Introduction
The qualitative approaches behind studying ‘Youth crime’ such as interviews, observations and ethnography uncover reasons for the prejudice. The discrepancy between the subjective interpretations and understandings of youth to appear in such social phenomena emerges the notion to understand and visualise reasoning behind prejudice. The reason behind the criminal prejudice is of course the variations of cultures in context with the ‘Multicultural environment’.
Recent British Crime Survey (BCS) data is the best evidence of the disproportionate crime rates. From vandalism to vehicle thefts and from ‘street’ crimes to inner urban cities (Simmons et al. 2002) these variations in England and Wales over the past few years have raised the feelings of lawlessness and helplessness associated with inner cities. UK is following a long term trend according to which the rates of crime pursue a disproportionate figure every year.
BCS shows that 1995 was the peak year of youth crime whereas over the last ten years the crime has fallen by 42%. However with such a decrease an average person was exposed to risk by 41% increased by 1% in 2006. According to the UK police, many categories of youth crime has declined up to 13% like firearm and burglary while on the other end vandalism is increasing over the years. (British Crime Survey, 2006/07)
The existence of prejudice among UK youth crime is justified for the multiculturalism which evoke or explain specifics about their offending. Such justification can be measured to the extent where structural deficiencies within the area occurs, such as high population density and high unemployment, and they may give rise to additional, illicit and illegal forms of economic activity, such as selling drugs and the trading of ‘second-hand’ merchandise (Hagan, 1994).
Cultural attributes of young people themselves are considered in relation to their offending (Surette and Otto, 2001). Post-war Britain has seen the changes throughout the generations in which crime-prone youngsters were exposed to young offenders with the teddy boys, mods and rockers, punks, skinheads, hippies, ravers, and, perhaps more recently, yardies and gangsters. And while the image of the young offender has certainly changed in appearance over the second half of the twentieth century, factors like media and society are responsible for it.
One half of all persons convicted each year in the United Kingdom are males aged between 15 and 21. The strongest predictors of known involvement in criminality are firstly sex, followed by age and class. There is a strong association between crime and being male, young, and from the inner city. High levels of crime within this group also produce high levels of victimisation. In some inner-city areas, the most likely perpetrators and the most likely victims of street robberies will be young black males aged between 15 and 21. In addition, a distinctive feature of young black offenders is that many come from respectable law-abiding families. Some are academically able. There are young people going to jail who should be going to college.
Reasons to Justified Prejudice
Criminality among the youth cannot be fully explained alone by the persistence of racist social attitudes and associated factors such as racist bias in the police and the criminal justice system. Though these factors do create deep and serious difficulties, but one cannot ignore the external threats to the younger generation. Effects of our social dilemmas such as youth unemployment and alcohol related crimes are also unable to highlight the real causes behind disproportionate crime (Robins, 1992, p. 3).
UK follows a particular trend which might be among one of the reasons for varying crime rates. There are certain places where the black people, particularly Afro-Caribbean people, are significantly over-represented at various stages of the criminal justice system. Africans that are living within the black ghettos have always been disproportionately represented in local criminal statistics. Between 2000 and 2002, all the robbery and violence serious offences was done mostly by blacks. When the youth justice workers and the youth and community workers were inquired they replied that about half of the young men they worked with were white and the other half black (Sanders, 2005, p. 19).
In the view of the government, the ‘joined-upness’ of solutions to youth crime and community safety consists in the simultaneous management of those ‘risk factors’ associated with the onset of crime and delinquency, and the application of ‘evidence-based’ technologies for the correction of familial, cognitive or behavioural deficiencies which lead to persistence. Along with this perception, systemic anomalies are eradicated by rigorous audits and the imposition, by central government, of financial penalties upon local government, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
Many times the efforts of Conservative government had failed to limit the powers of local authorities, which were seen as unreliable, but a decade later this policy was reversed by an incoming Labour government and local authorities in conjunction with the local police were given statutory responsibility for crime prevention and community safety. Local authorities in community safety participated and were seen as uniquely placed to connect with the local population and thereby able to increase citizen involvement in crime control while mobilising the wide range of agencies which were deemed necessary to develop a comprehensive community safety strategy housing, planning, social services, education, leisure services, youth services and others.
Youth crime control and its associated problems have always acquired limited attention. The responsibility has always been in a continuous shift in which local authorities played down the existing unequal distribution of needy people in different areas, as well as the geographical concentration of victimisation. Such placement of responsibility on the shoulders of local authorities have resulted in an increased range of problems that have further burdened certain municipalities.
Therefore neither this development may be seen as a recipe for the consolidation of injustice to the youth crime nor does it provide an alternative to the growth of a crime control bureaucracy, but instead broadens its base. Although crime in itself may be locally extremely variable, the level of crime in any particular area will also be a product of a wider process of deflection and displacement as well as a function of social and economic movements which affect the make-up and distribution of local populations.
Similarly, when youth crime starts affecting community safety in the vast majority of localities, it is affected by environmental, health and transport issues which reach far beyond the geographical boundaries of local boroughs and over which particular local authorities may have little or no control (Young, 1990). Therefore, in relation to crime and community safety there are unresolved issues about whether the local authority is the appropriate regulatory site and whether it might be more appropriate to locate these responsibilities in regional authorities if the aim is to achieve greater levels of distributive and social justice.
In a society in which the structural and social divisions are becoming increasingly pronounced, the ability of the Social Exclusion Unit to do more than identify and possibly ameliorate certain pockets of poverty and deprivation appear to be limited. This has given rise to the young criminal behavior. The proposed interventions such as job training, the development of ‘more flexible’ benefits, improved housing management, measures to ‘tackle’ anti-social neighbours, youth crime and drugs, youth work, improved local services and initiatives to get central government departments working more closely together appear to be both overly ambitious and at the same time inadequate.
Youth culture alone is not responsible for the increased and varied crime; they are not taught the morals and the restrictions of family by the device of deviance and truth. If we analyse youth violence community wise we would come to know that from the black diaspora to the gay community, a single culture has split into many subcultures that develop in the freedom of the urban landscape and spread into a virtual community under the influence of mass media and cultural artefact (Matthews & Pitts, 2001, p. 39).
The best example of media contribution to youth violence is the ‘gun culture’. There was a time when only USA was at peak in ‘gun culture’, today Britain is becoming in this respect, may swim in the media, guns were not really an issue with the young people some decades ago. Gun culture did not exist till the time when media promoted Hollywood movies. In fact gun violence is spread among the youngsters by three means, through home or school setting, the community and through media. Children who are subjected to gun violence are found easy victims of experiencing negative psychological effects that include anger, withdrawal, posttraumatic stress, and violence (Garbarino et al, 2002).
If we look into the pages of history we would see that there somehow has been a decline in the youth crime rate. The homicide rate in the city of Amsterdam in the year 1450 is estimated to have been 150 per 100,000 people. By 1850, when Amsterdam had been “civilized,” the rate dropped to 2 per 100,000 (Richman & Fraser, 2001, p. 84). Equality and equity issues invariably stand out as evidence that public schools are not what they appear to be: a democratic institution that provides increasingly diverse citizenry the opportunity to better their lives. Instead, schools mirror the more general social inequalities in society-income, race, gender, and age disparities.
The gap between rich and poor families is widening in almost all the European countries. Among inner-city schools, income differences translate into ‘savage inequalities’. As a result, poor children of all colors are consigned to a procession of overcrowded, under heated, textbookless, indifferently taught classrooms (Davis, 1999, p. 66).
According to my analysis, youth criminal activities whether call it in the context of prejudice, disproportional or simply crime is multidimensional. Starting from the assertion of petty crime and ending up in violence, youth crime is justified with what it seeks. Both dimensions end up in single notion of youth crime that ends up in ‘morals’. Whether it is culturally influenced or multicultural twisted, the essence lies with those factors that are primarily responsible for transforming our younger generation into criminals. When our children are suffering from lack of attention, due to poor economic conditions of our country no one cares. Why would one bother to notice psychological changes among our children when there is a significant flux with regard to materialism?
Low level psychological disorders are the main grounds on which youth lives revolves. From the school going teenagers to the gangs, all such civilities are the results of male and female teenagers’ gatherings which are often unsupervised, in public spaces on front walls, street-corners, in town centres and by the local shops.
Family factors like teenage mothers and parental psychopathology which depicts antisocial parental behaviour like alcoholism and depression is also among the major causes for disturbed children. Other factors contribution like television and media violence promotes the hidden aggressive behaviour in our youth. Youth violence has been a part of our society and cannot be placed aloof to understood the social and cultural contexts in which it occurs. Children learn not only from the larger culture, but from their specific subculture as well and particularly when it comes to UK, children have a lot to learn as it is a multicultural country.
For some children, that subculture might consist of a mostly white, middle-class, suburban neighbourhood. Other children might live within ethnic neighbourhoods in the inner city. Still others might inhabit rural areas such as those in the south or northeast. It has been observed that sub-cultures also play a significant role in influencing or reinforcing messages from the larger culture and when it comes to youth crime, culture matters.
There are other reasons to the justification of youth crime. When the Labour government, elected in May 1997, considered youth crime prevention, it wasted time in identifying and selecting crime control as a major plank of public policy upon which it grounded its office and judged.
Upon clearly visualising ‘flagship’ pieces of legislation such as the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) and the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act (1999) as key elements in the implementation of Third Way politics in the field of law and order, UK Home Secretary, Jack Straw, suggested that the statutory community safety partnerships established by the Crime and Disorder Act (1998) alongside measures such as the anti-social behaviour orders (ASBO) and child curfews will help bind together and empower communities to fight crime.
Labour government’s strategy for dealing with problem and excluded youth argued that although this strategy may strive to tackle ‘alienation’ amongst the young it would be unable to renovate the structural links between impoverished, destabilised, neighbourhoods and local and regional labour markets; nor will it offer the financial incentives and tax breaks to the businesses and industries which would ‘kick-start’ moribund local economies into life.
Government policy encourages the individualisation and commodification of security, offering only minimum guarantees, above which youngsters are encouraged to take responsibility for themselves. Such a liberal notion of ‘freedom’ and responsibility helps the youth to shape up and influence their personal morality and therefore welfare is replaced by the juridical subject of neo-liberalism.
Only through implementing such initiatives we can think to make the disproportional rate of youth crime to an extent where one can begin to make sense of the contradictory policy initiatives. Such policy initiatives are biased in a sense that on one hand they are aimed to establish agencies to alleviate social exclusion from the society, whereas on the other they seek methods to reduce welfare payments to marginalised populations.
Contribution to stop Youth Crime
Schools act as the fundamental institutions that provide regular access to students throughout the developmental years. Therefore schools are the only institutions that shape up young children morale in the early school years. Proper efforts should be made to socialise youth by staffing individuals to help youth develop as healthy, happy, and productive citizens. Many youngsters already possess delinquent behaviour must be identified and treated in accordance with the school-based intervention.
The School must understand its responsibility to point out those factors that escort towards delinquency and therefore be capable to identify the youngster if he possesses things like alcohol, drugs or any weapon. Factors that are responsible for disturbing or causing emotional disturbances must be identified such as school experiences, attitudes, poor school performance and attendance, low attachment to school, and low commitment to schooling (Sherman et al, 2002, p. 58).
Other approaches suggested by Sherman et al (2002) to reduce youth crime includes community based mentoring and after school recreational programs. Another community based anti-violence initiative is the ‘Gun buy-back campaign’, which remained unable to reduce the targeted outcome.
The true British youth learns in context with the aspirations that jump frontiers, about crime, since crime has been a free-floating commodity of the media. Our youth learns from the informal mores of everyday life which are constituted within public cultures which are global in their reach. The thing that bothers us towards considering the problem is the maintenance of order among teenagers. We ourselves are the notions of respectable and proper behaviour but are unable to teach discipline and order to our younger generation. This is so because our social entities have transformed our feelings of guilt into our attitude that means such morals are no longer part of our face-to-face encounter.
References
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Garbariono James, Bradshaw P. Catherine & Vorrasi A. Joseph, (2002) “Mitigating the Effects of Gun Violence on Children and Youth” In: The Future of Children. Volume: 12: 2.
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Young I. M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press.