On 1 June 2000 a new court order was implemented in England and Wales. The ParentingOrder provided for the extension of state intervention (primarily through youth justice agencies) into 'family life'. We have recently completed research with regard to youth justice parenting initiatives, and during the course of our research, our interest in, and concern with, the broader question of 'parenting', 'parental responsibility' and the 'parenting deficit' consolidated. This article sets out our principal concerns by locating the new statutory powers within their wider context. By tracing their historical antecedents, theoretical foundations and policy expressions we aim to critique the latest developments in state intervention. Similarly, by analysing the material circumstances of the parents who are targeted by such intervention, and reviewing the means by which children, young people and parents conceive such intervention, we argue that the new powers essentially comprise an extension of punitiveness underpinned by stigmatising and pathologising constructions of working class families.
The introduction, expansion and reform of anti‐social behaviour (ASB) powers over recent years in England and Wales have witnessed the extension and intensification of interventions designed to exert control over children's ‘troublesome’ behaviour, with those residing in marginalized and socially excluded contexts proving a particular target for the use of surveillant, correctional and ultimately punitive ASB measures. The ASB agenda resonates with the state's approach to social policy more broadly to define, legislate and sanction in relation to the duties and responsibilities it views as fundamental to the membership rights of a law‐abiding citizenship. Charting the continuities and shifts within youth justice policy generally and ASB policy specifically, this article will argue that developments in each reflect a consolidation and escalation of the criminalization of social policy within England and Wales. Focusing explicitly on the use and impacts of dispersal powers (to be rationalized as ‘direction powers’ under current coalition government proposals), it will be argued that criminalizing modes of state interventions such as dispersal/direction powers are likely to promote children's hostility and exclusion from a law abiding citizenship and to extend the criminalization net.
The launch of the ‘Respect Task Force’, on 2 September 2005, signals the New Labour government's ongoing electoral preoccupation with the behaviour of young people. Reflecting on how the ‘respect’ agenda fits into New Labour's overall youth justice project, in England and Wales, this paper argues that the government's willingness to define, legislate and sanction with regard to those responsibilities it deems essential to the membership rights of ‘law-abiding’ society is unlikely to engender positive outcomes. Rather it is contended that the continuing commitment to authoritarian penal populism within youth justice rhetoric and policy is likely to prove alienating, damaging and ultimately counterproductive.
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