner of the city centre.

[swiftangel.livejournal.com]

In terms of birth rates, the UK does, I believe, have the highest per capita number of teenage mothers in Europe. On an individual city basis, the teenage mother capital of Europe is Crawley, West Sussex. I worked there for several years and I can't begin to tell you how depressing it was to see so many teenage girls who treated their babies like fashion accessories. I'm really glad to be working elsewhere now. :-/

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

This is a serious question, not sarcasm or anything - how does one treat a baby like a fashion accessory? I'm not quite sure what you're describing here.

[swiftangel.livejournal.com]

They treat them like property rather than like people, make comments about how happy they are that their boobs are now bigger, care more about how expensive and trendy the pushchair is then about the baby in it, etc. I ran across a conversation one between one young mother and her friend. The young mother was out shopping, using the trendy pushchair to haul her bags. The friend asked where the baby was and the mother said she couldn't be bothered to bring it out, so left it at home, and freely admitted that there was no one at home to watch it.

[purplecat]

This is going to be vague but I recall a news item on Radio 4 where someone was studying the disparity between actual crime rates and perception/fear of crime. The hypothesis was that that crime in the UK had become more visible but highly localised to particular places and times - i.e. nearly everyone was aware of centre of town binge-drinking and resulting high level of associated crime on Friday and Saturday nights even though those areas were at all other times remarkably peaceful. This led to a higher perception of crime because, I guess (though I don't think that was explicitly stated), people extrapolated out from the Friday/Saturday night problem to a perception that the crime rate was constant across the week. I'm afraid I can't remember any names or publication venues for the research...

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Yah - the BCS reckon "high profile events" affect peoples' perception.

[almostwitty]

The trouble is that a lot of people - me included - can get surprisingly intimidated by a gang of hooded youths hanging out on the street corner. Thus raising the perception that there's a crime waiting to happen, when one doesn't actually happen.

Of course, from the youths' perspective, they're just hangin' out with their homies down the corner, because they've got nowhere else to go. Except perhaps the pub.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

David Tennant: "I've taken to wearing a hoodie quite a lot, because people avoid you. Presumably they take one look at you and think you're about to murder them."

[wyldemusick.livejournal.com]

ASBOs seem to have been a response to a spate of "happy slapping," which was pretty much a teenage thing. It resulted in a number of injuries and a couple of deaths (because people don't think that smacking someone in the head does any damage) and subsequent calls for control of this 'orrible youth population...and in came the utterly useless ASBO.

Perception is a lot of it -- it's not just what people see in the paper (or on yellowsheet online sites) and hear from talking heads and self-serving pols, and so on; there's reinforcement from TV drama and even comedy -- if you ask a random group of people, a good half of them will be convinced that there's variations on the Yorkshire Ripper cutting people up into snack size bits in their back yard right this minute.

This is the sort of perception that's allowed the British government to turn the country into a CCTV-surveilled nation, of course, with much reassurance from the dramas that the CCTV works just fine and dandy as needed (which is a polar opposite of the truth.) But the cameras do, of course, somewhat ensure compliance...well, not really, as people will be idiots regardless.