Beatrix Campbell - Masculinity and crime
At this past weekend's Green Party conference in Hove, a panel discussed Green Party attitudes towards policing. One of the panelists, Beatrix Campbell, our parliamentary candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn, offers her thoughts on the link between masculinity and crime:
The most impoverished, uninsured, unprotected neighbourhoods are those whose troubles are amplified by crime sometimes to the point that the neighbourhood feels unsustainable. And the poorest neighbourhoods are often torn apart by a polarisation between the generations and the genders - community action tends to be organised by mothers, community crime is organised by boys and men.
- Community crime fills our prisons. We now have a record prison population of over 80,000 - this has doubled in the ten years since New Labour's election. The criminal justice response is expensive and, it seems, largely useless - young men pack the prisons, they get de-toxed, they watch television, they eat regularly, they sleep, sometimes they access education, they spend all their time with other young men; usually they pump iron - they emerge fitter, but none the wiser.
- There is a total failure politically to address crime as where masculinity is made; where creating chaos is a form of control - young men taking control of the social space they share with their generation.
- Crime policy must, therefore, begin to address the power and pleasures associated with crime and violence; it must begin to confront the popular cultures that sponsor crime and violence as a way of ‘doing masculinity', and it must be able to help young men attracted by the allure of gangs and criminality find another way of being human.
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