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| S Philippines grapples with crisis after crisis MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- Tribal gunmen freed 47 hostages in the southern Philippines on Sunday, but the region continued to be wracked by violence as suspected Islamic radicals staged a deadly jail break in which dozens of inmates were freed, including comrades accused of beheading marines.... hosted.ap.org |
What is your view on Iran's nuclear denial? President Ahmadinejad has said a document showing plans to test a trigger for a nuclear bomb is a US forgery. What impact will his comments have? newsforums.bbc.co.uk |
The New Katrina Flood: Hospital Liability Are New Orleans hospitals liable for not protecting electrical generators? A series of lawsuits is testing the bounds of their liability. feeds.nytimes.com |
Thousands Feared Dead After Haitian Earthquake Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told U.S. television he believes more than 100,000 people may be dead www1.voanews.com |
Asbos for gangs don't work. This talking cure just might | Libby Brooks Instead of issuing control orders, Westminster can learn from a radical project that has curbed violence in GlasgowIt is only when the mother starts to speak that the swagger and hostility in Glasgow's sheriff court suspends. Most of the gang members gathered there don't have a strong male in their lives, Chief Inspector Robert Stevenson observes, "but there's something about boys and their mammies". As the woman slowly relates her experience of losing a son to knife crime, sometimes there is spontaneous applause, sometimes tears. These "call-ins" – unique events which bring together rival gangs, invite local people to confront them with the realities of their violence and offer them an exit strategy – are the cornerstone of CIRV (pronounced Serve). Strathclyde's Community Initiative to Reduce Violence is yielding quite Âastonishing results in one of the country's most benighted communities.Seventy-five years on from the publication of the novel No Mean City – which charted the extremities of Glasgow's Gorbals gangland and its Razor King, Johnnie Stark – blade culture remains endemic. There are an estimated 170 street gangs in Strathclyde, and a person is more than three times as likely to die from a stab wound in Scotland than in England and Wales. The legacy of Stark's penchant for slashing the faces of his rivals is in evidence in Scottish hospital Âadmissions for serious facial injuries of more than 20,000 a year.It was the recognition that you can't arrest your way out of a culture this embedded that led Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit to import Operation Ceasefire – a model pioneered on the crack-ridden streets of Boston in the late 90s – and, as Stevenson succinctly puts it, "to tartan-ise it". Ceasefire was based on extensive research into the group dynamics that existed within gangs, those mutable codes of honour and respect, and the understanding that it was essential to provide members with a moral as well as punitive imperative to change their behaviour.Piloted in Glasgow's east end, CIRV was not dealing with heavily armed, highly organised criminal gangs, but the Buckfast and jellies brigade: disadvantaged and disaffected young men for whom violence is recreational rather than drug-related. Still, the rudiments were the same. Without the luxury of compulsion afforded by the US legal system, police were not averse to chapping those mammies' doors in order to pressure their sons to attend call-ins, targeting the most prominent and thus the most potentially influential members.The sessions began with a statement of intent: it's made clear that from now on if one member steps out of line then the police will relentlessly pursue the rest of their group for the most minor infractions. The responsibility is made collective. Then members of the local community were brought forward – ex-offenders, victims of crime, their relatives – to testify to the devastating repercussions of the violence.Finally, the young men were issued with a freeÂphone number to call if they wanted out. If they did so, they were immediately assigned a street advocate to help them access help with education, housing, job-seeking and addiction problems, who also acts as a mentor to get them out of bed and off the bevvy. Over the first year, 368 gang members have signed up to the initiative and, in a report published at the end of last month, CIRV announced an almost 50% reduction in the recorded violent activity of those young men involved. Even among those who refused to engage, there was a drop of nearly 20%.It's ironic, then, that as CIRV celebrates its early success, the government in Westminster is stealthily expanding another scheme imported from the States which manifestly does not work. New antisocial behaviour injunctions, dubbed gangbos, which came into force for adults last November, are now being extended to children as young as 14 – thanks to a lightning amendment that was brought out only weeks after the original legislation became law.Such control order/asbo hybrids can be imposed on anyone suspected of engaging in, encouraging or assisting gang-related violence but, as is the sad habit with sanctions like these, proscribed activities are defined so broadly as to the point of absurdity. Not to mention the continuing blurring of civil with criminal law, the "net-widening" effects of civil orders, and the danger of ever-younger people entering the criminal justice system via the back door.In the US, where the authorities have two decades' worth of experience with similar injunctions, the research is clear that they have not been effective and are indeed counterproductive – leading to the stigmatisation of many innocent, mainly ethnic minority, young people. And, as Liberty, the civil rights group, points out, research undertaken in this country into the experiences of those residing in what are considered to be gang areas has revealed that young people are already subject to negative labelling, attracting police attention as a result of keeping the wrong company – or even just living on the wrong street – rather than involvement in criminal activity.It is profoundly depressing that, when a significant initiative driven by communities themselves is flourishing, our government seems more concerned with expanding its ill-proven list of suspect civil orders. It's worth noting that both the Centre for Social Justice and Policy Exchange, thinktanks highly influential in Tory circles, have commended the Ceasefire model.The tartanised version has certainly delivered results thus far, but it would take a brave government to roll out such a bulky multi-agency strategy countrywide. Then again, the same could be said for gangbos. But in the city that is a little less mean at the beginning of 2010, CIRV has proved that a radical approach with a little local knowledge and a lot of local support can work.GangsCrimePoliceCriminal justiceYouth justiceChildrenAsbosKnife crimeSocial exclusionYoung peopleLibby Brooksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |