Anti-Social Behaviour

Definition

‘Anti-social behaviour’ has become a major political concern and policy preoccupation in recent years, most notably in the UK. In the politics of behaviour, diverse activities and risks have been conflated in the amorphous concept of the ‘anti-social’. With its genesis in the management of public housing, a range of policies and interventions formulated under the rubric of ‘tackling anti-social behaviour’ now inform diverse aspects of social life from schooling through to urban planning. Primarily, these strategies have been focused on the question of governing youth. Anti-social behaviour (ASB) has come to categorize and demarcate a distinct policy field that blurs and transcends traditional distinctions between crime and disorder, as well as the appropriate use of civil/criminal and formal/informal regulatory responses. It constitutes a policy domain in which diverse organizational interests, working assumptions, priorities and multi-disciplinary approaches coalesce, often in awkward combinations. At the same time, it introduces the now important dimension of ‘public perceptions’ into issues of local safety, as a result of which fear of crime, public anxieties and community well-being have become prominent concerns in their own right.

Distinctive Features

To some degree, ASB is a misnomer, as all behaviour is ‘social’. The allied concept of ‘acceptable behaviour’ is perhaps more accurate, as it prompts the question: ‘acceptable to whom?’ Nevertheless, the term ASB is now widely used to cover a range of activities, misdemeanours and crimes (sometimes quite serious). It is recognized that people's understanding of what constitutes ASB is ‘determined by a series of factors including context, location, community tolerance and quality of life expectations … what may be considered anti-social behaviour to one person can be seen as acceptable behaviour to another’ (Home Office, 2004: 3). For this reason, the policy definition of ASB has been left deliberately opaque. In British legislation, ASB is defined as behaviour that ‘causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress’ to others. This capacious definition is both subjective and context specific as it rests on the perceptions of others. This generates difficulties of measurement and meaning, notably between agencies and across localities. ASB, by its nature, does not lie within the remit of any single agency and cuts across traditional legal, organizational and social categories.

Nevertheless, forms of nuisance behaviour do have a considerable impact on the lives of many people, with adverse implications for community life and the degradation of public spaces and where serious and persistent ASB can foster a sense of despair and mistrust which fractures informal relations, encourages those who are able to leave certain areas to move out and erodes the willingness of residents to intervene in support of communal values. Significantly, ASB, like crime, affects the poorest communities most severely. Hence, it has a compounding effect upon other forms of disadvantage.

As a policy domain in the UK, ASB arose out of the work of the inter-departmental Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) which had been [Page 5]set up to ‘narrow the gap’ between the country's worst estates and the rest of society. One report, published in 2000, focused specifically on ASB. Subsequently, in 2002, the Government launched its ASB Strategy and enacted the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, introducing a swathe of new powers. In 2006, the Government outlined its intention to ‘go broader, deeper and further’ than before with the establishment of the Respect programme and Taskforce. The Government's aim now is to ‘ensure that the culture of respect extends to everyone – young and old alike’. Some of the novel measures include: fixed penalty notices for disorder (PNDs), acceptable behaviour contracts (ABCs), parenting contracts and parenting orders, anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) and injunctions (ASBIs), tenancy demotion orders, child curfews, dispersal orders, as well as preventive programmes, such as youth inclusion projects and a focus on family intervention. Paradoxically, at the moment in history when the ‘myth’ of the monopolistic sovereign state had become increasingly exposed, in the UK at least, the state appears to have embarked upon nothing less than the attempted transformation of contemporary manners. Imposing ‘civility through coercion’ has become the ambitious (and ambiguous) aim of much policy. Hence, ASB is more an incitement to develop new technologies for regulating (youthful) behaviour than a description of particular types of activities (Crawford, 2008).

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