Cautionary Tales

Young People, Crime and Policing in Edinburgh

Simon Anderson, Richard Kinsey, Connie Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351952996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Juvenile crime makes headlines. It is the stock-in-trade of politicians and pundits. But young people are also the victims of crime. They too have demands to make of the police. Drawing upon survey and interview research with 11 to 15 year-olds in Edinburgh, this book examines how crime impacts upon young people's everyday lives. It reveals that young people experience far more serious problems as victims and witnesses of crime, than they cause as offenders. It shows that they report little of their experiences of crime to the police, and are left to find their own ways of managing risk, such as telling cautionary tales about dangerous people and places. The study concludes by examining young people's relations with the police, suggesting they are over-controlled as suspects and under-protected as victims.

1 Young people and the city

Introduction

Popular perceptions of different areas of the city change over time, as do the realities of life for residents and their experiences of crime and related problems. In general terms, therefore, we would argue that there can be no understanding of crime without history and no understanding of crime in Edinburgh which disregards the history of the city. At the same time, however, an understanding of young people and crime would be equally impoverished if it failed to recognise the history of childhood and the unique place which children occupy both in the public imagination and in the institutions designed to protect them.

In this chapter, we begin by looking at some of the stereotypes young people themselves have about the city they live in and the areas we have selected for study. This is followed by a brief description of those areas and their history. We do this not only to provide some sense of the differences between those areas for people who are unfamiliar with them, but to emphasise that such reputations have real outcomes for those living there.

Different styles of policing are an obvious case in point. But even more important, perhaps, is the way in which images of the city have tacitly invaded thinking about crime to the exclusion of factors of equal importance. For this reason we include in this chapter a brief review of the ‘underclass thesis’ - the proposition that problems of youth and crime are geographically focused in certain areas of the city, particularly the ‘inner city’ and the ‘problem estate’ where, some have argued, completely different sets of values have developed, particularly in relation to work, school and the family (Murray, 1984, 1990; Wilson, 1987; Baker, 1990). This argument is challenged by the results of the present research, where remarkably little difference is found between areas in terms of young people’s values and concerns. Indeed, at many points in this study we have found that similarities between young people of different backgrounds far outweigh their differences - victimisation and offending provide but two examples.

There is within both political and popular culture a marked reluctance to take seriously the claims and experiences of young people. In the last section of this chapter, therefore, the concept of ‘childhood’ is discussed. In particular we look at the modem history of childhood which gave rise to the idea that children should be ‘seen and not heard’. Only through this history and its specific place in the history of the city can their actual experiences, described and analysed in the remainder of the report, be understood.

Reputations and the city

Few people would dispute that, within Edinburgh, places like Craigmillar and Wester Hailes have the reputation of being ‘problem’ areas. On a variety of indicators, they are among the most deprived estates in Scotland. Yet the results of the Edinburgh Crime Survey (Anderson et al., 1990), for example, suggest that the reputations they have acquired locally for crime and delinquency far outstrip reality. In a city like Edinburgh, where poverty has been pushed to the periphery and hidden from the rest of the population, it is particularly easy for such reputations to gain currency. In the absence of first-hand experience of the outlying estates, many young people - and, of course, many adults - base their perceptions of those areas on what they hear of them. In this way, reputations quickly become caricatures and stereotypes, sometimes drawing on familiar media representations of the ‘deprived council scheme’; sometimes on the comments of their parents, and sometimes on particular incidents, occasionally experienced directly but more often relayed at second or third- hand:

SA: What do you think of Corstorphine? How do you think it compares with other parts of Edinburgh?

A: It’s probably a more friendly community. Well, there’s

not as much fighting. You don’t see a lot of drug people hanging about the streets like you would in Niddrie or somewhere like that.

SA: What are the worst places in Edinburgh to live?

B: I’d say Wester Hailes, cos every time you go past there

you see quite a lot of the windows are boarded up, there’s vandals there maybe, and you hear about things happening in Wester Hailes like say drugs, crime, things like that. Niddrie’s got loads of graffiti and smashed windows and all the shops are covered in big metal things.

(12 year-old boys, Corstorphine)

Talking to young people from outside Wester Hailes and Craigmillar, we came across many such examples. Young people interviewed in Corstorphine and central Edinburgh often told us what were clearly exaggerated stories about violence or crime in ‘the schemes’, though they had only rarely if ever visited them. The following example comes from an interview with 12 year-old boys living in central Edinburgh:

I ken someone from Niddrie and his back garden’s been burnt to the ground. Ken, he’s got hedges round his home and he’s got big, massive fences to stop people getting in with barbed wire at the top, and they’ve been bunging matches and that over the fences and all the bushes are all burnt, all black.

Similarly, a group of 15 year-old girls from Corstorphine told us:

A: I went there once (Wester Hailes) and nearly got my heid kicked in.

B: Wester Hailes is a dump. You just go in there and there’s a pile of kiddies from Wester Hailes and they beat you up. My brother went to Wester Hailes with one of his army pals and a group of casuals beat them up. My brother got a big slit right down his leg and they stabbed him in the front of the heid.

Already at this relatively early age, stereotypes of an area are attributed to the personality and characteristics of the individuals who live there. Thus, people from Wester Hailes or Niddrie are stigmatised as ‘the type of people’ who would ‘come into your area and break into a house’:

SA: Do you think there's much crime in Marchmont?

A: No, not much.

B: If there is crime it’s caused by people who don’t live in the area, people who come in.

C: It’s people who don’t live in the surrounding area but maybe they’ve been in town and they’ve come past and they’ve seen the house and thought ‘Oh, that’s rich pickings’. (General agreement)

SA: Where do you think they come from then?

A: Well, places like Niddrie . . .

B: The suburbs.

(14 year-old boys, Marchmont)

SA: What sort of person do you think it is that breaks into a house?

A: Hooligans.

B: Not really hooligans. Hooligans are folk who smash windaes, they dinnae really break in.

C: People that don’t get jobs.

A: People that don’t do well at school.

D: Unemployed, and they look maybe a wee bit scruffy and that.

SA: Where do you think they'd live?

C: In a bad place like Niddrie.

A: Wester Hailes.

B: Some parts of Pilton.

D: But you don’t really know that though, where they live,

cos you dinnae ken them, a criminal . . . Ken, they could live in a place like up Regent Street, these huge houses . . .

Could be a gang of them up my stair.

(12 year-old boys, Broughton)

The social and political process by which areas come to acquire this sort of reputation has been examined extensively in other research (see Baldwin and Bottoms, 1976; Darner, 1989). Such studies have focused particularly upon housing policy and the uneven allocation of resources. Thus, studies by Darner in Govan and by Bottoms and Baldwin in Sheffield have paid particular attention to local authority housing policy and the way in which it contributes to the process of neighbourhood decline. Indeed, within criminology, there is a long tradition of ‘ecological’ or ‘area studies’ upon which we shall draw presently.

For the moment, however, we are more concerned with young people, their perception of such processes and the effect that reputations and labels have upon their everyday lives. Among young people in Wester Hailes we found not only awareness of this process, but also an acute resentment of it:

A: People from, like, in the middle of town, if you mention Wester Hailes they’ve probably never been in it, they just think of AIDS and drugs and that.

B: They’re just going on what they’ve heard from other people who’ve heard it from other people.

(13 year-old boys, Wester Hailes)

Young people from both Craigmillar and Wester Hailes complained bitterly of discrimination on the part of employers. A 15 year-old boy, about to leave school, told us how he used his grandmother’s address when applying for jobs as she lived ‘up the toon’. Similarly, a group of 15 year-old girls at Wester Hailes all believed that coming from that area would affect their employment prospects:

A: Cos if you go for a job and that and they say ‘Where do you come from?’ and you say ‘Wester Hailes’ they say ‘You’re no gettin it. You’re trouble.’

B: ‘Dinnae want you. Terrible upbringing.’

C: A bit of crap or something.

A: Ken, cos people do put you doon when you say you’re from Wester Hailes. Like we went away tae camp with the school and they were saying that we were all troublemakers and everything. The people at the camp, they said ‘Where do you come from.’ ‘Wester Hailes.’ And they said ‘Oh no, not Wester Hailes.’ As if we were there to cause trouble.

CSV Why do you think that is?

B: Because of the reputation it’s got.

A: People have given it a reputation.

B: Then people get in trouble and the place jist gets a worser name and the place get messier with writing and spray painting.

Paradoxically, the labelling of ‘bad areas’ can have unintended consequences for the good areas. Thus, one girl from Corstorphine resented the way in which she felt the needs of young people in ‘her area’ were ignored by the ‘big people’ in the Council, because Corstorphine was not seen as a ‘problem area’:

The people round here got a petition and sent it off to the big people somewhere and said why can’t areas round here get more facilities for younger folk. And they said there’s not enough vandalism. Like if there was more vandalism they’d get more facilities, like in Wester Hailes and that. They’ve got the big pool and drama clubs and badminton courts and that. So what they’re trying to say, is if we do more vandalism, spray paint and that, we’ll get more swimming pools and clubs and that. It’s pretty stupid.

(15 year-old girl, Corstorphine)

We were subsequently able to corroborate her story - though the Councillor told it slightly differently. True or not, however, such stories have much to reveal. First, they show how, in terms of popular myth, crime is individualised and reduced to a quality of a certain ‘type of person’ living in certain ‘problem areas’. Secondly, for many of the young people we spoke to, there was clear resentment of the way in which if you were young and came from certain areas you were seen as trouble by the ‘big people’. We shall look at the ‘problem of youth’ presently. First, we need to examine the way in which area reputations have developed and their implications for the findings of this study.

Social area and social class

For purposes of comparison with the findings from the pilot study, we selected four schools in very different and distinct areas of the city. Craigmillar and Niddrie, as we have seen from the comments of young people living elsewhere, clearly enjoy a particular place in the city’s demonology. Indeed, its current reputation is one which long pre-dates the building of the scheme in the late 1920s to house residents from the original ‘inner city’, the slum areas of the Old Town.

Although there has been subsequent development of the scheme in the post-war period, with the construction of high-rise flats in the Greendykes area in the 1960s, and low-rise sheltered housing after that, Craigmillar retains the characteristics of a relatively settled, but persistently deprived area. Thus in 1936, the Edinburgh Council of Social Services reported that ‘health facilities were totally inadequate; shops were too few, and expensive, and carried a limited range of goods; and that there was a dampness problem in the houses’ (Hague, 1984:182). Male unemployment stood at 40% and cuts resulted in severe overcrowding at primary school level. By the 1980s, if anything, the situation was even worse, and Craigmillar was described as one of the most deprived housing schemes in Scotland (Gamer, 1989) - 51% of the children interviewed in the pilot study had neither parent in full-time employment, while in 1985, almost six in ten of the pupils at the school qualified for free school meals (Lothian Regional Council, 1988a).

According to the headteacher at the local school, ‘the main characteristic of the community is isolation - geographic isolation - which leads to isolation in terms of poverty.’ In many respects, therefore, Craigmillar conforms with the image of the Scottish peripheral housing scheme: depressed, dismal and hidden from view. For many Craigmillar people, there is very little contact with the rest of the city. Car ownership is low (25% of households, compared with an average of 50% across the city as a whole - Anderson et al., 1990) and many residents rarely visit the city centre (Lothian Regional Council, 1988b). In terms of policing, it is regarded as one of the ‘busiest’ areas of the city. Crime is said to be higher than elsewhere and policing highly visible.

In contrast to Craigmillar, therefore, we selected Corstorphine. On the other side of the city but about the same distance from the centre as Craigmillar, the differences could not be more stark. The ‘village’ of Corstorphine is predominantly a middle class commuter suburb, although it includes a large stock of council-built housing. Unlike Craigmillar and Niddrie, where the boarded-up windows and void flats are commonplace, the council housing in Corstorphine is, as it has always been, among the most sought after in the city. T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Young people and the city
• 2 The victimisation of young people
• 3 Living with crime
• 4 Breaking the law, learning the rules
• 5 Young people and the police
• Bibliography