Jackboot justice

What a great victory for democracy, eh? The law that provides for the imposition of Anti Social Behaviour Orders on teenagers came into effect last week.

Now, anyone over the age of 12 can be found guilty of an offence without being brought before the courts. The assumption that someone is innocent until proven guilty has been heavily compromised. The onus of proof on the Gardaí has been reduced. This is the Brave New Ireland of 2007. Big Brother is alive and well, he’s living in the Department of Justice and he wants to slap the equivalent of a parking ticket on your ass – except this one is impossible to peel off...
I’ve said it before here, but it’s worth saying again. The introduction of ASBOs reflects a profound hostility to youth that sadly seems to be a characteristic of contemporary Irish society. It is as if teenagers are to blame for whatever people imagine to be the ills afflicting society in general, when in fact – to a very large extent – the problems afflicting youth are a product of those ills, chief among which is a failure to address the fundamental problem of disadvantage.
It is clear from the experience in the UK that ASBOs are ripe for abuse, in all sorts of ways. And they will be abused. By local busybodies, cranks and bullies, who want everyone to conform to their narrow little vision as to what constitutes acceptable behaviour. And by the kind of lazy or prejudiced members of the Gardaí, who take a dislike to particular individuals or groups of teenagers and want to exert a bit of unsubtle pressure on them.
The irony is that the vast majority of Gardaí didn’t want to see ASBOs being introduced. They know that there are enough laws on the statute books to deal with juvenile crime, but that they have been consistently denied the resources to intervene in a positive way when that option is there. They also know that, from a psychological perspective, ASBOs are as likely to act as incitement to misbehaviour as a deterrent. They know that, among working class teenagers in the UK, and plenty of middle class ones too, it became a badge of honour to have an ASBO served on you. It was one of the things that smart kids joked about on the day they were introduced here. “I want to be the first to get one in Ireland,” one 16-year-old said to me. He may have been half joking – but he was expressing, seriously, the deep feeling of disenchantment with which he and a huge number of his peers have responded to the whole ham-fisted business.
People working on the ground with troubled or vulnerable youth didn’t want them. Teachers unions didn’t. Parents groups didn’t. No one who has shown genuine concern for the kind of teenagers who are most likely to fall foul of the system think they are a good idea. There is almost no one with any knowledge of the reality, and the nuances, of youth culture, who believes that they will remotely help to deal with the problems which arise from the deprivation, alienation and disaffection that so often afflict young people, especially in marginalised communities. They will not even help to address what is considered anti-social behaviour.
So what we have here is a farrago, a piece of useless window dressing, introduced by the Minister for Justice Michael McDowell for two reasons: (a) as a sop to the middle class windbags who moan about crime all the time because they have nothing better to do; and (b) to wrong-foot the opposition, who are busy making pillocks of themselves by jumping on the law and order bandwagon. McDowell is not stupid enough to believe that they are a good thing. But what he must believe is that their introduction will successfully cloud the real issue – which is the complete failure of the Government to come up with the resources necessary to address the social, educational and community deficits that are the real cause of the anger and despair that drive young people to crime.
You’d be inclined to think: this is the nadir, things can’t possibly get worse. But they can and quite conceivably they will. This is the awful, depressing truth, as the countdown to the 2007 General Election begins.
How so? The current stultifying, negative and utterly selfish emphasis on ‘law and order’ rather than on equality of opportunity is, in many ways, being driven by the main opposition party Fine Gael, who specialise in playing on people’s fears and paranoia. And guess what FG party leader and Taoiseach-in-waiting, Enda Kenny’s latest wheeze is? He wants to introduce random drug testing in schools. As another school-goer of my acquaintance observed: why not random drug testing of people in the street? Why should school kids be singled out?
And, in any event, what does it say about a society that it would contemplate resorting to blatant discrimination against, and intimidation of, its young? What does it say about a political party that it would advocate this kind of insidious, draconian policy? What does it say about Enda Kenny himself that this is the most imaginative response he can come up with to address the travails of youth, if indeed that is what they are?
You want to get kids to fuck off out of the educational system, by all means introduce random drug testing in schools. Watch the truancy rates soar! You want to further isolate and alienate them, go right ahead too. But understand that this is powder keg territory. You squeeze people hard enough, it gets to a point where they react. You think there are problems now? Climb right up people’s noses and see how bad it can really get.
The bottom line is that teenagers are as entitled to respect as any adults. They have rights. And they have feelings. They make choices for reasons that are often opaque to anyone other than their peers, but there is nothing sinister in that. Some of them drink. Others take drugs. And the vast majority engage in experimental sex of many and various kinds. As often as not they do all of this and come out the other side suffering no ill effects.
What they need is not bullying and intimidation: rather, they could do with just a little bit more understanding, support and, on occasion, plain old fashioned love. But they’re not getting anything like enough of all that in the Hour of the Boors that is upon us.
Against that depressing backdrop, it was wonderfully refreshing to hear Gay Byrne say last week that it was time to consider the legalisation of drugs. Some of the jackasses in Dáil Éireann know that the idiotically styled War On Drugs is, and will continue to be, a failure. They also know that it would be a powerfully progressive move to take what are currently illegal drugs out of the hands of the criminals – but they are too shit-scared to say so, in case they might be dumped by the electorate.
It’s less that the lunatics have taken over the asylum than that we are under the thumb of a confederacy of dunces.