TY - JOUR
T1 - Hunting gruffalo: 'gangs', unreason and the big bad coalition: Jon Shute and Juanjo Medina point to the rhetoric and inaccuracies behind recent policy responses
AU - Shute, Jon
AU - Medina, Juanjo
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - But who is this creature with terrible claws/And terrible teeth in its terrible jaws?/He has knobbly knees and turned out toes/And a poisonous wart on the end of his nose/His eyes are orange, his tongue is black/He has purple prickles all over his back/Oh help! Oh no! It's a Gruffalo!(Donaldson, 1999)Youth violence, like most other forms of violence has been falling steadily in recent years. Despite - or perhaps because of this - recent policy responses have begun to rely increasingly on the spectre of 'the gang' as a trope for representing serious youth crime, invoking moral panic, and justifying greater police powers in socially marginalised communities (Hallsworth, 2013). The cynical disconnect between this and the growing weight of critical, empirical British youth gang research strains belief, and exposes the unreason at the heart of coalition policy. In this article, we analyse the release of several reports relating to the 2011 policy paper Ending Gang and Youth Violence (HM Government, 2011). Amidst the rambling and turgid prose, we find a government wasting £10 million on untheorised, unevidenced, and unevaluated 'activity' that risks reifying the very problem it claims to fear. ©2013 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.
AB - But who is this creature with terrible claws/And terrible teeth in its terrible jaws?/He has knobbly knees and turned out toes/And a poisonous wart on the end of his nose/His eyes are orange, his tongue is black/He has purple prickles all over his back/Oh help! Oh no! It's a Gruffalo!(Donaldson, 1999)Youth violence, like most other forms of violence has been falling steadily in recent years. Despite - or perhaps because of this - recent policy responses have begun to rely increasingly on the spectre of 'the gang' as a trope for representing serious youth crime, invoking moral panic, and justifying greater police powers in socially marginalised communities (Hallsworth, 2013). The cynical disconnect between this and the growing weight of critical, empirical British youth gang research strains belief, and exposes the unreason at the heart of coalition policy. In this article, we analyse the release of several reports relating to the 2011 policy paper Ending Gang and Youth Violence (HM Government, 2011). Amidst the rambling and turgid prose, we find a government wasting £10 million on untheorised, unevidenced, and unevaluated 'activity' that risks reifying the very problem it claims to fear. ©2013 Centre for Crime and Justice Studies.
U2 - 10.1080/09627251.2014.926070
DO - 10.1080/09627251.2014.926070
M3 - Article
SN - 0962-7251
VL - 96
SP - 26
EP - 27
JO - Criminal Justice Matters
JF - Criminal Justice Matters
IS - 1
ER -