‘Street life’ and the ‘security gap’
…do you feel you’ve got a right to be safe on the street?
Yeah.
And do you think it’s your job to enforce that [by carrying a knife]?
Yeah, because no one else is gonna…Who else is going to? If you don’t look after yourself, who else is going to do that?
I’m not disputing it. But the thing is if you look after yourself, you get into trouble with the police anyway don’t you?
Yeah. I mean there’s other ways innit. But what can you do? If you’re like a kid my age, and you’re involved in all this, then something will be bound to happen at some point.
And what do you mean by ‘all this’?
Like I don't know how to explain it man. The road life innit…If I go out to go shopping that happens to me. Not round here, I won’t get robbed around here, it’s unlikely. If there’s other people from another area that I don't know but – let’s say I go somewhere else. Like if I go another area it could happen.
Again, it doesn’t sound like there’s anyone you could tell, like the police can’t help you.
No one can help you.
(Merlin, London, aged 16).
148
The quote presented on the previous page was selected as an exemplar to illustrate many of the points made in this chapter. The research participant’s comments express frustration, anger and determination, and speak to some of the paradoxes that face young men when they try to make themselves feel safer. This chapter conceives of this problem as a ‘security gap’.
Introduction
This chapter outlines the findings from the empirical data that relate to the circumstances that led participants to start to carry a knife. The chapter is in three sections: the first section introduces two important and related distinctions to have emerged from the data:
between offenders and non-offenders, and, between the different kinds of violence they were exposed to. It also describes the principal trajectories that participants took into knife carrying, and the relationship between these and offending careers more broadly. The second section explores the influence of peers, offending and normative codes on knife carrying behaviour, by drawing on the concept of ‘street life’ as it was developed in Chapter Three. The section outlines two issues that can be shown to have necessitated the need to carry a knife: first, engagement in collective offending, and second, the risk of lone victimisation. Adherence to a violent street code and an offending lifestyle more generally created significant problems around movement and visibility and carrying a knife provided, for some, an ‘effective’ solution to these problems. The third section examines sources of social support that participants could have drawn on as an alternative to carrying a knife. Further, it examines the relationship between offending, knife carrying and both the perceptions and experiences of formal and informal regulatory orders. The next chapter examines offenders’ decisions to stop carrying a knife, with reference to both the findings of this chapter and the conceptual framework.
The main argument put forward in this chapter is that the participants experienced a
‘security gap’ that had significant implications for their conduct in general and their knife carrying in particular. This was bound up in and contributed to ‘integrational difficulties’
149
for many participants. It was also related to intrinsic perceptions of place and space. There were two kinds of participants – offenders and non-offenders, both of whom had carried knives. Both groups had initially carried for defensive purposes, but within this there were differences by what was meant by ‘self-defence’. These differences were a consequence of the kinds of violence participants claimed to have experienced, and their consequent perceptions of their local environment. The offenders tended to experience more frequent and more severe violence as a result of their offending. Their offending then can be seen as both a response to and a cause of a ‘security gap’ in their local ecology. By contrast, the small group of non-offenders in the sample experienced bullying and some street violence, but overall this was less severe and less frequent. They generally carried a knife for self-defence, but for shorter periods, and less frequently, than offenders.
Starting offending was often part of a vicious circle: the more offending participants engaged, in the more likely they were to witness, experience, or even participate in street based violence, necessitating ever greater attendance to self-defence. At the same time, becoming entrenched in an offending lifestyle brought participants into contact with peers on a similar trajectory who could offer some collective support, but it also eroded already difficult relationships with other more durable sources of support and protection, further exposing them to the threat of victimisation. Indeed, as is explored further below, relationships with the police, especially, could not only exacerbate an offending trajectory but in assigning to participants a ‘troublesome’ or ‘outlaw’ status, could also exacerbate the very threats or ‘security gap’ participants sought to mitigate through the carrying of a knife. In these contexts, knife carrying could become habitual and this was where the more offensive uses of a knife were more likely to be realised.
The first section below develops the distinction between offending and non-offending participants, and the consequences of this for knife carrying. First however there is a description of participants’ neighbourhoods and their experiences of place and space.
150
Place, space and participants’ neighbourhoods
One of the principal themes of this research has been that some young people respond to extant social conditions, especially the presence of a violent ‘street culture’ (Hallsworth, 2008) by engaging in offending behaviour. They are not necessarily aware of the implications of this when they start on this pathway, but one of the consequences for many of these appears to be a rapid escalation and intensification of experiences of violence and the threat of violence. These experiences are rooted in place and space as these were defined in Chapter Three. In other words, participants experienced more generalise spatial risks when moving around, but also more specific and place based risks, according to share subjective definitions of certain places. It was apparent in the course of conducting the fieldwork that many of the areas where participants lived and studied were run down and badly maintained. Some spaces had an air of menace (at least it seemed that way to the researcher), even during the day. It would be an exaggeration to say that this as equivalent to that described by Anderson (1999) in downtown Philadelphia. At the same time, in a British context at least, some areas felt dangerous in the way that Anderson described areas where a ‘street code’ prevailed.
These feelings were recorded in the fieldwork diary, an excerpt of which is presented below.
Visited [area, London] today. Arrived mid-afternoon. The sky was already dark grey and mirrored the dismal surroundings. The estate is entered through a gate which I’m guessing gets locked at night. Not sure if it is to keep people in or out. The hut where I conducted the interviews was equally miserable. The door was lined with dented sheet metal and there were bars on the windows (not unusual). The staff who let me in were friendly but seemed quite strained. They helped me move faded plastic chairs and tables around the otherwise empty hall. The interviewees were friendly and chatty though. Left at about 7.30 pm, the staff member who let me out seemed concerned for my safety, but it was all quiet on the way back to station (Research diary, October, 2011).
There was also, in some places, a sense of implicit threat, of hostility and a lack of security.
This was sometimes because of the visible presence of potentially hostile others. Some youth offending service offices felt particularly threatening and at times quite volatile:
151
Visited the [location] YOS today. Parked close by, stood on broken windscreen glass as I stepped out of the car. I was told to go in by the back door. Walking towards the offices I could see why - a large group of lads stood smoking outside the main door. One asked me if I had a light as I walked past, another spat on the ground through his teeth (Research diary, March 2011).
Sometimes the sense of threat was related more to the physical appearance of a particular place, especially were there were signs of disorder or the potential for disorder.
Some spaces were marked as symbolic places: several areas had large amounts of graffiti and ‘tagging’ which is can be used to signal gang ownership and affiliations (Hallsworth, 2005; Gaskell, 2008). Likewise, schools and youth offending service offices where the research was conducted were heavily defended and supervised: this included locked areas that were only accessible to staff members with special keys, and two of the schools had high fences and areas of segregation for younger and older children. Of course these personal reflections are subjective. However, they reflect the perceptions of a reasonably confident adult who over many years has had exposure to such places. At least some of the research participants shared this general view, and in some of the accounts they described the areas in which they lived in derogatory ways.
And do you like where you live? Is it a nice place?
Not really.
Why do you say that?
Loads of trouble.
What kind of trouble?
Like [where I live] got this…woman…Her sister’s boyfriend pulled a knife out and the next door neighbour from mine on that side, they were having an argument and then he pulled a knife out on the kids (Lee, Yorkshire, white British, aged nine).
This was in contrast to other areas in the vicinity which were regarded as being more pleasant. Indeed, many participants voiced aspirations to leave the areas where they lived and to relocate to a place nearby, or even to leave the area completely and start a life somewhere else. At the same time, some expressed a pride in where they lived, mainly
152
relating to long standing social ties, whilst simultaneously speaking ruefully of the general physical and social environment.
The presence of violence has been cited as an important predictor of knife carrying:
violent environments can lead to a vicious circle, and exposure to violence, either as victim or witness, can cause stress and fear, or make a person more disposed to commit violence. Lemos (2004) has argued that knife carrying among young people was linked to whether they felt safe in their area from crime and victimisation, and there is a substantial body of research linking deprived neighbourhoods with high levels of offending and violent offending (Silverstri et al., 2009; Patchin et al., 2006; McGee 2003). These kinds of experiences are considered in the section below which describes an important distinction in the research, between offenders and non-offenders.