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

[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.