dreamer_easy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dreamer_easy) wrote2009-11-09 10:35 am
dreamer_easy) wrote2009-11-09 10:35 am
Entry tags:
Cat's bums
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?!
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?!
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no subject
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.